On Growing

On Growing

To My Daughter. You don’t have any reason to be afraid, you’re already asking all the right questions decades before I ever did. Your future is bright, embrace that and don’t let go. Every time we talk about life, my mind expands a little more into the future. All I can see for you, is dreams coming true. Reach for the stars.

To My Son. My literal mirror. “My favorite son,” as I call him. “I’m your only son,” he tells me, not knowing this admission still makes me right. I asked him one day, how he wanted to be remembered. He wants to help people, like his dad. He’s just not sure how. Keep that door open, child. Never close your eyes to the possibilities of the future, and your reality will only be as crazy as your most creative dream.

I

What is the earliest memory you have?

Some people say they can remember the very day they entered the birth canal and approached the light. Are they telling the truth? It doesn’t matter. That’s between them, and well… themselves.¹

I can’t remember back that far, but I’ve spoken to many children who seem to remember before the day they were born. This is a phenomenon that has been reported many times throughout history. Past-life premonitions. Views of “the other side,” but looking backwards in time instead of forwards.

Where do we lose this perspective?

Wordsworth asked the same thing two hundred years ago, only he answered it like a man who still half-remembered the answer. He wrote that we arrive into this world trailing clouds of glory, that Heaven lies about us in our infancy. Then, slowly, the shades of the prison-house begin to close around the growing boy.² He didn’t think the child invented its wonder. He thought the child remembered it, and that growing up was mostly a long forgetting.

Developmental psychologists put the shift later and describe it differently: somewhere around seven or eight, a child’s reasoning reorganizes, and the rules of the shared world start to bind.³ After that, if you ask me, it’s all environmental. Well, not all. But mostly.

We afflict our children with the toxic realities we’ve built for ourselves. The way I see it, no child is born believing the world is cruel. That belief gets handed to them, one moment at a time.⁴ Each one is a Jay, in my language: something happens, the child feels it, and the child leans toward or away. Thousands of them, laid down like rings in a trunk, until the rings are who the child is.

Rousseau said it cleaner than I can: everything is good as it leaves the hands of its maker, and degenerates in the hands of man.⁵ The raw material of the soul is fine. It’s the handling that scratches it.

Jung went one layer deeper. He said nothing weighs on a child quite like the unlived life of the parent. The dreams we abandoned, the fear we never faced, the version of ourselves we quietly gave up on.⁶ Children inherit our debts before they ever learn the word for money.

So maybe the most honest thing a parent can do is keep living. Keep facing the things we’d rather hand down.

II

I spent a lot of my life taking pharmaceuticals for conditions I have since come to understand differently. Are these drugs important? Of course. They bridge the gap for a lot of adults, make one day viable as it approaches the next.

What I can tell you is what happened to me, and only that. They were not, in the end, the whole of what I needed; the work that finally held was done in therapy. That is one path through one life. How long anyone stays on a medication is a question that belongs between that person and whoever prescribed it, and the answer is different for everyone.⁷ This is not a claim of clinical success, more a personal one.

Before I stopped projecting and started healing, the medications and the mental hurdles were things I was passing on to my children. Parents seem to do this all the time. Kids grow up medicated before they’ve ever met the world as adults. In my opinion, that’s terrible.⁸

But look at what I see the science community doing right this moment.

Waking up.

Realizing there’s more to life than extending it, and in the process of understanding that, they’ve begun to unlock new methods of extending life. Funny how that works out, isn’t it?

We’re not meant to live forever, but maybe we’re meant to be, forever.

One day, we’re going to look back at this and wonder what the heck was wrong with us. Fighting all the time, over things like money and power. Not understanding that real power comes from within.

Life is beautiful, depending on how you look at it. Go beyond your five senses, and feel your life as you pass through time. Blake promised that if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is: infinite.⁹ A child doesn’t need them cleansed. They were never dirty yet.

Feels like drifting down a river you can’t control, but somehow an unknown force keeps you from bouncing off the sides.

Synchronicity.¹⁰

III

We need to stop training our children that the world is a terrible place. We pull back the curtain and show them who’s really pulling the strings, the illusion fades, and they become parts of the machine like we have been for so long.

