As adults we have the collective habit of sanitizing our childhood experiences. Our childhood often take the form of a magical fairy land where we were innocent and cared for and had no real problems. But is this actually the reality? When we are children our problems were just as real to us as our adult problems are to us now. The problem is our nostalgia and yearning for simplicity we have relegated our childhoods as the sole receptacles of light and love in our lives. Thus we perpetuate our own unhappiness as strive endlessly and fruitlessly for the real and imagined ease of childhood.

When children fear monsters under their beds, it is cute to us as adults. We with our fully formed frontal lobes know better. Tut tut we say to the afflicted child. We think oh to be young and foolish. Forgetting that we were once young and foolish ourselves and forgetting that to other developed beings we are look just as foolish. We think children are so silly for their fears of monsters and ghouls for those are imagined things. They are illusions. We forget the fact that our adult fears are just as illusionary.

As a six year old my older cousins let me watch Lord of the Ring with them. The creature Gollum terrified beyond words. I could imagine nothing more evil and hideous than him. So naturally, Gollum is who occupied all the darkest shadows in my room waiting so he could drag me off.

There is something inherent to being human that makes us subject to this fear of illusions.

The idealization of childhood comes in the form of the over-appropriation of 'cuteness' to children and their issues. When the 2 year old you are babysitting gets angry because their sippy cup is blue and not red like they wanted we tend to think of this as kind of adorable; and in some ways it is. Children are precious little beings.

We think of childhood as only a time of beauty and wonder--where our 'real adult' problems did not plague us. We tend to idealize our childselves and our childhoods as result. We forget that as children our fears of monsters and ghouls were as real to us then as our adult fears of taxation and mortgages are to us now.

If we want children to grow up to be their own individuals we must not sever their connection to the world and humanity as whole. Idealization does just that.

My own experience with this phenomena was in my own childhood in which I was the prototypical golden child of my family. I was the one between my sister and I who the tremendously heavy burden of perfection and glory were placed. It was my job to farm self-esteem for my parents by being exceptional.

All Good or All Bad

The flip side of idealization is devaluation in which the person, place or thing is suddenly thought of as completely bad with nothing else mixed in. As the symbol of the yin and yang teaches us succinctly, nothing is ever all one thing. All evil has the seed of good within it and all good as the seed of evil within it.

As is one of the laws of nature pendulum always swings back to balance out the extremes. 

I was either idealized to the point of superhero-saintlike-awesomeness or devalued into evil-goblin-meanness. I was either a super genius or a super idiot. I worked very hard to always be the former, but it felt like rejection was always just around the corner. But rejection was always cold disappointing look from my mother away. Such a thing could happen at any instance, seemingly at random. Thus I had to be on guard at all times. There was no space for me to be as I truly was, messy, imperfect, sometimes smart, sometimes sweet sometimes impertinent. 

The truth is children are not angels. Anyone who has worked with children, babysat, or birthed children themselves can tell you this. Childhood is not this special magical period of time where everything was easy breezy beautiful.  

Children who are idealized/devalued are not seen truly for who they are. They are shown that they are grey area not the black or the white.