Childhood defined by, and through, language

by Michael (Speech Pathologist)

I recently read a paper by Michael Gerard Plastow* and was lead to ponder the following question: if what is taken to constitute a child depends on historical and cultural contingencies, can language development provide us with a more solid, less transient foundation? A century ago, the terms “infant” and “child” were synonymous; whereas today there is a relatively-distinct, if arbitrarily-placed, distinction separating the two. Going back further than this, we see that the child virtually disappears from the art of the Middle Ages: replaced by figures resembling adult men and women in all but stature.

Part of the confusion about which cluster of ‘ages and stages’ belongs under the headings, ‘infant,’ ‘child,’ ‘adolescent,’ and ‘adult’ is surely owed to the less-than-perfect correlation between said ages and stages. Not everyone comes into possession of the same attainments, by the same ages, as everyone else, and so we are left with a quandary as to which metric (ages or stages) we should use to judge whither child or non.

Moreover, as the preceding quote from Freud illustrates, we flatter or diminish ourselves (depending on how one looks at it) to imagine that we ever leave the child behind. Here, another quote, this time by William Wordsworth: “The child is the father of the man.” Hence the man, or woman, is both his or her own father or mother, and yet still the child, even unto manhood or womanhood.

What, then, might we speculate that words are worth in settling this debate—in providing a more solid foundation upon which some kind of boundary wall, bidirectionally permeable as it may be, might be constructed? Let us start with etymology. ‘Infant’ comes into English by way of the French enfant (as in, Les Enfants Terribles), which has only the connotation of ‘child,’ but this in turn descends from the Latin infans, designating “one without speech.” Aha! Now we have it, yes, a distinction as clear as night and day to bound and separate ‘infant’ from ‘child’ or ‘adult.’

I have my doubts, however. You see, while I would not be much of a speech pathologist if I made light of such a momentous milestone as speech, but, on the other hand, what of all all the people who never come into possession of speech, or which lose its facility? Most assuredly these people are not infans—literal Latin interpretations aside. Nor does it sit well with me that the short period of time preceding which most children do come into possession of speech is followed by a much larger stretch of time over which all sorts of mighty accomplishments (and not only in the domain of speech and language) are made on the way to the moving goalposts of adulthood.

In speech pathology, we often speak of “adult language,” and hold this out as a kind of endpoint towards which (we hope) “child language,” in the particular instantiations of individual children themselves, is moving. These two classifications encompass a range of abilities too numerous to delve into here, but suffice it to say that what is generally being posited is that there is a tipping point at which the complexity of a child’s language, and the ways that they use it, are in some kind of parity with the complexity and usage of adult language in the aggregate. There are two obvious problems with this, at least if we entertain any hopes the movement between these categories to in turn substantiate our categories of ‘child’ and ‘adult.’ First, it assumes that this is progressive movement in which gain after gain occurs, and nothing is lost; second, it runs into the problem of circular reasoning, since we form our conception of what constitutes adult language by evaluating how adults use language—which of course requires that we already have a definition for the very thing we are seeking to define!

I fear, then, that I can do no better than Oedipus in answering the Sphinx’s riddle, and only respond with “wo/man” to “which creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?”

* Plastow, Michael G. The Ages of the Child https://www.ecritique.net/volumes/Volume_10/fwdecritiquevol102015pdfs/6_Ecritique%2010.%20MichaelPlastowTheagesofthechild.pdf