Parents plead for help after raising Harry Potter-obsessed daughter to believe she's a witch
30 June 2020, 12:51
The mum and dad of the little girl, 7, are looking for more "sophisticated and creative ideas" to keep the lie going.
If you grew up reading Harry Potter, you probably imagined one day receiving a letter from Hogwarts telling you that you are in fact a wizard or witch.
And while that day never came for us, we moved on and still loved the books for the magic it bought us with each page and story.
However, for one little girl, her parents have been encouraging her to believe she is a witch, and that the Wizarding World is real for years now.
Sharing their story on Reddit, one unnamed father revealed that he and his wife had been raising their daughter to believe she was a witch for nearly three years now.
He explained that ever since they started reading the Harry Potter books to her when she was five, they have told her the Wizarding World is real and that she is in fact a witch.
Now, the little girl is almost eight, and the parents are running out of ways to keep the lie going, which bought the father to Reddit, to ask for help.
He said they were looking for "more sophisticated and creative ideas from the Harry Potter community to keep this thing going".
In the post, the father explained that her questions about the Wizarding World and her status as a witch have got "deeper", and that he and his wife have "kept building the illusion with more details about our family genealogy and its connection to book characters", as well as telling her "stories" about times they have used magic.
He went on to explain that through this belief, their little girl has "processed many difficult subjects" like racism, climate change and even coronavirus.
Aware that their parenting style may cause some backlash, the father wrote: "Before other parents judge or lecture, we know its gas-lighting and that eventually she'll have be disappointed and have trust issues with us when she learns the truth.
"We justify it that we are adding magic to her childhood, and giving her motivation to reach her full (magical) potential (since she needs to study hard to be accepted to Hogwarts).
"We've asked serious questions of her teachers and they think it's more awesome and creative than damaging."
He added: "At the very worst case, my take is that its analogous to children being raised to believe that traditional religious stories are true and that when the truth hits it will teach her to ask critical questions and not accept everything she hears or reads at face value."
And, as he expected, people are divided by their way of raising their child.
One person commented on Twitter about the Reddit post: "This kid is going to need millions of dollars worth of therapy and I hope the parents are prepared to pay for that."
However, another argued that this isn't much different than raising your children to believe in the Tooth Fairy.
He posted: "On the one hand this is very weird and I don’t think they really thought this through. On the other hand I’m trying to say how this differs from e.g. convincing your kids there’s a tooth fairy, beyond there being a preexisting tooth fairy myth that most other children believe."
One person online even said that her mum did the same thing to her when she was a child.
She explained: "Ok so my mother did this to me HARD (like, she wrote me an acceptance letter on parchment, got me a cauldron, etc), and it was really f**ked up when she broke the news to me."
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