When my four-year-old left his first day of French immersion after months at home and said, “Comment ça va,” he explained that the phrase meant “Clean up right now.” This amalgam, mistranslation and all, seemed like the perfect inaugural lesson, because it combined the new language with the rules: you will inquire after the well-being of others, and you will clean up.
A clever friend’s conversation starter with small children is to ask, “What are the rules in your house?” Because small children always know them, especially the ones the adults thought they hadn’t said out loud. Rules are about self-preservation, maybe even more than our desire to socialize is. Do as we say, we teach the young , because conforming is essential to our lives as social beings, our way of belonging to a collective, our survival itself.
This year has reoriented us to rules, to obeying and disobeying them, and has thus made us all children again, from young to old adults, to the...
Jessica Duffin Wolfe is a professor of digital communications and journalism at Humber College, in Toronto. She wrote The Routledge Introduction to Canadian Literature and Illness, out this month.
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