For the second year in a row, my husband James took our seven-year-old daughter Ella to the Father-Daughter Valentine’s Day dance, sponsored by the Charlottesville Parks and Recreation Department. It’s a popular affair, with room for only the first 200 couples, and it sells out quickly. For $10 a couple, you can twirl your girl on the heart-bedecked dance floor to the rhythms of Justin Bieber, the Hokie Pokie, the chicken dance, and the Macarena, plus feast on cupcakes, pretzels and drinks. Each girl goes home with a box of chocolates and a red carnation.

There is no dress code, but even the men go formal. Almost every dad wears a tie, and a few are in tuxedos. The girls decorate themselves in dresses as red as the red velvet cupcakes, some with hair in pink ribbons, swirled on top of their heads like frosting.

But what’s remarkable about the event is how racially and economically integrated it is. Or rather, what’s remarkable about most events we go to here is how much they are not.

Social segregation is still a problem all over the country, including in Brooklyn, where we lived until a couple years ago (all you have to do is watch a Spike Lee film to prove that point.) But here in the South, where school integration is something of recent memory, it has a different emotional resonance.

Charlottesville is a progressive college town, and 80 percent of us voted for Barack Obama. But we are surrounded by the remnants of our history. Only an hour to the east is the capitol of the Confederacy during the Civil War, and our downtown showcases a park named after Robert E. Lee and a statue of Stonewall Jackson. You don’t have to drive far, maybe fifteen minutes south to Scottsville, to see Confederate flags on grand old porches.

Partly it’s our fault when we mainly see people like us. My daughter’s dance and French classes are expensive, as are my son’s saxophone lessons and the live music and theater performances we love. But everything we do doesn’t have to be like that.

Our family has choices, so we have chosen to put our daughter on the city municipal swim team, whose negligible entry fee makes it open to all, instead of a team at a fancy swim club. We send her to a public school with an award-winning black principal. We transferred our son from a mostly white private school to the public city high school, which is about half black and half white.

If we’re really lucky, our children will grow up–with a black president, principal, school board members, neighbors, and friends—in a much more integrated society than previous generations. We’ll reserve our daughter’s Valentine’s Dance tickets early every year and hope that the only colors she’ll be concerned about are red and pink.

Photo: Ella in her homemade updo ready for the dance

“How much money do we have?” my seven-year-old daughter Ella asked, off-handedly, the way she just said, “What’s for breakfast?”

“None of your business,” I said, something I vowed I’d never tell my kids before I became a mom but find myself doing all the time.

My husband James was more diplomatic. “That’s grown-up information,” he said. “All you need to know is we have enough.”

“Do we have a million dollars?” Ella persisted. “How much is our house worth? How much do we have in the bank?

“That’s not something you need to worry about,” James said.

“Are we rich?”

“No,” he said. “But we’re not poor, either.”

I slid her bowl of oatmeal onto the place mat, and that was the end of the conversation—for now.

I’ve always been struck by the secrecy about money in our society. In middle and upper-middle class circles, anyway.

When I was a kid, I knew exactly how much money our family had–how much our house was worth, my mother’s salary as a secretary,  our only income for a family of four. I knew how much money we had in the bank, too, which is why I took a job at A&W Rootbeer Stand when I was fourteen. When I got to college, at Columbia, I was shocked that none of my fellow students knew anything about their parents’ finances. I vowed that wouldn’t happen when I had kids, but it just did.

Ella is savvy about money, though, in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I was seven. As the daughter of an economist, she takes part in conversations about currency exchange at the dinner table. She uses the phrase “opportunity cost” when deciding whether to take a dance class.

And the other night, when we strolled on the Downtown Mall after dinner, she begged for a bag of flavored popcorn from an almost empty store. When I said no, she laid our her argument: “We need to shop there to keep the store in business. It will boost the economy.” I didn’t believe it, but I gave in anyway.

Photo: Pingo 1968 via Flickr

At dinner, my seven-year-old daughter announced: “I know Santa Claus is not real.” When we asked how she knew, she answered: “I read it in a parenting magazine. It was an article about the recession. It said parents should tell their kids there’s an elf shortage in the North Pole and that’s why they’re not going to get as many presents.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yeah.” She started kicking the legs of the chair. “It also said that parents can tell their kids anything and they’ll believe them.”

Ouch. She’d discovered our secret. Not the one about Santa; I’m sure she suspected something about that for a while. I enjoyed pretending along with her but didn’t make a big effort to cover my traces. Unlike some other parents I know, I wrapped presents from us in the same paper as presents from Santa. The much more troubling secret she discovered is that parents can take advantage of their small children’s infinite trust.

It’s true: We could tell her anything and she would believe it. At least right now, at least at seven. At least until she goes through puberty and starts to question everything we say and do.

Later that night, my daughter handed me a piece of paper: her Christmas list. It said: “Dear Santa, I would like walkie-talkies. They can be a toy as long as they work. I know you are not real. But we can always pretend, can’t we?” And we will.

Photo by tofutti break via Flickr