Who's Profiting From Childhood?

The Business of Better Children

Let me ask you a few questions.

Would you expect a 40-year-old to act like a retired person?

Would you expect a 30-year-old to behave like someone navigating a midlife crisis?

Would you expect a 20-year-old to automatically be mature enough to take on a mortgage, a child, and a marriage?

Would you expect a 12-year-old to have the skills and capacity to drive on the freeway?

Of course not.

And yet, we place expectations on children under 10 to be "emotionally regulated," to control their emotions, to be "respectful," and to somehow have it all together.

We are sending children under 10 to therapy to learn how to self-regulate.

We are asking children under 10 to rationalize realities they may not yet have the cognitive capacity to understand.

We are diagnosing children with psychological problems before many of the brain systems responsible for emotional control, judgment, perspective, and impulse regulation have even properly developed.

We are drugging children to make them fit into someone else's distorted rendition of how a child should behave.

When someone asks me what keeps me up at night, it is this.

It is the pathologizing of children far before their time.

It is the judgment of children far too early.

It is the impossible expectation that a 9-year-old should somehow "have it together."

It literally boils my blood.

It boils my blood because it is profoundly unfair to the child.

It gives them no room to make mistakes.

No room to learn.

No room to grow.

It can lock them into a self-image before their identity has even had the chance to fully form.

It binds and freezes development.

It reinforces the belief that "something is wrong with me."

It reinforces the belief that "I'm not enough."

And it drives me nuts because these children are still at an age when they need the safety of close family and kin.

They need to feel that they belong, not that they are an outcast or a problem to manage.

They need the adults in their lives to remember the developmental stage they are actually in.

They need us to look closely and value exactly where they are.

Their deepest needs are not complicated.

They need to feel loved.

They need to feel appreciated.

They need to feel safe enough to make mistakes and keep developing.

They need guidance that helps them recognize the value they already bring and teaches them how to contribute, care, and be of service to others at the age and stage they are in.

Emotional development is not created by demanding that children behave like fully formed adults.

It emerges when children experience both safety and growth.

Safety without growth can become limitation.

Growth without safety can become fear.

But when children are deeply loved, appropriately guided, meaningfully challenged, and valued for who they are becoming, they are given the conditions to develop into whole human beings.

The goal should not be to manufacture perfectly regulated children.

The goal should be to raise children who feel secure enough to experience their emotions, supported enough to understand them, and guided enough to eventually take responsibility for how they express them.

That is development.

That is family.

That is flourishing.

And that is very different from convincing a child that there is something wrong with them because they have not yet mastered being human.

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Continue the Conversation

When you look back on your own childhood, what did you need most from the adults around you?

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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