PROTO-CHILDHOOD

By: Joshua Glenn
July 13, 2023

One in a series of posts elaborating on Josh Glenn’s TEN STAGES OF MAN hypothesis — as first floated in January.

TEN STAGES OF MAN: CHILDHOOD 00–03: PROTO-CHILDHOOD | 04–13: EARLY & MID-CHILDHOOD | 14–23: MID- & LATE CHILDHOOD / “TEENS.” ADULTHOOD 24–33: EARLY ADULTHOOD / “TWENTIES” | 34–43: MID-ADULTHOOD / “THIRTIES” | 44–53: LATE ADULTHOOD / “FORTIES.” MIDDLE AGE 54–63: EARLY MIDDLE AGE / “FIFTIES” | 64–73: MID-MIDDLE AGE / “SIXTIES” | 74–83: LATE MIDDLE AGE / “SEVENTIES.” OLD AGE 84 & up: OLD AGE / “EIGHTIES” & up.

What follows are preliminary observations and autobiographical data. I’ll continue to update this post, and we’ll see if it coheres into something like a theory.

00–03
PROTO-CHILDHOOD

Some misguided folks believe that they (or other adults) can remember events which they’d experienced as early as the age of two. Contra this dubious claim, in a large survey reported in a 2018 issue of Psychological Science, nearly 40% of participants reported a first memory that is likely to be fictional. The authors concluded:

We suggest that what a rememberer has in mind when recalling fictional improbably early memories is an episodic-memory-like mental representation consisting of remembered fragments of early experience and some facts or knowledge about their own infancy/childhood,” said Shazia Akhtar, first author on the study. “Additionally, further details may be nonconsciously inferred or added, e.g. that one was wearing nappy when standing in the cot. Such episodic-memory-like mental representations come, over time, to be recollectively experienced when they come to mind and so for the individual they quite simply are ‘memories’ which particularly point to infancy.

We don’t form memories before the age of 3 or 3.5 at the very earliest. Which helps support my theory that “childhood” doesn’t begin until some point after one turns 3…

In a chapter titled “Discrimination and comparison,” from Principles of Psychology (1890), William James is led, through considering things like the effect of chloroform on sensation and perception, to a “law” about the operation of concepts of part and whole in the mind:

[A]ny number of impressions, from any number of sensory sources, falling simultaneously on a mind which has not yet experienced them separately, will fuse into a single undivided object for that mind. The law is that all things fuse that can fuse, and nothing separates except what must. What makes impressions separate we have to study in this chapter. Although they separate easier if they come in through distinct nerves, yet distinct nerves are not an unconditional ground of their discrimination, as we shall presently see. The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space. There is no other reason than this why “the hand I touch and see coincides spatially with the hand I immediately feel.”

A plenitude of data is available to the unschooled mind of the proto-child, according to James’s theory, from which it may rapidly build up a complex set of contrasts to distinguish objects and experiences.

I was born in October 1967, in Boston. My parents, Charlie and Mary “Lee” Glenn, lived with another couple, Sib and Judy Wright, in a rather dilapidated house (built in the 1890s, it had become a rooming house in the 1940s–1950s, then left to rot) in Jamaica Plain’s Parkside neighborhood, on the Roxbury border. We lived just off Franklin Park. My brother and I would grow up in that house, and my mother would remain there until 2022. My parents divorced in c. 1972, but my father always lived quite nearby, so my brother and I would travel back and forth during the week… but that’s jumping ahead.

What happened during my first three years? Nothing — that’s what it means to be a proto-child. Yes, you do all sorts of things, but these things are neither work, labor, nor action in the Arendtian sense.

Is a proto-child even the same person as the child into which it develops? Certainly we share a body. I suffered from pyloric stenosis — a condition in which the pylorus muscles block food from entering the small intestine. Resulting in severe and forceful vomiting. I was operated on. I can’t remember this, but I have a scar to “remind” me.

My brother Patrick was born in August 1969. I don’t remember this momentous event.

During this period my father was earning a doctorate in Education. He’d been the minister of St. John’s Church (Roxbury Crossing) before I was born; from 1966–1968 he worked as the anti-poverty coordinator for the National Episcopalian Church; and beginning in 1970 he became director of civil rights and urban education for the Massachusetts Department of Education. My mother, who’d earned an M.Ed. in Special Education and trained as a reading specialist (and taught at Dedham High School) before I was born, during this period was earning her clinical certificate in Family Therapy.

They seem to have been very busy. But I don’t remember any of this.

In Chris Rock’s standup special, “Selective Outrage,” which aired in March of this year — that is to say, a month or so after I published Ten Stages of Man here at HILOBROW — he joked that “Women should have the right to kill a baby until he’s four years old.” I mention the timing, here, to make it clear that I wasn’t aware of Rock’s (funny) joke when I made the outrageous claim that until we turn four we ought properly to be considered “proto-children” — because, that is to say, until that point we won’t have yet entered the first of life’s ten stages. To be clear: A “proto-child” is not the same thing as a “pre-human.”

PROTO-CHILDHOOD

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