I was recently re-reading Christina Stead's 1940 novel, "The Man Who Loved Children." In his introduction to this book about a very unhappy family-what we'd call "dysfunctional" today-the literary critic Randall Jarrell commented that every child is brought up by a "different species", adult human beings. He compared the ordinary baby to Mowgli in "The Jungle Book" or to any so-called feral child.
Now, obviously children and adults belong to the same species, just as tadpoles and frogs are the same species no matter how different they look. Still, there is something in what Jarrell said. Children do have different needs, abilities, and ways of looking at the worlds than adults do. We don't expect children to understand us, but we can do a better job rearing or teaching them if we understand how they are different from us.
One key to this understanding is the knowledge that children are not only different from us-- they are also different from children of ages other than their own. Rapid developmental change is a characteristic of childhood, and children's emotional focus changes with age. Sometimes their emotional concerns seem to change almost overnight. Many parents have noticed that their friendly sociable baby of 7 months changes rapidly into an 8-month-old who averts her eyes from strangers who approach and who scrambles after her mother when Mom starts to leave the room.
These changes in emotional focus were described in detail by Erik Erikson, the social and personality psychologist who built on Freudian theory and who had been the tutor of Jung's children. Erikson's theory of emotional development is a stage theory and assumes that everyone goes through the same steps in the same order. (Whether this is exactly true for people in all cultures is difficult to determine.) However, Erikson would not have said that everyone goes through the same stages at exactly the same ages, or that each stage lasts exactly the same time for each child.
Much has been made of Erikson's description of the first stage of development, which he designated as the stage of basic trust versus basic mistrust; the assumption is that experiences in the first year determine whether an individual has a reasonable trust of other people, or an unreasonable mistrust. However, John Bowlby's attachment theory, which described many details of these events of early development, has taken the place of this period as Erikson discussed it earlier.
Although Bowlby also considered some developmental changes of the second years and later in childhood, Erikson's descriptions of these events still have a real power to show us how children are different from adults. In Erikson's view, the focus of the second year has to do with autonomy (self-control, self-regulation) versus shame and doubt. The toddler is less concerned than before with trust and mistrust in others, but begins to focus on his or her own "trustworthiness"-- the extent to which the child can depend on making the right decisions for himself, especially about controlling impulses. These decisions are not about major life concerns, but about things that seem very minor to adults: whether or not to hit or bite someone who makes the child mad, when it's necessary to go to the bathroom, whether it's all right to grab a toy from another child. The "opposite" of the sense of autonomy is a feeling of self-doubt about decisions, and a sense of shame about the self. Although adults may also feel these concerns, they are usually not the focus of emotional life as they are for toddlers and young preschoolers.
During the third, fourth, and even fifth years, children's emotional emphasis alters again, so the concern is with the ability to take initiative-- not just to make good decisions about problems that the child must confront, but the ability to start new things, to invent and try out new ways to behave or talk or play. Children of this age like to repeat words and actions, but they also like to elaborate on them to produce new combinations and original creations. Some of those new ways will seem like a good idea to adults, but not surprisingly, some will seem pretty undesirable. They may be dangerous, or messy, or socially unacceptable in ways the child has no suspicion of. Adults react to these situations in different ways. Sometimes adults simply offer guidance about the child's invention, cautioning that it's dangerous or "not nice" in some way. But some adults respond more severely and behave as if the child has intentionally broken a social or safety rule. Erikson's suggestion was that too many severe reactions to the child's initiation of new activities can teach the child a sense of "over-constriction" or fearfulness of inventing new behaviors-- even anxiety when other people do so.
An important aspect of Erikson's theory is the idea that the developing individual re-works each of these stages during every period of life. The resolution of a stage is not the end of the person's interest in the issues characteristic of that stage, but the emotional focus shifts in ways characteristic of a particular age period. For example, an adolescent re-works some issues of autonomy, but the concerns she deals with have to do with leaving the family, with school and work, and of course with a developing romantic and sexual life.
From the viewpoint of personality development, then, adults are vastly different in their concerns than children are-- but, in addition to that, each of us is different from people at all different stages from ourselves.
