Kids Won’t Step on Cracks--or Give Up On Superstitions

When 11-year-old Beth Huber of Orange finds a rubber band on the sidewalk, she puts it on her wrist and makes five wishes before throwing it back on the ground.

Across town, Gary Martinez bounces a toothpaste cap against the sink on the night before exams. If the cap lands on the counter, the 13-year-old considers it a good omen.

One of his classmates, Heather Estrada, also 13, holds her breath whenever she passes a graveyard; she regards it as protection against bad luck.

In the world of childhood superstitions, even stepping on a crack can break a mother’s back, listening to the wrong Beatles record can kill people and sitting in a certain chair by the TV can influence the outcome of the game on the screen.

Odd as such beliefs might sound, they play an important role in growing up, experts say. Superstitions reflect a child’s thought processes, fears and personality. Some appear generation after generation; others come out of nowhere. A few signal psychological disorders.

Fueling it is a phenomenon called “magical thinking,” says Michael Rothenberg, co-author of “Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care” and professor emeritus of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Washington.

Young children, unable to distinguish fantasy from reality, commonly believe that inanimate objects, like stuffed animals, have feelings--and that thoughts have magical powers over events, Rothenberg says.

It’s a perfect environment for superstitions.

Growing up in Brooklyn, Philip Goldberg believed he could help the Dodgers win by wearing his lucky cap and sitting on a certain stool at the local luncheonette as he watched the team on television.

“There’s a part of us that instinctively feels a connection between things we care about and our own behaviors and thoughts,” says Goldberg, whose novel, “This Is Next Year,” revolves around boyhood superstitions and the 1955 World Series.

As children get older, however, the nature of superstitions shifts. The intellectual belief in magic gives way to an emotional belief--and superstitions evolve into a “more sophisticated, less embarrassing” version of teddy bears and security blankets, says Nancy Hornstein, a child psychiatrist and assistant clinical professor at UCLA.

The rituals offer a feeling of safety and protection as children learn to cope with such uncertainties as dating and tests.

Among the superstitions surrounding romance, for example: When crossing railroad tracks in a car or bus, lift your feet and put your hand on the ceiling or you’ll lose your boyfriend.

For quizzes and exams, try rubbing a troll doll’s hair, says Lauren Eyrich, a seventh-grader from Santa Ana. Other classmates suggest putting pennies in your shoes or writing with a lucky pen or pencil.

“Sometimes we encourage such superstitions,” Hornstein says. If a child is fearful of leaving his house, for instance, “we have him find a magical object to help.”

Such practices get discarded after a child gains confidence or mastery over the particular situation.

In theory.

“There’s always that flicker of doubt,” says Greg Cynaumon, a psychologist in Newport Beach.

Superstitions also serve as social rituals.

Some mainly function as games: When two people say the same thing at once, for example, one is supposed to shout “jinx” and count to 10 before the other person says “stop.” But the bad luck that supposedly befalls the loser is incidental to the competition itself.

Other superstitions seem part of some unwritten social code: If, heaven forbid, you should somehow spit on yourself, you absolutely, positively must not wipe it off, cautions Patrick Smith, 13, of Orange. “I don’t know why; you just can’t.”

Many such beliefs--passed through generations--are almost institutionalized in childhood.

The rest are personal inventions, usually known only to their creators.

A San Diego County man wouldn’t play the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” album for years as a boy because he thought it would cause someone he knew to die. Why? He was listening to the record when his mother informed him that a family friend had been killed in a car crash.

The Fab Four became indelibly associated with the traumatic event, psychiatrists say.

Magic formulas are another private superstition. One girl made up a rule that she had to eat her Cheerios two O’s at a time and that if she finished the bowl with a solo Cheerio, it meant bad luck, Hornstein says. The only escape (pay attention, General Mills marketing department) was to add more Cheerios--a random number, of course--and try again.

Grown-ups also subscribe to magic formulas. The late actor Lorne Green used to add up the numbers on license plates until he found one that totaled seven, a good omen, he told a magazine writer.

Other formulas have more specific meaning. A 14-year-old invented the superstition that if he heard two particular songs back to back on the radio, he would get a girlfriend. The underlying purpose, Hornstein theorizes, was to counter the teen’s anxiety about attracting the opposite sex: “He didn’t feel like he had the ability to control his fate, so he made up some kind of formula to believe in.”

Kids who are “timid, unsure of themselves and maybe have low self-esteem tend to put a lot more credence in this type of stuff,” Cynaumon says.

In contrast, confident youngsters often disregard or even flaunt the rules. Take the perennial “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” he says. A self-assured child will laugh off the belief, ignore it or stomp his foot on a crack for all to see and proclaim, “See? Nothing happens.”

Hornstein agrees--in part. Although it’s generally true that insecure people are more superstitions, she says, mystical behaviors turn up “across all sorts of personality types,” especially in situations that are inherently uncertain.

One such area is sports--where superstition is virtually de rigueur, adults included. Former Oakland Raiders coach John Madden, for example, was reported to have refused to let his team leave the locker room until running back Mark van Eeghen had belched.

Other professional methods for summoning luck have included wearing a Jetsons T-shirt under the uniform (pitcher Charlie Kerfeld, when he played with the Houston Astros), not washing socks when he was on scoring streaks (former hockey great Bobby Orr) and eating chicken every day before a game (Wade Boggs of the Boston Red Sox).

Kids pick up the weird rituals and then manufacture their own, Cynaumon says.

An eighth-grade soccer player, for example, ties pretzels in his shoelaces for luck. Members of an Orange County Little League team, meanwhile, rely on the ceremonial rolling down of socks and rolling up of sleeves just before game time.

Failure to follow the prescribed practice can reinforce the superstition by creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, Cynaumon says: If Mom washes the “lucky jersey” in the middle of a youngster’s winning streak, the kid might subconsciously make himself mess up.

As puzzling and exasperating as these beliefs might seem to parents, children’s superstitions rarely are cause for worry, experts agree.

However, Rothenberg says, “things cross the line when the pattern of behavior begins to interfere with normal, everyday activities.”

Some children develop painstaking rituals, such as having to touch every object in a room--and having to start over again if a certain thought enters their mind, Hornstein says.

Even seemingly innocent superstitions can get out of hand. For example, a ritual of having to touch every third picket in a fence is normal unless it starts making a child late for school.

Overboard superstitions should be reported to a pediatrician or family doctor for advice, experts say.

In other cases--the lucky shirts and magic pretzels and counting of Cheerios--parents should just play along, psychiatrists say.

Of course, they might end up playing for a very long time.

Childhood superstitions, it seems, aren’t only for kids. Psychology Today found a lot of lucky pens when it looked into study aids used by college students.

And pro baseball’s maxim about not walking on foul lines bears suspicious resemblance to “Step on a crack.”

Novelist Goldberg, too, hasn’t exactly abandoned his boyhood rituals. At Dodger games, he still wears a lucky cap. “I don’t necessarily believe in it to the degree I did as a kid,” he says. Still, he doesn’t want to take chances.

“The old saying is that there are no atheists in foxholes. Well, there aren’t many in the bleachers, either.”