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We drove past the overturned car in the field again today, but this time my daughter saw it. She asked me if a baddie did it. And though I tried to explain that sometimes accidents happen unintentionally or are not one person’s fault, she was very keen on the baddie interpretation. “Mummy told me baddies put glitter on the road,” she told me. I didn’t know what mummy had been driving at there, but it’s best not to contradict her, so I agreed that that was one of the worst things that baddies do. It makes life easier to divide life into good and bad at this stage and it’s interesting that three year olds have such a strong sense of right and wrong, even though they continually test that in their own lives. And they quite like the baddies really. Because who doesn’t want to see a car career off the road and roll across a field? All the baddies in the kids’ shows she watches are slightly funny and admirable, even if they always lose. I wonder if we like goodies and baddies because we can pretend to be on the side of the goodies, but secretly admire the baddies for their refusal to kowtow to the rules of society. And make the roads all glittery.
It’s OK for a three year old to see things in such a binary fashion. Sadly many adults are just as unsophisticated in their moral outlook and perhaps have an additional layer of “if it’s something that directly helps me then it’s good, if it’s something that directly harms me then it’s bad.” They don’t even have the brains to understand that sometimes something that seems to benefit you can ultimately be bad or something that affects you badly in the short term can be good for you in the long term.
But I enjoyed the chat about morality in any case.
We went to another birthday party, this time at a polo club, which makes it about the poshest party I’ve been to in my life. Though it was just I a small marquee in a field, so maybe not that posh after all. But there were horse rides for the kids. In fact unicorn rides as there were plastic horns stuck to the horses’ heads. Phoebe was a little wary of going on the huge animal, but not as scared as I was to let her go on, but she had two rides in the end and came away unscathed.
Later I told my wife about the goodies and baddies chat. She mentioned that she had told Phoebe that baddies put litter on the road, after she’d seen people chucking rubbish out of their car. That made more sense. But made the baddies a bit less admirable in my opinion.
