Higgly Town Fears

She would block her tiny body against the TV screen whenever I raise the remote to that direction, as if that would prevent the channel from changing--my daughter loves Higgly Town Heroes, that much. So most of the time, I get to watch it with her. I even know the songs, and actually notice if the episode is a re-run. There's only one tiny thing I notice about the show that causes me to feel one tiny misgiving. There's this part in every Higgly Town episode where a problem will crop up, which is apparently "too big" a job for the Higgly Town kids, and so they need some help from the Higgly Town Hero featured for that show. Anyway, that's not where I saw something. It's that part where Twinkle would think of a very "lofty" idea to solve a problem, before giving up and eventually ask for help from the adults, because Fran, the squirrel character, and also their baby-sitter, would always bring it down with a condescending "Great idea there, Twinkle, but..."

I know kids should be taught logic and that the moon is not made of green cheese, but what's the big idea with "I hate to rain on your parade, Twinkle, but there are no such things as flying elephants and ant engineers..." This may sound cringy, but What became of make-believe? What became of dreams of being a swan or a princess in a sugar-coated kingdom? Should my daughter skip all of these and think like a realist, already? (Come to think of it, a talking squirrel, advising about reality, is a contradiction. Or was that the point I failed to see?) Recently, though, I had observed a noticeable cutting down with the "come on that's not possible" attitude. And the squirrel is actually "riding" with Twinkle, like inventing her own "fantastic" reasons like "the flying elephants are oiling their wings" instead of a cold, hard, "flying elephants don't exist." The Disney people probably just wanted to teach our kids about the balance of reality and fantasy, and that's okay, even if-- not counting books-- they are themselves, the store house of the biggest, and greatest fantasies in the universe. I only probably want my daughter to have a satisfyingly long suspension of disbelief, before she grows up and "naturally" think of these.

But then when she finally lets me have the control of the channels, and I arrive at these pictures of death and crumbling structures, of brutality and a world slowly coming to an end, I think about the border between fantasy and reality again, and this time my fear is no longer itty-bitty. Where can we put flying elephants and princesses on marshmallow carriages in the midst of this evil? And our children--how far out in Higgly Town or wherever dreamland their minds are, before being finally breached by the real?