My favorite season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is season six. It is the deepest and the darkest and although it is a silly, fantasy TV show, it explores some very real themes about finding one's way in the world and dealing with loss. There is one glitch in the season, though. Buffy, through a confluence of supernatural events in the previous season has inherited a little sister, Dawn. In season six, Buffy is faced with the challenge of parenting a teen-aged sister and trying to fight demons of both the supernatural and the internal sort while being just barely an adult, herself. It makes for some good drama and lots of leather pants. Anyone familiar with the show knows that each season revolves around some sort of impending apocalypse from which Buffy must save the world. It is in the midst of this impending apocalypse that Dawn continues to whine and flounce around the show, complaining that she's overlooked, that her sister is mean, that she can't do anything she wants to, nobody likes her and oh, boo-hoo. The Chief Lou and I love to hate her. We sit on our couch with our chips and queso and yell (sotto voce, of course, so as not to wake the monkeys) at the screen: "It's all about you, Dawn!"
In Piaget's stages of cognitive development, the Preoperational Stage is marked by egocentrism. It is a time of life when children are learning that their actions can have an effect on objects. They are learning motor skills and practicing them regularly with varying degrees of success. They are generally pre-literate, so they think in images rather than words. Any parent of children ages 2 to about 7 can vouch for this. Their small perspective, just discovered, is king. The way they see things is the way things are. They are the center of their own little magical universes and anything that happens around them is happening to them and probably on purpose. Anyone who has tried to convince a small child with logic or reason that there may be another way of looking at things has come to realize that most times, words have little or no effect. I had a discussion about pigeons with my Hooligan awhile back wherein he was explaining to me that pigeons are mammals. No amount of explaining that mammals have hair, not feathers, that they give birth to live young, not eggs, and that generally they don't fly would convince him otherwise. "I know all that, Mom. Pigeons do have live babies, not dead ones and they feed them milk from the nipples in their throats." You cannot argue with the logic of a four-year-old.
When children are small, this is endearing in a way. I really believe this egocentrism protects them from seeing the scarier world at large in a lot of ways. If they live in a happy, peaceful environment, then the world is a happy and peaceful place. If the people in their lives are generally nice and loving, then they carry that expectation with them of everyone they meet. In a healthy childhood, this auto-protection mode helps them incrementally deal with the darker things in life as they are exposed to them. This is as it should be, in my opinion. Of course, this egocentrism is also one of the most frustrating things about parenting at this age. It is when the "But it's not faaaaaiiiiiirrrr" thing crops up. (Side note: my monkeys are not allowed to say this because it is a cliche that forces me to respond with another cliche: "Life's not fair." They may express this sentiment to me, but they have to find other words to do it.) But all of this frustration is an opportunity for learning. It is generally accepted that children will behave this way because their perspective is, as yet, not fully formed. It is by butting heads with the real world and things being imminently "unfair" that they start to realize that they are not, in fact, the center of the universe.
This trait is not at all endearing in adults. Not even a little bit. By the time you are grown, you should have moved well past the Preoperational Stage into, and through two other stages (with a brief revisiting of egocentrism in adolescence, but for a different purpose) into the Formal Operational Stage that allows for both abstract and logical thinking. By the time you are an adult, you should be able to realize that all of the people in line in front of you at the post office when you're in a hurry were not put there solely to inconvenience you. By the time you are an adult, you should be able to differentiate between people talking around you and people talking to you or about you. By the time you are an adult, you should be able to understand and respond to logical arguments. And certainly, by the time you're an adult you should be able to recognize that the humans with whom you interact are not constructs of your imagination, put there for your entertainment or your personal persecution (depending on your particular bent). There should be that magical moment at some point when you realize that other people have bad days and good days, just like you do; that no, if there is no reason for a stranger to give you a dirty look, then probably they aren't - probably they have indigestion or are thinking of something unpleasant or their dog just died or they smelled something foul or their face really did "stick that way" as their mother warned them it would or any of other infinite possibilities that - gasp! - have nothing, whatsoever to do with you.
One of the criticisms of Piaget's theory, though, is that sometimes there are gaps or lapses in these stages and sometimes people don't complete a stage and get stuck there or just have bits of it stuck to them as they proceed on to other things. So you could have an otherwise reasonable adult who insists, in spite of all evidence to the contrary that it is, in fact, all about them. We are self-centered creatures. It is, I believe, our default mode. We all live inside our own heads and it is impossible, really to get into the heads of others. I've discussed this before and I don't believe I'd want to even if it were possible. But isn't that the beauty of growing up? Isn't that the blessing of being a rational animal? That we can realize this self-centered view is not necessarily the best one to take? That we can actively think - I know this is a challenge for some - and choose how we will respond to things? That we can operate in something other than "default mode"? Isn't it a distinct advantage that we have over two-year-olds that we don't have to just be a ball of emotional reactivity? To be able to realize that it is not just raining on me today because I wanted to go to the zoo? To be able to see clearly in the height of impending apocalypse that there are probably more important things than someone borrowed my favorite sweater without asking?
