One idea that drives me as a writer for children is that our childhood experiences and decisions determine our character as adults. I think “experiences” is well treated in literature, which has drawn a lot from Freudian ideas about trauma and triggers, and adults as living late reactions to what happened to them as kids. Less often are adults seen as the consequences of decisions, and this is what I want to preach: that children are architects of their own destinies.
But what if it’s all wrong? We’ve so absolutely accepted this “child is the [parent] of the [adult]” theory that we don’t question it. It’s one of those rare ideological principles that seems across political and religious differences, we frequently opine (for example) that a privileged childhood can makes a political candidate unable to “connect” with “regular people.” We agree that an abused childhood fosters an abusive adulthood. We owe our own character–good traits and bad–to the way were raised and the efforts of our parents.
This article doesn’t offer much besides questions, but I think they are intriguing questions. As every cell in our body is refreshed, do we disconnect from our childhood selves? For those of us (like me) who end up in new places with entirely new networks throughout our lives, is there enough continuity to explain our adult “self” with childhood experience?
For example, I have lived in Minnesota for nearly 20 years, and now, outside of fleeting facebook encounters, know few people from before I moved here. There are elements of my childhood self in my current self, of course, but the child I used to be is practically unknowable to me. I honestly don’t even know if Kurtis, age 11, would like the author “Kurtis Scaletta” who purportedly writes for children like him. Sometimes when I meet people who knew me as a child, but have not seen me for decades, they describe a child Kurtis I don’t remember or recognize.
I do think I am largely informed by the corrections I made in my 30s to mistakes I made in my 20s that were due to trauma suffered in my teens… so there’s a domino effect in play, but there is a lot to be said for the relationships I have had, the books I have read, and the decisions and experiences I have had since I turned 30… these things are of their own soil. My wife and son, my writing life and writing friends, have made me who I am, and most of those people weren’t in my life until five years ago (my wife, ten). Any one of a few major decisions could have led to a completely different life and a completely different Kurtis.
In a book the world has largely forgotten, Love Among the Mashed Potatoes, Gregory MacDonald (best known for the Fletch series), gives the advice via his columnist protagonist: you have until age thirty to forgive your parents; after that you have to begin forgiving yourself. It may be one of the best tidbits of wisdom I’ve gotten from a book, and as I get older I appreciate more and more what it means to forgive yourself and stop blaming your problems on a lousy childhood.
As a writer I will have to persist with the premise that children are laying the foundation for the selves they will build, but this article has given me something to think about.
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I love Peter Pan.
I remember watching the televised Mary Martin version as a child; the first Broadway show my grandparents took me to see was the 1979 revival of the Broadway show.
I watched those as a child and saw magic of
Peter Pan as a child: the wonder, the adventure, the fear and avoidance of what growing up would mean. That Peter was played by a woman barely registered in terms of text or subtext.
Growing older, growing up, meant learning more about
Peter Pan and J.M. Barrie, the man who invented him. I'm not going to get into that -- there is plenty out there about it. While the origins, inspiration, and evolution of
Peter Pan are fascinating right now I'm writing more about viewer response, and one viewer in particular: me.
I love
Peter Pan. Watching it as a child was magical. And I got it: Wendy and the boys went, had adventures, and when they had had enough, they went home.
I want to give a nod to three subsequent versions of
Peter Pan I adored:
Hook (1991), which said that growing up doesn't mean losing touch with one's childhood. Traditionally,
Peter Pan views growing up as either/or, with growing up a putting away and forgetting of "childish" things.
Hook said that becoming an adult can be a good thing, but it doesn't mean a rejection and forgetting of childhood and that Peter doing so wasn't healthy. It was just as unhealthy as rejecting adulthood.
Peter Pan (2003), which gave us an age-appropriate boy, Jeremy Sumpter (born 1989) playing Peter Pan. This meant that when Pan said he was a child who hadn't grown up, the viewer saw an actual child. The other children were also played by children of the right ages for the text; Rachel Hurd-Wood was born in 1990. It captured the magic of Peter, the desire for adventure, and kept it child-centered. It's practically perfect.
As a lover of
Once Upon a Time (TV series), I have to also mention their version of Peter Pan. Robbie Kay (born 1995) played Pan in 2013. Pan was played by an older teenager, and Kay clearly wasn't an adult but he also wasn't a child. This take -- spoilers -- was perhaps the darkest one yet, in which Peter Pan was not a child who refused to grow up but rather an adult who refused to remain a grown up. Once that adult was offered the chance to become a child again, he not only took it, he was willing to kill to stay a child. For this version, being a child was not about being "innocent" but was about refusing responsibility.
