Out of the Mouths of Babes...

I’ve been thinking about kids a lot these past few years. I never used to understand them - was inclined to keep them very much at arm’s length - but I’ve grown rather fond of them now. They’re so honest. Even when they lie, they do it honestly. Even when they’re trying to deceive you, it’s a sort of ‘straight’ deceit. And it’s been my experience over the last few years that they’re often better at judging the more meaningful qualities in adults than adults are.

Two things have got me pondering the relationship the adult world has with children – a lovely blogsite I found from a delightful young woman called Megan, from somewhere in the UK, and my current reading of JM Barrie’s novel Peter and Wendy (his own adaptation of his stage play Peter Pan.) It’s a book full of hidden meanings and surprises, so unlike the commercialised version, but more of that another time.

I think we look at kids all wrong. We treat childhood as something essentially different to adulthood - something almost opposed to it – something we grow out of. Once you were a child, now you’re a grown up. It doesn’t have to be that way, and I don’t think it should be that way. We don’t inhabit one world as children and another when we grow up. It’s not that simple. Who’s to say when one stops and the other begins? We are the sum total of all our experiences from conception to the present day. Every age has its qualities, and young children especially have qualities we do well to respect. They have an innate understanding of some extra dimension to life – call it magic, if you like - that we feel we have to suppress when we grow up. Who was it said that magic is the poetry of life? We don’t have to hide that poetry away when we reach the age of consent or the age of majority. There’s nothing shameful about it. We can keep it in full view along with all the other qualities we’ve gained along the way, and be all the richer for it.

So let’s stop seeing kids merely as inferior beings training to be adults. Let’s start seeing them as different but equal. And, perhaps more importantly, let’s start acknowledging and respecting the child we all still have inside us. Thereby lies, I believe, the road to greater wisdom and a wider understanding of life.