A friend of mine — she’s in her early 30s, no children — was having lunch recently with a friend and that friend’s 3-year-old daughter. At some point during the meal, her friend got up from the table, leaving my friend alone with the child. What followed, she told me later, was something close to a panic attack.
“I just sat there,” she said, “completely frozen. I didn’t know what to say.”
This is not a particularly anxious or socially awkward person. She’s poised and funny and holds her own in any conversation. She’s simply never had to have a social lunchtime conversation with a child. And so there she sat, staring at a 3-year-old across a restaurant table, both of them apparently waiting for the other to say something.
I’ve been there, I told her. As a childless adult myself, I said, I learned quickly that we have been conditioned to believe that when you talk to a child, you have to perform. You have to be sunny, upbeat, and relentlessly enthusiastic. You have to be, in other words, a clown.
Which is exhausting for everyone. I actually know someone who went to clown college. (Yes, that’s a real thing. You can even get a student loan to pay for it.) She told me that the central animating principle of clownhood is buoyancy. Clowns keep bobbing to the surface. They get knocked down and pop right back up, grinning. They are constitutionally incapable of staying deflated. That’s what makes them clowns. It is also what makes them terrifying. And irritating.
But for some reason, that is exactly how most adults think you’re supposed to act when you talk to a child. You raise the pitch of your voice. You broaden your smile. You trill things like, Well, hello there! What a pretty dress! And how are YOU today, with an emphasis that suggests that the world is a sunny, funny, clown-like kind of place.
Naturally, children hate it. I’ve been to enough birthday parties and family gatherings to notice that children being addressed by buoyant, chirpy adults wear a particular expression — not boredom exactly, but weary forbearance. The look of someone putting up with something.
I’ve even caught a child’s eye during one of these performances — a parent, sometimes, or an uncle, someone who should know better — and the child has shot me a look that can only be described as a plea for solidarity. Can you believe I have to put up with this, the look says. Are you seeing what I’m seeing?
Yes, tiny friend. I am seeing it.
So, I’ve developed a different approach. Instead of being a buoyant clown, I try to be what I’d call a low-energy adult. Instead of trilling, Well, hello there! And how are YOU? I say something flat and casual, like, ‘Sup?’ Not even a question. Just an acknowledgment that we are both here, through no particular fault of either of our own.
And then I immediately pivot to a mild, meandering account of something in my life that isn’t going especially well.
“Oh man,” I might say, staring into the middle distance. “I have to get my car registration renewed. Which is a whole thing, because I think I need to get it inspected first? Do I need to do that, do you know? I can send in the registration stuff with the check before I get the inspection sticker, right?”
The child does not know. But here’s what happens: The child becomes interested. In an adult who seems mildly beleaguered, who is not performing happiness, who is talking to them the way you’d talk to anyone. Children, I learned, do not need to be entertained. They just need to be met.
“Sometimes,” I might add, sighing slightly, “I just feel a little tired, you know?” And nine times out of 10, the child will try to cheer you up. They’ll ask a question, offer a suggestion. “Is that a nice shirt?” one child asked me once, apparently deciding a compliment was called for. It was a very nice shirt. I told him so.
We ended up having a pretty satisfying conversation, in which he told me all the things he liked about me (and my car), and I honestly can’t remember having an exchange as uplifting and complimentary with anyone else, except maybe ChatGPT. And children, at least at this size, are a lot better for the environment.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.