Children as mirrors of social interaction
Social interaction is supposed to be a science. That is why, I guess, we have sociologists. The thing is, experience in social interaction often smoothes our conduct. While you still have leaders and followers, buffoons and loners, back stabbers and martyrs, their natures are not immediately apparent, certainly not through casual social intercourse.
That is absolutely different with children. A person’s role and personality stands out in bas-relief when one is a child. At that stage of development we have not picked up the little ruses that allow us to fool those around us (including ourselves). We have not reworked and remodeled ourselves to fit whatever notion of self has been imposed on us.
I’d spent this weekend in an Inn in Vermont. Having managed to hurt both left and right knees at different stages of my life (lotus position, horseback ride) I don’t really ski. I mostly sit at the Inn library and read. A gaggle of kids assembled by the game table. After a while a certain pattern emerged. This tiny six year old kid was beating all the other kids (ages of about 9 to 12) in chess. Here was a perfect situation where everyone’s personality was emerging rather vividly. The natural course of events was breaking down – the superiority of older, bigger kids was being undermined. At that age, status is directly tied to age (lasts roughly through the end of high school). And a first grader was whooping 4th and 5th graders. So the older kids had to show deference to someone they would usually be much more condescending towards. The younger kid did not carry his fame well. “The urine went to his head” as we are wont to say in Russian. He became way too chummy with the older kids, being actually somewhat condescending to them – something, which they had to bear.
What was most fascinating to see was how the older kids dealt with the situation amongst themselves. The young kid was half their age and literally half their size. One kid was spewing admiration, looking at the chess master as some sort of a wunderkind that can be admired but not regarded as a member of his species; he would repeatedly tell everyone how the little kid “whooped everyone’s ass.” The older kids would try to taunt the chess winner, but he often did not get their taunting – their vocabulary and _expression was over his head – he was too young to understand what they were getting at, although he could still beat them up in chess. It was a strange social situation where the older kids had to try to treat the younger kid as an equal, but found it impossible – they literally could not speak the same language, having very different life experiences at that point of their respective lives.
This went on for a while. Then the kids left and I continued reading. One of the older kids returned. I saw that he was bored, so I got up to see if I could find a book he might find interesting. Before I had a chance to offer him the book (London’s “Sea Wolf,” he asked me for a game of chess. I have not played the game longer than the kid has been alive. I beat him with more difficulty I care to contemplate. We chatted about school and I showed him how to solve algebraic equations with two variables.
5:20:28 AM 
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