The Rules We Follow

Kids take a long time to learn what is ok and not ok to do. Thinking about it, there are a lot of social rules that have to be learned. There’s what you’re supposed to say in different situations, do around different people, or how to be. Some of the rules are for children’s safety, such as don’t play in the street and don’t eat food off the floor, while others are to fit into general society, like don’t sit down next to someone on an empty bus and don’t swear in public.

An old roommate I had had a daughter who lived in the house with us. At the time my friends and I rented the house, she had just had her third birthday. My time living with her taught me a lot about dealing with little kids. She was a really rough-and-tumble little girl who like playing out in the backyard and bouncing around the living room, and she also had a real fondness for skirts. A social rule that she still hadn’t learned by the time I moved out a year later was that other people don’t want to see your underwear (at least, not any normal person, certainly no one in our house). She liked to lay on her back and kick her legs around, and all of us adults in the house told her every time that it wasn’t appropriate, but she really liked kicking her legs in the air. She certainly had no understanding of why this was not allowed, because she had no notion of what the adults around her thought of the situation, such as concerns of if a predator saw her doing this at the park. She just thought it was fun, while we were concerned for her safety out in the world.

Little kids don’t seem to have much concern for what adults place sexual meaning to. A lot of kids around two years old go through a naked phase. It isn’t to attract a mate, they have no idea about those things yet, it’s just another way to be. In other cultures without strong beliefs about the personal nature of one’s own nudity allow children to continue this, sometimes because it simply is not an issue, others because of basic economic and resource reasons. These children do not learn the same lesson of Western children to clothe themselves, but I’m sure that there are other lessons that they are taught that are not needed for urban, American children to adhere to.

It takes a long time to learn all the rules you need to follow to fit in normally. Just think about if you went to China, France, or Saudi Arabia. All the things that we think of as foreign are things that they have learned, and are all similar to the kinds of things that we leaned as children, in order to fit in and follow the rules.