EPISODE 14

Creative cruelty.

As a general rule cruelty is discouraged but you have to appreciate the creativity that an imaginative child can showcase while mistreating a sibling. For example; My daughter decided  she was ready to start her own town (“Stripe City”) where all her stuffed tigers could live.  She, as the mayor, set up a main street, produced a constitution and wrote an anthem. This town however did not have open borders and did not welcome just anyone into it’s elite collection of citizens. As laid out in the anthem:

          “Stripe city is really cool

           And we don’t allow in any fools”.

She then used this to tell her brother he was not welcome there.

I am not proud of this. I hope she is not either (which she may not be, considering the talk we had after found out). Through being corrected as she was (and, I’m sure, will be several times more in the future), my goal is that she will turn her powers to good instead of evil - because it is clearly evident that she does have a gifted mind. Most children do I think, if they are encouraged and nurtured and taught how to use their imaginations. Unfortunately, human nature does not predispose us to altruism, or others-centered goodness. Our natural reaction is to please ourselves at the expense of whoever we find useful. In children it can be anything from making themselves feel better by making someone else feel worse, or getting out of trouble by shifting the blame, to a joke in bad taste so they themselves can laugh. In adults it can be much uglier.

When I was a kid, I remember my big sister tying a friend to a tree and leaving him there until he cried. This was her “game” and she insisted, while she was getting in trouble for it, that it was all in fun. This same sister slipped an Ex-Lax into another kids food, told my second sister she was adopted, taught me how break into a sealed-off room without getting caught (which we tried and did get caught because we had to go out the window onto the roof - also her idea- and we got in major trouble because it wasn’t even our house). She also hung a roadkill racoon from the ceiling of a cafeteria, chased a bunch of screaming kids around with a raw turkey gizzard and nearly convinced a friend to dig up a dead horse. She was - and still is - very “gifted”.

The beauty of it is, now she uses her wonderful mind to do wonderful things. She is a marine biologist with the dream of opening a learning center for middle-school kids so she can teach them all about the oceans and how to care for them. She is brilliant and because she was taught to use those powers for good and how to care about others more than herself she will make a huge difference in the world and every life she touches will be better for it.

This is what I want for my children. They are brilliant… you can see it in the way they torture each other! You can also see it in the way the tell stories, remember lessons, put on plays, talk to children younger than themselves and children older than themselves and to adults and in the way they play pretend. But what is better is you can also see that they are learning to care for others. Their gifts are seen in how they take care of each other, how they give freely, how they treat their friends. There is still much learning to do but that is why they are children. If we teach our children this now, that much uglier adult version will not be around to torture the world.