Don’t the parts of the brain that give us perspective and judgement come online later in life? Wouldn’t we be just shoehorning adult memories into the mind of someone who is going to think and react as a child.
And given how much we forget memories that we don’t re-use, how much of our adult memories will be intact after ten years living as a dependent?
I would go back to being 5 again, if I could keep my adult mind. Like madmonk28 upthread, I would mostly turn my energies toward money making (including investing in DC real estate!) to make my eventual adult life easier.
I would
eat my vegetables
floss
lay off the Doritos
stop hitting my brother
not be such a crybaby
learn Spanish, French and Italian (can I keep my adult mind but still get the easy language acquisition?)
watch less TV
wear sunscreen
spend EVEN MORE time at the Smithsonian museums
apply early decision
not waste time with that ridiculous black hole of angst ages 18-20
still marry my husband, only with less preliminary drama
But you have to guarantee that somehow I get exactly the same kids.
I actually would love it. But under one condition. I’d have the same family. The thought of growing up without my parents just is a horrible thought. I love my family too much to give them up just for a chance to change things I’ve effed up in life.
I wouldn’t do it but, if I could keep my adult mind, there could be one advantage. I could pull off all kinds of terrible crimes and either not get caught or not be a suspect at all given the scope of depravity of it all. Even if I did get caught, who cares, I am just a tiny kid and can’t help it. Five year olds don’t go to prison.
Wow, the other kids are going to tease the heck out of you. What a wasted youth, spent only to prepare for adulthood.
Childhood is for making mistakes without consequences; time enough to pay for them when you grow up.
Be 5 years old again? I’d take the offer in a flash!
Be 5 years old again in 1969, as I was - I’d take the offer in less than a flash!
Be 5 years old again, back in 1969 and know then what I know now… bwah hah hah!
The only provsio to any of those scenarios is that me going back in time wouldn’t make the kids I have today blink out of existence.
mm
Childhood sucks. People can tell you what to do, even if they really aren’t acting in your best interest. You are vulnerable and naive.
Adulthood rocks. I can eat ice cream for breakfast right now, if I want to. I can jump in my car and drive to Iowa if I feel like it, buy a house and settle down there. I can fly to Ireland, move out to the city or the country, decide to take up skydiving, whatever. My life is an infinite playground because I am an adult who still knows how to be silly.
You couldn’t pay me to go back.
right, I did that.
Some of the mistakes you make in childhood really do have consequences, hence the advantage of doing it again with an adult mind. This time I’ll know how to blow off teasing!
Go back to being 5 (so 1985 for me) with all my current knowlege? Definitely!
Why? Well, I wouldn’t guarantee anything I’d do a second time around would make me any better off in the long run, but I’d be validated in the choices I correctly made the first time around. Some things I’d do-
-Not be a victim. Fight back. If I get in trouble, so what- at least I stood up for myself. I’d rather remember my childhood as a time of frequent boyhood scraps and fights then whining about how I had to run home every day because kids in the bus pelted me with rocks as it drove by. Would I re-live it knowing how much I was punked on? Damn straight.
-Be more open to constructive criticism, to help me be a better writer/musician, but also be able to shut out un-useful advice people gave me.
-Try more extracurricular activities in school. Talk to girls more/take rejection better.
Some people are afraid to go this route because they don’t want to make things any worse, and they feel their childhood was so unpleasant they wouldn’t want to re-live it. I see it differently. I’d do it not expecting to be better off, just seeing what I’d be like taking a different route. Maybe I scrapped a lot in school, and it got me to train as a professional fighter and ended up being a UFC fighter at 27. Or maybe I was more driven in school and less affected by drama so I was a workaholic biochemist. Or maybe I end up in prison. Who knows!
thanks for the replies. i started the op thinking a return to childhood would be to replenish all that energy, and hope and enthusiasm for life while avoiding the growing pains and confusion and teasing with what you’ve learnt as an adult. i’d thought the op was an offer to an adventure rather than a ten year jail sentence. i’d reread the thread a couple of times and i still can’t quite place what bugs me, although i understand better now what it means for those who have had a bad childhood. i’ll like to point out one thing though, about freedom.
freedom as an adult comes at a price. generally speaking you would be locked down in a day job for every five out of seven days you have. the amount of free time you get as a child, even considering the demands of your parents, is alot. with the only responsibilities being to keep your grades up (easy in this case) and to pick up new skills along the way, the only limits to your freedom is your imagination! you’re five! stop worrying about not being able to drive, form contracts, travel, vote (vote?!), or to jump out of airplanes and other fancy adult stuff. your job is to have fun! don’t get me wrong, i enjoy what i do, but a ten year carefree vacation sounds like bliss to me.
i do have to agree though, not being able to eat ice cream anytime you want will suck. but i’m sure the attack plans for the fridge will be better laid out this time!
I would disagree - as an adult you are free to quit, be a dole bunny, change jobs, live under a bridge or work 7 days a week if you want to. The only limits on you are what consequences you are prepared to take. If you are a child you do what your parents tell you, and only have the freedom they permit.
I think that’s the problem - to me the things you’ve raised there are fun. And a kid can’t do any of them.
Its a completely different point of view.
Interesting question.
Me at 5 = not the most relaxed, happy-go-lucky kid you’d ever meet (raw deal on the parents there).
But my daughter is now 5, and she is one kick-ass kid. I don’t think I’m the best mom there is all the time, but I’m doing as well as I can, while striving every single day to do better. And she is a happy, healthy, smart, daring child.
