Real people.

Once upon a time, before I had children, I didn't really have a working knowledge of what babies and young children were like -- day in and day out -- at different stages.

I had seen TV depictions of families with babies, of course.  Infants on TV are often played by dolls wrapped in blankets, which quite sensibly circumvents any problems with child labor laws, but tends to give a funny impression of "baby" to the impressionable.  Babies seem to be either senselessly crying and motionless or reassuringly silent and motionless.  They convey nothing of importance.  They have no agency.

When I read in the newspaper some ghastly news item about something happening to a toddler, I vaguely imagined something babylike, only bigger and perhaps able to walk around and get into trouble.  If a twenty-one-month-old child were reported to be fatally harmed in an accident or crime, or to have gone missing, I'd make a sad face and feel sorry for the parents; but I imagined the loss of a passive, voiceless small one.  I never examined my prejudices, but it's clear, looking back, that I thought what was really lost was a potential life.  My memories don't really begin until age three or so; I couldn't really empathize with a child of two; I didn't really know any such children.  I never imagined them as having agency, or creativity.

It's really amazing how quickly you get schooled in this when you are living with a child every day, especially when -- because he or she is your own -- you are motivated to pay attention.  I remember being enchanted with my first newborn.  Yes, of course, he was cute and beautiful and all that -- but what really enthralled me was to realize all these things he could do!  He could see a toy and become interested and grab it.  He wasn't motionless -- in fact he could move surprisingly fast across a bed by wiggling and pushing with his feet, and he moved towards warmth and away from cold, and towards me and away from his dad.  He could do that cool newborn trick with mimicking facial expressions, which I had read about but really didn't believe until I had my own newborn to play with and saw it for myself.  Carried upright in a sling from birth, it was not many days before he could mostly hold his head up.  He learned within days to lift his bottom when we laid him on the table for a diaper change.

 I know now that there is nothing particularly special about this -- ordinary healthy babies can do all these things and more -- and so I laugh when I look back at myself, wondering at this astonishingly freaky genius baby I seemed to have.  Now I know that I was comparing my baby to my own poverty-stricken idea of what a baby can do.  I thought, I guess, that they weren't really people of any importance.

Yesterday I was making peppermint bark with my daughter, while the big boys were at church with Mark and the 22-month-old was meandering around playing with things.  I'd never tempered chocolate before and we had spent some time watching the Chocolate Tempering video at the Ghirardelli website before trying it ourselves (an aside: thanks to the video,  I now see the point of having an expensive granite countertop).  Not long after my daughter and I had finished the chocolate bark, I noticed this little assembly atop the stepstool on the floor of the kitchen, which I snapped (blurrily) with my cell phone:

Get it?  It's a "double boiler" -- the saucepan is represented by a gravy separator, the melting container by a blue IKEA cereal bowl.  That wiry thing is the probe of my instant-read thermometer.

The blue plastic bowl contained bits of candy canes scavenged from the floor and countertops.

He wasn't playing -- he was watching and learning, imitating, and making substitutions where necessary.  And there's nothing special about him, except in the "everyone is special" sense.  He is a full human being. He is my fourth, of course, so I have already learned this lesson a few times over -- but it still takes my breath away, though mostly over the repeated realization of how clueless I once was.

It's as if we are programmed to generalize about people, and not really to know in our depths the personhood -- the agency, the will, the decisionmaking capability -- of "that kind of people" when "that kind of people" is one we don't have direct experience with.

 I'm sure this goes beyond young children, to every other kind of "other" there can be.  Being surprised by people --  in the unpleasant sense, instead of the sense in which I discovered my own babies' innate abilities --sets this off vividly.  Whenever we can't understand, really cannot understand, why someone does the thing they do, or when they act in a way we could not predict, and we write it off as senseless instead of trying to see the sense -- that's when we ought to see that we weren't seeing them as whole and real persons, but instead a caricature, a simpler story to tell, like swaddled plastic on TV.

Comments

[MelanieB]

I love that double boiler! The ingenuity of small children is delightful.

I know exactly what you mean both about the vagueness about the personhood of a young child and the excitement of discovery. I remember marveling in my first year of motherhood that anyone could be bored as a stay at home mother. Were these women not paying attention to the amazing little being in their care? Now I suspect most of the women who are "bored" are extroverts who aren't getting enough social interaction and really are suffering. But for me the process of discovery of the capabilities and personality of my newborn was (and continues to be) intensely gratify on an intellectual level as well as emotionally satisfying.

[Cathie]

I think that false image, given on TV, or the other one, of babies being SUCH a burden (keeping the poor parents up all night because the baby is sleeping in another room across the house and, can you believe it, hungry, again?)affects society's impressions such that they begin to see them that way and why abortion IS so prevalent.
If Hollywood chose to show motherhood and the bond between them and the baby perhaps things would be different.

Thanks for the beautiful post. And #4 is both smart and cute.