Are children better than adults? It sounds stupid if you put it that way, but as a child I felt like I was inundated with this message. My first memory of noticing was when I watched Titanic and didn’t understand why the people on the boat said “women and children first”. Both parts seemed inexplicable but the children one even more so. Weren’t they less useful? Didn’t they represent a smaller investment of resources?
I also noticed people smiled at babies they didn’t know, or go out of their way to talk to random young children about their interests. But most of all they acted as if violence against children was worse than violence against innocent adults.
This seemed really bad and unfair to me. I didn’t understand why, and no one was so sensible as to offer me the evolutionary argument (“what it feels like from the inside to be a k-selected species with a history of communal childrearing”). I didn’t perceive myself or my peers to have more value than adults, and I found it offensive and alienating that culture ascribed such value to children.
When I found explanations in fiction, it was about ‘innocence’. I did not feel innocent. From the inside, I felt RAW AND REAL AND WILD. Children in kdramas were cute, stupid, scared of danger. But I thought about how cool I’d play it if I came home and found my parents murdered, and learned that I had to go on the run because the killer was after me, too. I thought: I am not innocent, and neither are any of the children I know.
As an adult, I still agree.
Having had a baby, I now experience the “children are precious” feeling from the inside, and am therefore able to offer my account to my past self. Yes, it’s mostly evolutionary wiring. That’s the outside view. But one part of my inside view is that children are really different from adults in one way that makes them better, and it’s that they are ambitious. They want to do new things and are bound to often succeed, because they are constantly growing into new capabilities.
(They are also appealing for the same reason a startup you know is going to become big is appealing. For me, it’s instinctive: seeing someone advance on their own makes me want to help them. Deep down, I know that being helpful to someone who is going to be much more capable a year or twenty years from now is a good idea.)
There’s a similar claim I’m not making, which is that children are curious and naturally want to learn. This is true of certain things (basically all almost-toddlers want to learn how to walk) and not others (“if schools didn’t beat curiosity out of you, everyone would want to learn physics”). I don’t think it’s that true that children by default want to learn in the intellectual or academic sense. But I think it’s safe to say that children want to do and accomplish. They want power – the power to climb, to build a house, to thwart their parents’ assassin. They do so in a quite amoral way – sometimes what they want that power for is to hurt someone – but damn if I don’t respect the hustle.
Children are always working tirelessly to accomplish something, even if it’s sort of silly. As an adult, I most like myself when I’m doing something new and difficult (even if it’s silly) – in the parlance of the fantasy books I read as a child, when I “perform a great working”. The main page of this website lists my great workings. I measure my life by them.
The Anglosphere already has a great term for this, which is Nietzsche’s will to power. That is what I see in my baby (and all children by default), and remember about my childhood. Choosing your direction, flinging yourself against reality, and glorying in your weight.