#notes from elsewhere

I'm not coming for you, but with all due respect it's not "just who they are".

Children aren't military robots because they aren't lifeless hunks of machinery incapable of thought or feelings; they are human beings (like you were at that age) who are trying to make sense of the world around them (like you did at that age), and who want to be a part of that world and feel welcome in it (like you did at that age). They are not coded to do the same thing over and over with no input from anyone else, they are not machines singly wired for carnage: they watch, learn, adapt, respond and interact with things around them because these are smaller, younger versions of you and me learning what it means to exist on this planet in the first place with barely any filters, impulse control and absolutely no guidance on how to do this except what the environment around them (parents, friends, family, teachers) tell them is and isn't okay.

I don't believe this is a matter of inherent goodness or lack thereof--I don't believe anyone is inherently good or bad: what I believe is that we are all inherently social creatures who desperately want to be part of our communities and involved with other people. Children are no different. They want to learn, they want to help, they want to figure out where they belong in their little social units and they look to you to tell them where that is because they don't know yet. And if they are in an environment where bullying is okay (either because they were treated horribly and no one did anything or they see and hear others being treated horribly and no one did anything or they treated someone else horribly and no one did anything) than that is what they'll accept.

If you follow your logic that everyone is "better off "avoiding children--what then? How do you expect them to learn right from wrong if no one is volunteering to teach them? How do you expect bullying to stop if no one is taking the time to instill it in them that bullying is not okay? How do you expect them to ever learn to be kind and considerate when everyone around them makes it clear they're not wanted? How do you expect them to learn what any kind of care and responsibility looks like if everyone is avoiding them to begin with? How do you expect them to think for themselves and reach their own conclusions if you treat them all like a monolith? Every single adult is an ex-baby, an ex-child, an ex-teenager--how do you expect decent adults to come into this world if you avoid teaching all three of those?

I'm not saying any of this to dismiss what you went through or undermine the horror and the impact of it, and I genuinely am sorry you were put through so much. But the best way I can answer your question is with full honesty: and I think it is going to be difficult for you to find those "good stories" and be open to them if you are already convinced that you are right because of what happened to you, that children are automatically feral terrors and that everyone else is just pretending otherwise or ignoring the reality. I believe what I believe because I've spent years around kids and seen all sides of them. I know they can say horrible things. But I also know they learnt those horrible things from a careless adult, or another child exposed to a careless adult. Children can be terrifying--but they are terrifying to other children. And that terror is coming from a reactive and limited understanding of the world where so much of what happens to you often feels like it's coming from large, hidden, horrible forces you can't wrap your head around (because you can't, because your head is 8 years old). But the fact is adults are also terrifying to children. And which of those are you now?

I can't speculate on what you went through or how you processed it, but I think it's worth considering that you may still be looking at children through the eyes of the child you once were and the horrible experiences you had. Again, I'm not dismissing that pain--it's real and it happened to you, and I can absolutely understand your feelings and conclusions--but that doesn't mean they equate to objective conclusions or generalization about all children, especially since you were a child: would you look at yourself like something similar to a military robot? Would you want to have felt the adults around you thought it better to stay away from you? And what about the people in your life that you care about most? Can you imagine them when they were children, like you were? Would you think the same thing about them?

If you want to change your mind, you need to put yourself in situations where that opportunity arises without expecting that your belief is the default. If you can, ask teachers what their fondest memories are of teaching--what's the funniest thing they've heard, what's the kindest thing they've seen, what's surprised them most about kids? What have they learnt from kids (because you do learn--you learn all the time). Ask people who love children why they love children, or simply see if you can find discussions on forums where people share those stories. As I said, I've heard and seen kids do some awful things--but those are tiny compared to everything I've seen that is the opposite (boys giggling face to face on a hill, a tiny toddler waving at me on a bus, a child naming a slug that crept in through his window, a 9 year old boy trying to teach me morse code after having known me for 2 minutes despite how long it took me to understand). It might also help if you give yourself the opportunity to learn a little about child psychology--if people's experiences aren't enough for you, then maybe getting insights into how children's actual brains and minds work might. If you're curious, there's a documentary series from 2015 or so that follows 4, 5, and 6 years olds as they play and engage with each other here to try and understand what their world looks like.

Every adult you meet (and you and your friends will be included in this), regardless of maturity level, is a former child in some regard; and as such how they act, respond, and cope with the world around them is a throwback to whatever they still carry from their childhood, or from the things that impacted them most in life, and whether or not they were able to adequately deal with them (and some do deal with them, and some refuse, and some are just in circumstances that make it difficult to even begin with).

I think what people mean when they say adulthood is better than adolescence is that the world get bigger, wider, and more interesting as you get older. It becomes less insular and all the things that preoccupy you most when you're 17 or 15 or that feel like the end of the world become diminished because you have a larger frame of reference for that world that goes beyond your school / friends / immediate family etc. It doesn't mean adulthood is not without difficulty, but simply that you won't be 17 forever. And as such you won't be stuck with all the things you hate about yourself at 17 forever either.

I don't know if there are any specific things you can do, because freeing and fulfilling mean different things to different people. There are some experiences / realisations you can only have when you are out on your own, true--but I also think maturity or maturing events are not necessarily only external ones, though those have an impact too: they come from getting to know yourself, facing your insecurities and flaws and limitations with unfiltered honesty and learning to understand these and work through them and learning to do the same with other people, too. Those external experiences can only go so far if you don't have the tools to fully apply what you learn from them.

You're assuming that "protecting" children is the same as absolving them of responsibility and that's not what I said. All children are vulnerable, because all children are children; they don't come out of the womb with a perfectly working moral compass anymore than they come out of it waiting to hurt people--they're vulnerable because their understanding of the world is entirely at the mercy of what we, as adults, consistently tell them and show them. Children behaving cruelly aren't exempt from that--they learn that cruelty from somewhere, or someone. Your job, as the adult, is to make sure they understand that it's unacceptable so it will not happen again--but your job is also to ask why someone that young is behaving this way to begin with, so you can ensure they become better.

"Protecting" kids is not ignoring when they hurt or torment others, it's not refusing to teach them consequences or right from wrong, it's not "zero tolerance" policies in schools that treat a child being bullied and the child bullying them as equal instigators, and it's certainly not protecting them from recognizing, and atoning for, the pain they have caused someone else. You don't have to make peace with the now-adults who hurt you when you both were kids, but you cannot let the horrors of your own childhood impact how you treat or respond to the children living theirs around you right now, either.