You don’t get to be a parent, by whatever means, without being a child first. This seems trivial, but there is something here to be pondered. As a parent you get to relive your childhood, with all that this brings with it. In my case, parenthood came relatively late in life (my mid-forties), so my childhood lay further behind me than for many others. We all have our random childhood recollections—of a birthday party, a day trip, a bad fall off a bike—but how easily can any of us recapture the atmosphere of childhood? What is it like to be a child?
Posing this question does not imply that there is some universal way of being a child. Some childhoods are relatively carefree, some are freighted with anxiety, and others are genuinely traumatizing. While it is easy to understand why someone with a troubled childhood would be loath to recall it, arguably there is a general disinclination to dwell on the times when we were young. This may stem from a sense that childhood is little more than a preparation for adulthood and, as such, is a mere means and not an end it itself. But what if we started to look upon this stage of life as something of lasting meaning and not as something to be left behind as soon as we possibly can?
In 1959 Edith Cobb published a paper summarizing the research she had been doing into child psychology for decades. Based on her study of biographies and autobiographies of notable artists and scientists from previous decades and centuries, Cobb noted a pattern of development where a profound childhood period of ecological attunement was experienced and recounted. She draws attention to “a special period, the little-understood, prepubertal, halcyon, middle age of childhood, approximately from five or six to eleven or twelve—between the strivings of animal infancy and the storms of adolescence—when the natural world is experienced in some highly evocative way, producing in the child a sense of some profound continuity with natural processes” (538). Cobb’s thesis was that the sense of ecological attunement experienced in middle childhood serves as a constant source of inspiration to productive adult artists and scientists.
Around the same time, the French thinker Gaston Bachelard published two books—The Poetics of Space (1958) and The Poetics of Reverie (1960)—which rest on a similar thesis concerning the lasting significance of childhood experience for creativity in adulthood. Bachelard focused on the solitary moments of childhood, through which, paradoxically, a profound sense of connection to the world is experienced: “The child knows a natural reverie of solitude, a reverie which must not be confused with that of the sulking child. In his happy solitudes, the dreaming child knows the cosmic reverie which unites us to the world” (The Poetics of Reverie, 108).
These sentiments are rare both in theory and in the practice of everyday life. As parents, it is easy to see our task as safeguarding children at a vulnerable stage of their lives and getting them safely through to an adulthood of relative security. Our approach to this is often to see children as relatively helpless and hapless, like baby birds threatened by circling predators. If fear gets the better of us, we can all too easily lose the balance between risk and exposure and end up weakening rather than bolstering a child’s chances of flourishing. Of course we must keep our children safe, but we must also let them explore the world around them and not fence it off or project the sense that danger lurks around every corner.
In the past four decades, especially in wealthy liberal democracies around the world, children have been subject to a ‘great confinement’ in line with Foucault’s description of the institutionalization of madness in early modern Europe. What initially began as a pervasive sense of ‘stranger danger’ has been augmented by increasing social and political intolerance of children’s presence in public space and a cultural disinclination to believe children should be in charge of what they do or don’t do with their time. Now it is rare to see children below the age of thirteen or fourteen unsupervised by adults outside the home. As with changed social attitudes towards dogs, seeing a solitary wandering child is most likely to produce social alarm at the sight of a ‘stray.’
This uncontrolled mass social experiment is potentially already having negative impacts. The pandemic brought into focus increased incidents of negative mental conditions such as anxiety and depression in young people. Losing regular face-to-face social connections during school closures threw children back onto the surrogate of screentime to an unprecedented degree. Confined to the home, stressed parents attempting to manage their own work lives while looking after children can hardly be blamed for relying on screens as convenient and relatively cheap distractions for their children. All this, however, is very far from the nourishing outdoor solitariness seen as pivotal for adult flourishing by Cobb and Bachelard.
Given where we are socially it’s time to start getting philosophical about childhood. Where to start? One suggestion would be to begin reflecting on your own recollections of being a child. What did you love, hate, struggle with, look forward to? What memories have you retained over the years and how do these memories feed into the person you are today? How can you connect these memories with your current connections to other children, either your own or those of friends, those you teach or simply encounter when out and about? In pursuing these questions, we can start to reverse the process whereby we see childhood as something discarded, as though it is an inconvenient precursor to meaningful adult life.
Along with this reflective, philosophical work there is the additional, practical task of allowing children more physical freedom. The absence of unsupervised children in the outside world beyond the home and school is a self-perpetuating one. It’s unfeasible for a parent to decide that a child of a certain age can freely roam the neighborhood if there are no other children around to encounter. The significant adults in children’s lives need to start reversing the message that danger lurks on every street corner. We also need to start designing our cities and neighborhoods with children’s outdoor exploration in mind. There needs to be a societal, collective shift in attitude and practice, borne of the recognition that keeping our children ever more confined within domestic interiors is failing in our basic duty to nurture them emotionally and spiritually.
We often use the world ‘childish’ as a term of abuse meaning something stupid or unsophisticated. But suppose ‘behaving like a child’ started to signify a person’s getting back in touch with those things which are most resonant with meaning for them? Suppose being childish meant being immersed in a satisfying and safe sense of connection to the world around us? Being struck by the wonder of existence in all its trivial everydayness and its transformative moments of euphoria? What if, in a word, being childish meant being philosophical?
Brian Elliott
Brian Elliott has taught college-level philosophy continuously since 1998, initially at the University of Edinburgh and University College Dublin, before moving to Oregon in 2008. He has held a faculty position at Portland State University since 2010. Building on a foundation in modern and contemporary European thought in the phenomenological tradition, Elliott's research has branched out to encompass architecture and urbanism, literature and culture, and political theory. His latest book project,A Child's Place in Nature, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025.
