I have a boy who just turned four this summer and started pre-Kl this year. Recently he’s been telling a lot of stories that aren’t true. They have been pretty funny, but it’s starting to get disturbing.
First big story we caught him in recently was when he told us that his pre-K teacher told him that she had a lot of skeletons in her house, and the reason she had them was because her husband really likes skeletons. We didn’t doubt him on this, the boy is always talking about skeletons (he’s loved Disney’s “Skeleton Dance” since he was a baby) and we know his teacher and her husband from when she taught his big sister - the teacher’s husband is a kindergarten teacher himself, is eccentric, hispanic, and an artist - we thought maybe he had a large skeleton collection that may have had something to do with Dia de Muerte or something, and this was brought up by my son always talking about skeletons. My wife mentioned this to the teacher one day and found out that our son made this up completely. He’s a pretty clever liar because he asked my wife if she had ever been to his teacher’s house before telling the story about the skeletons.
Second story was related to school as well. He said that the showed a spooky Halloween video in class that had all kinds of scary sounds in it (which he did imitations of). My wife told him she’d have to ask his teacher about it because it sounds like a really cool video and she’d like to buy a copy of it, and my son says “No, don’t ask her about it”.
Things have got really weird lately, though. The other evening he comes stomping out of his room, saying very angrily, “God didn’t make our food, he didn’t make the ocean, he didn’t make the seas, and he didn’t make my rainbow”. He then says “I’m so goddamn mad at God, he didn’t make my rainbow, I’m going to kill God, I’m going to kill Jesus, and I’m going to kill Mose” (not a typo, he said Mose instead of Moses). We say “That’s not nice, why are you saying that?” and he says he asked God to make a rainbow for him and his friends at school, and God said he was going to make a rainbow, but he didn’t, and he’s SO MAD that he’s going to kill God and chop him up (and he started miming doing fighting moves where he’s throwing someone down and doing karate chops on them). His big sister (7) told him that you can’t kill God because he’s already dead and you can’t kill a spirit. We told him that wasn’t nice to say and that God would be sad to hear him saying that, but he stayed in an angry mood for the rest of the evening.
The next day, he came in after playing outside and announced he wasn’t mad at God anymore. We asked him why, and he said that while he was playing on the swings, he saw God flying by, and he asked God about the rainbow, and God said that it was Jesus who made rainbows, and he’d talk to Jesus about it, and Jesus would try to make a rainbow for him. He seemed pretty happy about this, but a few hours later he’s mad again because Jesus didn’t make him a rainbow. He announced that he was building a trap for God so the next time God flew through our yard, he’d get killed. His trap was some sticks with ashes from the grill on them stuck in the ground next to a puddle he had made with the hose, and he explained that the ashes on the sticks would burn god and make him fall down in the water and die. He said he was going to get some shark eggs to put in the water and the sharks would eat God. I told him that God made sharks too, and that the sharks would probably just thank God for making them, but he said he was going to make the sharks mean. He then waited outside for God to fly by but he never showed up.
The next day he was still mad and my wife made him feel better by spraying the garden hose so it made a rainbow and pointing it out to him, and told him God is always making rainbows but sometimes he’s making them in parts of the world where he can’t see them. He hasn’t mentioned anything about being angry at God anymore but he re-built his trap yesterday after I took it down.
