Child-Like Behavior In Adults as Pathological

1. Child-Like Behavior In Adults as Pathological

2. To understand what child-like behavior coming from adults means, it is important to understand what it means to be a child or what it means to display child-like qualities. Because children are raised to be socialized and to adopt various values, disvalues, and practices associated with their specific culture, there is an under-socialized nature of children, as in not yet being fully influenced by ideas that come from their language and their meanings until they are predisposed to these concepts by other people, parents and peers, who have gone through the same socialization processes when they were children, as were their parents, and so on. Now that I’ve established the under-socialized nature of children, I argue that there is a very specific standard, at least in European (and American) societies, as to what one’s social identity in those cultures should have, and behavior associated with this socially uncorrupted nature of children has been deemed to be only acceptable from children and deemed pathological coming from adults or young adults.

3. The first example of under-socialized child-like behaviors displayed in the films is in the film Suicide Room. In the film, the main character Dominik, is a high school age legal adult living with his parents in Poland who lacks attention or affection from his parents and does not get along with his much of his peers at school. He is ridiculed at school and online for some homosexual behaviors that he performs with a classmate of his.

4. He eventually starts skipping school and playing video games at home and in his room, where he meets a girl, Sylwia, in an online video chat room. From talking to her, he comes to believe that the people who engage in regular social life “play ridiculous parts in a hollow, ridiculous play.” From this realization and the lack of care from his parents, he stays home from school entirely and, instead, stays in a role-playing chat room, the Suicide Room, with Sylwia. His parents hire psychiatrists to prescribe him anti-depressants in hopes to get him back to going to school, but he eventually takes too many with alcohol and overdoses. I think that in this film, Dominik displays a child-like attitude towards engaging in social roles by rejecting them, and therefore, his parents try to correct him by medicating him.

5. The other example of a “sensitive” young adult in European film is in Ben X. Ben is a teenager who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome because of his lack of social interaction. His asocial behavior results from his inability to understand what behaviors and responses are expected of him, so he does not perform these behavioral expectations.

6. A disorder, or a syndrome, has developed very negative connotations, as it means that there is something wrong, mentally. Even though Ben makes good grades and can function in his normal day-to-day tasks, like walking to school, his syndrome has told him and others that there is something wrong with his brain and his mental life, when in actuality, there is nothing more medically wrong with him than a teenager without Asperger’s Syndrome. His only problem is the lack of communication with his family and his peers, but to him, it’s not a problem; it’s only a problem to everyone else that he’s supposed to talk to. The reason, I think, that it is a problem to everyone around him is because the standards of his culture, like many other cultures, have highly valued extroversion and socializing enough to the point that people who are introverted and less inclined to socializing are considered less normal, and to the degree of Ben’s introversion, are considered to have mental disorders.

7. Anther disorder associated with child-like behavior in films like This Is England and The Edukatorsis the label of antisocial personality disorder. This Is England tells a story of a 12 year old boy, Shaun, who is bullied at school and finds comfort and identification with a group of skinheads, of whom are in their late teenage years or later. Skinheads, both in Britain and in America, have developed a very bad connotation as having racist, Nazi-influenced, and anti-social ideals. While some extremes exist in some particular people who display skinhead fashion, which the film does show, it also shows the other compassionate and accepting part of skinhead culture more focused on having fun, but in unconventional ways. Shaun’s socialization into this subculture shows various behaviors associated with the skinhead culture that can be seen as anti-social, but also childlike. Much of the group’s concerns and activities included fashion, music, getting drunk and/or high, or engaging in acts of vandalism

8. But Woody and his group (before Combo arrived) was the part of skin-head culture that was shown to be child-like, because of their lack of concern in the ideologies of the culture and sub-culture and their pure interest in having fun. Their ways of having fun in engaging in illegal acts though are how they are all dismissing certain values of the culture, and thus, they can also be seen as anti-social.

9. In The Edukators, the actions of Jan, Peter, and Jule also display behaviors which can be seen as anti-social. In “Smug Visions: A smug State of Political Progress” it describes the three young adults as “three disaffected and directionless twenty-somethings in Berlin who are eager to change the world in the mould of their 1968 heroes.” This passage, and the overall message in the article describe the kids as more focused on having a rebellious spirit, and less focused on the actual ideals that that they promote or reject, which shows how they can be shown to be more anti-social than they are socialized into a separate ideology. Their ideologies reflecting anti-capitalism and anti-consumerism, lead them to also engage in non-destructive vandalism: breaking into people’s houses and re-arranging their furniture.

10. Another film that I think is one of the best examples of the socially uncorrupted nature of children is the film Dogtooth. The kids in this film, who seem to actually be in their very late teens or early twenties have been sheltered by their parents to never leave their property. They have had no exposure to any culture past the culture of the own house. Because they have no way to have access to understanding cultural values they behave extremely different. In “Dogtooth: The Family Syndrome” it says:There is, however, something perversely angelic about the ‘children’ in Dogtooth. They appear angelic in part because they can engage in sexual activity without being corrupted by it. They have the state of radical innocence attributed to Adam and Eve before the Fall – They can have sex, but it is of no more significance than scattering seed.From this section of the article I think that their lack of socialization into culture beyond their home, gives them the same innocence that children have in not understanding right from wrong. The reason why this film is a great example is because, even though it may be fiction, it’s not too far from being a possibility, and it can provoke thought as to how much of our adult personalities are influenced by our own socializations into culture.

11. End • These realistic fictional stories associated with abnormal social behavior performed by young adults presented in the films, I argue, reflect the social expectations of youth and young adults in the European societies in which each film was made. The socialization of children into schools and other social organizations has created a very specific standard for social identity in these societies, and behaviors that do not conform to this standard can be labeled (as presented in Ben X), institutionalized (Ben X), and medicated (as presented in Suicide Room), as a means of correcting this behavior, by attempting to further socialize kids, in order to become a social, contributing member of society for when they grow into adulthood.