Shitting Myself About a Magic Trick
What a Rainbows talent show and a 25-year-old coin trick taught me about letting the kids go it alone
This story, as most of mine do, starts with a bit of childhood nostalgia.
In an ongoing effort to empty her house out of all my old crap and fill our house to the brim with it, my mum brought over an old magic set of mine.
“I thought [your eldest] would love it,” she said as she handed it over at the doorstep, whilst also dropping off my youngest, who, yet again, had fallen asleep in the car on the way home.
“Great, thanks,” I said. “I’m sure all my old stuff coming here has nothing to do with the yoga studio you want to make out of my old bedroom.”
But to be fair, she did enjoy looking through it. The magic set in particular was a Stephen Mulhern-branded one—for those who don’t know, he was a kid’s TV presenter back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, who also did magic tricks and stuff.
Aside from the cheap plastic cloak that features prominently on the box, it includes a pack of cards and some bits and pieces that kids can use to create heavily set-up tricks. They’re meant to be easy, but even I struggled to follow the instructions with a few of them.
As I expected, my daughter’s interest lasted a couple of days then drifted back to something else, leaving the magic set to sit on our lounge, along with loads of other stuff we don’t have a place for.
Fast forward a few weeks, and my daughter has some news.
She’s just come back from Rainbows—it’s this extra-curricular thing in the UK for girls where they play games and learn stuff. It’s similar to Girl Scouts in the USA, but for younger kids.
Anyway, she tells me that next week in Rainbows, there’s a talent show. Everyone has to prepare an act to show to everyone in the group.
She’s very excited about it. I outwardly match her excitement—but inside, familiar feelings begin to stir in my gut.
The idea of being made to participate in a talent show curdles my blood, even now as an adult. I’ve never been comfortable doing anything in front of even a modest gathering of people—even if I know the thing I’m doing is something I can do well.
Naturally then, I feel all of that for my daughter. None of her classmates in school go to Rainbows with her, so she’s only known these other girls—some of whom are three years older than her—for a matter of weeks. Surely she’s nervous as fuck like I would be, right?
Of course she’s not. She barely even remembers telling me about the talent show the next day, as we’re racking our brains for something for her to perform.
The easy things are do a song or a dance. Sure, having to do either of those things is my idea of unabated torture (unless there’s a karaoke machine and I’m six pints deep), but for there’s a lot of leeway for a five-year-old to do that kind of thing. Yeah she won’t be able to hold a note and her dancing will look a lot like entering red in Rainbow Rhythms, but half the group will either sing or dance and they’ll be objectively shit as well.
Alas, no. She doesn’t want to do either of those things.
“How about showing off some of your drawings?” we suggest. One thing she’s legitimately good at for her age is drawing. She loves the drawing tutorials on Art for Kids Hub on YouTube. We’ve got reams and reams of drawings that would be really fun to show off to everyone. Plus she wouldn’t have to go through the tedium of actually performing live in front of people. Win-win. Right?
Nope.
Suddenly, her face lights up.
“I want to do a magic trick!” She runs into the lounge, pushes away the latest crap we’ve dumped on top of the magic set—how she even knew it was buried there is beyond me—and starts rummaging through it for a trick she could do for everyone.
I guess that settles that.
We try a few of the pre-made tricks in the box, but they’re more convoluted than they look. The age rating on the box is 5-14 years old, and most of these were beyond her comprehension. Even if she could manage a couple of them, they took her forever to do and she’d say out loud the exact steps she was taking to fool the audience. She won’t be taking any of those to Vegas anytime soon.
How about a card trick then? There’s a few self-working ones that are impressive enough—certainly to a group of kids. The trouble is that they require you to remember a lot of steps which, under pressure, are easy to forget.
We even tried her out with the easiest card trick we could think of. All you do is fan the deck and get someone to point to a card. You split the deck and ask them to lift off the card and take a look. While they do so, you take a sneak peek at the card above it, in the half of the deck you’ve lifted away. Then they place it back, you put the deck back as it was, and you start counting off cards. When you see the card you snuck a look at, you know the next card is theirs. Cue rapturous applause from a group of five-to-seven-year-olds.
She could do the trick. But bless her, she wasn’t very subtle about looking at the top card. Then sometimes she’d put the deck back together the other way, or she’d just start shuffling the cards because…well, she’s five.
She was dead set on doing a magic trick, and we didn’t want to deny her that. But the last thing we wanted was for her to try and do a trick that was too complicated and for it all to go wrong in front of all those people.
Confidence is something I’ve struggled with since childhood. I was a fairly outgoing little boy, but my energy wasn’t honed or encouraged at all at home. In fact, it was drummed out of me, either by over-discipline or ridicule—and so back in my box I climbed, and I became an introvert.
I’m determined that this doesn’t happen to my kids. Yes there’ll be moments where enough’s enough and boundaries have to be set, but we’re going to allow the girls to go down paths and see what’s there, developing their confidence along the way.
That said, we couldn’t risk setting her up to fail with a card trick she couldn’t master. The confidence boost of doing this talent show would be invaluable for her, and we were determined to make it work.
Fortunately, there was one more trick up our sleeves. We just didn’t know it.
As I put the magic set away one night, a curious little blue box fell out of it. I slid it open, and inside was an old 1p coin, tucked in a tray that slid inside the box. I vaguely remembered how the trick worked: I turned the tray around, slid it into the box the other way. As I pushed it in, I heard a satisfying click.
I slid the tray back out and smiled.
The trick was perfect: immediately impactful for a group of our daughter’s peers, barely any setup required and super easy to learn. We showed her the trick, and she had it down in to a tee in half an hour.
The trick was nailed—but she still had to perform it.
The fact that she was totally unfazed as she left for Rainbows that evening only made me more nervous on her behalf. I was just desperate for the trick not to go wrong and for her spirit to be crushed so publicly and cruelly.
But this was a lesson I had to learn, just as much as one for her. You put your kids out into the world like a piece of yourself, and you can’t always control what happens to it. Our job is to prepare them as much as possible, giving them the skills they need to succeed and do well. But it’s up to them to go out and do it, or not do it. Either way, our next part in it has to be to simply wait for them to return from whatever quest they embark on, no matter how vast or small. And whatever happens, we’ll be there to give them a hug and tell them we’re proud.
I waited and waited, distracting myself with the bedtime routine for my youngest whilst my wife sat in the car outside Rainbows, eager for news regarding the coin trick’s success.
I emerged from my youngest’s bedroom after she’d fallen asleep to see my wife beaming with pride. Of course, she’d aced the trick and wowed everyone. I went to find my daughter to tell her what an awesome job she’d done.
But was she bothered? Not in the slightest.
How do your past experiences affect your kids?
It’s only natural that we want to protect out kids from the bad stuff in life—but it’s especially true if we know exactly what it is, because we’ve gone through it ourselves. But then you have to let them learn stuff on their own. It’s one of the fun juxtapositions of parenting!
So what tests this paradox the most for you?
