Children are never complicit! she replied to me in rage-font, and I let it go. It wasn’t so important to me to make my point there on the site of someone with legitimate fragilities around the issue.
But all these months later it still itches at me, as any sort of dishonesty does.
I dislike very much in any discussion of children the use of the word innocent. It doesn’t serve the purpose.
Kids are immature. They are in many circumstances helpless—against the actions of grownups and quite often against the actions of other kids. They’re often thwarted, for good or ill, in exercising their own agency. All kids need the guidance of decent sensible grownups if they’re to achieve a healthy well-functioning maturity.
But they’re born with natures, with personalities. Sometimes they come out badly damaged from the start. They can develop serious mental and emotional disorders from a very young age, and sometimes nobody can figure out why.
And sometimes they’ve no natural taste for the self-taming everyone needs to go through to become reasonably grownup people eventually.
They’re individuals; they’re unique, each in themselves; they change as they grow; they react to circumstances as their strengths and vulnerabilities allow.
Anyone who’s actually raised a kid has seen how early in life they exhibit good and bad traits. You can guide, reinforce or discourage or suppress either direction, and sometimes not very effectively. But every kid comes with his own foundational wiring.
Children can be complicit. They can figure out advantages. They can have desires and motives that aren’t very nice. They can recognize when something is wrong, and sometimes the permission or encouragement of a grownup to engage in the wrongdoing is a pleasurable license.
Kids can be coerced too, in plenty of ways. And they can recognize coercion and they can feel bad about it and they can feel or be without the means to resist it.
All these things can happen. Some are very excusable.
Some are not.
I like kids, in general. I was a kid and I remember what it was like. I loathe anyone who hurts kids, or deforms their potential to grow in the hoped-for direction.
But I ain’t sentimental about the time or the state of being. One can’t fight for the wellbeing of all children—of all individuals, and of society—by crafting misleading and untruthful maxims.
“sometimes the permission or encouragement of a grownup to engage in the wrongdoing is a pleasurable license.”
Oh, this phenomenon persists well past childhood.
Replace “a grownup” with “The State” and see how it reads.
So true. A friend has a four-year-old who has been manipulating her mother to get her way since she could barely babble.