Just whose child is this?
Just whose is this child in front of me, now is an Orphan (and most children in one sense or other are orphans).
Or better a chid is a weird thing – on the one hand they of course own themselves
They have a body.
Hey have name.
These have a little resource f memory, and a few very staid prejudices.
On the other a chid is of course needy of the parents or adult around it.
It grow it needs others.
To grow it requires unequal exchanges.
It loose then to others for materials to be what it is.
The question is then does one respond to this need (and its eventual termination_.
How is one an adult around a child.
A difficult question – as children within our skin are always restless, and often stroppy faced with these other brothers and sisters.
How then does one thing about ones relation to a child.
Is it a question of owning. Does the right to instruct convey the right to own the entity, and to treat it as ones own. To then actually capture it within an institution or prism. This child in mine.
I pay for it. I keep it. If it dies then of course I pay for it. Grumble…
Is this grumble good?
So does one like children in the abstract – only as they allow one to think of ones own child. That is the abstraction childhood becomes as means a junction point I love my child, and so I am soppy about all children – to a degree. I cry therefore at their demise thinking only of those I know.
Is this ability to switch the chairs goodness?
For one of those tings about child is not their innocent – which is a stupid idea- so much as the need that we are good. We piffle away to them about goodness to try t pull wool over our own eyes about are resentment in having ourselves to be good in front of them…
Is then to be good to be the child as an adult therefore?
Is that the best response/
Because in a sense there is nothing, really nothing more loving then the updated child.
One has all the open hearted of the child, all the looking towards and silent comprehension, and bodily empathy, and yet at the same time one also has the power of the adult to be there or to be somewhere else.
One can come and go, intuit and withdraw.
Those adult-children’s a good creating.
And yet they have a problem in helping too much they whisk the other adult alone.
What can be nicer than being mastered by such an adult-child/ I brings out of course ether child-adult in us.
That is the one who cannot easily let the other go (and cannot stop caring)
We become then pitched in something between the two – hybrids that want to lead us somewhere else and towards somewhere else.
And yet this lead gives a clue. The problem of childhood is what beyond the appeals to cuteness and ownership is one doing with and to a child? Why does one respond as one does?
Could or should one respond other?
This appeal to the childhood of the child – to its otherness – hides what this is really about. It I really about a disinterest helping of another- a helping that will allow that other to grow and change. This growing challenging and changing, does not formally need children to function. There are other children, whose adherence o the childhood stage is not so extreme or so compete. They might then be adults all the time and yet at point needs the comfort of the child.
Here ones needs care.
One might own a duty of care in such relations, and yet one does not eve have the right to impose care duty on the other adult who one helps.
That is they will have their own duties and their own world – possibility even there own parents.
To held them not as a child, but rather of the grounds that a childhood is fragmented (and made to sing across registers, in many voices or rather aspects of it are) therefore means that there need not be impose a single unifying parent of such non-children. So that those who you help need to owe you nothing or the help converts them to children and one is caught in the parent-child dilemma.
One helps there as if they were a child.
One helps those aspects of them that one can help, which function and enrich, which a child has in trumps, and yet one does it by not imposing a childhood in itself (even virtually) upon them,
Wise councils might map this root.
It might then be he only inset to the question what is good.
Unwonted children, and the response to the needy as if they were an aspect in childhood(and not the thing itself), as long as they needed that it.
All this is good.
But can one hold the resolution?