“concepts of children”

The point about kids writing “helment” reminds me of another trope that kept arising in those bicycle essays: “cracking one’s head open”. They have to wear a helment so they don’t crack their heads open.

I remember my cousin Dawn telling me a story at age 7 or so about her classmate who cracked her head open after a bicycle incident. I can’t imagine this was literally true, because it was a very small town, I always paid close attention to adult conversation from a young age, and adults would have referred in horror to a head-cracking incident and warned us to avoid it ourselves. So it was probably just a childhood myth-meme.

A number of years ago, that got me and my brother thinking about “Concepts of Children,” or concepts that play a major role in childhood life that are of negligible or no significance for adults.

We had quite a large list at one point, but it’s been misplaced. But along with “cracking your head open”, some of them were (and some of these may be culturally specific to the Midwestern USA for all I know, since I was never a child anywhere else):

*Chinese gimmicks, such as finger-traps, karate, etc.

*the obligation to shout “Geronimo!” before jumping from even the tiniest height

*racing (footraces to the door, and so forth)

I’ve forgotten the best ones, and will need to ask my brother to remind me. But one other concept that plays a much larger role for kids, surprisingly, is physical violence. As an Associate Professor of Philosophy, my chances of being punched, kicked, or bitten on any given day are fairly close to zero. Not so in childhood, when those were ever-present, foreboding dangers.

My youngest brother, for instance, went to his first day of Kindergarten in 1978, and another kid smashed his hand with a brick and broke his little finger. First day of Kindergarten!