Take a second and think back to being 4, 5 or even 10 years old. I bet your dreams looked a lot like shooting stars and chocolate ice cream on hot summer days, or snow angels and warm baths when it snowed. A place in time where days seemed to last forever and nothing bad in the world existed. But now you’re 19, 20, maybe even 25. And maybe you’re lost, or you’re confused, and you just want to go back to a time when your only responsibility was being back in the house by dusk and your biggest fear was sleeping alone in the dark.

What they don’t tell you when you’re 4, 5 or 10 is that reality is going to change every year you get older. You grow up believing in magic and fairytales until you begin to understand the all of the actual ways that the world works. And then one day you wake up and there isn’t any magic left. Suddenly you’ve lost that naïve and innocent outlook that only children seem to have, and you’re almost never prepared. It just happens, and it’s life.

When it comes to kids, adults seem to cherish that innocent mindset, and it is known to all not to corrupt that. We feed kids these films of happy endings and success because there aren’t many people willing to tell a 6 year old child that they can’t grow up to be Donatello from the Ninja Turtles. Nobody wants to kill the dreams and extreme hopefulness children possess, so we feed them with fake knowledge about how the world really works.

And then here you are in the real world, wondering why nothing works like it did in your favorite movie. What happened to the happy endings? They don’t tell you that life isn’t one giant story that plays out to where you want it to be. More often than not, you soon realize things are a lot harder than you expected. You get piled under passing school, finding a job, and balancing relationships and there’s never any time to breathe. Nobody warns you that life gets hard until you’re stressing out over everything you need to get done and everyone’s answer is “that’s life.”

Now I’m not saying we should go around ruining childhood dreams and wishing when they blow out their birthday candles, but it makes you think a lot about how we bring up our youth. Are we hurting them by blinding them about life’s harsh realities, or is it better to let them figure it out on their own? As special as magic is, when does it become too much? When you’re 10, there’s no such thing as stress or anxiety, and then ten years later you’re 20 years old trying to figure out any way to take those two feelings away. It makes you wonder, when does the magic become too much?