parents and they’ll treat you well; share with your siblings and they’ll share
with you.
These new values are more sophisticated because they’re abstract. You
can’t point to “fairness” or draw a picture of “prudence.” The little kid thinks,
ice cream is awesome; therefore, I want ice cream. But the adolescent thinks,
ice cream is awesome, but stealing stuff pisses my parents off and I’ll get
punished; therefore, I’m not going to take the ice cream from the freezer. The
adolescent applies if/then rules to her decision making, thinking through
cause-and-effect chains in a way that a young child cannot.
As a result, an adolescent learns that strictly pursuing her own pleasure
and avoiding pain often creates problems. Actions have consequences. You
must negotiate your desires with the desires of those around you. You must
play by the rules of society and authority, and then, more often than not,
you’ll be rewarded.
Figure 6.1: A child thinks only about his own pleasure, whereas an
adolescent learns to navigate rules and principles to achieve her goals.
This is maturity in action: developing higher-level and more abstract
values to enhance decision making in a wider range of contexts. This is how
you adjust to the world, how you learn to handle the seemingly infinite
permutations of experience. It is a major cognitive leap for children and
fundamental to growing up in a healthy, happy way.
Young children are like little tyrants.^15 They struggle to conceive of
anything in life beyond what is immediately pleasurable or painful for them at
any given moment. They cannot feel empathy. They cannot imagine what life
is like in your shoes. All they know is that they want some fucking ice
cream.^16
A young child’s identity is therefore very small and fragile. It is