Innocence and children - Some thoughts I had watching some children during Mass

[fpb]

Anyone who thinks that children are "innocent" in the moral, let alone the theological, sense of the word, has never spent ten minutes in the company of a real live child; and, what is worse, does not remember, or refuses to remember, his/her own childhood. Certainly children do not have the idea of the depth and extent of evil, of the many ways temptation can seize on you, the vast dimension and background to every act of sin. But to say that children don't do wrong is blatantly wrong; and to say that they don't know it's wrong is nonsense. Children take up evil with the same mixture of concealment and defiance, with the same evasive arrogance, as adults do. When confronted, they either bluster, or attempt justifications, or both - just like adults. And it is only when these things are broken down that they accept their responsibility - just as adults do. And just like adults, they tend to forget the lesson after a while. It's not necessary to go as far as the murderers of James Bulger (although anyone who tries to tell me that they didn't know what they were doing is going to get a loud horselaugh in his/her face); any child who steals biscuits from the larder, who fakes his father's signature on a permission slip, or who deliberately hides stones in a snowball, knows perfectly well that whet s/he is doing is wrong and forbidden. The one thing they will not do is be surprised when someone charges them. The question in their minds was not whether what they were doing was wrong, but whether they would get away with it.

Nevertheless, the notion of innocence and our experience of children are indeed intimately connected. Only people associate them wrong. It is not their past that is innocent: it is their future. We adults, worn down as we are by our decades of effort, frequent failure, inevitable regret, and more or less admitted guilt, can't help but be warmed by the unbroken energy and enthusiasm of most children. Children are the wonderful gift made to the human race at large, to allow us to be renewed again and again, to have a new start with each new birth. It is the fact that they have not yet suffered what we have suffered, nor yet had to do what we found ourselves doing, that they have, in our eyes, that wonderful quality of innocence. And that innocence - that lack of the burden of an inevitably painful and often guilty past - that makes them such a pleasure and such a relief to be with. There are no complications with a child. In the rare cases where s/he instinctively does not like you, s/he lets it be known with no messing, and that is in a sense a relief from the difficulties of adult company, where (especially in England) you may be acquainted with someone for years before you find out that s/he dislikes you. And most of the time they just welcome you. It takes very little to make friends with a child. One little girl at Mass today smiled at me before I had so much as spoken a word to her, just because she saw that I was interested in her book (a "Children's Bible" with illustrations).

And our instinctive love for that innocence, that innocence of the future, imposes on us adults a frightful duty. We have a duty to that innocence; we can't, for shame, allow our children's future to be worse than ours has been, nor even as bad. We have, somehow, to guide our children to be better than we are.

Not just richer, better off, more prosperous. Every adult knows, in spite of all the obvious ironies and superficial responses that spring to mind, that in the depth of reality money can't buy anyone happiness. We certainly don't want our children to be poor; but if all we could offer them was material prosperity, we would have to realize that we have failed them. We have not given them a better life than we had; we have passed them the same burden of weariness, disappointment and guilt from which their innocence was such a relief. We want them - and here is the terrible thing - to be better human beings than we have been.

Is that even possible? I don't know. But I am reminded of something that happened to me. One moment in my childhood I remember very well is my mother teaching me to ride a bicycle without side wheels. I was six. She stood behind and near me, ready to catch me if I fell, until I had understood the mystery of balance, and, to my enormous surprise, was riding ahead, straight and fast.

It took me forty more years to find out that my mother had never learned to ride a bicycle herself. She had taught me something that she herself could not do.

Does that make me a better person than my mother? In a million ways, no. But it shows that what seems like an impossibility and an absurdity - teaching children to be better than we are - can, in some areas, really take place.

Comments

[noblesandwich.livejournal.com]

So are you saying that children are innocent or that they aren't? That they're not innocent but represent innocence, maybe? It's almost five in the morning where I am, so I'm afraid my reading comp. isn't quite up to your rambling, incoherent text-walls.

Super-sweet childhood anecdote, by the way. I remember learning how to ride a bike when I was like ten, it was pretty good times.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It sounds to me like your willingness to understand, rather than your ability, is not. Otherwise you would not use insulting language ("rambling, incoherent text-walls").

[noblesandwich.livejournal.com]

My apologies for the insult, it was unnecessary and unjust. However, though my assumption was that you meant the latter, I would still like to hear some clarification.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It doesn't seem so hard to understand to me. Children are not innocent in the sense of being incapable of willing and doing evil; to the contrary, their behaviour is, within its own parameters, easily comparable to that of adults who will and do evil. But they are free of the great burden of personal failure, self-doubt and various kinds of shame that goes with adulthood. They have a future rather than a past, and their abundant energy and directness feel like clean mountain water and light as compared with the constant burden of unstated or neglected doubts and weariness of the adult. This freedom from doubt and weariness is a positive fact, something that most children have and that can be felt. It also means that we need, not to preserve that innocence - because that is impossible - but to lead them along a path where there is less of the weariness and self-doubt that we suffer from.

