“Childish Adult”
I called you childish, was I wrong? No
Are you childish? Yes you are
Is it a bad thing to be childish? No
In fact, it’s a very special and comfortably normal thing to be childish for any adult.
When I called you childish I didn’t really mean to infantilize you it’s just that when something bothers a child we understand that little children have very limited abilities to diagnose and communicate what’s really their problem but for an adult, I expect you to act like an adult and provide me analogy over your issue which you didn’t and because of which I called you childish.
At times everyone is childish we just don’t understand this phenomenon of an adult being childish.
Let me explain,
There was a kid I noticed today was screaming at the person who was looking after him, the same kid even pushed the bowl of chocos fetched for him but the person (his mother) wasn’t mad about all this in fact she wasn’t even bothered and she continued to persuade the kid to have his chocos.
His mother didn’t take all that personally she wasn’t agitated by his behavior she wasn’t hurt by his gesture because we seldom associate such a kid’s behavior to be intentionally mean or have any negative motive. We ourselves come up with a plethora of benevolent interpretations for such acts none of which lead us to panic or get terribly agitated we might think that they are tired, they need sleep, we might look for some external stimuli disturbing them or clear it if something is poking them.
The reverse tends to happen in general for adults we think that every such unfair and shocking screaming or pushing away is deliberate to upset us and cause us some distress.
If only I would have applied this infant interpretation in your case I would have come up with reasons like maybe you couldn’t anecdote because something else was going on in your mind, you couldn’t absorb my analogy because you already had a bad day.
It’s nice that we have learned to be so kind to children but it would be even nicer if we could be a little more generous towards the childish part of one another.
This is known as Partner-As-Child Theory which urges us to recognise, that part of our psyche will always remain the way they were at the early stages of our life so instead of labelling someone’s childish attitudes when they fail to act like the ideal grown-up we should recognise this as a normal, inevitable feature of all adult existence.
From now on instead of arguing about something annoying you said to me I would rather reassure you and show you that it’s okay, you’re okay instead of hitting back with an equally annoying comment. And the day I act childish I want you to play a parent-like role to correctly guess what is it that really bothering me like our parents did when we were baby and truly childish.
