The kids are alright.

Jun 05, 2018 16:20





Apparently this is a photo of a child demonstrating autistic-adjacent behaviour. She categorizes things, she puts things in in an aesthetic and logical order. This, truth be told, seems to me to be a completely natural endeavour which actually rings my happy bells. We all try to make sense of this world by whatever means available.

When I was a child I would crawl into Grandma's pantry and reorganize all the tinned food in the order that seemed to make the most sense.  What did I take away from doing that? I got a few moments of being in control of my environment. I got praise for a job well done from my Grandma. I got a sense of purpose that a six-year old rarely gets when navigating the grown-ups world.

I think that adults really need to stop to think a bit; to think about where they came from, and to think about what effect the labels they parse out has on kids. If I were to throw out an observation it would be that we adults are still trying to organize our own crayons and we really shouldn't be pushing our unresolved crap onto our next gen without taking a few moments of introspection first.

But then again I'm neither a parent nor a psychologist so I could be entirely off-base, in which case just enjoy the photo.
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