Are Grownups Just Giant Kids?
Late this past summer, I was at the convenience store with my son, buying ice cream, when a Tesla Cybertruck pulled into the lot. Peter is six, and fascinated by Cybertrucks; hushed with awe, he walked closer, peering out from beneath his bike helmet. Angular and metallic, the Cybertruck loomed in its parking space like a meteor fallen to earth, or a Transformer waiting to transform. Peter said, “Whoa,” and the truck’s middle-aged driver, wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, rolled down his window and offered a thumbs-up in return. They grinned, like-minded across the decades.
Later that day, we biked to the marina near our house, to test our new remote-controlled boat. We’d burned out the motor on our old one, and I’d sprung for an upgraded model, which turned out to be two feet long, with a top speed of thirty miles an hour. As we installed the battery, configured the controller, and then descended the boat ramp, a small group of gray-haired men milled around on the dock. They stayed to watch as our boat zoomed to and fro. When Peter successfully raced it between two tightly spaced pilings, they applauded. “Sweet boat,” one of them said, as he walked to the berth where his big version was moored.
When packs of burly bearded dudes cruise by on their belchy motorcycles, it’s easy to see them as giant children enthralled by their toys. Grownups like kid stuff, and vice versa—having been both a kid and a grownup myself, I’ve always known this to be true. Still, it wasn’t until I had little kids of my own that I realized the true extent of the overlap. Clearly, there are preoccupations, challenges, and fascinations exclusive to adults. (I can’t imagine too many kids enjoying the movie “Marriage Story,” for example.) But, at least to my parental eye, the similarities can seem to outnumber the differences. Kids are on an endless quest for yummy treats, and adults line up for trendy pastries; kids like playing dress-up, and grownups spend hours in the dressing room trying on everything in the store. Kids can be nostalgic, recalling fondly in third grade the games they played in first. They can wish to be useful and suffer from feeling useless; like their elders, they can thirst simultaneously for belonging and solitude, dependence and independence. Children have dignity, which can be injured by the careless exercise of parental power, and they worry about death, sometimes in a more direct way than adults do.