I’d LOVE to have a week as her, as long as I could go back to having her as a daughter.
It’s taken more than 25 years to (mostly? partially?) get over the first 20 years of my life, and while I guess I intellectually understand that childhood can be fun, it doesn’t resonate with me. I don’t have any idea of what a carefree life is or what unguarded hope would be.
I know about being terrified if I’d be killed over a tiny mistake or feeling helpless as my father would beat my mother or a sibling. I carry the guilt of not saving others, although there is too little a child can do to protect one parent from another.
I know what it’s like to be forced to doubt if my feelings, thoughts or memories were true. The psychological damage which occurs when a parent uses what is essentially brainwashing techniques and torture to insist that a child believes he feels, thinks for remembers events in a way the father wants. To lose one’s self is so hard to overcome and is a much harder burden not only to overcome, but also to explain to others.
I know how long it takes to overcome being raped, especially when it’s forbidden to talk about. I know what a shock it is to hear directly from a father how he molested my sisters. I know how long it takes to trust any sex after that.
I know what it’s like to be asked as a four-year-old which food I’d like to be given, and to be beaten for the wrong answer. I know how long that takes to overcome feelings of panic as an adult when faced with unexpected choices.
I know how hard it hurts to be beaten for asking, as a child, the parent to let me play a game first instead of waiting for the father’s turn. I know how hard magazines can hurt when thrown because I happened to be reading one my father wanted.
I know the danger of seeming smart. Or happy. Or carefree. Or even sad, if that was the wrong emotion of the day. You learn how to say a little to figure out the right emotion to be in. It helps you survive. That, and trying hard to not have needs.
I cannot fathom repeating that experience. I guess it would be different if there were more the happy parts. Hell, at one point, all I wanted was to have just one happy memory of my father.
While I don’t know how many others have shared experiences, I’m sure it’s unfortuanately too many.
loose nuts and all, i still envy the present you for having found love. (((TokyoPlayer)))
And I am fortuanate and even more so for having gotten rid of enough shit that I was able to get past the need of going out with people with severe problems of their own. I’ve been sort of wallowing in my shit for a while but I’m getting out of it now.
If I’m five again, my freedom is limited by the fact that I have to live with my parents and must obey them, don’t have any money of my own, must go to school, must be in the class assigned to me, cannot drive, cannot travel on my own, cannot work, etc. In comparison, working 5 days a week at a job that I can quit at any time seems blissfully liberating.
TP, don’t be hard on yourself for ‘‘wallowing in your shit.’’ I think it’s a natural part of the healing process to have to come to terms with the suckage. And sometimes you come to terms with it, then get on with your life for a while, then have to face it again down the road, and you think, '‘crap, didn’t we already do this?" Perfectly normal. And believe me, you’ve been through shit that would make my head spin, and I don’t often say that. 
So don’t dare forget your strength, that’s all I’m sayin’.
Five, no way in hell. I was harrassed by nuns from the age of 5 to the age of twelve. Just one of my favorite experiences: I got a D in math in the 5th grade because the nun teaching my math class didn’t like the way I stacked my books. I stacked them in the order of my classes. She thought they should be stacked from biggest to smallest. I aced every test and still got a D. :smack: I begged my parents to let me go to public school but they refused. I told them my teachers didn’t like me. And ya know the funny thing, years later my Mom told me that during a teacher conference the math teacher above told my parents she just didn’t like me. :eek: BITCH. But my mother was an uber-Catholic and so there was no other choice.
However, if I could go back and be 15 again that would be great. I was in public school, I liked my classes, I had the best friends and I discovered boys in a totally good way. My 15th summer was the best ever. Playing kissy face all afternoon and into the night, 11 hour days at the pool, drive-in movies with much lip-locking every weekend, no drugs, no drinking, no worries, riding my bike everywhere, parents still happy with each other…
When I was 15 I was positive that only good things could happen and that I was living in the best of all possible worlds, me and Candide. 
Yeah I would do my 15th year over, but I wouldn’t want my ‘adult’ knowledge. And don’t take that the wrong way, I’ve had way more ups than downs in my life, it’s just; that one year was so good and at that one point in time I couldn’t even imagine bad things happening. The funny part is my actual life turned out way better than I ever thought it could. So in reality I was probably suffering from a lack of imagination. Hmmm maybe ignorance is bliss.
If this hypothetical were true and you went back with your memories intact, you wouldn’t be that same 5 year old. The reason he could do that to you was because you didn’t know how to deal with it. You wouldn’t have to go through the same hell because you’d know there were alternatives to just taking the punishment. Running away, telling someone, getting some kind of help from outside the family, and even killing him would be possible. (What’s the worst the police are going to do to a 5 year old? Probably therapy for whatever psychological scarring would cause a kid to deliberately kill his father.) I sure wouldn’t morally censure you for getting rid of him. That man both directly and indirectly caused you more physical and emotional pain than most other people ever have to handle in their lives.
That wouldn’t change the terrible memories you have from the first time, but you wouldn’t have to live through it again.
That’s a tough one, because I don’t what I could have done as a five-year-old to change the situation. Murder seems to be about the only option, and I don’t know if I could do that or not, even knowing that I wouldn’t get legally punished.
The world was different then, and parents were giving more latitude in fucking up their children’s lives. I don’t know if other people would have helped.