THE ART OF OBSERVING

In 2021, I grew fascinated with the idea of childhood and how childhood has been viewed throughout history. It came from reading a college textbook about children’s and young adult literature. In the first chapter, a set of questions were posed for students to consider as they worked through the entire book. I got stuck on one of them and have basically been obsessed about it ever since.

Do children themselves have any influence, agency, or voice in how they are perceived, or are they wholly subject to what adults imagine them to be?

What a question, right? It’s led me into such a rich research process, both seeking to answer this question in my professional work (children’s and young adult literature is my day job) and my personal work (I’m currently working on a couple of children’s lit and young adult projects), and it’s even made me think a lot about my own childhood.

For one thing, we all have things about our childhoods that we did not like. Fair. But I hadn’t really pondered how I would have preferred those events to go. I would not have traded living in Oregon, for starters. Even when it felt like any dream I had could never come true because of where I lived. For instance, at 14, my longtime piano teacher began to mention to me the possibility of attending college based on my piano skills.

“Julliard,” she said, “they have rooms of used baby grands that people donate, and you can practice in one of those rooms for hours if you want to.”

Julliard was located in New York City, which for all intents and purposes in my head, was another planet. This was 1988. I grew up in the backwoods of Oregon (haha, I’m joking, but we did live in the woods, far from the big city of Portland, and Portland is not big. Not like New York City).

There are just not as many people in Oregon. And as a kid, you heard stories about New York City, not all of them great. Plus, a college like Julliard cost money and I had zero ideas about how I would even pay for any of this. Like zero ideas. I was Generation X and we were raised differently, just because of who our parents were and also the fact that the world in which I lived was completely analog.

And I was not a super dedicated student. I was a daydreamer and had to repeat Algebra twice in middle school. I would frequently zone out during a class that didn’t feel interesting and think about something else. I was also slightly boy crazy. I think journalism class was my favorite, but I was so reserved that asking people questions for a story felt out of my league. I also loved jazz choir, where I was the pianist (happiest moments were jamming with the drummer and bass guitarist before choir class began), but to attempt to become a concert pianist? My dad’s stepsister was a concert pianist, but I barely knew her. And I was so young. I think someone suggested I reach out to her and ask questions, but I didn’t.

Because it was a comfortable life. To take a grand leap to attend college in New York would have been such a massive shift in my worldview and would have required I leave the safety of the world into which I had been born.

Fast forward thirty years and in 2018, I was in New York on a business trip just having finished lunch with an editor at Disney. I sat down at an outdoor space across the street from Juilliard on a fall September day and ate a brownie I bought from a coffee and tea kiosk and thought about what might have been. It was surreal. The honking of horns from taxis as the traffic flew past, the guy who dropped a twenty-dollar bill after buying his coffee, and his gratefulness when I picked it up and handed it back to him. I thought about if I had been 18 and living in New York and practicing the piano for hours at a time on one of those used baby grands in those practice rooms. I thought of what might have been.

Generation X had very big dreams, but the world hadn’t shifted in time for me to even begin to figure out how to get to Juilliard and New York City. I’m intensely proud of my Generation X friends who are parents and raising Generation Z, who see life so differently and are able to imagine a future so much bigger than I ever could at their age. I love this. It makes me so happy. Generation Z is going to do amazing things. Millennials are also rethinking things and raising a generation that’s going to do things differently.

So, back to my question:

Do children themselves have any influence, agency, or voice in how they are perceived, or are they wholly subject to what adults imagine them to be?

I had a little bit of influence, agency, or voice, at least I think. Others may disagree. But I think I should have had so much more. That’s what I think could have been different. My life has worked out great for me. I work at a job I love, I still get to live in the Pacific Northwest, my work takes me to New York City a lot, and I don’t hang on to that much regret.

As I work on a YA writing project and remember back to being 16, I’m so very aware of how far I’ve come, how much I’ve learned, and how bright my future is.

I will keep you posted on how the writing is going.