Why Kids Create Secret Alter Egos: What I Learned When My Son’s Maskman Got His Face Revealed
The elementary school gym smells like scuffed basketball shoes and powdered lemonade, and I’m squeezing past a cluster of papier-mâché planets when I spot my 8-year-old son Leo’s drawing taped to the third row. For three months, every doodle on homework margins, every make-believe game after dinner, every stuffed animal line-up in his bed had revolved around one character: Maskman. Maskman wore a solid black paper mask that covered his entire face. He fought giant spiders and snuck into forbidden castles and never, ever got nervous talking to new people. He slept in a cardboard box under Leo’s bed, and any time I asked how Leo’s first few weeks at his new school were going, Leo would shrug and say “Maskman had a good day.”
Leo’s teacher, Ms. Henderson, stepped beside me and nodded at the drawing. “See that? Maskman got his face revealed last week.” I leaned in closer. Sure enough, under the half-tugged-off black mask is a kid’s face: messy brown hair, a gap between the two front teeth, a smudged grin. It’s Leo. I’d been so focused on the mask I almost missed it.
We moved three months ago for my husband’s job, and Leo left behind his best friend and the only elementary school he’d ever known. I signed him up for soccer, baked chocolate chip cookies for his class, asked every night how school went, got nothing but “fine” or “Maskman did cool stuff.” I worried, of course. I scrolled parenting forums late at night, read that persistent imaginary characters can be a sign of unaddressed anxiety, which I already knew. All the advice was the same: “Encourage him to open up,” “Help him be his real self.” I tried that. Every time I pushed for more than “fine,” Leo would just go quiet and retreat to his room to play with Maskman.
What none of those posts said was that the alter ego isn’t the problem. It’s the solution. Leo wasn’t hiding from me. He was practicing being the person he wanted to be, when he didn’t feel safe being that person yet. When he first started at the new school, he couldn’t walk up to a group of kids and ask to play. But Maskman could. When he forgot his math workbook the second week, he couldn’t raise his hand to ask the teacher for an extra one, but he’d tell me later that Maskman would have just done it.
I started doing something small that worked, instead of the big “open up” advice everyone gave. Instead of asking “What did you do today?” I’d ask “What did Maskman do today?” That took all the pressure off. He could tell me he’d sat alone at recess for an hour, without saying that he, Leo, sat alone. He could say Maskman thought the new math was too hard, without admitting he was scared he was falling behind. I never pushed him to connect Maskman’s experiences back to his own. I just listened. I never tried to make him give Maskman up, either. When relatives came over and asked why he was always talking about a kid in a mask, I told them it was just his favorite character to draw, and changed the subject. I let Maskman stay as long as he needed.
Two weeks before the art show, a boy in Leo’s class named Javi shared his lunch with him when Leo forgot his peanut butter sandwich. The next day, they built a Lego spaceship out of the loose bits in the classroom bin. Last week, they walked to the bus stop together after school. On the drive home from the art show, Leo has sprinkles all over the front of his hoodie from the vanilla ice cream we stopped for, and he says, “Maskman got tired of hiding. Javi knows I’m the new kid, and he still wanted to play with me. So Maskman didn’t need the mask anymore.”
I used to think that when a kid hides, it means we’re doing something wrong, or that they’re hurting too much to fix. But this taught me that hiding is just a step some kids need to take. They don’t need us to yank the mask off before they’re ready. If your kid has a Maskman of their own, you don’t have to plan a big talk or force them to open up. You can do one small thing tomorrow: ask them one question about their character, instead of prying about their feelings. Let them tell the story through the alter ego first. Don’t rush them to connect it back to their own life. The mask comes off when the kid is ready, not when you’re ready to stop worrying.
Leo still draws Maskman sometimes. Last night, he drew Maskman and Javi’s alter ego Dino Man eating pepperoni pizza together. Last week, when he got nervous about his first spelling bee, he said “Maskman never misspells words, so I won’t either.” Maskman isn’t gone, he just doesn’t need the full face mask anymore. I still check in, of course, and some days are harder than others. But I don’t stay up late scrolling parenting forums anymore. I know now that some of the scariest things we see as parents are just our kids figuring out how to show us their face, on their own time.
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