The Vanity of Adulthood
One of the conceits of adulthood can be in seeing childhood's sole purpose as aimed
at adulthood, as though children’s lives were merely there to deliver an adult.
This is an impoverished view and if you look at childhood, or children, like this
you miss most of what matters.
Childhood is not a series of mini proto-people aimed solely at becoming his/her
eminence the adult. Childhood is not simply aimed at the future with the child
to be downloaded with the agenda for being an adult.
Childhood needs to be seen as a time of life that has it's own life stages and inherent needs so that children have a place in life as the unique beings that they are.
Frequently however children are seen as having nothing better to do with their lives
than foreshadow us, as though the past is only working to deliver our
particular present, our own time. This is the vanity of adulthood.
However children do not exist to support us, it is merely that we cannot be
adults without childhood having taken place, and until we remember this we as a species are stuck on a lower rung of our evolution.