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by Michael Bettencourt

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CHILDREN AS ALIENS

I've had the opportunity lately (some might say the misfortune) to spend time with two young children, ages 7 and 5. I've learned from these children, and I don't they're unrepresentative, that the world children inhabit is a strange one, not unfriendly or inaccessible, but limited and, in its own way, difficult.

I say this because many adults suffer from J.D. Salinger's near-deification of imagined childhood simplicity and truthfulness. A child's mind is not a perfect parabolic mirror focusing more clearly on essentials than our own adult fun-house mirrors. Their minds are as muddled as any adult's, in part because they lack a certain level of analytical distance from their own concerns. (So do many adults, but that's another story.) And they can deceive themselves with even more facility than adults because they're already enmeshed in a stream-of-consciousness that sometimes bears only a tangential connection to the material world around them. To be sure, children can often portray truths in an indirect or fabulisitic way. But this seems to me a hit-or-miss proposition a lot of times, and they can as easily imagine themselves into a false as a true perception.

Children are also not innocent, if by innocent we mean a certain unadulterated goodness, beauty, and truth. Children, at least these children, come nowhere near that standard. Instead of Rousseau's noble savages they more closely approximate Hobbes' state of nature. They fight and bicker almost constantly, usually about who gets what of something - candy, gum, the back seat of the car. The older child continually refines her despotical talents on the younger; the younger, in turn, sharpens her rebellious strategies. They often act like two harridans on a tear, as egomaniacal, greedy, and omnivorous as any Mussolini.

It's important to see that children are not proto-adults and not paragons of lost Edens. They're struggling toward a self-definition that goes beyond solipsism, and at the same time are struggling to hold on to the carelessness that is the right of childhood. And sometimes adults are irrelevant to this process, like the Greek deities, powerful annoyances that must be tolerated. Children inhabit a world very much their own, a world plastic and obdurate at the same time, full of wants and battles most of us have forgotten about or resolved or given up on. As Emerson said, "children are aliens," and, as he advised, perhaps we would be better off treating them as such, with a patient curiosity that would not tend to anger when we become confused or thwarted by their self-centered impulses. Perhaps then there would be fewer battered, and more better-understood, children.

Learn more about this author, Michael Bettencourt.

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