Child's play

We were all children once—why is it so hard to understand childhood?

It’s not just a modern failing; from ancient times the wisest among us (and the less wise, of course) have devised all kinds of cockamamie ideas about who children are and how to raise them. Throughout history kids have been regarded as little adults, once they had dodged appalling infant-mortality rates and could walk and talk. Not until relatively late has childhood been seen as a special place of its own: a shift in attitude that might be dated from the appearance of nonpedagogical children’s literature.

Alice—the perennial child who was 150 years old last November—fell terrifyingly into wonderland and encountered homicidal monarchs while carrying on conversations that made no sense—all without harm or obvious moral. Her adventures, as her sister reflected, were “a dream of wonderland long ago,” which Alice would someday tell her own children, “remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.”

Without sentimentalizing children, Lewis Carroll was on to something: Unbound as it is to memory and experience, childhood has a dreamlike quality. In The Importance of Being Little, early-education teacher Erika Christakis recalls how the preschoolers she taught ended up teaching her about “child-life.” The little Alices in her classroom were both knowledgeable and clueless: “how could these children talk to me in such animated detail about important differences between crested bullhead and Galapagos bullhead sharks, yet have to be reminded multiple times per day—for a whole year!—to pull up their pants after they left the bathroom?”

Unbound as it is to memory and experience, childhood has a dreamlike quality.

She marvels at the perceptive leaps a young mind can make, at a 4-year-old’s capacity for language and communication. How to turn these talkative incompetents into successful adults? The necessary ingredient—parents and teachers take note—is talking with them: letting them speculate freely and follow their imaginations while grown-ups fill in the gaps. What children need is relational intelligence: learning to make inferences and sort out impressions with sensitive adult guidance.

Instead, we’ve returned to the “direct instruction” model of education, or rather we’ve pushed it all the way into preschool, where learning time for math facts and phonemes crowds out free play. The hammering on academics continues through high school, with increasingly adult content. A typical overachieving high-school junior may rise at dawn, arrive at school early for debate club, spend his study-hall time cramming for a calculus mid-term, eat lunch in the library while prepping for the PSAT he’ll take on Saturday, and end the school day researching an extra-credit project in physics. After dinner he’ll revise his paper about Heart of Darkness for honors English (with a break for the latest Walking Dead episode), wind down by beating up prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto V, and finally crash at midnight. His life is heavy: heavy academics, heavy entertainment, heavy expectations.

But when he gets to college he starts acting like a kid, as Erika Christakis learned last fall during a controversy at Yale over Halloween costumes. An official memo cautioned students to show sensitivity for diverse cultures before dressing in drag or donning a Native American headdress. Christakis, whose husband served as master of Yale’s Silliman College, sent around an email gently suggesting that Halloween costumes were no hill to die on. Offended students angrily demanded her dismissal and surrounded her husband on the quad, where one weepy girl insisted on affirmation while stamping her foot.

Hurry and grow up, we tell little ones; you’re 5 and can’t read yet? But when they reach college—the goal, in some families, of their entire childhood—a noisy few revert to kindergarten while others cool their jets and coast like lazy preteens. We publish grim “YA” novels for 11-year-olds and let actual “young adults” inhabit a wonderland of immediate gratification, shielded from discouraging words.

There is a time for everything, says the Preacher; while children are young there’s time to set aside the workbook and let them come to you with their whimsical questions—for such may be the kingdom of heaven.

Email jcheaney@wng.org