On Adults Engaging With Children

Many adults seem generally comfortable around children, but I observe other adults who look very self-conscious trying to relate to and converse with children. Some of those adults may find it equally difficult conversing with other adults, but some probably find children uniquely difficult to relate to, due to the gulf in age and understanding.

For those people, the writer Rebecca West makes an eloquent observation about children that might help. In one of her novels, she says that children have their adult qualities within them but are handicapped by a humiliating disguise. I wouldn’t take it hyper literally, of course, but it’s a sharp observation about how children’s core temperament contains adult qualities in seed form, and as they grow, their real interior perspective develops at a rate that is constrained by their childlike frame.

This kind of ideation might counsel against patronising children based on what we see on the surface rather than the continuity between who they are and who they are becoming. The essence of the adult is already present, certainly in nascent form; it’s just trapped in a body and social position that can’t express itself fully yet. But children are already equipped with the seeds of adult flaws and the seeds of adult virtues. Perhaps this is why experience tells me that children grow in confidence more quickly, and mature emotionally more steadily, when adults speak to them respectfully and sincerely, as fellow persons rather than caricatures of childhood.