Little Terrors

Stop romanticising childhood

When I was young, I vowed to never allow something as insignificant as growing up stop me remembering what it is like to be a child. At first only a brief thought at the back of my mind, the thought grew more insistent as the adults in my life proved themselves incompetent at understanding the trials and tribulations that haunted my childhood. Why, for example, could they not understand the importance of selecting the special edition Clarks school shoes (complete with a little plastic doll in the sole) over the regular, mundane, run-of-the-mill pair they so inevitably purchased? To them, it meant the difference of a sole unmolested by a desperate child’s attempts to prise the dolly out and keeping that crisp tenner at the back of their wallets. To me, it meant the difference between spending a lunchtime swapping my precious, foot-smelling bounty amongst friends, or watching on, alone and green with envy. Of course, this sounds dramatic, but in truth such trivial and seemingly irrelevant events can make all the difference in the complicated, fragile existence of a small child.

What I am trying to say, whilst being waylaid by the bitter remembrance of unfulfilled accessory-centred longings, is that adults shouldn’t underestimate children. Of course, it is easier said than done. Despite being certain I would never let such idiocy befall my adult self, I experience a form of this every time I encounter a small child. Take my baby cousin, for example. She is almost four years old, chubby-cheeked, curly-haired, and just tottering her way out of nursery into the big, bad world of preschool. Every time I look at her, regardless of the mood she is in, I am filled with a sense of her innocence, certain she must live a worry-free life of cartoons, picture books, and Disney sing-alongs.

Then I remember my own tentative steps out of nursery and into school — the worries around making new friends, the politics of who pairs up with who in class projects, or who you will end up sharing a table with. This may sound delusional, and the amount each child is affected by such events depends on their character, but I distinctly recall events in my own four-year-old life that have stayed with me forever.

As I write, my mind takes me back to an early PE lesson, with my whole class rushing to get changed before the teacher comes in. Slowest almost every time, I stand alone, the rest of the children yelling at me to hurry up as I fumble pitifully with my buttons. The stakes now, avoiding the wrath of our teacher and the disdain of my friends, mean nothing, but, at the time, such emotions were my whole world.

Sadly, such problems only get worse as children begin to mature. Yes, it is a wonderful thing to see a child growing up, learning to understand the beauty and complexity of the society they have been born into. Yet this increasing intelligence also has a downside: children simply become clever enough to come up with new ways to torture each other. Before, happiness depended on what edition school shoe your parents fished out of the sales rack for you, now it pivots on whether you have received that invite. And if you have, are you going to the sleepover, or simply the pool party before? In fact, I would argue playground politics dictate the life of every child right up until the moment they are released from the clutches of puberty. Yes, it comes in different forms, and likely it depends on the school you attend, your gender, even your ethnicity, but the fundamental point remains the same: the schoolyard is a minefield of social hierarchies across which one must tiptoe if they hope to make it to the other side in one piece. If I owe anything to the little girl who got me across it, it’s never forgetting that.

Image from Wikimedia Commons