Today’s post is guest authored by my daughter, Tiffany Michele. I hope it is helpful to you and your family. You can find her on Instagram here.

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

So you’ve come across a game, movie, or book that you want to enjoy. But low and behold…magic.

Yeah it can suck to have this happen. But let me share with you something my mother had us kids do as children.

“How can you explain it not being magic or witchcraft?”

We kids took that question as a personal challenge and ended up coming up with scenarios that feel so real to me that I forget that it isn’t Cannon.

“Well you see, Mom. They have nanites in their blood that gives them abilities to freeze water by affecting the molecules around them!” or “So they have this device in their brain that allows them to move things with their minds!” and “See their ‘Wand’ or ‘Staff’ has technology in it that only works if you say the password for the ability you want to use!”

If our arguments were convincing enough, then we could play, read, or watch what we wanted. Though usually during this if my mom would look over and see a new ‘Spell’ or something she would sorta quiz us on it.

Just to see if our minds were in the right place.

I remember when we were using potions in Kingdom Hearts she looked over and was like: “Well how do you explain that?”

And me and my brothers were like: “Oh hohoho. We have explanations.” We went on to theorize that Potions were simply herbal concoctions. And the more powerful ones may or may not be imbued with nanites that can help heal you or heighten your senses creating a ‘Luck Up’ effect. (this explanation was easy to reach due to having read the Warrior Cats books that deal with Herbs and also having been fed a steady diet of Sci-Fi all our lives.)

As you can tell, I still remember these explanations. And honestly they weren’t hard to come up with. My brothers and I usually made them up on the spot. We didn’t spend much time thinking about them. We just were like: “Well here’s a logical explanation,” and that was that.

To this day I’ll find myself almost subconsciously doing this, making up explanations for ‘Magic’ and the like.

(Sometimes like with Narnia or Lord of the Rings we said ‘God blessed them’ and that was that.)

Instead of saying or thinking: “Oh no. Witchcraft etc. things! I must not let my child view this because they will think it’s real.” Challenge your child, like my mom challenged us. Take it as a learning experience and let your child come up with an answer. (We did not by any means win every debate. Sometimes we had to lick our wounds before trying again. Pokemon was one we never won until we were late teens, and then we didn’t even want to play it! It was just the principle of the matter . . . )

Kids are smart. And with the right carrot at the end of the stick, they can come up with really convincing arguments.

Personally I’m going to do this with my own kids. I’m not going to let them play Kingdom Hearts without a good explanation. I’m not gonna spoon feed them my own hard won victory. They have to do their own reasoning.

And that’s really good for them.

I will add that sometimes when we would watch certain things (like Krats Kreatures or movies with unexpected bad language) that were iffy, my parents would say: “That’s not true!” or “Bad word!” so much so that whenever we kids heard it we would start saying: “Bad word!” and “That’s not true!”

Also there were some things that even if we had an agreement for it, my parents did not let us watch it. Disney Princess movies were one of these things (though personally I don’t remember coming up with an explanation for Princesses, as a Tomboy it wasn’t my thing).

And that’s my rant. Hope it was helpful!

~Tiffany