From the day they join us, they perceive the world the way it was meant to be seen, no adulterants necessary. Adulterants. As I said in On Feeling, this is such a funny word to put in place of the sensation of maturity being superpositioned over the beautiful and innocent viewpoint of a child.¹¹

We force them to be adults. We never give them a choice. We tell them to exercise patience, but we’re not patient when they’re telling us about the things that make them happy. Then we pile our burdens on top: problems that were never theirs, which they’ll be left to work out. Let’s not offload our burdens onto them. Let’s put every bit of effort we’ve got into providing for them.

Just the other day, my son told me something that ended up turning into a full piece of prose. He’s one of my strongest muses.

I spent quite a long time being not so great of a father, only to come around and realize all the things I said above over the years. There is true beauty in being a parent. A love that can’t be explained. A love so strong that even my wife resonates with it, though neither of my children is hers; you wouldn’t be able to tell. Her love for them is inexplicably real.

It seems to me that of every image human beings have ever made (every war, every king, every god), the one we keep returning to, brush after brush, is a parent holding a child. Mary Cassatt spent decades on it and never ran out.¹² The Madonna and Child may be the most painted subject in the Western tradition. We are a species that, when handed paint, keeps painting the same thing: someone smaller, held by someone who won’t put them down.

Are we supposed to breed people or breed thought? Both. Fortunately some of us don’t want to breed people, and that’s okay too. But I only ask you this: don’t be bothered by the children of others. Not only does it take a household, it takes a village, a city, a country, and a planet in 2026. Nobody grows into a coherent person alone. We’re going to get this right one day.

IV

A parent is a bow, and the child the arrow. The archer bends the one so the other can fly swift and far.¹³ I think that’s the whole job. We’re the tension that gives them their distance.

Alison Gopnik splits parents into carpenters, who build a child to a plan, and gardeners, who tend the ground and let what comes up surprise them.¹⁴ I try to be both: teaching my children the skills they need to face the world, including how to sit, observe, and be kind.

If I get to do one thing before I go, it will be to ensure that they have everything they need to move forward. To grow. To live. To be, everything they want to be. Which is exactly everything they were meant to be.

There’s an old line that says a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they’ll never sit in.¹⁵ What we plant in our children is our Trace, the reach a life keeps after it’s done, and it carries the blight with the shade: the lives we lived, and the ones we didn’t. I’ve made my peace with the shade. I won’t see all of it.

I wouldn’t be the person I am, without their laughter. This is music too, and it resonated with me in a way that spilled these words onto the page. Someday somebody will ask them for their earliest memory. I hope there’s some of that laughter in it.

Avery and Jasmine, I love you with all my heart. I promise to always water the garden I’ve planted, if you promise to grow and never stop.

Even when the “great design” takes me away from your eyes, embrace this piece yourselves, and remember I’m right next to you, forever and a day.

Notes

1. Accounts of memory from before or around birth, and of past lives, are reported sincerely and often, but they are not established as memory in any sense a developmental psychologist would accept. Adults’ earliest memories usually date from about the age of three. In one large survey nearly four in ten respondents claimed a memory from age two or younger, and the authors judged such early memories likely to be fictional, assembled from fragments, photographs, and family stories. Akhtar et al., “Fictional First Memories.” Young children’s reports of a life before this one have been gathered at the University of Virginia since the 1960s; Tucker, Life before Life, describes the first forty years of that work and takes up the ordinary explanations for its cases, chief among them faulty memory on the part of informants. The essay reports what people say and leaves the verdict with them.

2. Wordsworth, “Ode.” The poem was printed in 1807 simply as “Ode”; the title “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” was first attached to it in 1815. The lines in question: “trailing clouds of glory do we come,” “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” and “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy.”

3. The nearest established claim is Piaget’s concrete operational stage, conventionally placed at roughly seven to eleven years, when reasoning about the world becomes systematic and rule-governed. Piaget and Inhelder, Psychology of the Child. Piaget’s stage ages are contested and treated today as approximate rather than fixed.

