Quote of the Day - 2/18/2012

She awoke from long childhood in which she had always been protected and surrounded by attention and comforts, and not responsibilities. - Isabel Allende in The House of the Spirits: A Novel

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Two thoughts on today’s quote: 

1. It is interesting that we associate childhood as a time without responsibility. Our laws embed the concept in our formal legal system. But having or not having responsibility is not a binary thing. It is more accurate if we think of a child’s growth as a continual path of increasing levels of responsibility. At some point a child becomes responsible for dressing themselves, putting food in their own mouth, completing a household chore, completing homework without prompting, getting their first job, etc. At what age do they cross a threshold that says they are no longer a child? Certainly when they are financially independent…but probably before and the use of age is a simplifying criteria for our legal system which may work on average but not for all individuals.
2. In the past, the optimum in our culture was for women to continue in a child-like state (i.e. without acknowledged responsibilities) for most of their lives. The things that they did were important to their families but were not appreciated by society as responsibilities. The quote reminds us of the awakening that happened for many women as that ideal began to crumble.