The Non-Cuteness of Childhood

Adam Levin had specific memories of his childhood and wrote them into this short story titled 'Kid Positive', published in The New Yorker's issue of March 2, 2020. The writer grew up in the 1980s, which was the same era I grew up in, so I read it to see if I could understand his childhood angst and reference.

My childhood is mainly carefree, I'd say. But growing up in the family I did, I learnt about the ways the world faster than most. The adults who protected me taught me well. Before I turned twelve, alongside integrity and holding on the my fundamental values and beliefs, I also learnt deceit, lies and manipulative gestures. I understood what's an act and what's a game. That's not to say I didn't enjoy my childhood. It was a privileged existence and I loved it. I simply learnt how to stand aside from all that, protect my ass and do my own shit. I'm glad that I'm absolved of responsibilities to create a happy and carefree childhood for any sprog.

The writer remembered his singing in an impromptu concert for the adults at a dinner, being punished, a discussion about whether puppets were real, conversations with classmates and spats during recess time between schoolboys. All fairly typical. Except they didn't mention about happiness or thrill. They were more... real and talk about what pain and reality meant to a young boy.

There were animals and pets — eleven baby rabbits in the garden, turtles, throwing the cat andsuch. They got a cute Pomeranian as the family dog in 1983, and ended up returning the dog to the breeder because it refused to be house-trained, despite the efforts of the incompetent dog behaviorist. He also talked about meeting his younger twin sisters Paula and Rachel when they were born in 1980. In an earlier interview, Adam Levin explained his inspiration and push for writing this story,

All of which is to say that I suspect I wasn’t, while I wrote “Kid Positive,” thinking all too directly about the duplicity or humiliation that characterizes being a child so much as I—having just come off a years-long stretch of thinking about cuteness for hours a day—was considering cuteness as a set of behaviors in which children (often strategically) engage, the various ways in which such behaviors affect adults as well as other children who are subject to them, and the distinctions we make between being cute and acting cute. None of which is to say that I don’t appreciate that children are frequently sweet. (Certain children, at least.) I think I probably appreciate the sweetness of children as much as the next guy. I can’t, however, recall a time that I’ve enjoyed hearing about a child’s sweetness, let alone have I ever, after witnessing a child’s sweetness, thought that strangers might enjoy reading about it.

Then it was 2015. The final little vignette was themed 'Splash Pad, 2015'. The writer was married; he was with his wife returning home, from Paris to Chicago. They made a stop in Brooklyn to visit their good friends, a couple with two kids. I was wondering where this was going. When I read the final paragraphs, I laughed.

Their pleasure was contagious. I was feeling kid positive. So kid positive that, when I told our friends how kid positive I felt, I got a little expansive, almost lyrical. I said that these kids in the splash pad were better than we had been, that the way these kids were playing in the splash pad was better than the ways in which we would have played in the splash pad if we’d had a splash pad when we were kids, and it would leave them, I suspected, with the kinds of lasting sensory impressions that form the kinds of joyful memories that loving parents hope their children will carry always, thereby fostering deep within them greater capacities for kindness and decency than the people of our generation possessed, and that, down the line, these greater capacities for kindness and decency would grant these kids the strength they’d need to neutralize and overcome what would otherwise be our generation’s malforming influence and, eventually, turn the whole country, perhaps even the whole world, into a safer and friendlier place. Or so it seemed to me, I said. 

“Are you making fun of us, Levin?” our friends said. 

“You making fun of our children?” they said. 

“I don’t think so,” I said, and that was true at the time.