4. This is the framework’s claim about outlook, the story a child comes to tell about the world, and not a claim about mood disorders. Depression runs partly in families and has heritable components: a meta-analysis of twin studies put the heritability of major depression at about 37 percent, with experiences unique to each person accounting for much of the rest. Sullivan, Neale, and Kendler, “Genetic Epidemiology of Major Depression.” No parent of a child who struggles should read the line as blame.

5. Rousseau, Emile. The opening sentence, in Allan Bloom’s translation: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”

6. Jung, “Paracelsus”: “Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the human environment, and especially upon children, than the life which the parents have not lived.” The lecture dates from 1929.

7. The account above is one person’s experience and is not advice. How long anyone takes a medication is an individual clinical judgment, not a rule. Among adults, combined treatment often does better than either medication or therapy alone; for many of their conditions, medication on its own is effective. Stopping a psychiatric medication abruptly can cause withdrawal effects and relapse, and in some conditions carries serious risk; anyone weighing a change should weigh it with the person who prescribed it.

8. The view on medicating children is the author’s opinion, drawn from his own family. Decisions about any particular child’s care belong with that child’s family and clinicians. That opinion is not advice about any child’s treatment; no child’s medication should be stopped or changed except with the clinician who prescribed it.

9. Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.” The book is dated c. 1790–93.

10. Jung, “Synchronicity.” The word is his name for a coincidence between something felt inside and something that happens outside, which the one living it takes to be meaningful. Only that description is borrowed here. The unknown force belongs to the feeling the river sentence describes, and Jung’s own account of what joins the two, which he called acausal, is left with him.

11. Johnson, On Feeling, where the word stands for the sense of maturity laid over a child’s innocent view, and the subject is saved for another day under this essay’s title. Calling that a superposition borrows a word from physics as a figure, nothing more.

12. Mary Cassatt took up the mother-and-child subject around 1880 and, after 1900, worked almost entirely on it; many of the later pictures recall Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and Child. No one has counted the Western tradition’s subjects, and the paragraph’s larger claims are a reader’s impression of the galleries, offered as that.

13. Gibran, Prophet, “On Children”: “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth,” and the archer “bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.”

14. Gopnik, Gardener and the Carpenter. Her carpenter parent works from a blueprint toward a finished product; her gardener builds a protected, varied space and lets the child grow in directions no one planned.

15. The saying is often called an ancient Greek proverb, but no Greek source has been found. The image of planting for posterity is old (Cicero quotes a Latin poet on the farmer who plants trees for another generation); the “shade” form appears in English in the nineteenth century, and the “society grows great” wording circulates from the late twentieth. It is best treated as a modern proverb of uncertain origin.

Bibliography

Akhtar, Shazia, Lucy V. Justice, Catriona M. Morrison, and Martin A. Conway. “Fictional First Memories.” Psychological Science 29, no. 10 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618778831.

Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Introduction and commentary by Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford University Press, 1975.

Gibran, Kahlil. The Prophet. Alfred A. Knopf, 1923.

Gopnik, Alison. The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us about the Relationship between Parents and Children. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Feeling. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20729832.

Jung, C. G. “Paracelsus.” In The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, translated by R. F. C. Hull. Collected Works of C. G. Jung 15. Princeton University Press, 1966.

Jung, C. G. “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.” In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, translated by R. F. C. Hull. 2nd ed. Collected Works of C. G. Jung 8. Princeton University Press, 1969.

Piaget, Jean, and Bärbel Inhelder. The Psychology of the Child. Translated by Helen Weaver. Basic Books, 1969.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile, or On Education. Translated by Allan Bloom. Basic Books, 1979.

Sullivan, Patrick F., Michael C. Neale, and Kenneth S. Kendler. “Genetic Epidemiology of Major Depression: Review and Meta-analysis.” American Journal of Psychiatry 157, no. 10 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.157.10.1552.

Tucker, Jim B. Life before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives. St. Martin’s Press, 2005.

Wordsworth, William. “Ode.” In Poems, in Two Volumes. Vol. 2. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807.

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