Are Grownups Just Giant Kids?

Late this past summer, I was at the convenience store with my son, buying ice cream, when a Tesla Cybertruck pulled into the lot. Peter is six, and fascinated by Cybertrucks; hushed with awe, he walked closer, peering out from beneath his bike helmet. Angular and metallic, the Cybertruck loomed in its parking space like a meteor fallen to earth, or a Transformer waiting to transform. Peter said, “Whoa,” and the truck’s middle-aged driver, wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, rolled down his window and offered a thumbs-up in return. They grinned, like-minded across the decades.

Later that day, we biked to the marina near our house, to test our new remote-controlled boat. We’d burned out the motor on our old one, and I’d sprung for an upgraded model, which turned out to be two feet long, with a top speed of thirty miles an hour. As we installed the battery, configured the controller, and then descended the boat ramp, a small group of gray-haired men milled around on the dock. They stayed to watch as our boat zoomed to and fro. When Peter successfully raced it between two tightly spaced pilings, they applauded. “Sweet boat,” one of them said, as he walked to the berth where his big version was moored.

When packs of burly bearded dudes cruise by on their belchy motorcycles, it’s easy to see them as giant children enthralled by their toys. Grownups like kid stuff, and vice versa—having been both a kid and a grownup myself, I’ve always known this to be true. Still, it wasn’t until I had little kids of my own that I realized the true extent of the overlap. Clearly, there are preoccupations, challenges, and fascinations exclusive to adults. (I can’t imagine too many kids enjoying the movie “Marriage Story,” for example.) But, at least to my parental eye, the similarities can seem to outnumber the differences. Kids are on an endless quest for yummy treats, and adults line up for trendy pastries; kids like playing dress-up, and grownups spend hours in the dressing room trying on everything in the store. Kids can be nostalgic, recalling fondly in third grade the games they played in first. They can wish to be useful and suffer from feeling useless; like their elders, they can thirst simultaneously for belonging and solitude, dependence and independence. Children have dignity, which can be injured by the careless exercise of parental power, and they worry about death, sometimes in a more direct way than adults do.

Meanwhile, adults move from the Hardy Boys to “True Detective”; they decorate extensively for the holidays; they want what they want right now, and order it using next-day shipping. They read Y.A. fiction and think about ancient Rome. Give me a child at seven, Aristotle said, and I’ll show you the man. What if, through the commutative property, the man is basically the child at seven?

It’s possible to adopt “adults are just giant kids” as a lens through which to see other people. A work colleague is unreasonably angry at being left off an e-mail chain—but don’t playmates always hate being left out? An elderly relative refuses assistance—but doesn’t every child insist, “I can do it myself”? Seeing people this way can be condescending, but also gentle: it nods to the basic psychological needs that often drive our behavior. It’s certainly useful to see yourself as a giant kid: an oft-quoted piece of productivity advice is simply, “Go to bed!”

I live in a small town where many families have stayed for generations. My son goes to the same primary school that his mother and grandmother attended. Recently, the mom of one of his classmates told me that our children’s first-grade teacher had also been hers—“She was wonderful,” she said. Experiences like these make it easier to understand people as continuations of their childhood selves. It’s a soothing, somehow mystical perspective: it’s striking to picture my wife, in shrunken form, walking the school hallways that my son walks now, and her mother, similarly tiny, doing the same when my wife didn’t yet exist. In Ecclesiastes, this line of thought leads from despair (“Meaningless! Meaningless! . . . What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun”) toward an acknowledgment of the intergenerational circularity of time (“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens”) and, eventually, to some idea about the value of commonality and togetherness (“Two are better than one. . . . If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. . . . A cord of three strands is not quickly broken”). Adult life can come to feel random—in the midst of it, you find yourself hemmed in by seemingly arbitrary circumstances. It can help to conjure a sense of being the same person you’ve always been, connected to the places where your life has unfolded.

It’s often said that childhood was “invented”: in his book “Centuries of Childhood,” from 1960, the French historian Philippe Ariès argued that, in medieval times, children were basically seen as tiny adults, and that childhood as we know it today is the product of schools and other institutions. It’s a disputed thesis, but a compelling one: adults definitely do a lot to preserve childhood as its own special time, from promulgating the myth of Santa Claus to setting up parental controls on Netflix. There are many social and cultural barriers between childhood and adulthood. It’s telling, therefore, that those barriers prove porous in everyday life. Uncertain about some fact—how does the differential in a car work?—kids and adults can find equal happiness in a rabbit hole. Gliding on our bikes down the long, sweeping hill near our house, which descends from the school to the water, my son and I both glory in speed, ease, wind, and sun. We have the exact same experience. I think we even share the worry that he’ll crash.

Adulthood is real, of course. One wouldn’t want to minimize that. But in my life, at least, the import of adulthood—its sheer routinized force, its practical and moral weight—is already maximized. A little corrective can’t hurt.

Like many people, I strive for maturity, which has many components. There’s the cultivation of the ability to think in rational, self-directed, and complex ways. There’s the handling of emotions, both in the stoic sense of managing them and in the therapeutic sense of expressing them. There’s the creation of value, for myself and others, and sustained engagement with the big subjects—God, art, science, nature, politics. (Adults can be giant children in these areas, too.) The list goes on and on.

But childhood is woven into maturity. Part of being mature is knowing yourself, which entails knowing who you’ve been and perhaps still are. Maturity might involve acknowledging your childishness, or tapping into it for your own grownup purposes. The creation of an adult identity can be self-alienating, as you strive to leave childhood behind; a mature person might have undone some (though by no means all) of that work. Therapists sometimes invoke the idea of an “inner child,” and certain therapeutic approaches even posit the existence of “exiled” inner children, who have been wounded or rejected and might be recovered and nurtured. But that negative, traumatized conception of the relationship between childhood and adulthood isn’t the only possible one. Like memoirists, we might simply wish to recall the past—to meditate upon and appreciate the whole of our life spans.

Either proudly or in protest of some rule, my son often says, “I’m part grownup.” Many grownups, if they were truthful, might say the same thing as a kind of admission. One question we can ask is, How big is the grownup part of us? But another is, What kind of part is it? In Peter’s room, a set of Russian nesting dolls sits on the dresser. He tends to see the dolls generationally—as a baby, a mother, a grandmother, and so on—and I tend to see them temporally, as a baby, a child, a teen-ager, an adult. The dolls themselves encourage the idea of sequence. But, also, they nest. The bigger contains the smaller. Life can move forward, one thing after another, but it can also grow inward, deepening itself without leaving everything behind. ♦