On Stuttering

Children have an interesting view of the world, often not clearly understood due to limited vocabulary and imaginative barriers between children and adults.
Children then become adults and often can no longer remember how they once thought as children, so it is up to the adults who are around them when they are young to catalog their surprising moments of brilliance, despite communication barriers.

Alice Walker was afraid of how her daughter might react to her eye. Would she be ashamed?
And yet her daughter tells her she has a world in her eye.

Similarly, Edward Hoagland mentions his child in his piece on stuttering.
As she was learning to talk, she briefly thought she was supposed to stutter like her father. He lists it as one of the top 3 scariest moments as a stutterer.

So why is it adults are so afraid of being different, whereas children don't seem to mind? Clearly social expectations come into play.
However, it raises the question: is it really that important?

Walker's child saw a beautiful world in her mother's eye.
Hoagland's daughter wanted to talk like her father.
Are these not heart-warming expressions of love and admiration between parent and child?

A trivial difference can become the world to the bearer of the difference.
The difference can become a beautiful world to a small child.
While physical deformity, diseases, and difficulties are hard to live with
these moments show just how much emphasis we put on such silly "normalcies."

I'm not at all trivializing the emotional hardship these authors went through,
but as a generalization, this link between the pieces made me think of how often we take something that isn't a problem, and make it a problem.

If the world were a nicer place, these slight differences wouldn't matter. People wouldn't stare, be cruel, or react with impatience to those around them who are different in some way, slight or large.

Truth comes from the mouth of babes because they haven't been confused yet by the complications that arise as we grow up. Politics, religion, social standards, bullies, sex, etc all come forth to confuse us. While these issues have helped us all to grow to be the people who we are today, they sometimes skew us. Without this skewed sense of the world, I believe children just might have a better view.