if you give a mouse a cookie. kids are smart. i don't know if they always were. precocious kids are definitely the norm now. i look around at my little cousins, aged five through nine, and i'm amazed at what they can retain and understand. there's no bullshitting these kids. were we that smart? were we that aware? i know i wasn't. at nine, we were in what? fourth grade? what the hell did i know in fourth grade?



my little cousin brian is reading starcraft manuals and installing video games and talking to me about RAM and disk size. he's telling me the best strategies to use when defending against a zerg rush and all this stuff that seems so beyond this little three foot child. then again, i'm brought back to reality when i see the remains of his spaghetti dinner on his face and on his lap. do chinese boys get bowl cuts just so they can look cute and innocent? because they aren't. they know way too much. brian goes into his little indian teepee tent to read or sulk. the little plastic indian teepee tent that used to belong to me. as in, i still feel like it's mine. we never outgrow childhood possessions, we just want them less badly.



anyway. all children nowadays know way too much. they get too much tv or internet or gay sesame street characters or something. i remember when rated R movies really meant you couldn't watch them until you were of the appropriate age. i'm wondering when i'll be asked about drugs and alchohol by my little cousins. that day is bound to come, later rather than sooner hopefully.



in taking this children's writing class, the hardest thing i've had to deal with initially is to fight the idea that writing for children is the same as writing simplistically. one article we read in class, about a children's author, states that the only thing she changes between her pieces for adults and pieces for children is the sentence structure. she pares down her sentences to bite sized pieces and lays complicated sophisticated structures aside. other than that, she uses the exact same techniques and the same vocabulary.



does the thought of nine year olds who can out-think, out-smart, out-dance, out-earn, out-cute you scare everybody? i think it does me. kids are really just little people. you can't just give them a piece of candy and expect them to go away. well, actually you can, but only on halloween. as a side note. my cousins are damn cute. if i could find a combined picture of them, you would die. literally.