Why Kids Create Secret Identities: What It Means When Their ‘Maskman’ Gets Revealed
It’s 1:45 on a rainy Tuesday in my second-grade classroom, the art table is smudged with half-dried blue tempura, and 7-year-old Milo just knocked over his glue stick shoving his drawing behind his backpack to hide it. For six weeks, every drawing Milo turned in was signed “Maskman” instead of his name. If a substitute called him Milo, he’d sit silent, staring at his desk until she got it right. I played along—most kids go through a superhero or secret identity phase, I figured it would pass on its own.
Last week, he tripped over the kickball on the playground, scraped his knee raw, and when I knelt down to clean it, he pressed his palm so hard over the wound his knuckles turned white. “Maskman doesn’t feel hurt,” he’d said, jaw clenched. I didn’t push. I wrapped it up and called him Maskman like he wanted, and he ran back to the playground before I could ask any questions.
After the last kid left for the bus that Tuesday, he lingered by the door, holding that crumpled drawing behind his back. The rain tapped the window, I was folding extra construction paper, and I asked if he was waiting for his mom. He shook his head, then held out the drawing. It wasn’t Maskman fighting bank robbers or saving the world, like all his other drawings. It was two people standing in a field: a little kid with messy brown hair, and a guy in a full blue mask. The little kid had a thick blue tear drawn down his cheek. “That’s me,” he said, so quiet I almost missed it. “And that’s Maskman. I don’t want him to have to be the only one anymore.” That’s when Maskman’s face got revealed—not the character, but the scared little boy who’d been hiding behind him.
A lot of adults react to a kid’s secret persona one of two ways: they brush it off as silly attention-seeking, or they panic that the kid doesn’t want to be themselves, that something’s deeply wrong. Early in my career, I’d done both. When I was a first-year teacher, I had a first-grader who went by Dragon for three months, and I kept correcting him in front of the class because I worried he’d never fit in. By the time I figured out he was doing it because his dad was deployed and Dragon was the character his dad played with him every night before leaving, he’d stopped talking to me at all. That mistake stuck with me. What I’ve learned since is that when a kid builds a whole mask to hide behind, it’s not that they don’t want to be themselves—it’s that they don’t think their actual self can handle what’s going on right now.
Milo told me that day that his family moved here three months ago from a town two hours away. Their apartment caught fire the week before they moved, and he lost everything: his old dog Bo died in the fire, his mom lost her job when the store she worked at burned down, all his toys and his favorite books turned to ash. He found the broken Maskman action figure in a box of donated clothes they got after the fire. Maskman didn’t have a family that lost everything. Maskman didn’t miss his old house or his old dog. So Milo let Maskman take over, because it hurt too much to be Milo right now.
The first concrete thing any parent or teacher can do in this situation is not rush to take the mask away. For six weeks, I called Milo Maskman when he asked, I signed his weekly behavior slip that way, I let him introduce himself as Maskman to our student teacher. That doesn’t take any extra time, it doesn’t coddle bad behavior—it just lets the kid know you accept the safety they built for themselves, so they don’t have to defend it all the time. If you demand they drop the act immediately, they just learn their real feelings aren’t safe to show you.
The second thing, when they finally do show you the person behind the mask, don’t dismiss the mask itself. When Milo showed me his drawing, I could have said “I like you so much better as Milo, you don’t need Maskman anymore.” But that would have erased how much Maskman had helped him get through the hardest months of his life. Instead I said, “Maskman looks really strong. He did a good job taking care of you this far, huh?” That’s when he started crying, the first time I’d ever seen him cry. We agreed we could keep both: sometimes he’d be Maskman at recess when we played kickball, and sometimes he’d be Milo when he was sad or wanted to draw pictures of Bo.
For parents at home, the adjustment is just as small. If your kid wants to wear their mask to dinner, let them. If they want you to call them by their character name at the grocery store, do it—if it really is a problem, like at a formal doctor’s appointment, you can say “We’ll use your secret name in the waiting room, and your real name when the nurse calls, okay?” You don’t have to dig for the big secret right away. Just holding space is enough.
This week, he’s been half Maskman, half Milo. Today he was Maskman for recess kickball, and after that he came to me upset because another kid knocked his block tower over, and he let himself huff and wipe a tear off his cheek, instead of clamping his jaw and saying Maskman doesn’t feel anything. His mom mentioned last week at pickup that he talked about Bo for 10 minutes over dinner, the first time he’s brought him up since the fire.
I still have his drawing taped to the inside of my desk drawer, where I see it when I’m digging for extra band-aids or a lost eraser. It’s a good reminder when a new kid starts going by a fake name or hides behind a hoodie all day. We’re still figuring it out. Some afternoons he’s still all Maskman, no Milo allowed, and that’s fine. The point isn’t to make the mask disappear as fast as possible. The point is to let the kid behind it know they don’t have to stay there forever, if they don’t want to.
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