As an adult, how I view Peter and Wendy is more complex. The recent TV version,
NBC Peter Pan LIVE, got me thinking about Peter Pan and childhood and how we view that, and I'm not sure if they intended it to be that way. Except for the roles of Michael and John, all the actors were adults. Wendy, Peter, the Lost Boys: all grown ups. Seeing adults say the lines about being a child, pretending, not growing up, just made me really think about those lines and what was, or wasn't going in the play.
As I think about it, I realize that the hero is, and always has been, Wendy -- it is Wendy who goes on the adventure to Neverland, it is Wendy who is faced with the conflict of her "let's pretend" being challenged by those around her as not good enough, it is Wendy who realizes that playing by someone else's rules gets tiring, and let's just all go home now, OK? It is Wendy who later realizes she cannot deny that same pretending to her own daughter, just because Wendy herself is older and wiser.
Because of the age of the play, much of Wendy's choices are presented in some very old-fashioned ways, and many of us watching wished mightily for a feminist retelling of
Peter Pan. But as I write this up, and with the acknowledgement that the play is over 100 years old -- really, what's so wrong with wanting to play house or play school, as Wendy does? She also wants Peter's version of adventures, but what is so wrong with her manner of pretending, and why won't the boys play along with her? The problem is not in Wendy's desires, but it's in Peter's denial to recognize her dreams as being as valid as his own, and wanting to keep Wendy in a box of "mother." That's not just because the play is old -- it's because Peter is a child and that's how children think. Only their own dreams matter; other people exist only in the child's own reality. (Ask any child who is shocked to see a teacher in a store, outside of school.)
Part of the problem is that it is Wendy's adventure in Peter's world. Emily Asher-Perrin has a brilliant analysis of Peter, and how Peter himself is hardly a hero, in
Peter Pan's "Greatest Pretend" is Heroism at Tor. As she explains, "
Here’s the thing about Neverland—it is Peter’s playhouse. He is like the guy who owns the casino; the house always wins and he is the house. Everything in Neverland is set up so that it caters directly to his whims." Most children, myself included, would not pick up on that because the whims of children can be so similar so it's not obvious to younger viewers that this is Peter's playhouse, not any child's playhouse.
That it is Peter's playhouse, and all those his playthings, is part of the problem with Tiger Lily. Tiger Lily -- that's another area where much has been written. Two recent articles on that: at
Why 'Fix' Tiger Lily? Why Not Just Let Her Go? by Dr. Adrienne Keene, posted at Indian Country; and
#NotYourTigerLily: Nine Months Later and They Still Don't Get The Point by Johnnie Jae, posted at Native News.
As Asher-Perrin concludes at her article at Tor, "
as Barrie states, Pan will always come back to steal our runaways and lost boys, and will continue to do so as long as children are “Innocent and heartless.” The genius of Pan’s tale, is that innocence does not automatically denote goodness. Instead, it makes a child’s lack of experience a very frightening thing after all."
These things happening to children, by children, as in the 2003 version, make sense. Peter played by a child has it make sense, even if the child has lived years and years as Peter has. As adults, we recognized that children are, well, children, and excuse or understand.
Now, suddenly, have adults say those lines? Do that pretend? Refuse to grow up?
The NBC version is no longer a brilliant and honest look at childhood and growing up; instead, it is a look at those adults who avoid growing up, even as they physically grow and mature, and it shows that
this resistance to adulthood is not charming - it's creepy as hell. Holding onto childhood and avoiding responsibility or making decisions is neither innocence nor goodness. It's creepy.
And that creepiness? Is why yes, I still love
Peter Pan. Because it gives one thing to the child viewer and another to the adult viewer. Because it's willing to say that children and childhood aren't perfect; and are not something to idealize. Growing up is not a bad thing; refusing to do so, fighting against it, isn't a good thing.
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A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy
By Mark E. Courtney
For most young people, the transition to adulthood is a gradual process. Many continue to receive financial and emotional support from their parents or other family members well past age 18. This is in stark contrast to the situation confronting youth who must navigate the transition to adulthood from the U.S. foster care system. Too old for the child welfare system but often not yet prepared to live as independent young adults, the approximately 29,000 foster youth who “age out” of foster care each year are expected to make it on their own long before the vast majority of their peers.
