The Beach Is Magical All By Itself

Let your kids find their own seashells.

The other day I was scrolling Instagram when I came across a video that made me recoil in horror. The video was of a little girl at the beach, probably about 5 or 6. As she is walking down the shore, she notices something sticking up out of the sand. It’s a “mermaid comb,” the video informs us. It is, as we see from the next shot, a comb her mom has spent her one wild and precious life hot-gluing various seashells to, in order to make it appear that it once belonged to a mermaid. The mom then planted it on the beach, to make it appear her daughter had stumbled upon the secret treasure. The video encourages other parents to do the same. To “make magic” for their child at the beach.

The video had thousands of likes and comments. What a good idea! What fun! What a good way to make the ocean feel magical for your children.

Feel magical? The ocean does not need a single thing added to it to make it feel more magical. Let me tell you something about the ocean. Did you know that there is a shark that lives for 400 years? It’s called the Greenland shark and there are Greenland sharks that have been swimming around since the Pilgrims arrived in America. Did you know that a blue whale's heart is so big you could backstroke through its arteries? Did you know seaweed can grow so fast sometimes it grows up to 18 inches a day? That’s longer than a full-sized Subway sandwich. But this woman is out here telling me that a dollar store comb with some clam shells glued to it is what is going to make the beach magical?

The other day, I took my children to a beach to hunt for sharks’ teeth. We had to hike about 2 miles to get to this beach on the Chesapeake Bay. It was a long way for a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old. Yes, there was a lot of whining. No, they did not have a good time the entire walk there. Yes, we had to stop for snacks. But when we got there, they were immediately drawn to the sand and the water. I didn’t have to tell them what to do, they just knew. The five-year-old trudged knee deep into a tide pool. The 2-year-old plopped down on the sand and started making piles and shifting through broken shells, building a castle. We spent hours there, sifting through sand trying to find sharks’ teeth, looking at dragonflies flying by, and splashing in the water. In the end, we only found one shark’s tooth, but nobody cared. The beach was magical all by itself. I had to drag them back to the trail when it was time to go, where they whined the whole walk back, too.

The point is, Instagram wants to tell us that our children need us to make the world around them magical, but they don’t. The world around us, especially to children who are experiencing it for the first time, already is magical. We aren’t bad parents if we don’t spend our precious hour or two after bedtime frantically making crafts for our children— if anything by doing so we are doing them a disservice.

There is another video that made the rounds a few years ago, about a grandfather who buys perfect seashells and hides them around the beach for his grandchildren to find.

How sweet, all the comments said. All I could think when I saw this video was how I used to spend hours looking for perfect seashells as a kid. Sorting through all the broken pieces, it was almost impossible to come up with a perfect shell that wasn’t broken. But when you did find a seashell that wasn’t chipped, it was the most valuable treasure. You saved that seashell forever on your dresser, because you knew you’d never find another one like it. All I could think when I saw that video of the grandfather was that he wasn’t “creating memories” for those kids, he was depriving them of memories. Because searching for the perfect seashell is finding magic at the beach. That’s the activity. That’s the fun. If you found it right away, you could just go home.

Ultimately, of course, both of these things seem pretty harmless in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, maybe the mom liked spending her night making a little seashell comb. Maybe it meant a lot to the grandfather to see his kids light up when they found the “perfect” shells. But when I think about the kind of magic I want to make for my kids, it’s not this. Yeah, it’s harmless, but it’s also fabricated at the expense of following the lead of children who think the world around them is magic. I want my kids linger, to watch how the ghost crabs scurry in and out of their holes, how the pelicans dive for fish, to learn how to drip wet sand through their fingers to make a castle. I want them to know they can walk the beach for hours and find nothing to put on their dresser, but still come home full.

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