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so in general, daniil's stance on the kids in town is often 'oh my god, a child should not be in your position.' which makes sense, frankly! he's not used to this town and the sheer amount of orphans left by the first plague. it's jarring to see so many children, a lot of them quite young, walking around unsupervised, getting up to all kinds of dangerous things, and being put in positions of power. daniil often expresses alarm and concern about all those things.

(fretting over whether sticky has parents he lives with)

(alarmed that a little girl is in the termitary and asking how old she is)

(alarmed that said little girl is, in fact, in charge of the termitary)

(concerned that kids are in the streets unsupervised)

i could have sworn there's at least one other instance like this, but this is what i could find from my searches/memory. anyway. what does he do with this concern? well, in many cases, he immediately shifts to trying to be the responsible adult himself. he doesn't just tut about how someone should be looking after them and then turn away, he steps into the role himself to either police their behaviour or try to keep them from doing dangerous things.

(responding to taya's intention to go outside by shutting that down immediately)

(rejecting sticky's offer of a guide to the silent house, even though this would save him time on his quest, because he doesn't want sticky to leave the house when it's dangerous)

(trying and failing repeatedly to get notkin to stop swearing. and hey, i did a whole spreadsheet of curse words in PCHD. excluding the protags, notkin swears the second most out of every character in the whole game, beaten only by bad grief and BEATING andrey stamatin. bachelor's got a point here.)

(generic 'please for the love of god stop doing dangerous stuff')

and i have to say, the funniest manifestations of this are the multiple times he tries to ground children that are not his. including clara. absolutely sensational. daniil, you can't do that.

while we're on the topic of dangerous situations for kids, too, i want to bring up how he handles the dogheads and khan demanding the rifles, and specifically the difference in how he handles it when you are playing him vs when he's acting without player input in the haruspex route. obviously, in the bachelor route, you have to give the kids the rifles. it's a main quest. you have no choice. but even when daniil does grudgingly get them the rifles, this exchange happens:

he's insistent on making khan promise that he won't do anything rash that might make the soldiers open fire on them. and even after khan promises, he keeps pushing to make sure khan will keep the other kids in check too. he does not want to be handing these kids dangerous weapons.

now, if there is no player input... he won't give them proper ammo at all. acting in his 'natural' state (if we can call it that), without player input, he tries to give them fake bullets so they can't hurt anyone or end up in an actual shoot-out with soldiers.

this gets him imprisoned by a bunch of twelve-year-olds, which, objectively, is hilarious. but i think it's telling that he tried to find any way out of giving kids anything that could get them into a bad situation.

(now, admittedly, when daniil tells artemy where to find the actual ammo, he does call the kids little gits and say he hopes they shoot each other after all, but given that the kids were literally going to torture him to death, he's maybe entitled to a bit of anger and harsh words. i still think the fact that he tried to keep weapons out of their hands in the first place has relevance.)

as far as the last bits, i want to highlight little instances of him being genuinely sweet and comforting to kids, often in ways that went beyond what he had to do or say. these are the ones that really made me go 'okay, yeah, you can absolutely play him in a way where he doesn't just feel concern for kids, he actually likes them a lot and is pretty good with them.'

(the side quest where you help the little girl and boy. note that he's using her childish language to meet her at her level by saying 'daddy' as she does instead of 'father,' and comforting her when she's crying. even if he rejects the quest, he does it as gently as possible and calls her pumpkin when he does it.)

(reassuring taya that what happened in the termitary is not her fault)

(comforting murky by not rejecting her childish fears, but telling her that he'll lock the scary thing up if it comes for her)

(after having to literally crawl out of his own grave when he's been shot multiple times and attacked by dogs, he's still calling grace sweetheart and reassuring her that he's okay and not 'hers' [read: a dead body] yet)

WHEW. anyway. that was long. that's my "you can play daniil in a way where he seems to really care about kids, actually" propaganda. as with so much in pathologic, it completely depends on how you choose to make the protagonist you're playing. can daniil be cruel and dismissive to kids? sure, absolutely. but can he also be compassionate, caring, and concerned? definitely.

and that's what i mean when i say that he treats kids like kids. i think the presumption that artemy is better with kids comes from two sources. first of all, his bound are all children, so there's a natural association. he does interact with them more. and second of all, he speaks to them more like equals, as if they're small adults. he gets involved with what they have going on already. he doesn't condescend to them. and let's not forget, daniil has a consistent habit (with adults and with children) of trying to be helpful or compassionate, but expressing that in the rudest way possible. he's the stereotype of a new yorker who will call you a useless idiot while carrying your sofa up six flights of stairs for you because he saw you struggling on the street. he's often kind, but often not nice. a lot of his concern about children is expressed in ways that do seem condescending or even controlling. he's chastising them for things like swearing. he's ordering them to stay inside or stop wandering the streets. he's trying to GROUND KIDS THAT AREN'T EVEN HIS. but he's not doing it because he hates kids, he's doing it because he sees a bunch of vulnerable children in dangerous situations with no adults stepping up about it and he decides to be the one to do that, albeit sometimes in a rude way.