We fetishize childhood and…

We fetishize childhood and at the same time do a real disservice by not listening to the wisdom of those children, most of whom desperately want to grow up and be like us.

Children encounter their own powerlessness as a constant frustration. Adults are too busy getting misty-eyed with their own adult projectionings about how awesome childhood was when everyone else did things for them and death was so much farther away.

As psychoanalyst Adam Phillips puts it so well, the message our cultural obsession with childhood (and include in this the thriving fiction market sexualizing the shit out of high school students) sends young children the message that being an adult is fucking awful.

Maybe children see the benefits of adulthood we have lost touch with due to our desperate scrambling to avoid confrontation with our own hopelessness and feelings of incompetence and failure.

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