Chapter 1: What is the story behind kids believing in the Tooth Fairy?
Rebecca remembers exactly when she learned the astonishing truth. She was in second grade and ran into her best friend Rachel at school one day.
And she pulled me aside and said, you know, last night I lost a tooth and I woke up while the tooth fairy was putting the money under my pillow. And guess who the tooth fairy was? She said, oh my God, who was it? I have to know. And she said, my dad. My dad is the tooth fairy. And I remember running home after school and telling my mom, Mom, I know who the Tooth Fairy is.
And declaring it as if I had grown up, that I knew who the Tooth Fairy was. And she said, oh, well, who is the Tooth Fairy? And I turned to her and I said, Rachel's dad is the Tooth Fairy. Ronnie Loberfeld is the Tooth Fairy. And she said, I can't believe you know. It's totally a secret.
Chapter 2: How do children arrive at incorrect conclusions despite logical reasoning?
You can't let anyone else know. But you're right. Ronnie is the Tooth Fairy. And, you know, he works really hard. And, you know, it's a secret. So you can't let anyone else know. He is the Tooth Fairy, but you can't let anyone else know. And from that day on, Ronnie Loeberfeld was the Tooth Fairy. And all of my notes under my pillow were signed, Love, Ronnie Loeberfeld.
Now, in his day job, what did Ronnie Loeberfeld do?
I think he did something in finance. He was either an accountant or a stockbroker. He worked next to a stop and shop in Massachusetts in Newton. Had dark hair. Wore a suit.
Chapter 3: What insights does Michael Chabon provide about kid logic in his story?
And I definitely had images of his driving his Volvo around the Boston area and delivering the Tooth Fairy Treats.
I remember wondering what it was like for Rachel to know that her dad was the tooth fairy and definitely being a little envious that her dad had this special job and this special power and that he had this whole other interesting life where my dad just came home from work and that was it.
So when you would actually run into Ronnie Loeberfeld, what was it like for you? How would you act?
I tried to act cool. It's like if you're starstruck but you don't want them to know that you're starstruck.
So it's like meeting a celebrity.
Exactly. You downplay it. You try not to mention it, but you definitely check them out twice and, you know, look at them when they walk away. You're like, oh, my God, you're the tooth fairy.
But you knew enough to play it cool.
I knew enough to play it cool. I said, hey, how you doing? You know, what's for dinner?
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Chapter 4: What are the humorous misconceptions kids have about love?
How am I getting home tonight? Are my parents going to pick me up if they called?
You did play it cool. One interesting question in all this, why did both girls come to what seems like the least likely conclusion from the evidence in front of them of a parent swapping money for a tooth under a pillow? Well, Alison Gopnik studies how children think. And she says, of course, it's logical for a seven-year-old to conclude that her own dad might be the tooth fairy.
Children understand that their parents, for instance, are powerful in all sorts of ways that make them very different from children. Now, from a child's point of view, knowing where those powers begin and end is pretty tricky. I mean, think about all the things that your parents can do that you can't do.
And think about the fact that there isn't any obvious explanation about why your father can use a Visa card, for instance, which is something that you can't do. The power to be a tooth fairy isn't all that much more impressive.
There's a certain kind of story that kids tell, like the Ronnie Oberfeld story, where they look at something going on around them, observe it carefully, think about it logically, how one thing connects to the next thing to the next, and then come to conclusions that are completely incorrect. Therapist Aileen Goldman in Texas tells this story about a little girl on an airplane.
And she was about four years old. And her very first flight, and as the plane was airborne, she turned to the woman next to her and said, when do we get smaller?
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Chapter 5: How do mistaken beliefs about reality persist into adulthood?
That had been her experience at airports watching airplanes take off. They do get smaller.
These stories are like jokes, and they're also like poems. I think because there's this aha quality to them. Some connection is made between things. A surprising connection. A wrong connection, actually. Well, we at This American Life love these stories. And so today we bring you a full hour of them. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.
