I had basically a happy normal childhood, I guess.  Yet, as a child it seems
like I frequently had clothes that pulled and itched, I'd get voraciously
hungry and had to wait for hours to eat, and I'd need to use the bathroom
when none was at all nearby, which meant waiting for ages.  Now that I'm an
adult, none of these things seems to be a problem anymore.  I buy clothes
because they're comfortable.  If I'm hungry, it's usually mealtime, and if
it's not, it's easy to either wait for mealtime or go ahead and find some
food.  And I'm never billions of miles and hours from a bathroom.
I'm sure the world hasn't changed, so it must be my perceptions of it.

I was wondering if other people had the same perceptions of their childhoods.

Did lots of everyday things seem really stressful to you when you were a kid?

40 responses total.

I think that's because you weren't ever in control; your mom probably bought
your clothes, you ate when she was hungry, and people never really think
about the discomfort of someone else who has to go to the bathroom ("We
just left the house. You can wait till we get home."). Also, when you're a
kid and very hungry and mom says "We'll eat in 5 minutes", it usually means
30 min. Plus time goes by slowly when you're a kid.

I remember being very stressed by subtraction in the first grade, and again 
by multiplication in the fourth grade, and *again* by long division in the 
fifth grade.  I guess most things just get easier with practice....

I found it stressful to pay attention in my early school years. All my life
I had been told to go run around the block and release my energy. Now I was
being told by a stranger to sit still for hours on end. My seemingly non-
existant attention span worried my teachers and I was held back in Kinder-
garten. What a joke.

re#2: I know what you mean. Subtraction gave me the worst time. It took me a 
month and a half to finally master it.
(Who needs subtraction anyway, it's so...so...NEGATIVE!)

   I think as a child you're more concerned with things that directly
affect you, such as the location of the next bathroom.  The fact that
an adult has a larger bladder to hold it doesn't hurt any, either.
   But after growing up, I think that most adults just exchange their
infantile fears for the fears of adulthood.

... many of which are also infantile....

You know, I find it exactly the opposite.
Things were a breeze when I was youngewr, but are more stressful as I
grow older.

life is tougher for children because their perspective is so different.
Do the weeks (even years!) go by you faster and faster? think about what
fraction of your life is represented by an hour's time. now apply that to
someone who has lived only 1/4 of the time you have. 1/8 of the time.........
See? It's a matter of perspective.

I don't know. I think things are easier being a child in some aspects.
All a child has to worry about is having fun and doing their homework.
And adult has to worry about a job, money, rent, car payments, etc...
I learned this recently and came to the realization that   

                Being an adult SUCKS! 

Do you remember when you were a kid and time went by so slow?  Remember 
when you were sent to your room for five minutes and it seemed like 
forever?  

Maybe it didn't just *seem* like a long time, but actually was.  If I 
was ten, those five minutes would pass as slowly for me as would ten
minutes would if I was twenty.  This actually happens.  

Humans have little concept of what time really is.  

I'd agree that it's a control thing.  As a child, (depending on your
parents of course) your parents are supreme all-powerful gods who can
do anything, and it takes time for children to learn the distinction 
between things parents can control (when you may leave your room) and
things parents can't control (distance to next bathroom.)  You get sort
of a dog-sense of time, where everything is either "right now," or "will
be right now if I just beg and whine and fuss enough," or "never."

As a kid, you have arbitrary amounts of time. You can color in the callouses
on the bottom of your foot with a blue ball-point pen, then connect them 
up with lines across the arch, then draw a spider wandering around them.
As an adult, you don't even have time to notice that you have callouses.
You don't even have time to remember which cable channel is which,
because you watch them so infrequently and they're always changing.
That's why you need kids.

It's also a responsibility thing, since that comes along with control.
When you're a kid, Christmas means seeing people and getting stuff.
When you're an adult, it means shopping in crowded malls where you
can't find a parking space and cooking an elaborate dinner and putting
up decorations you're just going to take right down again and running up
bills you won't be able to pay off by next Christmas.

I never had any control as a kid, and dang it, the same thing is true
as an adult...

