[abeppu]

Certainly it's true that kids can get a lot of joy out of something that to an adult seems really small or boring. But the flip side is kids can get totally emotionally distraught or enraged over tiny things.

Are these two sides of the same coin, and come from having just a smaller world, where small things can feel very big to a developing brain? Or as an adult with a fully-formed brain and access to the larger world, can we separate them and find that kind of unrestrained joy in the small stuff without also being swept away by small disappointments?

[Qworg]

I think many adults also get distraught or enraged by tiny things - it is an emotional regulation problem, not an age problem (but adults can and should be better than children).

[alt187]

Curiously enough, not a lot of those adults still find joy in the tiny things.

[Jeremy1026]

An analogy I've heard in the past is that emotions are like a button fixed in a box with a ball in it. When you're younger the box is smaller so the ball hits the buttons more often as there is less free space. As you grow, your box grows too, so your ball has more space in the box and more empty space on the walls for the ball the bounce off of, making the buttons less likely to be pushed.

[jiggawatts]

That analogy seems a bit contrived, but the "button pushing" reminds me of something.

At a recent dentist visit the Lidocaine local anaesthetic was accidentally injected into a (small) artery. That's when I discovered that it's a mixture that includes adrenaline, which contracts peripheral blood vessels, preventing it from dispersing too fast. Unless.. it goes directly into an artery, sending it straight into circulation.

To this day I can't come up for a better explanation of what happened, other than it felt like someone had simply pressed a button in my brain labelled "panic".

The dentist explained what had happened, I fully understood everything, I'm not at all afraid of dentistry, and I'm not easily frightened. None of that mattered. The button had been pressed, and now I was panicking for no discernible cause. Just... naked panic. Panic, panic, panic.

I had to cancel the appointment and walk home, slowly, listening to calming music the whole way and trying not to sprint down the sidewalk to escape whatever I felt like was chasing after me.

[legacynl]

Although probably not great at the time,.. I can imagine it would be an interesting experience.

Did it change how you much control you feel you have in regards to being in charge of your own thoughts and emotions?

[jiggawatts]

What a great question!

Thinking about it… yes, I suppose it did change my perspective.

It made me feel a lot more empathy for the “lone woman in a dark parking lot” scenario.

It made me realise I’m a meat computer running on chemicals and I’m not as in control of my emotions as I previously liked to think.

I realised that strong feelings can occur without an apparent matching cause. Feeling good without a success, feeling bad without hurt, etc… Emotions exist in and of themselves and can be directly triggered.

Etc… probably too much to write here, and things that are probably obvious to most readers but wasn’t obvious to me until that incident.

PS: It reminds me of instinct: we humans don’t have many that can override our conscious minds, but we do have some. The feeling of drowning for example can trigger completely involuntary actions. Unless you’ve experienced something like this, you just don’t know what it’s like to have biology overrule your thoughts.

[philsnow]

This "ball and button in a box" analogy is precisely the one that people told me about when I was processing grief.

Right after the traumatic event, the "ball" hit the "button" nearly continuously, but as the months and years progressed, it's gotten farther and farther apart.

[LUmBULtERA]

>But the flip side is kids can get totally emotionally distraught or enraged over tiny things.

Oof isn't this the truth. The tiniest things will drive my son into full meltdowns right now.

[nagonago]

From what I've read, children's brains haven't fully developed the capability for emotional regulation. So not only are they less experienced, they might actually be physically incapable of managing their own emotions. Keeping this in mind helped me survive the toddler years. :)

[Sohcahtoa82]

When you're a kid, so many experiences are new, so the emotional response is higher.

A kid might fall off their bike, get a minor scrape on their knee, and cry because while the pain is pretty minor, it might actually be the greatest pain they've ever experienced in their life.

As an adult, you're probably not experiencing a lot of new things, and the new things you're experiencing are likely variations of things you've already done.

Though uh...I've seen my wife's boobs thousands of times, yet my brain still reacts like it did the first time. >.>

[j7ake]

Yes. Basically kids can have strong emotional reactions to seemingly small things.

[MonkeyClub]

They naturally take all the space they can get, learning their limits. Issue is, they don't hear "no" often enough early on, to know that there are limits.

[nucleardog]

I don’t think it’s an either or. They are two sides of the same coin in that “kids experience stronger emotions”, but my experience leads me to see multiple reasons for that.

There’s the external trigger and how it fits into their life experience. Something that may be a 6/10 fun for you may literally be the most fun the child has ever had because they have less life experience. Something that’s a 2/10 pain might be literally the most pain they ever remember experiencing.

Which plays into how much practice they have managing these emotions. You get better at dealing with pain and frustration with practice. But no amount of practicing dealing with a paper cut will ever prepare you for being stabbed. Curling a 5lb dumbbell every day won’t get you to curling 100lbs.

But this is also impacted by the options they have available to respond to these emotions. As an adult if you’re frustrated you have the practice, fully realized autonomy, and societal trust to make real changes to address the issues in front of you. You don’t need to deal with this entirely internally. As a child, often your options essentially boil down to “deal with it”. And even as they expand, it takes time to practice with the new options available to you.

So an adult will experience the emotions less heightened and they also have more practice and better tools for handling them. The child will experience a stronger emotion, have little practice in managing the emotion, and few other options to address the overall situation.

Which can easily get into a negative feedback loop. Something is frustrating. The emotion is strong and you don’t know what to do about it. That’s frustrating. You can’t fix the situation. That’s frustrating. Now you’re more frustrated, GOTO 10. Pretty soon the emotions have compounded into something overwhelming.

And a child, much like an adult that hits this point, is going to have a meltdown. I don’t think adults are much better equipped at handling themselves when they are experiencing overwhelming emotions, it’s just much more difficult for them to get there in the first place.

As an adult, I think you can absolutely learn to find more joy in the small things. We have to, by necessity, filter some of the small things out of our days so just being an adult doesn’t become overwhelming. Making a conscious effort to be present and aware can go a long way. This is, I think, what’s happening when people have these mundane experiences with children and find them magical—simply having the child there to point things out and force them to be aware can bring back a lot of that small joy. It will never rise to the same level as the child’s because you come into it with a greater range of experience and it often lacks the novelty, but it can be made into much more than it normally is for you. And you will certainly be dragged down much less by any negative parts of the experience.

Anyway, my two cents as someone that spends a lot of time thinking about this both in terms of managing my own emotions and happiness as well as being a dad… And someone that’s trying _very_ hard to procrastinate right now.