Little Monsters

Parenting isn’t easy, especially when your kids don’t respond to conventional tactics. But Meghan Flaherty has a trick up her gauntlet: a lifelong love of fantasy and role-playing games. To the dungeon—and a quest to unlock her eight-year-old’s sense of self!

I look around the table at these kids and at the teenagers and noobs at this suburban shopping center bookstore. Maybe some of them get bullied. Maybe some of them can pass as cool. But there is something pure in their expressions, something that has come alive here when they sat down with their juice and crisps and fellow traveling adventurers. They’ve pulled on the imaginary mask of character, right here in the Waterstones café, under the fluorescent lights, with parents lurking in the shelves, and they are free. It is as if, at first dice roll, they stepped into their truest selves. If only for two hours on a school night.