IN HIS 2005 COLLECTION of essays Going Sane, Adam Phillips makes a keen...

IN HIS 2005 COLLECTION of essays Going Sane, Adam Phillips makes a keen observation. "Babies may be sweet, babies may be beautiful, babies may be adored," he writes, "but they have all the characteristics that are identified as mad when they are found too brazenly in adults." He lists those characteristics: Babies are incontinent. They don't speak our language. They require constant monitoring to prevent self-harm. "They seem to live the excessively wishful lives," he notes, "of those who assume that they are the only person in the world." The same is true, Phillips goes on to argue, of young children, who want so much and possess so little self-control. "The modern child," he observes. "Too much desire; too little organization." Children are pashas of excess. If you've spent most of your adult life in the company of other adults-especially in the workplace, where social niceties are observed and rational discourse is generally the coin of the realm-it requires some adjusting to spend so much time in the company of people who feel more than think. {When I first read Phillips's observations about the parallels between children and madmen, it so happened that my son, three at the time, was screaming from his room, "I. Don't. Want. To. Wear. PANTS."} Yet children do not see themselves as excessive. "Children would be very surprised," Phillips writes, "to discover just how mad we think they are." The real danger, in his view, is that children can drive their parents crazy. The extravagance of children's wishes, behaviors, and energies all become a threat to their parents' well-ordered lives. "All the modern prescriptive childrearing literature," he concludes, "is about how not to drive someone {the child} mad and how not to be driven mad {by the child}." This insight helps clarify why parents so often feel powerless around their young children, even though they're putatively in charge. To a preschooler, all rumpus room calisthenics-whether it's bouncing from couch cushion to couch cushion, banging on tables, or heaving bowls of spaghetti onto the floor-feel normal. But to adults, the child looks as though he or she has suddenly slipped into one of Maurice Sendak's wolf suits. The grown-up response is to put a stop to the child's mischief, because that's the adult's job, and that's what civilized living is all about. Yet parents intuit, on some level, that children are meant to make messes, to be noisy, to test boundaries. "All parents at some time feel overwhelmed by their children; feel that their children ask more of them than they can provide," writes Phillips in another essay. "One of the most difficult things about being a parent is that you have to bear the fact that you have to frustrate your child.

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