I know that parents fear for their children for many reasons.  

Will they have a job?  Will they be happy?  Will the climate change?

My daughter’s now two. Yesterday I was telling her about Jack & The Beanstalk (or what I could remember of it), and she said “Mommy and Daddy and Nic jump into the story.” So basically, two years old and using metafiction. 

Of all the things in the world, this scares me. I probably should bey more concerned about drinking water in the mid-21st century, but instead I worry that, as a culture, we’re consuming story at too fast a rate.

Where does it end?

Unreliable narration by age four?  Myth modernization tapped out by age six?  The heat death of cross-genre pollination by age ten?

Current media numbers look like what, twenty-five half-hour story lines consumed a day? Add in YouTube punchline story forms, sketches and memes as intermezzi and over the course of a week, what kind of story tolerance will she have built up?

At age twenty, how much plot will she be mainlining, just to keep the withdrawal at bay?