Lies We Tell Kids

The writer Adam Gopnik calls the trap into which I had fallen the “causal catastrophe,” which he defines as the belief “that the proof of the rightness or wrongness of some way of bringing up children is the kind of adults it produces.”

Much of our childhood experience subtly reinforces the belief that there are categories of grown-ups, starting with teachers, that share in none of the child’s fears. We may, at a certain age, need such an illusion to make the world feel stable enough. But we pay a high price in loneliness for this faith in the face value of figures of authority. T

children tend to misunderstand wealth. They confuse it with money. They think that there is a fixed amount of it. And they think of it as something that’s distributed by authorities (and so should be distributed equally), rather than something that has to be created (and might be created unequally).