Give Me a Child...
She says, “I’m sorry” when she falls down. She means, “I’m okay.” Her “tanks” is on target, but she hasn’t got “please” yet. Waiting her turn is almost impossible, but she’ll get there. She is being shaped, conditioned by her caretakers and she is two years old.
Children absorb the world around them. They are natural mimic machines and they will become exactly what they receive, for better or for worse. Adults have always known this and the race to control these future adults begins at a very early age. Mostly we want our children to grow up happy and healthy; but we also want them to share our culture and our values. We’ll turn to experts for the ways and means to make that happen.
Every time period and every culture has its own unique set of experts. We in our Western world, both old and new, have always had one or another educational specialist who have glibly announced their views and methods through the millennia. Three of the most famous of these authorities have very different perspectives but share the same catch line – Give me a child…
In the 4th Century BCE, Aristotle described his observational approach: “Give me a child of seven and I will show you the man.” He was positing that a child has a fully formed character very early on in life. The 16th century Jesuits had a more intentional approach. Their view was: “Give me the child for the first seven years and I’ll give you the man.” The coldest and possibly the most accurate approach is from the 20th century. B.F. Skinner stated: “Give me a child, and I'll shape him into anything.”
None of these maxims are wrong in and of themselves. They outline the two primary means to mold a child: determine their behavior and imprint their beliefs. If successful, the cultural high priests, in whatever society they rule, will have created a true disciple, one who has become a good soldier for King and country, or more accurately for the specific flag and the specific faith they were born into. But surely there is more to us than our conduct and the tenets drilled into us. Surely, something has been lost when we treat children as commodities; as if human existence is only to serve someone or something else. Surely all children have purpose and meaning in and of themselves.
Surely we do too.
What the pundits ignore or gloss over in this race to make compliant members of society is that there is a crucial and essential part of childhood that isn’t built from conditioning or catechizing, that exists unto itself. All children live in two very different domains. One where they learn “tanks” and waiting their turn and the other one where everything is alive, magical and interconnected - the one we know as the world of wonder.
Wonder is a simple word but it conveys endless depths of feeling and possibility. We call wonder a feeling. Something that comes to us when we see or experience something strange and new. For children the world is a constant wonder. Everything is new and strange and we engage with it fully, without hesitation or doubt. Wonder is the means by which we absorb the world.
This natural inclination to feel delight in everything around us has a very short life. By the time we are seven the pull of everyday life is gaining ground. We begin to lose the magical feeling that everything around us has life and meaning. Our collection of living things begins to shrink. Where once small rocks carefully pulled from the driveway, or stuffies that shared our bed, or clouds and trees – all the vibrant, animated beings that shared our world, begin to fade. We forget that they are real. Ordinary life has set in and magical thinking fades.
Codes of conduct and religious beliefs become solidified just when the wonder is fading. The early behavior modifications have prepared us for what comes next. We are given ideas. We are given books.
My reading life occupied two very different worlds, two different sets of stories. In one, the books contained images of happy families with mommies in dresses and daddies in suits. The houses all had gardens and the little children would help with the chores or play in the yard. It was 1950s Dick and Jane material. In the other, in my fairy tales, there were castles and seven league boots. All the animals could talk and there was always a magical helper to guide you along the way. To me those early books shared a common ethos – worlds filled with mysterious guides ever ready to provide protection and advice.
My Catholic school readers gave me guardian angels and special saints who could perform miracles. More importantly they gave me Baby Jesus. The books were filled with cheerful pictures of Mother Mary dressed in blue and white with the sweet blond baby on her lap. Both mother and child had golden halos around their heads and other children and small animals would lovingly surround them. These early reader books would constantly tell me that Baby Jesus loved me and didn’t I want to make him happy.
Of course I did.
My fairy tale books had no Baby Jesus. They had no codes of conduct. The young boys and girls belonged in worlds that required no beliefs or tenets. The characters lived in perilous times and it was their job to both survive and thrive. And they too had magical helpers. But the fairy tale guides didn’t wear wings or halos. They were old and ugly, sometimes weak and crippled. They were invisible to all except for the true of heart. They were the kind of people who had no place in my Catholic school readers.
In my childhood book world, I had these two vastly different kinds of stories, and I loved them both. Baby Jesus was a constant pull, but the life he required, or that the Catholic books told me he required, began to change in tone and emphasis. The chapters of everyday life events began to cede space in my books to stories of young children who happily sacrificed whatever was near and dear to them.
At the end of the very first book, the little girl in the story is coerced into giving her brand-new Christmas present, a beautiful baby doll, to another child who doesn’t have one. She doesn’t want to do it, no kid reading the story wanted her to do it, but her parents and her teachers all tell her that Baby Jesus would be so pleased if she would only do it. By the end of the last book in the series, when I had been completely absorbed into this world for more than four years, the writers introduced a girl only a little older than me. She was pretty and brave and her name was Agnes. In that story she tells the Roman judge “I do believe in Jesus Christ and I am not afraid to die for Him.” And so, with a smile, she did.
The angels and saints and the magical sense of wonder in the universe that had once existed in those early schoolbooks had changed. The stories had devolved into rigid codes of conduct and odes to piety and complete selflessness. The angels and saints had moved from being otherworldly helpers sent to guide and protect to missionaries of complete self-abnegation. The nuns and priests in my early world used my natural sense of wonder and redirected it towards a particular creed. For them, this world had no value. It was merely a way station, a temporary place of detention before we could finally be freed and ascend to our real home, Heaven.
My mother was my first and primary caretaker. As she watched over me she could see how these Catholic readers affected me. She knew that I was too literal a child to carry the weight of these religious teachings, to forego any pleasure in the here and now and to be focused entirely on the afterlife. She knew my sense of belonging, of being part of this world, was in danger. She wanted to keep my sense of wonder alive.
One hot summer night as we kids ran about trying to collect fireflies my mother called me over and pointed up to the sky. Up there I could see the moon and it was encircled by a perfect ring. “What is it,” I asked. “It’s a summons,” she said. “The Queen of the fairies has called everyone to her court.”
My mother wasn’t trying to indoctrinate me that hot summer night, or even instill a silly superstition. She was talking about more than just fairies and their Queen. It wasn’t a belief that she offered me but a possibility - an understanding that the world is filled with untold and unseen activities that constantly surrounds us. That the magic of this world is real whether we understand it or not. When we look up at the sky or at any part of the world the way we were trained, if we even look at all, we see mere weather phenomenon. She wanted me to know that there was so much more going on that night and every other night. The world was far more alive for my mother than my little school readers let on, and she was sharing that with me.
I still have those Catholic readers. I still love them and the pictures are engraved deeply in my heart. But it’s my fairy tale books that I return to whenever the ordinary world is too much with me. In those stories I can remember what it was like before I turned seven, before I reached the Age of Reason. Before I lost that seamless life where the miraculous was everyday.
All the wonders of fairy tales: the gingerbread houses, the pumpkin coaches and carpets that fly may not be real to some folks, but they offer me a chance to feel that way again. They keep a vestigial memory alive – that there once was a time when I was in this world and of it too. When I was at peace, in peace and one with everything. When the animals in my stories begin to speak they remind me that I am alive in a much larger universe than I can possibly imagine. One where I can live now, fully in this world, and not wait for the next.