The Good Child

 

“Good children do their homework on time; their writing is neat; they keep their bedroom tidy; they are often a little shy; they want to help their parents; they use their brakes while cycling down a hill.” [The School of Life: An Emotional Education by Alain de Botton et al]

The world wants good children. Moulding good children is apparently the only purpose of the very existence of parents and schools. This is one of the gravest injustices done to children.

The excessive need for compliance shown by the good child, the eagerness to please others, and the unquenchable thirst for appreciation are signs of a subdued existence. The good child is a bud that won’t bloom. It is a nestling that won’t fly, at least not far enough. The good child is a bland breeze that carries no tang.

The good child chooses such compliance maybe out of love for a depressed parent who makes it clear that she couldn’t cope with more problems. The good child may be trying to soothe a violent parent. The good child is being good for somebody else. The good child is being somebody else.

The good child is often a sponge that absorbs a terrible lot of unpleasantness on behalf of parents or others who matter. The goodness is the silence of the cemetery.

The good child is a storehouse of secrets and mysteries. When he grows up he may say lovely things, things that mesmerise huge audiences. His words may have the power to sway the trees and move the mountains. But there will lie a whole raging ocean deep within his being, an ocean whose rage will be visible to none, until one day the buried thoughts and feelings will erupt in God knows what forms.

The rage may not explode in some. They will continue to live like automatons programmed by somebody, doing things mechanically. Even the basic human urge for sex will hesitate to approach them. Purity is one of the integral elements that make up the good child. Sex has its natural and necessary extremes that lie at the other end of the spectrum of goodness, the wrong end. So the good children will disavow their desires and detach themselves from their bodies. Or perhaps they will “give in to their longings in a furtive, addictive, disproportionate or destructive way that leaves them feeling disgusted and distinctly frightened.” [Alain de Botton et al]

The good children will grow up physically and go to work like others. They will face more problems at work than others. As a child, you could manage to be good by following the rules, not making trouble, and avoiding provocation of any sort. It is impossible to go on doing that in the adult world. The adult world is a world of Brownian movement. Every moment you are knocked by somebody or the other. And usually knocked the wrong way.

“Almost everything interesting, worth doing or important will meet with a degree of opposition,” as the authors cited above put it. Even the best plan of yours will be subverted by somebody in your office. (Don’t be surprised if that ‘somebody’ turns out to be your best friend.) Every noble ambition has to face and overcome disaster and ignominy. The good ‘child’ can’t endure all that. So he will succumb to a mediocre existence. He will try his best to keep other people pleased so that his mediocrity does not become another problem to himself.

Come on, you don’t have to be so good.

Come to terms with imps and demons that haunt your psychological innards. Your parents or other people have put them there. They were helpless too. They had their own inner monsters to deal with. Isn’t life largely about dealing with demons and monsters – some within us and others out there?

Yes, maturity is nothing short of fixing up a frank and bold relationship with your inner darkness.

You don’t have to be so good. You have every right to live your life happily without having to sprinkle rose petals on the paths of the others. What makes you happy may not please the others. Never mind. You be happy. Without having to steal the air from their inflated balloons, of course.

Do you want a genuinely good life for yourself? You deserve it. But it is your choice. If you really want that, you may have to be bad sometimes. Be fruitfully and bravely bad. No great inventor or philosopher was a physically grown ‘good child’. 

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Read the previous parts of this series below:

A: Absurdity

B: Bandwagon Effect

C: Chiquitita’s Sorrows

D: Delusions

E: Ego Integrity

F: Fictional Finalism

Tomorrow: Humanism