Children are People

I've been thinking about the way we talk to our children. We speak to them as if their feelings don't matter, like they aren't actual people. I don't mean that we go out of our way to be cruel as most parents wouldn't dream of doing so. It's more the casual indignities that we so often visit upon them unthinkingly that we wouldn't dream of doing to another adult. 

An example is the way we'll casually mention a need to a child for them to bathe in front of others. Who among us think that is appropriate or sensitive behavior towards another adult?  Yet it's something we do to children frequently. We act as if by dint of not having reached adulthood somehow their feelings are armored when in fact the opposite is most often true. They are sensitive beyond what you and I are so eager to please and crushed at being found wanting. What is merely mildly embarrassing to us as adults can be devastatingly humiliating  to a kid who who yet to acquire perspective.

We seek to teach our children to move through the world with compassion and empathy but we don't model that with them. When dealing with their fragile egos and delicate emotions we steamroll over them assuring ourselves and each other that it's dramatics and teen/tween angst causing them to behave in such overwrought ways. What we don't stop to examine is how we as their parents are contributing. How our lack of treating them as people worthy of basic considerations like privacy and discretion and kindness translates into them not seeing others as worth those things.