Several comments have been about how time seems to pass more quickly
for adults than children. That relates to the hypothesis that I have
been musing upon, that mental time passes logarithmicaly, starting 
at conception. The unit of this time I call the menton, and time in
mentons is given by
                        x=20*ln(4*t/3)

where t is time in years since conception. The scale is somewhat
arbitrary, like a temperature scale, but has the following useful
properties:

You are born at x = 0 mentons, equal to an age of 9 months.
You are conceived at t=0, but that is -infinity in mentons.

Mentons are the *perceptual* time. The rate at which perceptual time
passes is given by

                        dx/dt = 20/t

The scale is set so that one calendar year is one (perceptual) menton,
when you are about 20 years from conception. At age 5, the rate is 4
mentons per year, or only 1/4 year per menton - calendar time seems to
drag. At age 60, it is 1/3 menton per year, or 3 years per menton -
calendar time flies. 

At conception, time stands still (or, there is a singularity in perceptual
time). 

For what its worth.

Maybe I was born a curmudgeon ... but when I wasn't "believed"
in about the 3rd/4th grade somewhere-in-there, about having to
use the bathroom, i peed in my seat. Teacher and I went back
and forth a bit before and afterwards - parents called in for
a "conversation" - slightly embarassed but not much really.
  
It is my responsibility to be as accurate as possible, I was,
she wasn't, i had a wet morning but I was never again refused
the option of using the bathroom. Funny how that worked.
 
Oh, and I didn't do the mop-up afterwards either. 
  
And when I was told that I +could+ run away from home (about
the same timeframe), mom packed me a lunch for the journey!
  
I stayed most of the evening in a city park (we were in town
by then) and the lunch was gone and I was hungry again, and ...,
and I went home a few hours after dark (dunno waht the time
was). 
  
Got a casual "welcome home, how was the trip?"  - told them
and went on to playing something, maybe reading a book, I
don't really remember after I got back. LIke, Ho-Hum.
  
In retrospect, I'd guess that dad called everyone in town to
be on the lookout for a tiny (small is too large a word) hobo-vagrant
complete with stick-over-shoulder-holding-stuff and wandering
about. Geeze, was *I* suckered into +that+ one. 
  
I was raised to think things through and ask questions. I don't
remember any other Prime Directive really - tons of Secondary ones
though. 
 
Did the inkpen on callouses thing too, later, after ball points
were invented. Spider webs in the palm of hand too - much fun.
  
Clothes didn;t always fit, just like popcorn. I was told that
i could change later, but to live with it for now. 
  
Some stress from  -dang, just remembered this-  a fan, yes, a fan.
It was blowing through the house in the summer sometimes, and would
blow across the dinner table. Howver, it would also be blowing
across the milk glasses and that did something to the milk that
made it taste terrible, +really+ terrible. Mom and dad didn't
get the same taste until i let the milk sit for the whole meal
adn then left it there. Whatever it was (probably spoiled/curdled
or something) they tasted it then. And the fan arrangements were
altered somehow. Stressful to +want+ the milk but force self to
refuse it - I love milk.

I liked that. Kinda like a day in the life of little ts taylor.
Cute but true. When you were a kid you could get what you wanted
just by whining, crying, or being good. Now you actually have to
work for it.

As a child, when I whined and cried, I got ignored, not what I wanted.
When I begged and pleaded, I was told no.
When I asked politely and smiled, I generally got just about everything.
Of course, it helps to be unbelievebl cute as a child.

I was the first born. So I was spoiled up until my sisters came alogng
3 years later. Then it went all to hell.

Re 15: That was pretty much my experience, too.  My 13-yr-old son still
hasn't figured it out yet (lots of whining and crying over stupid stuff,
and the answer he gets is always 'no').

I like #12.  Seems about right to me.

I thought #12 was kinda comforting: it means that time isn't going
to get *too* terribly much faster when I'm older.  I mean, if a day when
I was a kid felt about as long as a year does now, I'm inclined to worry
that time might run another 365 times faster in another 28 years.  It'd
be *really* hard to get anything done then.

So, if perceptual time runs much slower in childhood, this means we spend
the majority of our perceptual time as children, even though we spend the
majority of our chronological time as adults.  Interesting....

