To stand around the children’s face-morphing booth at the Museum of Science’s “Secrets of Aging” exhibit as I did for a couple of hours last week was to encounter loads of kids anxious to see what they would look like at age 65 (and at various intervening points.)

I had been present when the exhibit opened last April to much hoopla among museum officials and assorted gerontologists. Since then, reports had circulated about the crowds of boys and girls who come to see themselves grow old. I wanted to make a return visit to see for myself what was happening.

Also, the more I thought about face-morphing, the more I felt doubtful about its suitability as a tool for teaching the realities of aging. Might it not be, I wondered, that this gimmick was giving the wrong message and thereby going against the purpose of the whole exhibit?

In fact, face-morphing has turned out to be far and away children’s favorite activity in the ongoing Secrets of Aging exhibit. It looks as if some of them must be tearing themselves away from the Museum’s featured attraction, Sue, the recently discovered Tyrannosaurus Rex, looming up menacingly and boasting some ninety percent of its fifty or sixty- million-year-old bones.

Here are some comments I heard outside the two face-morphing booths from kids like eight-year-old Christian from the western suburbs of Boston. Looking as if he had tasted something bad, he commented on another boy’s experience: “He’s disgusting at 42.” About seeing himself at 65, he said, “Not good; I don’t want to grow up.”

Donna, a mother from North Reading, watching one of her sons morph his way to 65, told him: “The girls say you’re getting ugly.” To another son she said, “That’s when you look the best – as a little boy.”

A kid from Hingham named Madeline called the experience “scary” and said she was “shocked” to see herself old. But, by contrast, her sister Natalie judged that she aged well and her mother thought Natalie looked more like her father as she aged.

A smaller girl had a different idea altogether, “I want to go to the mall,” she fussed as she tried to tug her harried mother in that direction.

Some adult passers-by, though ineligible to morph, also took an interest in what was happening. Bill Fennell, a resident of Abington with a face really 65 years old, commented on the scene: “That’s kind of negative. That would depress me if I were young.”

His sister-in –law, a visitor from Dublin named Marie Fennell, leveled a gerontological criticism at the morph-makers: “They should emphasize that you’re made up of body, mind, and spirit.” For her, showing the changing of one’s face alone was leaving out altogether too much.

That comment comes close to my feelings about the demonstration. To me, having kids morph their faces suggests that aging means changes in outward appearance, largely negative changes at best. This particular experiment ignores what is most important about growing older, namely changes in mind and heart.

Yes, as written materials on the wall advise kids, their faces will grow longer, their skin drier, and they will probably develop wrinkles. They may also show receding hair lines and more flab in their face muscles.

But is that nearly so important as the changes that will take place within? Given that many children are likely to focus on face morphing to the exclusion of other parts of the exhibit that might balance this activity, should not someone emphasize that aging involves much more than looking different? Above all, it means being different.

Jan Crocker, the woman who is the museum’s director of temporary exhibits and manager of the “Secrets of Aging,” acknowledges having had some doubts about face morphing at the beginning. “Is aging merely cosmetic?” – that is the question it posed for her. However, she feels that the exhibit as a whole establishes a healthy balance and answers the question clearly. Aging is indeed much more than seeing a person’s face become transformed.

One mother to whom I spoke, Regina Corraro Clanon of Carlisle, made a point of this with her children. In discussions with them she discovered that they all had a bias against growing old. Part of her reason from bringing them to the exhibit was to counteract that bias. In asking them about older and younger, she received the precocious response from one of them, “When you’re older, you’ve done so many more things.”

And another mother who also happened to be from Carlisle, Nancy Di Romuldo, said something beautiful to her kids about aging: “You become wiser and more knowledgeable and life makes more sense.”

So perhaps face morphing, for all its high-tech dazzle, needs to be supplemented by other educational experiences and to be put in context by savvy parents.

Richard Griffin