If you still find this hard to understand, I give up.

[noblesandwich.livejournal.com]

So they're innocent of things, the way an adult can be innocent of a crime, but not innocent of intent/possible sin. That's my interpretation of your comment, anyway, but due to past incorrect interpretations of your posts by many people, I would appreciate confirmation.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think so. Maybe if state what I was denying, things will be clearer. There is a widespread tendency to treat children as if they did not know right from wrong and were not able to will wrongly; if a child breaks a window in a fit of temper, "he didn't know what he was doing". The truth is that he knew it and removed the guilt in ways that are very similar to those used by a guilty adult. So a child can do wrong things and be aware that they are wrong. But a child is clean of all the complexity, self-doubt and hidden guilt that decades of experience have inflicted on adults.

It's not that I don't agree with you, it's that I don't agree with absolutism.

[noblesandwich.livejournal.com]

I can agree with that in some cases - many, even, but in other I think the children truly are innocent. Breaking a window is an example of the child's lack of self control, as is stealing a treat or hitting someone who angers them. They may know this is wrong, and still do it, but their sense of morality is undeveloped. Even if they know intellectually that doing so is "bad", they don't grasp much beyond their own desires. YMMV, though, and children are diverse creatures.

Re: It's not that I don't agree with you, it's that I don't agree with absolutism.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And how many adults have any real self-control? How many adults justify doing what they want even though deep down they know it's just plain wrong? I don't think the children are anything special in this. But I have a suspicion that if we go on with this we may start just repeating ourselves, so I suggest we stop now. Thanks for taking an intelligent and (after a rather rocky start) polite interest.

Re: It's not that I don't agree with you, it's that I don't agree with absolutism.

[noblesandwich.livejournal.com]

Good idea, and thank you.

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

Is there some point at which we need to make a distinction between 'naughty' and 'wrong'? Children often know that they are doing something that Mummy and Daddy would say was naughty, but they don't actually know WHY it is bad, just that they're "not supposed" to be doing X. (Yes, on other occasions they know perfectly well that something is wrong and do it anyway, undoubtedly!)

And, of course, there has to be a disctinction between ages of children. Babies, for example, have no idea of right from wrong. But I think there's a learning process where first children think "this is naughty because I know Mummy and Daddy think so" before they get to "this is wrong and I know for myself that it is wrong".

There is an age in childhood where kids who are asked whether it's naughtiest to break one plate ON PURPOSE or ten BY ACCIDENT. The age at which they say the first one is naughtier is a sign of an understanding of accountability. Littler children will always say breaking more is worse.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Figures that it should be a practicing member of the trade of Mother who would ask the most pointed questions. Well, of course by "children" I meant those who were able to speak articulately but younger than puberty - say five to twelve, although I don't want to be too neat. But I have to ask you whether adults are ever more conscious of the grounds on which an action can be said to be wrong than any child. We have a longer and more elaborate notion of the harm it does. But if the average adult should be asked why incest or theft are wrong independently of their final results - that is, if the incest would still be wrong if it resulted in a loving couple and a brood of children with no genetic malformations, or if a theft would still be wrong if the victim - say, a very rich man or a large corporation - never realized it or felt the want, and if the thief got away with it and lived a long and otherwise useful life - if the average adult, even the average intelligent and educated adult, were asked the question in these terms, I doubt many adults would have a better answer than most children. We know these things are wrong, but we tend to think that they are wrong because they always produce evil; and faced with the issue of whether, if they somehow were to produce no evil, they would still be wrong, we are stumped. And that shows that, in effect, we have no better idea as adults of why certain things are wrong in themselves, than children do.

(I have a view on this, of course, but it's much too long to produce here, and it is largely off the point of this debate.)

I think the distinction between naughty and wrong is a distinction in intensity, not in kind. Between the child who pulls the cat's tail, the child who joins with other children to verbally bully a third child during a disorderly class (which I have seen happen as a trainee teacher), the child who works out a nasty practical joke on someone they despise, and the murderers of James Bulger, there is a progression with few real breaks. Most child bullies will tell you that the victim "asked for it" somehow; and every one of them will tell you that it's fun. And yet they all know, deep down, that it is something they should be ashamed of.

(I am sorry for this review of horrors, and most children, like most people, are better than that at nearly every point in their lives. But these things do happen, and we can't hide from them.)