TIME OUT:Children's belief in magic can prove useful
‘I WAS THINKING about something and wishing for it, but I know it won’t come true,” said a boy of perhaps nine or 10 years of age to his friend as they traipsed through the foliage on the path skirting the upper lake at Glendalough, Co Wicklow, last Sunday.
“What is it?” asked his friend.
“It’s a wish” replied the first boy, “so I can’t tell you or it really won’t come true.”
As an adult overhearing this exchange, one could not but feel the poignancy of the child’s wish: a child straddling the world of realism and the world of magic, whose heart longed for something, a longing he could not share.
What was it this child was wishing for? Why did he know that it could not come true? What experiences had brought him to the realism that his wish would not be fulfilled? What magical thinking did he retain, sufficient to have him respond at his friend’s inquiry about the wish that to tell it would be to jinx it. As he said to his friend, “I can’t tell you or it really won’t come true.”
The wishes of children are exceptionally special. They have the intensity of childhood yearning, the delicacy of childhood feelings, the poignancy of childhood longing and the emotions of childhood hope. They may be momentary, fleeting or persistent. They may be triggered by sadness, happiness, anger, fear, fun or despair. They may be for themselves or others. They may be specific or global. They always provide interesting insights into the life of a child and what it is in that child’s life that he or she would wish to be different.
It is a measure of children’s sense of imagination and insecurity that they often wish for magical powers. With a wish and a wand there would be control over life, over interactions with parents, teachers and friends. There would be control over events, over objects, friendships, success and failure and emotions. People would behave how you wished them to. No one could harm you. Nothing could hurt you. No evil could threaten you. No calamity could befall you. Life would be how you wished it to be. It would be perfect.
Psychology has extensive literature on the wishes of children, on magical thinking and its meaning, on the age and stage at which children subscribe most to the belief that what is wished for may be possible because forces other than the visible are at work.
Few clinicians would interview a child without asking about wishes. In the answers lies unique access into the world of that child. Ask any child – or even early teens – to pretend that they had just three wishes that would come true and to tell you what those wishes would be? They must think carefully and choose well because they only have three wishes. They can wish for anything at all, even what seems impossible.
Be prepared to be astounded by the child’s world. For, among the anticipated wishes for toys and treats, there are also wishes of amazing altruism and magnificence: world peace, end to hunger, no more poverty, family concerns and general fairness in the world.
There are wishes that parents who have parted would get back together, that people would not fight, that grandparents would be with them forever, that people who are sick would get better, that they would be successful in the future and sometimes the third wish is that they would have as many more wishes as they liked.
In the wishes of children lie insights into their thinking, their development, their beliefs, their worries, their aspirations and an opportunity to understand the delicacy of childhood imagination and the respect that children deserve.
And while developmentally time may erode our own childhood capacity to believe in magic, children keep possibility alive for us. They are magic.
Marie Murray is a clinical psychologist and director of Psychology in UCD Student Counselling Services