Ferry line the other day featured a tantrum child and it got me thinking about the sort of classic caricature of the whiny "are we theeeeere yet?" and it's variants - and about how little control kids have, generally, over where they are or where they go. How long they stay, how they get there. Slim to none? Maybe intervals of time when they have freedom of movement and choice of activity within a predefined scope. But for the most part you're told where you'll be - not necessarily even with warning - and then you have to go. Non stop, day in and day out. At which point, yeah, maybe it is the final straw if you're told you'll be in that traveling limbo longer than expected. Or just longer than you can stand.
It was interesting thinking about this, because I never conceptualized it that way as a child. I didn't think I was under an unreasonable pressure of having my location controlled by others, because it didn't ever really occur to me to see the shape of that pattern as something that Could be different.
I did get lost, though. Or - by my memory I only got lost once, when I was 5, and it was very scary. My mom remembers... many more incidents. But in those cases I knew where I was, and I'd got there on purpose, and I came back on my own time. Most of them, I didn't even know anyone thought I was lost. I'd just gone somewhere. And not told anyone.
At least a couple times I knew very strongly that I needed to be somewhere and not have anyone know where. I needed to get away from being seen, being known, being circumscribed. I needed no one to be able to come get me. Those times were mostly when I was older, when I'd started to go more places on my own power - city bus to school and so on - and when that sense of being pinned in place closed in I knew the shape of what I was escaping. But when I was younger it was just something I Did. I didn't know it as a need or as a reaction to anything in particular. It was just something that was important to me to sometimes do.
And I think it's an interesting window into misbehavior in kids. Problem behavior, things parents tear their hair about, things kids at some point just.... grow out of, apparently. How much is the backlash of a stress applied elsewhere? Some constraint, which they don't have the perspective to understand as unbearable or even unreasonable, which is pressurized and transmuted into some reaction through some other pressure-release valve. I mean, that's not at all a new analysis, that kids 'act out' in response to pressure. But I guess I don't often see it applied all the way back to "normal" levels of kids whining and yelling and getting into trouble, in response to the "normal" levels of constraint kids are under.
Which is so much, actually, once you're looking for it. But strangely I think a lot of people go through this double-forgetting, while they simultaneously gain more agency in their own lives and more perspective about the world and about agency as a concept. They don't complete the analysis of the situation they used to be in, with the new tools. They don't track the shape of the behaviors they grew out of, and what they felt like from the inside versus what they were named by adults, and how and when exactly those feelings and those behaviors slipped away.
And then they grow up into adults who put kids through the exact same thing.
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