Words have depth. One word can mean many different things in different contexts. How we may understand a word or phrase in our youth can be vastly different from how we understand that word latter. This isn’t anything new, you can go back in your mind to think of examples of this from your history.
Not long ago during the Trump era add campaign in the fall of 2020, with the mask laced pandemic protocol, we met two 9–10-year-old boys riding scooters around a parking lot that we were walking to. We went to one of the store fronts and they rode up to us and told us that it was closed. We started up a conversation with them. Unsure of where our loyalties were at, they seemed compelled to a certain degree to gush about an “old lady” who verbally berated them for not wearing their masks in the outside world in spite of the fact that nobody was around for miles. She told them to not get to close to her and they should be wearing masks. She also told them that they should be home and not outside… obviously she was a loon. We asked them what they thought about what she had told them. And with the limited verbal filters they possessed, and determining that we were not the enemy. They asked us if we voted for Trump in the previous election which seemed to be the ticket to be on “their right side”. We could hear a lot of parental wording spouting from their youthful mouths. Big adult concepts boiled down to what they could grasp at their ages. Kind of a definitive logic, you like this, so therefore you must be like that—in an all or nothing concept of sorts.
In essence the voting for Trump, the not liking of masks meant you were a friend, but if you were an “old person” who were at least 50 years old (as they described her) then you were not friendly and probably didn’t like Trump either. Masks and the fear of disease or the not fearing was the dividing line in their world. If you liked masks or agreed with it, then you were an idiot from their understanding of the situation and were not a friend. More than likely parroting what they heard and understood from their homes—or at least what they perceived to have understood. The take away from that conversation to us, was what parents say in the home is compressed, filtered, massaged and can be meaningful in many different ways therefore could be misinterpreted in many ways too.
One of our religious tenants is not to drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, it is called the Word of Wisdom—there is more to it than just the “don’t do this or that”, but the don’ts can be grasped easier than the dos at an earlier age. With that understanding I was talking with coworkers regarding some of their experiences in the past and that involving their kids with respect to the misunderstandings. As an example, one coworker told of a story that another couple recently stayed with them at their house- they were relatives —my coworker was not LDS and so he and his wife rose early and prepared coffee for the morning, as many do across the world. Well, the daughter of the visiting couple was stunned and started to bawl when she found them drinking coffee. She with unfiltered angst, said that uncle and aunt so-and-so are now going to hell and she was inconsolable. On one hand it’s funny and cute innocence but somewhere the little girl had heard a message what happens when people disobey rules and this was a rule in her world, I really doubt the parents taught her that anyone who drinks coffee is consigned to hell—but maybe in this incidence the daughter believed that all people who drink coffee are disobeying a rule and are rule breakers therefore the rule breakers go to hell—a pretty closed loop argument of logic in a tiny brain. It seems growing up you think that everyone else growing up has a similar way of being raised—that everyone does the same things—until you start to observe the differences. I remember this concept when having sleep overs, not everyone did the same things, they ate different things or things were missing from the daily routine that I might have been used too. I believe that everyone growing up seems to think that “this is the way”, and there is no other way. We all eventually find that everyone has different lives growing up and that there is not just “one way”. If you tried to explain that to a young person without the contrasting experiences of observation then the concept might be completely inconceivable—they have no other experience to gauge the difference by. It is just not understood, until they have more experience and live to see those in action. To be clear I don’t think there should be any direct pressure to get every 5 years a total data download of all humanity and the differences that are present over a lifetime—just to make sure they have it all that day. Youthful innocence should be enough of a concept to hold onto without having them being too grown up to soon—there will be plenty of time to be all grown up, innocence should be a precious commodity.
Another co worker then shared the story of his nephew telling his mom that he was concerned about his uncle (my coworker), that he had become a smoker. When he got on the phone with this nephew’s mom (his sister) he asked what was going on. Well, the story went that, my coworker had recently bought a wood smoking grill to cook and BBQ meat with… he had become a “smoker”, the only thing the kid heard was that Uncle Nathan was now a smoker (and the only smoking he knew about was associated with cigarettes) and that made him feel bad that his uncle was now a serious sinner. Words at his age and understanding maybe only meant one thing. As an example, the word “run” could be an activity to do, to run along the road, run could also be a place where salmon move along a stream or paint dripping… run can mean a lot of things—this is where the depth is found, in the discovery that words aren’t just single facets, but are multiple faceted like diamonds and therefore can have a richness to themselves.
Finally, when I was 5 or 6 or close to that age, we had some sheep in our pasture where we lived. One of the sheep was mine to take care of and the other was one of my sisters – My sheep was a male and had a black face and therefore, I named him “Blackman”. A description of his face color without malice or any sinister classification of people. It was simply a sheep with a black face. We also had a game that we played with our neighbors, called “tackle blackman” two end zones, where one guy had to tackle kids running from the safe zone to the other safe zone. We just used words to describe events or things—no political motivation, just simple. The game was also a mimic of events that actually occurred in the pasture. We had to run from safe zone or pasture to safe zone without getting charged or bucked by the ram Blackman…. He in essence was the kid in the middle. It was Blackman that we tried to run from—because he was a mean ram sheep. Just part of growing up with animals on an acreage. Never in our minds did we equate the name of my sheep called Blackman and our childish games to the suffering of the lives of the real slaves in the early American and World trading of humans for labor—nor should we have done; we were still innocent of the world and there was no need to get old all of a sudden. It would be inconceivable to expect an understanding of that concept.
Kids are funny in how and what they hear, and how they restate what they thought they heard. There is a lot of misunderstandings in what the intent of a situation can be. There is a lot of parental parroting which might or might not be intentional, only in that it’s called raising kids. There is no need to have the wisdom of Solomon realized in grade school, there will be plenty of time to be an adult later. We don’t need to hurry that process along because of expediency, and especially because of fear. As adults when we discovered some nugget… remember “how did you come by that little nugget of wisdom in the first place”. Usually through some hard-won experience. I believe that kids should and need to be taught and lead through the process of adulting, but innocence is a precious commodity too—The adults now seem to be in a hurry to make all kids aware of the atrocities of life in 1st grade. Why not just let them grown up as innocent as they can be. Let them discover the depth of words through their own lenses, and smile with them as they do; you might even learn a little of what you have been missing yourself.