Children Are People Too

Going to try to accumulate the clever things I wanted to say about parenting yesterday, but didn’t, touched off by this fine article about how wonderful the ‘Spanish aesthetic’ is in children’s clothes. The pictures of Princess Charlotte are to die for.

One
I agree wholeheartedly that it matters how a child is dressed. I learned, after thirty seconds of being a mother, that the best way for me to feel love and affection for my mewling infant was to dress her up in adorable outfits. Not that I didn’t love her in and of herself, of course, but it’s easier to be kind to a clean well dressed child than to a scruffy filthy one. As the days went by, I figured that the cuter the children (for they increased in number) looked on Sundays, the more grace would be meted out to them in church. They would be let off the hook for being children. And this has pretty well proven to be true. They have to dress up and be respectful, and this affords them mercy from the people they irritate. Also, it helps them think decently about themselves.

This is also why I make them get dressed every day at home. Don’t come up to the school room in your pjs or a shirt that needed to be washed last week. Unless you want me to yell at you and be irritated.

Two
But it is hard, no question, to find clothes appropriate to the age of the child in the US. Especially if that child is right on the edge of teenage-hood. She isn’t a grown up. She isn’t a little girl. She doesn’t want to stand out or put herself on display. She keeps whispering that she just wants to look ‘normal.’ But all the clothes on the rack want her to slut herself out, to leap into adulthood–the kind that should come with marriage–when she’s not interested at all. Finding clothes for her becomes a maze of broken dreams and ruined hopes. Little girls are pushed to grow up far too soon, to skip over the charm of girlhood, just by the clothes they have to stumble over trying to find something pretty to wear.

Three
That’s really the great tragedy, I think, the fact that nothing is pretty. I’m not asking for froufrou, for lace and bows and flowers. I’m asking for something that’s cut nicely and is pleasant to put on. It’s one thing if I can’t find it, broken as I am by motherhood. But it’s ridiculous that my daughter, untroubled by great flaps of extra skin, wouldn’t be able to discover it, instead discarding endless piles of useless dresses where the front is much shorter than the back and she has to wear three extra garments underneath in order not to appear, or feel, naked.

Four
Because somehow, in the melt down of critical thinking, children are expected to know all about sex, all about personal fulfillment and discovering who they really feel themselves to be, almost from the moment of leaving the womb, which considerations are really very adult–identity of whatever kind–but they aren’t expected to be competent in the realms in which they might actually enjoy competence. Getting a glass of water for oneself, for example, or dicing an onion, sweeping a floor, making a bed, climbing a tree, discovering how to get from point A to point B, stumbling into the thrill of heroism, baking a cake, going through all the steps to complete a task from start to finish–these are taken away as children are babied all the way to the age of maturity, where, unhappily, they find that maturity has fled, gone to some other distant land. In the great panicked rush to self discovery, the very means by which one might discover oneself are passed over, left abandoned by the roadside, dilapidated and useless. Young adults find themselves in their, by now worn out with wear, adult clothes, unable to do any of things required to make themselves comfortable as adults.

Five
This is why I refuse to talk down to and ‘baby talk’ my children, even from infancy. Babies and children are people too, and they need to be given space in the world to walk the long hard road to adulthood. Indeed, they should Want to go there. They should look forward to the freedoms and responsibilities that come with increased age. I don’t want them to stick forever where they are, nor do I want them to rush forward too fast. So I talk to them as people, as I wish to be spoken to myself. Condescension to a child, who is busy enjoying his own life and way of being, immediately knocks him back on his heels to wonder if he is in the wrong place. ‘Am I too young?’ he wonders, ‘is there something wrong with who I am?’ He must pause and consider himself, turning inward, as happens with any person who suffers the condescension and belittling tone of another person. His outward gaze towards the world is wrested from his grasp before he even knew he possessed it.

Six
And it’s why I don’t do things for my children that they can do themselves. And why I expect them to participate in the life of the family, as full members, helping with the physical and material labor that makes life pleasant for all concerned. Everyone has a task, or more than one. Everyone gets a chance to speak and be heard. Everyone has to sacrifice sometimes for the sake of another. To be known by others is an important first step to knowing oneself. To help another person is to discover that sometime, one will need help oneself. The gaze turns out first so that when it finally turns in, there is something to consider, there is something There, besides the empty vacuous pit of self love and the endless need for other people’s approbation.

Seven
So there you have it. Go forth and parent! Or, if you don’t have children, speak kindly and sincerely to a child when you see one. Treat him as you yourself would like to be treated. Children are people too. And go check out more Takes!