What is special about youth?

I saw a kid near my apartment the other day, and he was gardening. Probably 7 years old, I asked him how his plant was doing. We had a long conversation about his horticultural skills, and at the end I started to walk away and wished him good luck with his plant and said that I hoped for it grow healthily. He then looked at me and said, “well actually you know, this isn’t a plant. This is just two twigs I stuck in the ground.” I laughed and said “O well in that case, it probably won’t grow then.”

He looked back at me and shrugged his shoulders and said “Yea well, you never know,” and for some reason, the way he said it made me agree even though of course I knew nothing would come of two sticks in the ground. I said “Yea, you never do.”

What this shows to me is that our relationship to kids is much more complex than we think. On some crude explanations of the world, in which everything is reduced to either economics or evolution, the explanation would be this: “You indulge children and find them so wonderful because you are genetically programmed to care about and defend them. You see them in a certain light.” That might partially be true, but there is then the other side of human life, which is the rational side and the side of wonder.

I think that children strike us with wonder not because we are programmed to find them cute and worthy of defense but also because they are pre-rational. They are clues as to how gaining a character and rationality changes us. As we become older, we notice ourselves indulging in activity that was previously unknown to us. We become bitter or petty or jaded or disillusioned or ambitious or over-intellectualized and we wonder how continuous this behavior is with our smaller selves. Some people see total continuity. The bullying of the playground becomes the power grabs of boardrooms. Others see a sharp discontinuity. The innocence of children is replaced with obligations, responsibilities, and social pressures. On one view, biology is active from childhood and spills right over into adulthood. On the other, childhood is one way, and then human life and culture makes us different. I’m not sure which I really believe, but something about this conversation with this kid really struck me.

[Via http://questionbeggar.wordpress.com]