“No more Goldfish for today? It’s 10AM! What if I pass away?!”- a wise 6-year-old
Us adults are scorched by the heat of our misguided passions, emotional baggage, and dysfunctional childhoods. According to Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, post-conventional wisdom develops following a stage largely dictated by external rules and expectations. That is, we move from only behaving appropriately to avoid punishment to constructing our own personal ethics and value statements.
The child who sneaks into the kitchen while Daddy sleeps off his 14th can of Busch Light has strategically chosen a time frame in which consequences can’t be doled out--- he has evaded punishment while still doing something he knows he isn’t supposed to. The child wouldn’t consider such cookie-snatching to be a betrayal of his self-appointed values; he sees it as a means to an end. Timmy wants dessert, and the means by which to get there are to make sure Dad is down for the count and therefore unable to slam him with a veto. The adult perspective may be that of discussing controversy openly. This happened last semester when I initiated a conversation about Black Lives Matter. When I posed the question, “If everyone’s lives matter, why not name every single racial group?”, the class disintegrated into a radio silence. Only the black students volunteered their opinions, to which their classmates passively nodded. When the class was dismissed and only a couple were left behind, they admitted to nodding because they “just didn’t want to get into it”. We behave differently depending on the circumstances, particularly if those circumstances take the form of other people.
Children don’t hold themselves hostage to such convoluted social opinions, specifically those of the chattering class. While all humans have an evolutionary inclination towards grouped thinking, children’s worldview isn’t polluted in the same manner as adults. A denied Oreo is a denied Oreo. It isn’t indicative of systemic inequality amongst the machine-processed goods of Nabisco. Their greatest rival may be the husky vato who kicked their scrawny ass in a game of four square during recess. A young girl’s frenemy could be the one who successfully landed a paper fortune teller in the hands of 6th grade heartthrob Neil Lichtenberger. The inner workings of a child’s social status are grounded in largely surface-level influences, like clothing preferences and Pokémon rank. You’d be hard-pressed to find a middle schooler who has ousted a peer because their parents are Trump Supporters. That level of depravity is reserved for us millennials.
Personal values, when compared to socially-constructed behavior, are broader principles we use to guide our choices. Our choices and behaviors, when consistent, tend to further influence our beliefs and self-appraisal. If a millennial went for a walk but didn’t bring her iPhone and Apple Watch to publicly announce her total steps for the day, did the walk count? The value in taking a walk, should it be truly important to the individual, should be devoid of an audience or celebration of a step count. Unlike goals, our morals or “values” are never actually met--- they’re constant revisions versus rules. As development would have it, children and adults see themselves and their behavior quite differently. In a recent conversation with a little girl, who I’ll call N, I was reminded why children can sometimes function as the best sources of untainted intelligence.
“Miss Kayla, why are you nervous?”
“I don’t know, actually. Maybe because I haven’t done this before so I don’t know what to expect. Does that happen to you?”
“Well, I mean… what do you think your Mom or Dad might say?”
In psychology, we often use third-person perspective-taking as a way to get out of our own head. For the depressed individual who makes judgmental and often critical statements about herself, it may be useful for her to offer guidance as if she were giving such guidance to a friend. Doing so distances us from our feelings just enough to gain clarity about their meaning, which in turn shapes our advice into that which is more neutral, more helpful, and more adaptive than berating our psyche. To be on the receiving end of such sound counsel, especially from a girl so young, was the awakening I believe us adults are mostly stripped of. The advice we receive is usually a perverse version of an old adage that bears minimal association to the problem we presented, leaving us even more frustrated had we confronted the problem on our own dime.
Seeking advice from other adults, particularly those close to us, has benefits: we’re afforded a new perspective, alongside validation for our complex blend of guilt, shame, laziness, and entitlement. As seen primarily online and in politics, aligning too closely with those who share our point of view fosters a diabolical groupthink, one characterized by ad hominem attacks, pathetic character assassinations, and nonsensical accusations taken as gospel by others within the clan. Kids? Sure, they can be little dicks. But their alliances are often disassembled as quickly as they’re built, making for screaming little people quick to forgive and swift in moving the hell on. They’re too young to harbor grudges. Life remains simple enough for them to kiss Ethan Drower in the ball pit at the McDonald’s Play Palace and hours later propose to his twin sister. To perhaps perfectly encapsulate my yearning for such virginal simplicity, I’ll toss in the heading from Bob Seger’s Against the Wind: “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then”.
