on children

I wanted to post a piece I published in my collaborative book "Diamond Tumbleweeds" with Stellar Cassidy. Hopefully you will all be able to read the book really soon. This piece is a social commentary about the treatment of children and my vision for how thing should be instead. 

Childhood

I’ve been thinking a lot about childhood lately. How our society only sees them as adorable accessories. We condescend them and fail to appreciate them for their incredible gifts and love them for how cute and simple they are. Children are only “simple” in their lack of concrete knowledge of our manufactured, poisonous ideas. But even though they lack the words to qualify these ideas, they are not blind to them.

 

            Their brains are like sponges that are constantly learning, changing, and imitating. What they lack in words and conceptual knowledge, they thrive with feeling, emotion, and instinct. Ingrained in their tiny bodies is the innate desire to eat, breathe, scream, love, and be loved. Why is it that the older we get, the less in touch we are with these basic life functions? Children know nothing of greed, cruelty, self-consciousness, or anxiety. They know themselves as a being that must survive, stay warm, dry and safe.

 

            I wonder if children have mental powers that we don’t understand. It seems like they can always see through bullshit and tell if someone is truly genuine. I find that sometimes I will smile at a baby and think “you’re incredible and beautiful” and they will smile like they heard me. They are so brilliant and perceptive and are never afraid to tell the truth. Young children don’t know lies, but unfortunately they believe the ones we tell them. Their little minds are squishy, colorful playdough, constructing their own worlds.

            We paint the world in rainbows, unicorns, and fantasy. They run through mud, spin in circles, sing, spit, shout, and we think it’s adorable. How does it feel when all of a sudden they are told to keep it down, slow down, calm down. Why is silly seen as immature? We thrive to create a beautiful, fanciful world for our children. I want to know why that world has to disappear, why we have to go through the trauma of realizing that the world is not perfect, but very cruel.

   Perhaps the world would be less cruel is we learned from children. We idolize adults for their great feats in music, movies, and politics, but why don’t we glorify the child who created a magical forest out of stuffed animals, tree branches, blankets and facepaint.? Why do we idolize van gogh instead of the boy who drew a dinosaur on his wall with his mother’s lipstick and mud?

 Creativity should never be discouraged in a young child because it is the time they are learning the most. That lipstick was probably expensive and tested on animals, there’s more than enough mud, and I’m sure you weren’t going to do anything with that wall anyway. Let your son go nuts! You’re probably afraid that hell grow up to be a graffiti artist, right? Well the streets need more decorating, more words, more tales from the silenced.