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My project for the last few years has been to try to understand small children's mental worlds by combining scientific knowledge with a healthy dose of imaginative projection. I'll be talking more about this in the weeks to come as I describe some of the scientific research that has inspired my own imaginative efforts. In this post, I want to mention a conundrum that has been puzzling me from the beginning, and which I think tells us something important about our attitudes to small children.
When I started writing on this topic, I thought I might get some clues about young children's experience from the way that writers have depicted them in fiction. Writers through the ages have described an amazing range of experience, both human and non-human. If you want to ask what it is like to inhabit a particular part of the universe, you could do worse than consult a novelist, poet or short-story writer.
The depictions that I was looking for, though, turned out to be hard to find. There are babies aplenty in fiction, although they function mostly as plot devices, or as something for a ‘real' character (usually an adult) to react emotionally to. They don't tell their own stories. There are some wonderful child narrators in fiction—think of Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, for example—but they are rarely younger than around five (Scout is six at the start of Harper Lee's novel). The first-person experiences of humans between the ages of zero and five are almost never represented in a way that is true to their psychology.
I find this a real puzzle. I have read novels narrated by shopping trolleys and Sumerian urns, but I have not read any in which the story-teller is a healthy human toddler. You could argue that small children are unlikely to make good narrators, embarked as they are on a quest to acquire (or at least to realise an innate disposition for) fundamental concepts of time, agency and self. I disagree. One of the themes that emerged most strongly for me in writing A Thousand Days of Wonder was how much Athena made sense of her experience in terms of narrative—how she applied principles of story-telling to a world of information that needed to be organized. Nevertheless, young children's narratives have their quirks, and won't necessarily be the stuff of satisfying grown-up fiction.
Forget about narration, then, and show me some little kids who function as proper fictional characters, with their own unique sets of desires, motivations, secrets, and beliefs. They aren't there. Young children can be sources of family color or overburdened little confidantes, but the fictional realisations of their characters rarely match up to what adults ask them to do. Is that because the personality of a three- or four-year-old is not yet formed? I can't imagine that many parents would agree with that idea, and yet it is what writers' depictions of young children implicitly seem to be telling us.
You'll note that I'm making a particular assumption in all of this. Young children have subjectivity, character, and personality; those experiences and patterns of being just aren't necessarily like our own. I think this is one of several very good reasons why toddlers are almost invisible in fiction. Next time I'll be suggesting that our best way of understanding a young child's distinctive subjectivity is to turn to science. I'll end with a fairly major caveat: I haven't read everything (far from it), and I am certainly not an expert on the literatures of non-Western cultures which might give a much richer depiction of the experiences of little people. I hope that commentators on this post will prove me wrong.
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