That night we went to London and the next day, by rail, to Legoland, near Windsor Castle. It’s a theme park, with almost but not quite everything (e.g., the roller coaster) built from Lego. A traffic ride had little Lego-like cars with their own controls, lights and stop signs. Gideon was salivating. At the front of the line was a notice: “Six and up only.” “How old is he?” asked the attendant. Six, I lied. She let us through. “Daddy, you lied,” said Gideon. “Yes,” I said, “because they won’t let anyone under six in a car, and you’re almost six, and really want to do it, and sometimes it’s all right to lie if it won’t do any harm or might even do some good, for instance, if it stops someone from being hurt.”

He drove beautifully. He obeyed the stop signs, made the turns even though it was English on-the-left driving. We were both proud. That night in bed before he dropped off, he said, “Daddy, I liked it when you lied.”

It seemed to come to him as a relief, and maybe a delight, to have some account of the problematics of lying. That’s different from trying to instill a moral sense or values. It’s more like tips on how to think about these things. Perhaps he had been working through similar thoughts and found it useful—a bit like Piaget’s notion of moving from external moral realism (all lies are bad) to considerations based on intent and context. When I was a student at Union Theological Seminary in New York during the 1960s, that kind of ethical calculation was called situational thinking and treated as daring, though it is how most people behave most of the time, whether they admit it or not.

The way out of the park took us, by design, through a store called The Lego Big Shop, where I had my main parental meltdown of the trip. He wanted to buy a Bionicle—a pricey one—to go with his collection back home. I felt a surge of resistance about the cost and responded with a little blast instead of a regretful no. Maybe I was feeling underappreciated after providing this grand trip: isn’t anything ever enough? etc. His eyes teared up. Had they not, he might have argued, it occurred to me, that we’d flown all the way to England, travelled two more hours by tube, train, and bus to get here, paid a big entry charge, roamed happily around for hours—surely this proved the importance of our attendance at Legoland. Why shouldn’t he buy, as a memento, something grander than the toys he gets all the time at Kidstuff on Bathurst Street in Toronto?

We picked up the Bionicle he had chosen and made for the cash. As we edged forward in a long line, I grew aware of a cacophony of voices, howls really. Listen, I said. Every kid seemed to be yelling for something and each parent was barking back in reproach. He began to laugh. By the time we got to the bus stop, outside the park, he was making faces to show how I looked when I had my dementia. I didn’t know if the whole event had been a good or a bad thing. But come to think of it, Piaget says something useful on this topic.

He writes about helping kids to depend on their own sense of moral judgment rather than outside authority. “One must place oneself on the child’s own level, and give him a feeling of equality by laying stress on one’s own obligations and . . . deficiencies,” he writes, “to draw attention to one’s own needs, one’s own difficulties, even one’s own blunders, and to point out their consequences, thus creating an atmosphere of mutual help and understanding.” This suggests the nice possibility of turning your meltdowns into a source of moral assistance for your kid. How? By acknowledging them and using that admission to establish a level moral playing field between children and adults, thus encouraging kids to have confidence in their own judgment. That means it could actually help not to be a perfect moral model—a comforting thought whenever you lose it with your kid.

On our last day in London we went to the Imperial War Museum. Gideon chose it from a London-for-kids book. The choice surprised me (unlike the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum or the zoo). But he was just shy of three on 9/11. His mother and I put the sound down, but still kept the TV on all day. He must have seen those images hundreds of times, as we all did. Since then, it’s been lots of war: Afghanistan, Iraq. “There’s always fighting in Iraq!” he says in exasperation, as the news drones on. He’s a kind of war baby, as I was in 1942, except this war is in ways more pervasive for him, due to the omnipresence of media. So at the museum he scurried about among the tanks, missiles, and hands-on submarine controls. He was disappointed there weren’t more swords and daggers à la Robin Hood. I try my best to interpret war for him, but he has his own view, which I can only partially penetrate. So I have to hope my fairly ham-handed tales of Winston versus the Nazis or our chats about Iraq strike some useful chord. Surely it will have to do with good guys and bad guys, nuanced and filtered through his own conscience and values.

When we emerged from the tube in Paddington Station on the way to the airport, we went to a kiosk and bought a new bear, large and red with plastic rain boots. The first Paddington liked Canada so well that surely another would also enjoy it, plus how nice it would be for Paddington One to have company on the return trip. Gideon caringly strapped them both into his seat with him and when we reached cruising altitude positioned the computer so they could all watch a dvd, as we settled in for the eight-hour flight home.