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There are differences between adults and children, but perhaps, not as significant as we imagine. While for obvious reasons children need adults’ help and protection, they also want respect, freedom of choice, and many of the other things adults value. Children wish to grow up, because they want to live lives after their own hearts.
Because we imagine that children are very unlike adults, we think also that they can be happy in situations in which none of us would be. Here is how Rose Aubrey, the protagonist in Rebecca West’s This Real Night, puts this point:
A pretense already existed in those days, and has grown stronger every year since then, that children do not belong to the same species as adults, and have different kinds of perception and intelligence, which enable them to live a separate and satisfying life. This seemed to me then and seems to me now great nonsense. A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness.1
Why suppose that adults and children have dissimilar psychological propensities and needs? That the conditions of children's happiness are very different from those of our own?
How children’s appearance misleads us
I will take the first question first. One reason we tend to see children as unlike us has to do with outward appearance. Children look different from adults. Most adults surveying a child do not see someone to whom respect is owed, someone you don’t have permission to lie to as you wish, or on whom you can impose your will for arbitrary reasons. Many adults conclude from here that children don’t care about being treated honestly and with respect.
Relatedly, it is convenient for adults to assume children do not mind being bossed around and lied to. It makes doing those things easier. (It is a bit like a person with servants assuming that the servants like it.)
Last but not least, when it comes to children, we often focus on what matters from an adult’s point of view: are they fidgety or obedient? Loud or quiet? Picky eaters? It rarely occurs to us to describe the very young as we would a grownup: by mentioning character traits. But children have characters. They may be kind to other children or they may be meanspirited; selfish or altruistic, ambitious or not, and so on. There may be greater similarities in character between a particular adult and a given child than there are between that same adult and another adult.
Children may, for their part, be prone to see adults as belonging to a different species as well. They may not see grownups as people who have the sorts of character traits their friends have. However, the very young among us may be excused for not seeing the common humanity between themselves and us. From a child’s point of view, an adult is a person in charge, someone who can exercise power over you but whose behavior you cannot influence except perhaps by throwing a tantrum, a desperate tactic. This asymmetrical dynamic is not ideal for promoting the recognition of our common humanity.
Can children be happy?
What about happiness? Is West’s character Rose Aubrey right in suggesting that children endure conditions that preclude the possibility of happiness?
To be sure, there are aspects of happiness available to children but generally not to adults. Children can experience exhilaration in a way almost no adult can. There is freshness and novelty to the world from a child’s point of view. (Some meditation practitioners attempt to replicate something of this state of mind later in life though I don’t know how successfully.)
Children also carry less "baggage" -- fewer memories of past frustrations and failures than adults do. With a lighter burden on the shoulders, they are better able to live in the present moment and saver life.
On the flip side, however, they have immature defense mechanisms and a much weaker ability than an older person to deal with disappointment. They do not yet know the healing power of time, so when something bad happens, it seems to them that the current pain will go on forever.
More importantly, children live in a world populated by people who exercise power over them in a non-reciprocal manner. They are not in a good position to hold adults accountable for disrespect, ridicule, dishonesty, or arbitrary commands.
It may seem to adults that children are happy when they make adults happy. But no one can thrive merely in virtue of fulfilling other people’s psychological needs, and this is as true of children as it is of anyone else.
It is sometimes said that children ought to be happy in virtue of bearing no responsibilities or not serious ones. What's missed here is that kindergartners and preschoolers don’t know what the weight of responsibility feels like, so they don’t experience the absence of that weight either. They do, on the other hand, know quite well what it's like to be denied the right to choose for yourself. They experience that quite frequently. And they don’t like it.
Perhaps, children are just as mistaken about the benefits of adulthood as adults are about the benefits of childhood. Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz says that happiness is an imaginary condition attributed by adults to children and by children to adults.2 No doubt, there is something to that.
However, on balance, most any child wants to grow up, and no adult I have ever met wants to be 5 years old again. People may want to be young or younger adults but not toddlers. This suggests that when children ascribe happiness to adults, they believe their own attribution. What, by contrast, adults believe about the happiness of children given that none of them are interested in that alleged happiness is unclear.
Respect for children
I wish to suggest, in closing, that we can help make childhood happier by showing more respect for children. As adults, we don’t have a license to lie to children any time it is expedient or to insist on that they do as we say simply because we say it. If the demand we make is a reasonable one – and it better be – then the reasons behind it can be explained to the child.
Some adults already behave in just that way. I knew such adults in childhood. You probably did too. The mother of Rose Aubrey, Rebecca West’s fictional character I quoted at the beginning, is said to be such an adult as well. In an earlier volume of the book, Rose says this of her mother:
She did not argue with me. She often did seem to look to her daughters for protection. (…) Moreover, she understood children and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and had their adult qualities within them. 3
Seeing the fledgling adult qualities in a child may, among other things, help us get along with children, not simply in the superficial sense of decreasing uncontrolled outbursts but in the deeper sense of promoting mutual understanding. There is no need to look very far in order to find a common language with a very young human. Children’s vocabulary may be limited, but their psychology is not very different from ours.
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References
[1] West, R. (1984). This Real Night. London, UK: Penguin Books, p. 1.
[2] Szasz, T. (1973). The Second Sin. Anchor Press, p. 31.
[3] West, R. (2002). The Fountain Overflows. New York, NY: NYRB Classics, p. 97.