We all have these little sisters inside us that want to wail "It's not faaaaiiiiirrr!" and storm around and cause petty problems even while there are larger things at stake. Larger things that we - wait for it - that we might not even know about, that we might not understand or that - how can it be?! - have nothing to do with us. We are all the protagonists in our own novels, the stars of our own shows. But as adults, we have that distinct pleasure, and I would argue the responsibility, to sometimes be the reader - the detached observer to see the larger story unfold. Or the TV viewer to watch from the couch and shout with dripping irony through mouthfuls of Tex-mex treats: "It's all about you, Dawn!"
In Piaget's stages of cognitive development, the Preoperational Stage is marked by egocentrism. It is a time of life when children are learning that their actions can have an effect on objects. They are learning motor skills and practicing them regularly with varying degrees of success. They are generally pre-literate, so they think in images rather than words. Any parent of children ages 2 to about 7 can vouch for this. Their small perspective, just discovered, is king. The way they see things is the way things are. They are the center of their own little magical universes and anything that happens around them is happening to them and probably on purpose. Anyone who has tried to convince a small child with logic or reason that there may be another way of looking at things has come to realize that most times, words have little or no effect. I had a discussion about pigeons with my Hooligan awhile back wherein he was explaining to me that pigeons are mammals. No amount of explaining that mammals have hair, not feathers, that they give birth to live young, not eggs, and that generally they don't fly would convince him otherwise. "I know all that, Mom. Pigeons do have live babies, not dead ones and they feed them milk from the nipples in their throats." You cannot argue with the logic of a four-year-old.
When children are small, this is endearing in a way. I really believe this egocentrism protects them from seeing the scarier world at large in a lot of ways. If they live in a happy, peaceful environment, then the world is a happy and peaceful place. If the people in their lives are generally nice and loving, then they carry that expectation with them of everyone they meet. In a healthy childhood, this auto-protection mode helps them incrementally deal with the darker things in life as they are exposed to them. This is as it should be, in my opinion. Of course, this egocentrism is also one of the most frustrating things about parenting at this age. It is when the "But it's not faaaaaiiiiiirrrr" thing crops up. (Side note: my monkeys are not allowed to say this because it is a cliche that forces me to respond with another cliche: "Life's not fair." They may express this sentiment to me, but they have to find other words to do it.) But all of this frustration is an opportunity for learning. It is generally accepted that children will behave this way because their perspective is, as yet, not fully formed. It is by butting heads with the real world and things being imminently "unfair" that they start to realize that they are not, in fact, the center of the universe.
This trait is not at all endearing in adults. Not even a little bit. By the time you are grown, you should have moved well past the Preoperational Stage into, and through two other stages (with a brief revisiting of egocentrism in adolescence, but for a different purpose) into the Formal Operational Stage that allows for both abstract and logical thinking. By the time you are an adult, you should be able to realize that all of the people in line in front of you at the post office when you're in a hurry were not put there solely to inconvenience you. By the time you are an adult, you should be able to differentiate between people talking around you and people talking to you or about you. By the time you are an adult, you should be able to understand and respond to logical arguments. And certainly, by the time you're an adult you should be able to recognize that the humans with whom you interact are not constructs of your imagination, put there for your entertainment or your personal persecution (depending on your particular bent). There should be that magical moment at some point when you realize that other people have bad days and good days, just like you do; that no, if there is no reason for a stranger to give you a dirty look, then probably they aren't - probably they have indigestion or are thinking of something unpleasant or their dog just died or they smelled something foul or their face really did "stick that way" as their mother warned them it would or any of other infinite possibilities that - gasp! - have nothing, whatsoever to do with you.
One of the criticisms of Piaget's theory, though, is that sometimes there are gaps or lapses in these stages and sometimes people don't complete a stage and get stuck there or just have bits of it stuck to them as they proceed on to other things. So you could have an otherwise reasonable adult who insists, in spite of all evidence to the contrary that it is, in fact, all about them. We are self-centered creatures. It is, I believe, our default mode. We all live inside our own heads and it is impossible, really to get into the heads of others. I've discussed this before and I don't believe I'd want to even if it were possible. But isn't that the beauty of growing up? Isn't that the blessing of being a rational animal? That we can realize this self-centered view is not necessarily the best one to take? That we can actively think - I know this is a challenge for some - and choose how we will respond to things? That we can operate in something other than "default mode"? Isn't it a distinct advantage that we have over two-year-olds that we don't have to just be a ball of emotional reactivity? To be able to realize that it is not just raining on me today because I wanted to go to the zoo? To be able to see clearly in the height of impending apocalypse that there are probably more important things than someone borrowed my favorite sweater without asking?
We all have these little sisters inside us that want to wail "It's not faaaaiiiiirrr!" and storm around and cause petty problems even while there are larger things at stake. Larger things that we - wait for it - that we might not even know about, that we might not understand or that - how can it be?! - have nothing to do with us. We are all the protagonists in our own novels, the stars of our own shows. But as adults, we have that distinct pleasure, and I would argue the responsibility, to sometimes be the reader - the detached observer to see the larger story unfold. Or the TV viewer to watch from the couch and shout with dripping irony through mouthfuls of Tex-mex treats: "It's all about you, Dawn!"
