The Illusion of Kids Effect

When you go places with a large volume of children, there are certain dynamics you begin to see regularly. Older people will often stare and smile at all the youthful, energetic faces. Questions like, “Got the whole crew out, huh?” and “Are they all yours?” are pretty much guaranteed to be asked.

And then there’s what I’ll call the illusion of kids effect. I need to work on the name…

The illusion of kids effect is when all our kids are together and someone gets the impression that they are friends or just a bunch of random kids instead of siblings.

They’ll be at a playground or park and playing some made-up game that only they know. A new kid will come to the playground and see all these kids playing and he’ll want to play too.

He’ll ask one boy if he can play but it’ll be one of the shy ones who just runs off. He’ll ask another boy who just yells, “sure” and keeps running. The kid will either go away wondering how all these kids came to be playing this game he doesn’t understand, or he’ll just jump in and start running but not know why.

That second reaction is another really common response to the illusion of kids. If the seven kids start running (and that’s at least 80% of the time) other kids just get swept up in the stampede. And I don’t mean stepped on, they just sort of get sucked into it and the herd of children grows as they run somewhere that only a handful of them are even aware they’re going. It turns out the illusion that every kid in the world is going somewhere fun only takes six or seven kids to pull off.

But increase that to say 20 kids and the illusion demonstrates electromagnetic powers. If our kids and all their cousins are playing football or tag in a field together, kids always show up wanting to join this enormous game they think is spontaneously occurring.

If we drove out to the middle of nowhere in a corn field and started playing flag football with all the cousins I’m telling you kids would appear out of the corn asking if they could play. The pull of a whole bunch of kids having fun is gravitational.

My favorite dynamic caused by the illusion of kids involves ice cream trucks. I get it, ice cream truck drivers see seven kids on a street and think they’ve struck pay dirt. However, they become just another victim to the mirage that having seven kids can create.

I’ve never bought a treat from an ice cream truck. It’s annoying to have the ice cream truck pass the house a dozen times blaring its music to try and get the kids to beg their parents for treats. However, my annoyance is tempered by two things: 1) the humor that the ice cream truck slows down and blasts its music in front of our house in futility and 2) because I told my kids the ice cream truck plays music when it runs out of ice cream.

So, just like the kid who thinks he’s missing out on a game everyone else knows, or the kids who think teams got chosen and they didn’t get picked, the ice cream man thinks he’s got a chance that at least one of these kids’ parents will get them ice cream – but their parents are all same. Because, yup, they’re all ours.