Earning Our Children's Trust

We trust children when they're first born. Perhaps it's because they respond so easily to our love and attention, and don't question us too closely. We lose that trust somewhere along the time they start talking. Then we tolerate them, most often love them still, and occasionally allow them to entertain us with their concerns. Trusting them is another matter.

To begin with, we doubt the intellectual capability of the child who says that he or she wants a nuclear free world. When children suggest that we can, as rational beings in a rational, mostly civilized world, simply talk out our differences, we question their maturity. Nor do we trust their capacity for sustained logic when they say that if people on one side of the world don't want war and people on the other side don't want war there's really no need to have a war.

What we end up doing is giving our wars with the regularity of Saturday night dances and casting suspicious glances at the children who think we're out of our minds.

We're probably right not to trust children because basic to the child's world is the concept of free will. Free will is often embarrassing, if not downright unpleasant for adults to consider. Not so for children. Children tend to think that we, being adults, are perfectly free to exercise our wills to accomplish those things we say we believe in. It baffles them when we profess love but zealously guard our stores of hate; when we celebrate universal justice while talking of "acceptable" levels of oppression.

We confuse children even further when we tell them how fervently we want peace as we pass yet another huge military budget to insure it, knowing full well that the "other side" will have to pass an equally huge military budget to keep their version of the "peace." We really confound children as we champion the cause of democracy by supplying arms to dictators.

We've got one thing going for us, though. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood we teach a great many children to think like adults. We're even able to convince them that their children should not be trusted.

As writers we face no more formidable task than to bring children and adults together. We need to see the world clearly and to explain it clearly to children so that they, in turn, can explain it back to us without our adult compromises, and without our adult excuses. To do less is to abandon our talents, perhaps even our universe. If we're lucky, we might even get children and adults to trust each other again. If we're lucky.