To demonstrate through use of a story, we turn to a little girl who I’ll refer to as B. As a 10-year-old, her uncomprehending little face would fall into the developmental category of “Good Boy Attitude”: good behavior is good, so long as it lives up to social rules. As a child with a litany of emotional and behavioral diagnoses, as characterized by never-ending, thrashing tantrums, hurricane-like destructive tendencies, and a vicious mean streak, one may assume her concept of “good” was different from what most would consider normal. Not so.
B, in a flogging frenzy after being told she couldn’t walk the family chickens in the hallway, let alone bring them to school at all, landed a roundhouse fist to the right eye of a young professional—one we’ll call Cora. To be entirely honest, Cora, with her unnecessarily high-pitched, sing-songy voice and bouncy demeanor, was kind of asking for it---perhaps B merely absorbed a lewd fantasy us more crusty team members kept mostly hidden. B’s knuckles managed to shake loose Cora’s right contact lens, which popped out of her eye and onto the carpeted floor, quickly disappearing into its fibers. Because it had seemingly evaporated into thin air, at least from B’s childlike vantage point, B thought the contact lens was her actual eyeball, which resulted in a series of frenzied “I’m thorry, I’m thoooo tho thorry!” and panic-stricken hands, clawing at the floor in search of that illusory oculus. Following the mass assault on Cora’s face, B proceeded to treat her desk as a workshop for fake eyeballs crafted out of playdough, Styrofoam, wadded up spit and paper, and rubber cement, offering each one up as a replacement for Cora’s now-vacant gaping hole. Cora was fine, but the gaping hole was what was communicated to B, as Cora wore an eyepatch the rest of the day to leverage the inevitable life lesson weaved in to this whole scenario: don’t punch people in the face unless they deserve it.
In what Kohlberg refers to as the Heinz Dilemma, a man called Heinz has a wife who is suffering from cancer. Doctors claim a new drug might save her, but the drug is far outside of Heinz’ financial means. Desperate to save his wife and stave off heartbreak, Heinz breaks in to the chemists’ lab and steals the drug. If you ask children to decide if this was right or wrong, the answer varies depending on their age and, in turn, their stage in Kohlberg’s moral development. For preschool-age kids, their moral reasoning is based solely on direct consequences; that is, stealing is bad, stealing is illegal, stealing should be punished. Should you ask B, though, who is slightly above the Good Boy Attitude phase explained earlier, her response may be something like, “Heinz shouldn’t steal and break the law because that might make him a bad citizen” or even “Heinz maybe could steal the drug and still be okay because he’s just trying to be a good husband.” Ask a millennial? “Chemists are White males and are gatekeeping access to drugs so as long as the wife is a POC, she should be allowed free and equitable access to anything she wants.” Okay, this may admittedly be an oafish exaggeration influenced by the media. In seriousness, though, the answer given by adults will likely vary far more greatly depending on life experience, personal values, and our understanding of our role in society.
These are referred to, interchangeably, as “morals”, “ethics”, or “values”---that is, those invisible, unwritten rules we often unknowingly abide by. Society and culture play important roles in how we come to understand the problems of ourselves and others. A perverse interpretation of this can be seen online, where anyone who disagrees with you is plausibly a Nazi or a Klansman. This putrid narcissism is a learned, shaped behavior, one younger children are largely immune to by virtue of their cognitive development. Not only does their surface-level understanding of punishment and reinforcement result in no-brainer resolutions to problems, it also fosters greater forgiveness for slip-ups. This said, I truly believe there is no such thing as a “bad” kid. This makes for possibly the only intellectually celibate tribe capable of original thought versus those caricatured, those parroted, and those plagiarized---like adults. Dr. Becky Kennedy has done pretty stellar work in this arena, developing a consulting business called “Good Inside” which is much what it sounds like: all children, despite inappropriate and assumed-to-be sociopathic behavior, are sincerely good inside. Bad behavior is not synonymous with bad kid. This unfortunately changes in adulthood, though, when enough instances of poor decisions and ample opportunities to showcase one’s arrogance and self-centeredness do plausibly make for a bad person. That, or you said the politically incorrect thing on Instagram. Again--- this brand of debasement is one kids are incapable of, as they’re too pure and too good.
