A story arc from 1989 in Bill Watterson’s much-loved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes features the young tyke Calvin and his parents returning home to find it burgled. Calvin recovers from the shock quickly enough when he finds that his beloved stuffed tiger Hobbes is safe. A little while later, we see the parents alone in bed, talking — an unusual scene for a comic strip defined by Calvin’s perspective.
“It’s funny,” Calvin’s father mulls, “when I was a kid, I thought grown-ups never worried about anything. I trusted my parents to take care of everything, and it never occurred to me that they might not know how. I figured that once you grew up, you automatically knew what to do in any given scenario.” This is exactly right, and captures something real about the sense of security and reassurance a stable family can give. He concludes wryly, “I don’t think I’d have been in such a hurry to reach adulthood if I’d known the whole thing was going to be ad-libbed.”
This too is exactly right. No one automatically knows what to do when something really unexpected happens. To be a grown-up is to be ready to improvise as life demands. And, we might add, to pull off a convincing impression that one is not merely improvising, at least while the children are watching.
Nothing is less reassuring to a child than a sense that the grown-ups don’t know what they are doing.
The great task of bringing up children goes well beyond conveying some fixed body of knowledge that can be mastered. Bringing up children involves giving them a sense of what it is to be grown-up. This can be the hardest thing of all, because few grown-ups are really as grown-up as they’d like others, particularly their children, to believe they are.
Calvin can often seem a self-involved brat, too clever for his own good. But the fact that his first thought on learning of the burglary is of something, or someone, other than himself — his stuffed tiger — suggests that there’s more to him, ethically, than meets the eye. He has, after all, already learned the most basic of ethical lessons: to think of the interests of someone other than oneself and to take responsibility for them.
One reason for giving children teddy bears or similar stuffed animals is to initiate them into just this sort of responsibility. “Here is one small, vulnerable thing you and you alone are responsible for.” This is certainly a preparation for parenting in particular, but the point is more general than that. To be grown-up is, among other things, to be the sort of person who can be entrusted with the interests of vulnerable others. (This fact strongly suggests that the larger the number of stuffed animals a child is given, the less effective they are as lessons in responsibility.)
The relationship of child to stuffed animal goes beyond this simple moral lesson about responsibility. Stuffed animals are not merely things to be protected, but also protectors. That is one reason some children cannot sleep unless they have their teddy bears close at hand. Again, many children talk to their stuffed animals and weave large, intricate stories involving them. Long before they go away to school and make human friends, they simulate the sorts of relationships they will have in their future lives, when their parents are not at hand. Long before they are allowed to have friends over to stay, they are beginning to get a sense of what it’s like never to be entirely alone, not even at bedtime.
It is striking just how many children’s games involve simulating adult relationships. Children playing house, or doctor, or even cops and robbers, are obviously trying on stock adult roles. But even those games that seem not to refer to any adult activity, such as hopscotch, contribute to learning something general about adult life. This is in virtue of something that characterises all games and most adult activities — namely, their being governed by rules, sometimes strictly defined and enforced, at other times, vague and leading to disagreement.
Children arguing over whether someone is cheating can seem like they’re merely fighting, but again, important lessons are being learnt. Obviously enough, they are learning something about fairplay, but they’re also learning something less obvious that the old-fashioned moralists miss out. This is the fact that what counts as fairplay is itself a matter for interpretation; there aren’t easy answers. The complexities of adult life will never be entirely covered by a set of rules. It is as well that so much of children’s play is about ad-libbing.
Nakul Krishnais a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cambridge
(This monthly column discusses questions of morality through pop culture)