Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

Here, I think, is the main point, now that I've slept on it. There is an adult world. There is a children's world. The adult world is characterized by restraint, impulse control, a developed sense of the emotions and needs of others, and by sophisticated and educated taste.

https://twitter.com/_Cindy_K/status/1369423252523786240

Adults prefer quiet, order, and conversation to noise, chaos, and screaming. Adults dine, rather than eating like animals. Adults are sexual and cynical, not innocent.

Children are hilarious, exuberant, innocent, full of wonder--and monstrously narcissistic.

A kid finds chasing a pigeon all afternoon *delightful.*
Chasing a pigeon all afternoon would properly strike any adult as completely dumb.

A kid will happily nourish himself on Ho Hos.

Adults don't think Ho Hos are edible.

What I appreciate about France is that there remains an appreciation--and it's common to most cultures, save in the US, where something's gone wrong--that wondrous as childhood is, your goal as a parent or teacher is to make the kids outgrow it.

They should enjoy it, sure--have a happy childhood!--but none of it is cute when it's time to go to college. By the time you're that age, you better be toilet-trained, and trained in many other adult skills, at that.

Trained to the point you wouldn't *dream* of living on Ho Hos, because you've internalized adult mores. You wouldn't *dream* of screaming--or speaking--so loudly while others are speaking that they can't have a conversation.

And basically, the goal of childhood is to graduate to adulthood as quickly as is developmentally appropriate: No, we don't want five-year-olds driving, but by five you can certainly grasp, "Other people are speaking, I need to be quiet."

Something has gone wrong, in American culture, such that the boundaries between the world of children and that of adults have been blurred. Adults are over-involved in the world of children--creating and frequenting, e.g., "children's restaurants,"

--and children aren't leaving that world: They're becoming childlike adults. Adults who don't see anything wrong with--in the example @ArunLeParisien described--eating between meals and having second helpings.

Parents who can't have adult conversations because they see nothing wrong with letting their kids interrupt all the time are failing the kids--they're not teaching the kids the skills they need to function in the adult world.

They're failing adults by making the adult world more like the children's world. The French are perhaps *too* sensitive to this distinction. I can't say, I'm not a French parent; perhaps they're a bit too eager to wean their kids,

as @ArunInParis described. But generally, the balance between the world of children and adults seems reasonable, whereas it seems out-of-whack in the US, to the detriment of kids and adults.

This is one reason I was so appalled by the story of Donald McNeil. Not only was he treated in a scandalous way by @nytimes, the relationship between the adults and the children was totally out of whack.

(Yes, children, @ArunInParis, because *that's what they were.* Clearly they were suffering from arrested development.)

He was doing his adult job: He was educating them and telling them, politely enough, from the sound of it, that their views were jejune.

Kids are supposed to have jejune views. But adults are supposed to educate them so their views are no longer jejune. The kids were exposed to the views of an adult with more experience of the world. That's *the whole point* of education. But they freaked out:

Clearly, this had never happened to them before. And instead of telling them, "Yes, that's why your parents paid a lot of money for you to go on this trip, aren't you lucky," the Times took this seriously.

Their complaints amounted to, "We wanted to eat Ho Hos all day."

The Times humiliated, and then drove out, an outstanding reporter who'd worked loyally for them for nearly half a century, *because he did his job.* He tried to educate teenagers who knew nothing about the world.

The Times' response inverted the appropriate relationship between adults and children. Lord of the Flies resulted. Terrible for the adults, even worse for the kids.

The culture in which this results is an infantile one;

and "infantile" is not a good thing in adults. It's a culture in which everyone is screaming; people think in black-and-white; no one can delay gratification; poor impulse control prevails; and everything's childish.

It's a culture of narcissism--a normal developmental phase, in children; but adults should help children to grow out of it, not treat it as sacred. And they certainly shouldn't emulate it.

By the time you're old enough to go on a trip to Peru, you should be conversant with the idea that there are many opinions in the world; that being exposed to new opinions is good, not bad; that you don't know everything, indeed, you don't know much; and you shouldn't tattle.

These kids probably came from a family where the mother made them separate meals of spaghetti at breakfast, lunch, and dinner because "She just won't eat anything else!" They never heard, "This balanced meal is what's for dinner. This is what adults eat.

"If you don't eat it, that means you're not hungry. Wait for the next meal." Probably their every utterance was praised so extravagantly that it never occurred to them, "I might be a kid who like most kids knows nothing about the world."

Also: The world of children is for children. Adults don't belong there. A "kid-friendly" restaurant is a category error; if something is "kid-friendly," adults shouldn't be there. Restaurants are for families, not kids, and family meals should be organized around adults.

Adults understand nutrition, kids don't. Adults are paying for the meal. Kids of any age *can* behave in restaurants and allow the adults to have adult conversations. Kids naturally want to be part of the adult world. They should be encouraged to be.

When adults pretend to like childish things, they confuse the kids (and themselves) about the desirability of those things. Kids are eager to outgrow babyishness and be grown-up. If their parents are eating in "kid-friendly" restaurants, how do they know what that is?

Also: No one wants to see a sexualized nine-year-old. But no one wants to be around adults with a childish view of sexuality. Our hypersensitivity to sexual transgression, too, is part of the collapse of the distinction between childhood and adulthood.

It's never appropriate for an adult to flirt with a child. But when you have grown women melting down because adult men flirted with them, something has gone wrong.

Anyway--that's what I meant.