What is it in us that just cannot seem to take children seriously? They are property, they are little carbon-copies of ourselves, they are vessels to be filled and nourished, they are anything other than what they actually are: Tiny, developing human beings, with legitimate likes and dislikes, cares, feelings, senses and perceptions of the world around them.
If an adult has a bad day and expresses it as such, if they describe - for example - the typical wreck that a Monday can be, we immediately empathize, if we've had similar experience, or offer some equally serious anecdote or advice. On the other hand, if a child of about five expresses a similar experience or dislike about her or his day, many of us do not hesitate to dismiss them as tired or tell them to take a nap, go play, or "man up", depending on the physical sex of that child. Or worse yet, we pretend to listen, dismiss them to go play, and then forget about the matter entirely, except to recount it to our friends as, "It was so cute - the other day, little..." And so the cycle begins again. Had that child been about nine or ten, they would have been "exaggerating", of course. Had it been a teen, they would have been "inexperienced and melodramatic".
Has it ever really occurred to any of us that maybe - just maybe - the killers, high school- and university-campus shooters, the extreme behavioral problems, the withdrawn children, tweens and teens with occasional outbursts of anger, the dropouts, the addicts, the... Well, the list goes on, but did it ever occur to anyone that these and many others like them (even the well-adjusted, "everyday" kids) did not need systematic psychological probing, but just to have their feelings taken seriously, to begin with? That maybe they just wanted somebody to listen to them and treat them as a human being instead of as a pre-adult, pre-legal-rights human being that knows no better? No...that would just be too simple. After all, what do kids know?
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