`Shrunken Adults'

This is from Kaddish, by Leon Wieseltier:

“For many centuries, children in Western art were represented as grown-ups in miniature. Childhood has a history, and it was not until the early modern centuries that boys and girls were depicted as boys and girls, and not as little men and little women. I will always have a fondness for the awkward figures of those shrunken adults in the old paintings. In their teleological understanding of childhood, in their impatience for adulthood, those pictures remind me of my own beginnings. For my parents and my teachers proceeded according to the principle that it is never too soon…I think of my early years, and I admire those distorted images for their verisimilitude.”

I find this passage mysteriously moving, as though its author had breached my psychic sovereignty and reported to the world what he discovered. Prematurely aged children are disturbing and evoke fear and pity. My upbringing was more ambiguous and conflicted than Wieseltier’s. My brother and I were prodded into emotional stoicism, especially by our father. I now recognize this as a parody of adulthood. At the same time we were encouraged to remain dependent, and thus childish, by our mother. In short, any move we made left us uncertain and guilty, and we both developed a profound distrust for any authority we suspected to be unearned. As another result, while my brother has lived within a roughly 10-mile radius of our childhood home all of his life, I left home at 17 and almost never returned.

In my 3-year-old’s cubby at preschool this week, his teachers left a one-page article by “Kay Albrecht, Ph.D.” I use quotation marks because people compelled to proclaim their doctorates always strike me as comically insecure. In the piece, titled “How Toddlers Learn,” “Dr.” Albrecht writes, “Children are best prepared for future success by fully experiencing and growing through this stage without being hurried or pressured to perform or learn about how they will be in the next stage.”

Talk of “success” in the context of childhood is always dubious, but otherwise Albrecht’s conclusions are sound. I get uncomfortable when I watch parents nag their kids into performing like stunted ponies in the circus. Using children to compensate for our weaknesses and anxieties is a crime without a statute of limitations.

Even more mysterious than the power of the passage cited above is my great fondness and admiration for Kaddish, one of my favorite books of the last decade, a chronicle of deep emotion, scholarship and faith. Mysterious because I am not a Jew or even a believer, and I never experienced love or respect for my father, who died 10 months ago. I feel no necessity or desire to grieve for him, as Wieseltier does so movingly for his father. I feel only a sense of relief, an unseen pressure lifted. Perhaps my admiration for Kaddish is rooted in envy. How I wish I had had a father worthy of mourning. How I wish I could share some of Wieseltier’s faith.