The Superhero Thing: Little Capers, Hegel, and the Sound of the Moon

Our 3.5-year-old daughter Z is into pretend play, no question. She prepares a feast for her stuffed animals and her "babies" every night, down to the cloth napkins, and complained to me in a plaintive voice the other morning while playing with one of her imaginary friends that "Sylvie" had pushed her. (You try modeling conflict resolution strategies under those circumstances with a straight face.)

But it took a Little Capers shirt and cape to remind us of the limits of her current vocabulary of pretend-play roles. After days of wearing her new half-outfit while remaining the not-so-mild-mannered Z herself instead of transforming into a couch-jumping, distress-call-responding heroine, we finally put two and two together and realized that Z has no earthly idea what a superhero is.

It's ironic, because the concepts we have sheltered her from are precisely those that Little Capers are designed to subvert. Superheroes have not yet made it past our parental goaltending because of their inherent violence, conflict, and their genre's conception of evil, which is (in our view) a reality to be confronted at the mature age of four or five, at which point we'll pull out our stack of PowerPuff Girls DVDs. I'm guessing that if Z were a boy, she would have sucked all of this stuff in by osmosis by now, but last Halloween our little one still stared blankly at the preschool Supermen with their foam six-packs and the infants in Spider-Man outfits, and identified Disney Princesses based on their presence on her Pull-Ups.

Little Capers have a printed-on belt, strong but simple Velcro attachments for a bright cape, and a symbol on the chest showcasing one of several generalized, Zenlike forces - love, lightning, peace, concern for the planet - intended to help wean kids from the idea that superheroes are fixed personas they ape from television and the action-figure aisles. At its core, the semiotic adjustment is really an attempt at revolution, disentangling heroism and its superlative from violence altogether.

It's hard for me to envision what the success of such a coup might look like. Can the concept of the superhero survive being stripped of conflict? Is such conflict supposed to live on in strictly metaphorical terms? I can see how mental and interpersonal "superpowers" have gotten short shrift and could be used in a "super" way, but they still have to be pitted against something, don't they? Isn't strife - Hegel's dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis - the very foundation of Western civilization, or at least with so much of our current definition of it that to fail to embrace it, at least on a symbolic level, is to miss the boat on much of the good that pop culture has to offer?

Grrr! Hegel stole it all from Heraclitus, you fool!

Perhaps what makes these well-designed, well-constructed dress-up garments so great is the fact that they haven't mandated a peaceful encounter, but that they invite its natural development. There's nothing stopping a couple of kids from declaring intergalactic war between the superheros of Saturn and Earth, and there's nothing keeping Heart Girl from marrying the power of love with a kung fu grip. Such contradictory impulses can hang together only in mythology, in dreams, and in childhood.

Years ago I worked at a daycare. One day, while playing a listening game with a bunch of three-year-olds, a boy whisper in my ear that he could hear the moon, which was visible overhead. Good child care workers are sometimes born, sometimes made, and I was definitely one of the by-the-book school, fumbling my way through most of the head games I had no idea kids that young could play with adults. So one of my fondest memories from that period of my life is the knowledge that I had not been exposed to any percept of training that forced me to correct this kid on which sense was what. Instead, I listened with him, silently, hoping to hear that world.

If anyone can show us how to break free of supposedly ironclad dialectics that define heroism, superhuman achievement, and power, I'd put the money on my kid, not me.

Want to win up to four Little Capers shirts and capes for your children, their friends, or the kids in your neighborhood? Don't miss your chance to enter our sister blog PRIZEY's Little Capers Super Force! giveaway, which is accepting entries through Jan. 31.