Wasting Time with Childish Things
How C.S. lewis responded to critics who accused him of Arrested Development
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The following is a revision of an older post that I published here in the fall of 2023 when there were maybe around 30 readers. I’ve reworked it a fair amount, and thought it was one that you might enjoy or find useful. Here goes…
There were early critics who accused C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien of being childish for “wasting time” with fairy stories. And aren’t we glad now that they “wasted their time” writing The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings?
The accusation levelled at them was that of “arrested development.” No, they weren’t talking about the TV show that starred Jason Bateman.
“Arrested development” means a “psychological development that is not complete.” The Collins dictionary, from where I pulled this concise definition, provides an example sentence: “What I used to think was playfulness now looks like arrested development.”
That sentence represents precisely what Lewis’ critics were on about and it is also how many of us approach our lives. We think all the ways of childhood ought to be left behind and we are usually more than eager to do so.
What I want to advocate for is a reversal of this sentiment.
Can we instead look at our present adult lives and say: “What I used to think was arrested development now looks like playfulness?”
Or, perhaps, in a more full form: “What I used to think was arrested development turned out to my surprise and eventual delight to be a playfulness that I hadn’t known I needed.”
Even Jesus said “unless you become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”1
I’ve studied and preached on this saying before, and there are all kinds of opinions on what it really means. Does it mean that we need to keep some semblance of innocence? Does it mean that we need to embrace our vulnerability? Is it about keeping a childlike sense of wonder and joy?
Maybe yes to all of these. Maybe he meant “unless you become like a little child, you can’t really live the good life.”
What about your own childhood? What did you actually like? What did you like doing? What brought you joy? Maybe it is simply about pursuing the things that you actually enjoyed in your childhood.
When I think back to my childhood, especially those pre-teen and teen years, I was often preoccupied with wanting to grow up. If I could have understood the Collins Dictionary definition I would have agreed with it wholeheartedly when I was fourteen or fifteen or maybe even twenty-seven. There were things that I would look back on and think “I was so childish and now I’m so much more grown-up.”
I now realize that J.M. Barrie was really on to something when he wrote Peter Pan, a story about a boy that never grew up, the exact opposite of what what most adolescents think they want. Most teens want desperately to be adults. Nine year olds love reading books about eleven-year-olds, and thirteen-year-olds want to watch TV shows about high schoolers. And so on and so on, until somewhere along the way we hopefully realize that Lewis and Tolkien were right all along, and we hope to even have a few fleeting moments of child-like wonder in our life.
When I was a teenager I used to draw fantasy maps and then make up stories in my head of what took place in the lands they represented. I never showed them to anyone, and it didn’t take me long before I had thrown them all away, thinking they were silly. I had no idea then that I would eventually write fantasy adventure novels for young readers (of course, I say they are for young readers, but they are really for adults too, aren’t they!).
When I was really young, I used to dig in the dirt during soccer games until I learned that that wasn’t the right way to play. I also used to love collecting seashells and making sandcastles on the beach. I liked learning about the planets and about Greek and Egyptian mythology.
I actually still like all these things, and I’m much more able now to dig a sandcastle than play soccer after several torn ligaments in both ankles.
But what do any of my childhood joys or avocations really do for me now?
This is the question adults ask. What is the utility? What is the point or purpose? Or how might I turn this into something?
We’ve probably seen people do this with something they love. Someone loves crochet and they do it all the time. They make lovely things for their family and some friends. They wonder if this could “be a thing” and then they set up an Etsy store, and are attending thirty craft shows per year, and they’re creating TikTok videos of their creations. Feel free to do this if you want, but this is not the standard by which we ought to measure whether something is worthwhile. And actually, we all know this. Most people who crochet don’t do it to get a lot of views on social media or start a side business. They do it for fun. Period.
Sometimes the question of utility is really about legitimacy. It this really something that, as an adult, I am allowed to enjoy? The C.S. Lewis critics said that an Oxford professor most definitely should not be spending time writing fairy stories, and especially not enjoying them!
But, we have some weird lines in the sand for this sort of stuff, don’t we? Because it is totally okay for me to play fantasy football, but doodling maps or digging in the sand is somehow not what anyone over about 12 years old should be doing.
Children are our example here. Children don’t ask questions of utility and, when really young, they are rarely self-conscious about what brings them a sense of delight. They are too busy actually enjoying what is in front of them to worry about what anyone else thinks. The key for them is that they are in the moment actually enjoying the thing.
Also, sometimes kids are bored, especially if you get them away from a screen. It’s good to be bored. If you have kids, let them be bored! Being bored is an opportunity to imagine what might be the next enjoyable moment and then discover it: on a walk, or while looking up at the clouds, or in the pages of a good book, or digging in the dirt.
Here is a longer part of C.S. Lewis’ response to those critics of his. He challenges our notions of what personal growth actually looks like, contending that we ought to embrace all things that bring delight.
“The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? I now like hock, which I am sure I should not have liked as a child. But I still like lemon-squash. I call this growth or development because I have been enriched: where I formerly had only one pleasure, I now have two. But if I had to lose the taste for lemon-squash before I acquired the taste for hock, that would not be growth but simple change. I now enjoy Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Trollope as well as fairy tales and I call that growth: if I had had to lose the fairy tales in order to acquire the novelists, I would not say that I had grown but only that I had changed.”2
Lewis asks us to resist discarding what delighted us in childhood and instead simply add on new things that delight us as adults.
So go ahead - dig a sandcastle and play fantasy football.
Find funny animal shapes in the clouds and watch your favourite series on Netflix.
Or, simply, read a fantasy adventure book that is full of wonder. I know a good series that you could get into.
Don’t think that what you loved as a child needs to be destroyed or given up for the sake of some concept of “being an adult.”
Feel free to keep “wasting time” with “childish things” and delight in it all.
Matthew 18:3
From “On Three Ways of Writing for Children” - Originally a talk that C.S. Lewis delivered at the Library Association and was eventually adapted into an essay and published in Lewis’s Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories. Check out this great article about it from the Marginalian.