Delphic Maxim 143: As a child be well-behaved

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.

143. As a child be well-behaved

I was having a conversation the other day, I can’t remember with whom, about how much I look back at the times I misbehaved or resisted the wisdom of adults when I was a child and wish that I had been better behaved. This isn’t because I wished to be an obedient child, or that I wasn’t particularly well-behaved anyway, but because when you’re young it’s really difficult to understand the wisdom and advice of adults. And it’s very unlikely that a child — or an adult for that matter — would be reading this maxim anyway, so I suppose reflection is the best way to approach this one.

One of the reasons that we can look back and see the benefits of being well-behaved is that we understand as adults the value and power of discipline. That’s not intended in the punitive sense, mind you, I mean in the sense that habits and regular practice (like writing for 15 minutes every morning) pay off in the long term. A little bit of regular investment pays off in the long term (life’s compound interest, I have mentioned previously). That goes for a whole suite of avenues in life: exercise, reading, writing, learning a language, practicing an instrument. Howard Gardner describes ‘five minds for the future’, and one of those is the disciplined mind. It’s a word that carries double meaning: disciplined as in well-practiced and well-behaved, and also disciplined in the sense that it is familiar with a discipline of knowledge, deeply.

All of this might seem a little far removed from the idea of childhood, but I think there’s got to be a sense of continuity in the person — our sense of discipline, our investment in self, starts from a very young age. There are a whole range of different constructions of childhood — I used to have this conversation with students when I taught at the University of Newcastle. Are children just young adults, waiting to get older? Are they qualitatively different somehow? At what point does childhood end? Why?

I think it’s really easy, actually, to draw a line from who we are as adults to who we were as children. We evolve morally and intellectually, but we’re products of that development — it’s almost like our child-selves are the parents of our adult characters. It’s one of the reasons that we know early childhood education is such a potent and important investment for later in life. So a well-behaved child, or at least a child with an eye on the future, can grow up with a head start — some of that powerful compound interest.

One of my favourite shows of all time — Stargate SG-1 — features an alien race called the Nox. They seem primitive, childlike, and the human space-faring team SG-1 feels the need to protect them from their enemy. What they don’t realise is that the Nox are in fact an ancient race, with advanced (though pacifist) technology. As SG-1 disobeys the Nox’s request not to interfere, and accidentally saves some lives, the leader of a small group of Nox says to Colonel O’Neill: “the very young do not always do as they’re told”. It’s a gentle riposte, half in gratitude, half as a way to teach.

The very young may not always do as they’re told, and I suppose if you were to take this maxim as an absolute (a law, even, I’ve been engaging lately with Kant’s distinction between maxim and law) that might be a bad thing. But sometimes good behaviour doesn’t always equate to compliance. I’d rather see children develop their moral sense, even if that means taking a degree of independence and intelligence that seems far beyond their years.