The federal government has long recognized the challenges facing foster youth, providing states with funds to help prepare them for independence since the late 1980s. Federal support for foster youth making the transition to adulthood was enhanced in 1999 with the creation of the John Chafee Foster Care Independence Program. This legislation doubled available funding to $140 million per year, expanded the age range deemed eligible for services, allowed states to use funds for a broader range of purposes (e.g., room and board), and granted states the option of extending Medicaid coverage for youth who age out of foster care until age 21. Vouchers for post-secondary education and training were also added to the range of federally-funded services and supports potentially available to current and former foster youth making the transition to adulthood. While the services provided through the Chafee Program were a step in the right direction, the fact remains that in all but a few states youth are still summarily discharged from foster care on or around their 18th birthday, rendering them “independent” of foster care, but seldom self sufficient.
That may finally be changing for the better. Recently, there was a fundamental shift toward greater federal responsibility for supporting foster youth during the transition to adulthood. The Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 extended the age of eligibility for federal reimbursement of foster care from 18 to 21. Beginning this year, states will be able to claim federal reimbursement for the costs of providing foster care until foster youth are 21 years old. To qualify for reimbursement, foster youth age 18 and older must be either completing high school or an equivalent program; enrolled in postsecondary or vocational school; participating in a program or activity designed to promote or remove barriers to employment; employed for at least 80 hours per month; or incapable of doing any of these activities due to a medical condition. They can be living independently in a supervised setting as well as placed in a foster home or group care setting.
This change in federal policy was informed by findings from the Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth (“Midwest Study”), the largest longitudinal study of young people aging out of foster care in the U.S. The Midwest Study paints a sobering picture of the outcomes experienced by foster youth making the transition to adulthood; foster youth fare much worse than their peers
Recently the New York Times published a major story featuring Jeffrey Arnett’s research on “emerging adulthood,” his term for the age period from 18 to 29. The article received tremendous attention (boosting it to the position of top emailed story) and Arnett was soon asked to appear on the Today Show, among other major media outlets around the world. In the original post below, he expands on the ideas previously presented and responds to stereotypes about emerging adults.
By Jeffrey Arnett
How do you know when you’ve reached adulthood? This is one of the first questions I asked when I began my research on people in their twenties, and it remains among the most fascinating to me. I expected that people would mostly respond in terms of the traditional transition events that take place for most people in the 18-29 age period: moving out of parents’ household, finishing education, marriage, and parenthood. To my surprise, none of these transition events turned out to hold much importance as markers of adulthood. In fact, finishing education, marriage, and having at least one child have consistently ended up near the bottom in importance in the many surveys that I and others have done in the United States and around the world over the past decade.
Consistently, across countries, ethnic groups, gender, and social classes, the “Big Three” criteria for reaching adulthood are these: 1) Accept responsibility for yourself, 2) Make independent decisions, 3) Become financially independent.
What the Big Three have in common is that they all denote self-sufficiency. For emerging adults, adulthood means learning to stand on your own as a self-sufficient person. Only when you have attained self-sufficiency are you ready to take on the obligations of marriage and parenthood. Because the Big Three all occur gradually rather than as one-time events, most emerging adults feel in-between until at least their mid-twenties, on the way to adulthood but not there yet.
There are negative stereotypes that have sprung up with regard to emerging adults: that they are lazy, spoiled, selfish, and never want to grow up. These stereotypes are common and extremely unfair. Lazy? Have you noticed lately who is pouring your coffee, working the retail counter, mowing the lawns? It’s mostly emerging adults who are doing the crummy, low-paying, no-benefits jobs older adults try to avoid. Emerging adults often hold one or more of these jobs and combining them with going to school as they try to work their way up to something better. Spoiled and selfish? Who is it that is applying in record numbers to Teach for America, Americorps, and the Peace Corps, among other volunteer organizations? Not their Baby-Boomer critics, but emerging adults. Never want to grow up? By age 30 most people are married, have at least one child, and are committed to a stable career path. Why begrudge them the freedom of their twenties to try to make the best possible adult lives for themselves, and to have fun and adventures that they will not be able to have later?
Whatever older adults think of it, emerging adulthood is here to stay as a stage of the life course. Instead of tearing them down, as parents and as a society we should be building them up and giving them the support they need to enjoy their twenties and have a successful entry into the responsibilities of adult life.
Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Ph.D. is a Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at
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