Dear Dame Prudence,
My 9-year-old son has gotten deeply into LARPing, which I originally thought meant running around the yard with a foam sword. That seemed healthy. He was outside. He was wearing sunscreen. For approximately three days, I believed I had won parenting.
Now our entire house is “in game.” The kitchen is an inn called the Bent Ladle, and he will not ask for breakfast without placing three bottle caps on the counter and saying, “Something hot, if the roads have been kind.” His 6-year-old sister has been appointed Royal Falconer despite our not owning a falcon. She appears comfortable with this arrangement, but she has begun charging us passage through the hallway.
Last week, my son handed me a sealed quest marked FOR THE INNKEEPER’S EYES ONLY. Inside was a request to buy more waffles. Yesterday he told his teacher that his homework had been destroyed by “agents of the Ash Crown.” The teacher, who is a better sport than I am, wrote back, “The Ash Crown will accept late work until Friday.” I worry we are all encouraging him.
The final straw came when he invited four friends over without explaining that they would remain in character for five hours. One child spent most of the afternoon guarding our hydrangea. Another accused my husband of concealing a cursed bloodline because he would not reveal his “true name.” My husband’s true name is Greg.
I love that my son is imaginative, but I would also like to cross the living room without being challenged by a nine-year-old customs official. How do I bring him back to reality without humiliating him or becoming the villain in a campaign that already has troublingly detailed maps of our property?
—Out of Character
Dear Out of Character,
First, some reassurance: Your son knows the kitchen is a kitchen. This is why the inn reliably contains waffles and why he has not attempted to pay the electric bill in bottle caps. He is not losing his grip on reality. He has discovered that reality contains other people, and that if he can persuade enough of them to treat a hallway as a border crossing, the trip to the bathroom becomes considerably more eventful.
That is a social achievement. It is also, as you have noticed, annoying.
The problem is not that your son is pretending too much. It is that he has begun treating everyone nearby as an automatically enrolled supporting cast. Shared imagination is shared. A game that exists only because one person refuses to stop declaring it is less a magical realm than a very small municipal government.
Talk to him outside the fiction. Do not summon his character before a tribunal or hide your request inside a prophecy. Say plainly that you enjoy some parts of the game and need other parts of the house and day to remain ordinary. Together, establish where and when play is invited. The yard can be the Northern Marches after school. The kitchen can become the Bent Ladle during Saturday lunch. The bathroom should remain a sovereign and unthemed territory at all times.
Give the beginning and ending visible signals. A scarf tied to the stair rail might mean the house is in game; removing it means everyone returns to ordinary names and requests. Your son may love this. Ritual boundaries make imaginary worlds feel more, not less, substantial. A kingdom with no border is just somebody talking at you.
You should also give every participant a real way to decline. His sister may genuinely enjoy collecting tolls, but “Royal Falconer” should not become a job she must perform whenever her brother wants a scene. Friends arriving for a playdate need to know what they are being invited into. Greg should be permitted to keep both his true name and his disputed bloodline private.
None of this requires treating your son’s commitment as ridiculous. Ask him about the game when you have the attention to listen. What does the Ash Crown want? Why is the road unkind? Who decided bottle caps are worth breakfast? You may discover that he is not merely producing fantasy lore. He is designing systems, reading his friends’ reactions, offering roles, revising rules, and trying to maintain a world across several distractible human beings. Adults receive salaries for doing less with more meetings.
But interest is not unlimited consent. You are allowed to say, “I am making dinner, not playing the innkeeper.” He is allowed to be disappointed. The fiction does not need to rescue either of you from that ordinary exchange.
As for school, collaborate with the teacher before the Ash Crown acquires a reputation for document destruction. Imaginative framing can make work inviting, but it should not obscure whether the work was done. The kingdom may have its own account of the missing homework. The gradebook gets a separate record.
Finally, preserve some evidence. Save one map, one bottle-cap coin, or the quest requesting waffles. Do not preserve everything; that road leads to an entire garage of canonical artifacts and a future argument about whether a damaged pool noodle is the original Blade of Westmere. Keep the object that lets the story return.
Your goal is not to bring your son back to reality. He never left. Your goal is to help him notice the generous trick at the center of what he is doing: other people can help make a world real, but they have to be able to enter it and leave it under their own power.
Also, buy the waffles. The roads have been difficult.