One of the biggest put-downs people can bestow on another is to label someone childish. We presuppose that being a baby or a child is something to be avoided. The notion that age equals maturity is not always accurate. What’s so undesirable about a baby crying? The infant is merely following a biological urge to get fed. Crying is just testing a theory: the last time I cried I got fed; maybe it’ll work again this time.
It is true that babies cry, need to be changed and have tantrums, but I contend older people often are as culpable. Children have the excuse of being young and therefore behaving the way they do.
We hear people exclaim, “Stop being such a baby!” when someone appears unhappy. To shed a tear for whatever reason, especially when the shedder is male, is unforgivable.
But why don’t we ever say to someone whose behavior we don’t approve of, “You’re acting like an Enron executive”? or “You’re behaving just like a day-trader with insider information”? or “You’re acting just like an Exxon Valdez pilot”? or “You’re behaving like a petulant radio talk-show host”? Maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places, but I don’t find “childish” behavior that undesirable. My observations have yielded cases of extreme compassion, consideration, courtesy and cooperation among young people. It’s not necessarily as if their behavior somehow gets better and therefore more “adult-like” as they age.
What’s desirable about an adult woman who lets her child bake in a closed car while she parties? What’s desirable about an adult sperm donor who impregnates a dozen women, denies responsibility, yet boasts about his conquests? What’s desirable about older people who prey on the young, trying to hook them on drugs or alcohol?
All these questions came to mind only recently as I watched an older sister pummel her brother.
I watched because, although I wished to get involved, the kids’ father was largely ignoring them, while the mother appeared to be cheering her daughter on.
This event took place at the recreation center. The girl, around 8, was easily twice the size of her brother, no more than 5. Each time she poked and punched her brother she stared expectantly, hoping to coax a few tears from the child.
Watching the bullying was disturbing but not as much as the obliviousness of the father and the near-complicity of the mother. Both parents looked like over-the-hill jocks.
The boy, at once angry, fearful and frustrated, appeared hopeful that somehow he could fight his sister back, but if he’d landed a blow, who knows how much harder the sister would have come back at him.
For a while the boy tried to ignore the constant punching and pinching, hoping his sister would stop. She kept batting him on the head, not with a fist, but with her palm–anything to get a reaction.
Then she started her chant, one I hadn’t heard in decades, but which came back to me clearly, inasmuch as I’m the youngest (or as some would say, the “baby of the family”). The chant went like this: “Cry, baby, cry; stick your fingers in your eye; tell your mother to give you a piece of pie.” What a revelation that all the words to the taunting chant returned! But this isn’t about my callow childhood; rather it’s about people’s zeal to humiliate others, and the mistaken notion of what growing up really is. I wanted to say something to the parents about their daughter’s bullying but feared being told to mind my own business, in the same way that cops hate getting domestic calls from wives or girlfriends to report their husbands or boyfriends.
In church just last month, a participant in a skit told two other quarreling participants, “You’re acting like petulant children.” Now that ought to serve as a real put-down! To show their experience and implied superiority, people will play the age card and say something like, “I was in the military when you were still in diapers.” And the favorite, “You’re acting like a baby.”
Interesting that “baby” does double duty, as a term of endearment and also as a put-down: “You’re such a baby!”
Though I don’t advocate conditioning people, especially young males, to turn on the water-works for little cause, I vehemently resent the notion that males shouldn’t show their feelings.
The one bit of interest the aging jock showed regarding his bullied son was to utter, “That’ll make a man out of him.”
It would be interesting to revisit the boy in, say, 10 years, to discover what kind of “man” he’s evolved into. Equally revealing would be peering into the earlier years of both parents.
Somehow, it’s hard to buy the notion that bullying and being bullied constitute adequate rites of passage toward something called manhood. Perhaps there is some merit to the expression that “what goes around comes around.”