Yup, if you live to be 75 you've spent almost 70% of your life under 18.

In regard to ordinary things, I had trouble with  fear of the dark.
Although this is not uncommon, I think that I had anxiety longer
than most.  I think that I was eleven when the fear left quite
suddenly and completely.  

I know the problem with bladder control in childhood:  I had to walk home from
school.  The promise of an accessible bathroom seemed to get those muscles to
start to relax.  If I had trouble getting my key out, I  would end up doing the
classic "gotta go" dance.  Now that I'm an old fart, I have to think about what
I'm doing to get it started.

My childhood was more living nightmare than anything else, and time passed
in fits and starts - sometimes dragging but then dashing ahead like
lightning periodically (things have always gone pretty fast when you 
look back on them.)  School was a living hell of frequent hazing and 
beatings from the local bullies, unsympathetic adults who didn't know 
how to help, and straight As without effort.  home life was isolation
from society with only a little sister to beat up on, a dad who was
forever withdrawn, and a mom who ran things but suffered a lot of stress
doing it.  

Adult life has about the same content of challenges and problems as my
childhood, but now I am relatively in control - of my attitudes, my
career, my relations with others, etc. - and (since the divorce that
ended a 15 year nightmare marriage that almost killed me) I am building
a life that I love.  Those of us who have had traumatic, near death
experiences from whatever cause, often find a new outlook that makes
life pretty wonderful.  I am in hog heaven most of the time now.  
(BTW, I had the help of some excellent therapists, and some OK ones,
on and off along the way.  I give them some of the credit for my current
relatively joyous situation.  Childhood and early adulthood were 180
degrees out from this.  Life begins around 40, cause by then we have 
learned what we're going to learn from the school of hard knocks and
can start using it.  Once you're "over the hill" you can COAST - in some ways!

But don't forget that cliff ahead - yet don't dwell upon it.

Agora 128 linked to InBetween 15.

hmmm....I always joke about how I'm really six years old, and I don't
think my time perception has changed any more than my maturity level.
However, I *have* managed to gain control of my bladder sometime in
the past eleven years!

The thing I remember about childhood (quite fondly, I might add) is
getting enough sleep.  My parents would make me go to bed, and then I'd be
up at 7:00 in the morning, and go watch cartoons, and wake evereyone else up.
 It got so bad that my parents forced me to stay in bed until 8.  <sigh>.
Ah, what I wouldn't do for someone to force me to stay in bed until 8 now.

I also noticed recently that maturing is definitely not a linear process. 
In the last year, I have matured at least twice as much as in the four
years before that.  
 

My childhood is a total and complete blur.  Yet I hate to be left out.  I do
have one memory, getting hit by a car while riding my bike, age : 7, after
that it's all...  hazy.

re#26:  I think I've matured more in the last year than I have since my
parents got me toilet-trained...which was at *least* 16.5 years ago.
hmm...maybe my parents just didn't do a good enough job toilet-training 
me!.  things to ponder...

My childhood was bananas.

I don't remember much of my childhood, mainly because it was not a particularly
memorable one.  I wasn't much of an extrovert, my early life was plain, 
except for a few stories that my parents love to tell about my pre-preschool
days.  But I wouldn't remember those anyways.  In elementary and middle 
schools, I was quite the social outcast, though I don't quite know why.  Most
of my character has been formed in th last three years or so...sort of like
I'm building it from the ground up.  Maybe that's why I'm maturing so fast
now...I'm trying to make up for lost time.

Hmmm...I think I'm much like you, Flem.

I have memories back to when I was one.  Then again, my life has resembled a 
soap opera.  

whose doens't?

MINE doesn't. Mine had resembled more of a sit-com cancelled after two
episodes.

but, you know?  It's such a relief not to have to ever ask anyone permission to
go to the bathroom any more.

Hmm...My life is a soap opera.

me too...<sigh>
actually, it *is* getting better :)

Mine just gets worse and worse.
Excuse me, I'm goiong to go sleep with my step brother's second cousin's
dead horse. 

as long as he doesn't like karaoke--i was at a rush week party last night.
nuf said!

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