I bought my wife a copy of Titanic on video for her birthday, thinking it would be a nice, slightly dramatic surprise. When my three-year-old noticed the tape, he immediately asked if he could watch it after school. I smiled and told him no, explaining patiently that it was a movie for grown-ups, something Mommy and Daddy would watch together. He seemed to accept that answer without complaint, and I thought nothing more of it. That afternoon, when I went to pick him up from preschool, his teacher greeted me with a strange expression\u2014half amusement, half disbelief\u2014as if she\u2019d been holding in laughter all day. Before I could ask what was wrong, she leaned down and said, \u201cYour son has been very\u2026 expressive today.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Apparently, he had spent the entire day proudly telling anyone who would listen that his dad bought his mom \u201ca movie about a boat that sinks\u201d and that it was \u201conly for adults because it has kissing and crying.\u201d He explained, in great detail and with dramatic hand gestures, that grown-ups like Mommy and Daddy needed special movies because they were \u201cvery emotional\u201d and \u201ctoo sad for kids.\u201d The teachers couldn\u2019t stop laughing, and neither could I once I heard it. What stayed with me wasn\u2019t the embarrassment, but the reminder of how children absorb the world so literally\u2014and then reinterpret it with complete confidence. To him, Titanic wasn\u2019t a historical romance or a tragic love story. It was simply proof that adulthood came with strange rules and even stranger entertainment. The meaning of the moment stuck with me: kids don\u2019t need to understand everything to reflect it back honestly. Sometimes, their innocent explanations say more about us than we ever intend\u2014and remind us to laugh at ourselves a little more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I bought my wife a copy of Titanic on video for her birthday, thinking it would be a nice, slightly dramatic surprise. When my three-year-old noticed the… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28699,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"views":403,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28698"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28700,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28698\/revisions\/28700"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsinbr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}