Although we’ve heard endlessly that technological advances are royally fucking up the mental health of our kids, I’m still of the belief that they remain better people because of their immaturity and clean-handed intuitions. To refer back to B, who graciously made enough battered, forged eyeballs to plug the sockets of a small village in eyeless Greece, her aggression and her “mean streaks” weren’t necessarily calculated mean streaks at all, but a mere means to an end. For kids this age, I’m wary about theories like “trauma-responsive practice”, and its efforts to better guard kids against the inevitable anxiety of being alive. While nervousness and even tragedy does not discriminate between adults and children, the development of post-traumatic symptoms rest almost entirely on robust cognition and thorough understanding of emotion. For the 10-year-old demanding a chicken coop next to their desk, concluding she’s doing so for “emotional support” for her ”social anxiety” is an assumption as dangerous as it is smug. Instead of using kids as vessels to fuel our perverse obsessions about their imagined problems, why not leverage their simplemindedness to counterbalance our own projections and judgments?
In a recent exchange with a fifth grader:
Me: “I don’t really like Uno.”
Her: “Oh. Hmm. I mean that’s okay, I still love playing games with you.”
With a shake of her coiled little bangs and a half-smile, N showed me a positive regard I honestly don’t think I’d seen in adults in quite some time. How easy it was for her to acknowledge my preferences, which contradicted her own, but still maintained emotional composure and human decency. Imagine if we’d taken N’s approach to political differences, controversial stances, and any dividing issue: “It’s okay if you don’t like it or disagree. I still would like to hear what you have to say.” Yes, there is (I would assume) a basic understanding that such open-mindedness is more difficult in adulthood because of our cognition. Our language, our upbringing, our socioeconomic status, and our religious affiliations can all bear weight in how our innermost beliefs are expressed, particularly to those who may find them repugnant. The hatred we’ve harbored towards ourselves or our childhoods or our parents becomes intolerable, so we externalize it and make it somebody else’s or something else’s problem. Our intellect is our most versatile tool but also the most destructive weapon in that sophisticated reasoning can quickly become sophisticated lying. We fumble with metaphors in ways that kids can’t, yet still manage to entirely miss the plot… despite the plot being painfully obvious.
Children are unencumbered by such willful misunderstanding. I saw a personal trainer and postpartum nutritionist make a blog post recently stating “If your child can accompany you to a 30-minute trip to Target, they can tolerate you doing a 30-minute workout.” In other words, she’s urging mothers to stop making excuses such as “I don’t have time” in reference to things they simply do not like or have not prioritized. In expected sequence, a slew of furious mothers showcasing their resentful, self-hating projection chimed in: “SO WHAT YOU’RE SAYING IS I SHOULD WORK OUT INSTEAD OF FEED MY HUNGRY CHILDREN?!”, “HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO EAT IF I’M BUSY EXERCISING?! SHAME ON YOU!”. Children may have the attention span of goldfish on narcotics, but they do not so shamelessly and so cruelly distort the meaning of what was very clearly stated. They do not have enough years under their teeny belts to foster such insecurity, such pronounced self-doubt. If we remember Kohlberg’s stages of development from earlier on, this behavior is characteristic of blind egoism, or the first stage: if I can’t have it, then you shouldn’t be allowed to either.
We should rely on kids more often than we do, and we should also rebuild our trust in them. They’re not fragile snowflakes with brittle psyches that will crumble should they hear a voice tone that isn’t the same octave as Cora’s. While they face issues more complex than we ever did before the advent of the smartphone, they’re still more resilient than we ever give them credit for. I’m wondering why tough love is now interpreted as a twisted, unrequited love, as if the discipline required to build them into strong beings is biased or immoral. Like I mentioned earlier, the more you know and greater your maturity, the easier it becomes to lie to ourselves about what reality is. As sixth grader Ricky puts it, “As you get older, things seem more lame than before. Nothing will change but you, I promise.”
