My poor kid, now six, does not have a hope in hell of living a normal life. He is just by virtue of growing up in my house condemned to poverty and neurosis.
Here's how: This morning he decided to write a story before school. He asked for help with the spelling of most of the words, but ended up with this: "Once upon a time there were two little children. They saw a stranger's farm. They thought it was their dad's house. When they got there the farmer captured the children."
Now you might think that's okay, not special, typical for his age, and say "good job" and ruffle the kid's hair and get him out the door. Not this kid's parents. They take this awfully seriously and pore over it. They cannot help it. They are not full of praise, but rather critique. The father notes, out loud, that there are basic narrative elements in place: (1) the inciting incident (the discovery of the farm). The normal order is disrupted. This is good. (The father cannot remember which French theorist called this classic device "inversion" and starts frantically searching online.) (2) Peripeteia : reversal of fortune. The capturing of the children.
This is excellent, but we are still awaiting a denouement. The father tells this to his adult students all the time: best to have the ending in place before you get so far into the second act. Otherwise you may meander aimlessly. All must be leading to a place of change. What change will occur? These are the weightiest questions the father has to ponder, and because of this does not have political office nor executive power nor beachfront property.
The kid's mother adds some logical objections: Why would they think it was their dad's house?
Now, here, you see, is an important principle of narrative that the corrupted kid is already onto. Obviously, he is working with the foreshadowing of a mystery. The idea of the dad's absence, the missing dad, is nicely, even subtly planted here, and it is clearly going to have to come into play in the third act. Screenwriters call this "setup/payoff": the setup is the missing dad; it must be "paid off" with a consequence.
The kid's mother posts this cute story, boastfully, online, and of course the professional writers who make up the kid's extended family have suggestions. A novelist notes that there is "a nice use of psychic distance." He also comes up with the most obvious payoff: "The father IS the farmer. Our narrator knows this, but the kids think the dad is a stranger – for some reason we haven't yet discovered."
Fine, but this whole question of a narrator "knowing" and not revealing information is problematic: Who is recounting? From what vantage point? Is this narrator himself a fictitious character or the voice of God? We are going to have to start talking, soon, about framing devices. The kid's time spent with mathematics may, sadly, have to suffer, but this is important.
I also want to sternly implant the idea that the most effective way to get across the back story – the father's absence, his secret identity – is not going to be through flashback. Man, I tell my kid, my finger practically wagging at him, I am so sick of flashbacks. Let's keep the forward momentum going, please, let's keep the narrative linear. All this chronological jumping around is nothing more than fashion. The trick is going to be to have the events of the past becoming clear entirely through events in present time.
This is clearly a toxic environment for a child. My kid is going to learn archness cleverness, and how to manipulate emotionally – unattractive attributes. Familiarity with phrases such as "psychic distance" will serve to impress his potential mates (who will also be people in extremely low-paid occupations), but not to manage, supervise, build or accumulate. Furthermore, in the United States at least (the only country on which I have found these statistics) authors are 2.6 times more likely to commit suicide than average.
Don't make the mistakes I am making. Do not condemn your children to the life of an adjunct instructor. For God's sake, teach them what things are worth.