Today on our program, Kid Logic, our show in four acts. Act one, baby scientists with faulty data. Act two, werewolves and their youth. That story from Michael Chabon.
Chapter 6: What lessons can we learn from children's misunderstandings of complex concepts?
Act three, the gay man over to the fatso man sings. Act four, when small thoughts meet big brains. Today's program is a rerun, a good one. Stay with us. Support for This American Life and the following message come from Squarespace, the all-in-one platform for creating a fully custom on-brand website.
Choose from a wide variety of professionally designed, award-winning templates with options for every user category. Showcase your offerings with a website designed to grow your business and manage payments seamlessly with branded invoices and online payments. Visit squarespace.com slash American to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is Ira Glass.
This Valentine's Day, why don't we make it official? No more playing around, no more games. I want you to become our life partner. When you become a life partner, there'll be no more ads coming between us. You know the ads on the podcast? They'll go away like that.
Chapter 7: How do children's logical deductions lead to entertaining stories?
Also, we'll be so much closer. You'll know us so much better because of all the behind-the-scenes bonus episodes that you'll be getting. Also, okay, can I just be real for a second? To fund our show these days, the way that we're doing it is with people who sign up, people who subscribe, people who love our show or people who like our show. And they pitch in money.
And that's how we're staying on the air. That's how we're staying going. So if you fall into any of those categories, I hope you'll consider it. go to thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes of this episode. And happy Valentine's Day. This American Life, Act One, Baby Scientists with Faulty Data.
Fifty years ago, psychologists and scientists believed that babies could not think at all, that they were irrational and illogical, self-centered little balls of need and want. What science has learned is that this is not true, that children are observing the world and thinking about it and coming to logical conclusions from the day they're born.
When Alison Gopnik and two of her colleagues decided to summarize a lot of this research in a book, they called it The Scientist in the Crib, meaning that babies are like little scientists.
Chapter 8: What surprising realizations do adults have about their childhood beliefs?
They argue that when a small baby sits in a high chair and drops a spoon onto the floor over and over and over for mom or dad to pick up, what the baby is doing essentially is running a little baby-sized experiment. Because it turns out that babies are very interested in gravity and how gravity works. The fact that things fall down and not up is not obvious to babies.
And it turns out another thing they're very interested in is human beings and how they work. We are actually the lab rats. They're actually doing experiments on us to see how we tick. So when you play Drop the Spoon, you get two for the price of one. You get an experiment about gravity, you get a little physics tutorial, and you get a psychology tutorial.
You can see about how that person will do something over and over again.
While kids think with the same logic that adults use and apply that logic just as rigorously, there are certain things that they simply do not know and take a while to figure out. Up to six or seven years old, for instance, it's not exactly clear to anyone what is imaginary and what is not, or if wishing for something can make it come true.
There's a wonderful experiment about this, actually, that Paul Harris in England did, where he got children to imagine that something was in a box. So he would say, okay, now here's this box. We're going to open it up. We're going to close it. Now let's imagine that there's a puppy in this box, or else let's imagine that there's a monster in the box.
And he asked the children, you know, is there really a monster in the box? Is there really a puppy in the box? They said no. They were just imagining it.
Then the researcher would walk out of the room, leaving the box behind with the child. And then something funny would happen. The kids who were told to imagine a puppy in the box would go over and peek inside the box just to check. And the kids who were told that there was a monster in the box, they would edge away from the box.
So they weren't going to take any chances, just in case wishing actually could make monsters happen. They didn't want to take any chances about what was going on in that box. But by the time the children are six or seven, like grown-ups, they've understood that just wishing for things isn't going to actually make them happen.
When they're still small and inexperienced about what happens in the real world... children have to make logical inferences all the time based on the data that they do have. Here is how children responded when our producer Jonathan Goldstein asked them about the tooth fairy. What do you think she does with all of these teeth that she's collecting?
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