My eyes are currently pulsing with the rhythmic, agonizing throb of a thousand tiny needles, thanks to a misplaced glob of tea tree shampoo that I managed to smear across my corneas exactly 24 minutes ago. It is a sharp, chemical reminder that the world doesn’t care about your intentions; if you put soap where it doesn’t belong, you will pay the price in tears. I am sitting in a drafty studio with Rio K.L., an origami instructor who treats paper with more reverence than most people treat their firstborn children. She is currently working on a complex tessellation, her fingers moving with a mechanical grace that makes my own stinging, squinting efforts feel pathetic. Across the room, her nephew, a boy of about 4 years, is staring out the window at the skeletal remains of the old canning factory that sits on the edge of the industrial district.

“Why is that house so sad?” the boy asks, pointing a sticky finger at the jagged glass and the rusted corrugated steel. I wait for the explanation of the 1994 economic downturn, the shift in global shipping routes, or the fact that 484 people lost their livelihoods in a single afternoon. Instead, his mother-Rio’s sister-ruffles his hair and tells him that a grumpy giant used to live there but moved away because he couldn’t find a pair of shoes that fit. She laughs, a light, airy sound that feels entirely out of place against the backdrop of industrial decay. The boy looks at her, then back at the factory. He doesn’t look satisfied. He looks like he’s being told a secret in a language he hasn’t learned yet, and he knows he’s being cheated out of the translation.

This is the great absurdity of modern adulthood: the desperate, flailing need to protect children from the very friction that defines human existence. We have decided, somewhere between the invention of the participation trophy and the rise of the curated social media feed, that the truth is a toxin. We treat children like they are fragile ornaments, incapable of processing the concept of failure, collapse, or the cyclical nature of suffering. Rio K.L. stops her folding. She looks at the boy, then at her sister, her eyes narrowing behind her glasses. She’s been teaching origami for 14 years, and she knows that if you don’t make a sharp crease, the whole structure eventually sags and dies. She doesn’t like the giant story. Neither do I, especially not while my eyes are still screaming from the shampoo incident.

When we lie to children about history or the state of the world, we aren’t protecting them; we are gaslighting their intuition. A child can look at an abandoned building and feel the weight of it. They sense the absence of life, the stillness of a place that was once loud. By telling them a story about a shoe-less giant, we tell them that their internal compass is wrong. We tell them that what looks like a tragedy is actually a whimsical fairy tale. It’s a subtle form of madness that we bake into the foundation of their development. By the time they are 14 or 24, they find themselves standing in a world that is objectively harsh and unfair, and they have no tools to navigate it because we spent their formative years telling them that the sharks were just misunderstood dolphins.

The Weight of Truth

Rio K.L. finally speaks up. She tells the boy that the building isn’t sad, but it is empty because the people who worked there ran out of money to keep the lights on. She explains that sometimes, things break and stay broken for a long time. It’s not a scary story, but it’s a heavy one. The boy nods, his expression shifting from confusion to a sort of somber understanding. He likes the truth. It fits the data he’s seeing with his own eyes. There is a specific kind of relief that comes with being told the truth, even when the truth is ugly. It grounds you. It gives you a floor to stand on, rather than a cloud to fall through.

We see this same sanitization in the literature we hand to the next generation. So much of it is scrubbed clean of the grit and the grime of real history. We present a version of the past where every conflict was a simple misunderstanding and every villain was just a friend who hadn’t been hugged enough. It creates a generation that is functionally illiterate when it comes to the mechanics of struggle. They grow up thinking that the 54 major revolutions in human history were just polite disagreements over afternoon tea. When they eventually encounter the real thing-the messy, bloody, unfair reality of human ambition-they crumble because they were never given the map. They were given a coloring book with the lines already filled in.

The Foundation of Understanding

I’ve spent the last 34 minutes trying to focus on the edge of my paper, but the sting persists. It’s a distraction, much like the fluff we feed kids. If I keep pretending my eyes don’t hurt, I’ll eventually trip over the furniture. If we keep pretending the world isn’t a place of profound difficulty, children will eventually trip over the reality of their own lives. There is an inherent value in grounded storytelling. That is why Jerome Arizona mining history matters so much in the current landscape. They recognize that children are capable of handling the weight of history without needing it to be wrapped in bubble wrap and tinsel. They provide the historical accuracy that respects the intelligence of the reader, rather than patronizing them with ghost stories and giants.

Rio moves on to a new sheet of paper, a deep indigo square. She tells me that in origami, the most important part is the initial fold. If that first move is based on a lie-if you try to force the paper to be something it isn’t-the rest of the model will be skewed. You can’t fix a bad foundation with fancy decorations later on. It’s the same with the human psyche. If we build a child’s understanding of the world on a foundation of sanitized myths, we shouldn’t be surprised when they struggle to find their balance as adults. We are currently seeing the fallout of this approach. We have 44 different ways to distract ourselves from the truth, yet we are more anxious than ever because deep down, we know the giant story is a lie.

I remember a time when I was about 4 years old, sitting in the back of a car and asking why the man on the corner was holding a cardboard sign. My father didn’t tell me he was waiting for a bus that never came. He told me the man didn’t have a home and that the system had failed him. It was a cold, hard piece of information, but it stayed with me. It made me look at the man with empathy rather than curiosity. It made me realize that the world has sharp edges. Because I knew the edges were there, I learned how to move around them. I didn’t spend my life walking into walls because I had been told the walls were actually pillows.

There is a peculiar kind of cowardice in the way adults approach these conversations. We claim we are protecting the children, but more often than not, we are protecting ourselves. We don’t want to have the difficult conversation because it forces us to admit that we don’t have all the answers. It forces us to admit that we live in a world where 64% of outcomes are governed by luck and systemic forces rather than pure merit. It’s easier to talk about ghosts. It’s easier to pretend that the abandoned factory is a haunted mansion rather than a monument to a failed local economy. But children are small, not stupid. They see the soot. They see the rust. They see the way our eyes dart away when they ask the real questions.

The Imperative of Honesty

Rio K.L. finishes her crane. It’s perfect. Every edge is sharp enough to cut. She hands it to the boy, who takes it with a level of care that suggests he understands its value. He looks at the factory again, then at the paper bird. He seems to be weighing the two things-the decay of the real world and the precision of the created one. He’s learning that beauty exists alongside ruin, and that you don’t need to lie about the ruin to appreciate the beauty. In fact, the beauty is more impressive when you realize how hard it was to create it in such a messy environment.

As my eyes finally begin to clear, the stinging fading into a dull ache, I realize that the shampoo was a necessary, if unpleasant, interruption. It forced me to see the world through a veil of irritation, much like the veil we place over history for the sake of ‘age-appropriateness.’ But once the soap is washed away, the clarity is breathtaking. We owe it to the next generation to stop the gaslighting. We owe it to them to provide books, stories, and conversations that treat the past with the gravity it deserves. If we want them to build something better, they need to know exactly what broke in the first place. They don’t need more giants; they need more truth. They need to know that the world is 44 times more complex than a fairy tale, and that they are 44 times more resilient than we give them credit for. The question isn’t whether they can handle the truth, but whether we are brave enough to tell it.