Chapter 7
Conclusion: Children and Fictional Children
Treehorn noticed one day that he couldn’t reach the shelf in the closet where he usually hid his candy and bubble gum. Strange. He also realized that his clothes were too big for him. He seemed to be shrinking!
Neither Treehorn’s mother nor his father would take any notice of the situation. “Do sit up, Treehorn,” they scolded him at the dinner table.
“I am sitting up,” Treehorn protested; “this is as far up as I come.”
Treehorn’s mother explained that it was all right to pretend to be shrinking, as long as Treehorn didn’t do it at the dinner table.
“But I am shrinking,” Treehorn insisted.
“Nobody shrinks,” said Treehorn’s father, who spoke with great authority.
Eventually Treehorn’s parents did take in the fact that Treehorn was really shrinking. But, of course, they didn’t know what to do. Neither did the schoolbus driver, or Treehorn’s teacher.
When Treehorn told the school principal that he was shrinking, the principal said that he was very sorry. “You were right to come here,” he added; “that’s what I’m here for, to guide, not to punish, but to guide.” Still, he had no guidance for Treehorn.
Home again, Treehorn retreated to his room, where he found a game to play. It was called “The Big Game – For Kids to Grown On.” Treehorn played the game. As he played, he grew – except that when he reached the size he used to be, he stopped playing the game.
* * *
The most obvious fact about children is that they are small. A child may be too short to reach the door knocker, or to get a drink from the drinking fountain. Children who live in apartment buildings with elevators may measure their grown by seeing how many buttons they can reach without having to be lifted up by mummy or daddy.
Although tables and chairs at school may be the right size for children in kindergarten or second grade, for most of the furniture of the world children are misfits. They are the naturally handicapped. When we call children “the little people,” we may express affection, but we also express condescension.
Size is important in our culture, but especially height. A few people are, of course, too tall. Except among basketball players, excessive height is also a handicap. But to be a little taller than one’s peer group, especially among boys, is a good thing.
A second fact about children – not quite as obvious as the first, but equally important – is that they are essentially in transition. In particular, they are growing. True, they grow at different rates. One seventh-grader may be as tall as the teacher, or even taller, whereas another could still pass as a fifth-grader. But all of them, even the tall ones, are in transition.
Of course all of us are really in transition. We’re in high school preparing for college. Or we’re in college preparing for “the real world,” or for graduate or professional school. Or we’re single preparing for marriage, or married preparing for children. And all along there is the advancement to senior status, the “golden years,” and then death.
Of course the “normal” transition through life’s stages is often cut short, dramatically these days with school killings, with AIDS, and with violence on our city streets. Still, the pattern of a standard progression through life, with adulthood up to retirement as the normative plateau against toward which childhood is taken to aim, is built into our ways of thinking about what it is to be a human person.
When Treehorn deviates from the expected progression toward becoming a standard, fully real, adult human person, his parents are flummoxed. When Treehorn deviates from the norm by actually shrinking, we sense immediately that this is either comedy or tragedy. Florence Parry Heide’s whimsical writing style, in her classic tale, The Shrinking of Treehorn (New York: Dell, 1971) tips us off that this is comedy. And Edward Gorey’s mock antique drawings remove any lingering doubt.
Yet the joke is on us, especially on those of us parents, teachers, and counselors who undertake to guide and nurture children’s growth. For we, may of us, have such unyielding preconceptions as to how children should be developing that we fail to notice what is happening in and to the real children around us.
One thing that has made this story a favorite among children, I strongly suspect, is the way it mocks adult pretence and concern with what others will thing. When Treehorn’s mother finally sees that her son is shrinking, she asks her husband, “What will people say?”
“Why, they’ll say that he is getting smaller,” replies the father, in what is surely his best line. But just when the father has won a few points with enlightened readers, he glows it all by adding, “I wonder if he’s doing it on purpose, just to be different.” How we adults like to be in control, even if only by analyzing our own kids.
The shrinking of Treehorn is a metaphor for deviance in child development. As parents and teachers we all want our children to develop “normally,” perhaps also to excel, but not so as to become “oddballs,” and certainly not to retrogress. Most of us adults assume that our children should develop in roughly the ways that we did, or think we did. But that may well not happen, either because they as individuals are too different from us, or because the society in which they are growing up is too different from the one we grew up in.
As I have tried to indicate in this book, doing philosophy with children, perhaps in response to a children’s story, may be liberating for the child, for the parent or teacher, and for the relationship between adult and child. One way it may be liberating for the adult stems from the need, in philosophical dialogue, for each party to listen carefully to with the other party says and reflect on it. If my child seems very different from what I think I was at that age, getting my child’s perspective on the matter may help me to understand better my child, myself, and the world we both inhabit.
* * *
Although The Shrinking of Treehorn may not be a given adult’s favorite book, anyone with a any sense of humor at all can be charmed by both the mock seriousness of both the words and the drawings. But some children’s stories annoy and even upset parents and teachers. Of course, some stories that adults find annoying or upsetting really have no redeeming qualities. But sometimes adults need to learn that a book they dislike is liked by children for an important reason.
Some years ago I was conducting a workshop on philosophy and children’s literature at the University of Calgary, in Canada. One of the participants, a librarian, asked me if I knew the story, Not Now, Bernard, by David McKee (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986). I didn’t, so she promised to get me a copy. I became intrigued when this woman told me that, although some parents of children in her school were upset by the story, it was, among the children in the school, the most popular book in the library. There was always a waiting list, she said, of children waiting to take the book out.
When I read Not Now, Bernard I could see immediately why some parents would be made upset by it. It took a little longer, but not much longer, to figure out why children might like this story. There is, I think, a very good reason for them to like it.