Gray Matters, October 2026
The Purpose of Childhood
Our year is off to a wonderful start! September is a busy month as we check off many beginning-of-school traditions: we welcomed new students and educators to Capitol Hill Day School at our Common Threads all-school assembly, celebrated our 8th Grade class at our annual Dot Assembly (ask your children about this unique tradition of nearly 40 years—it’s one of my favorites), and just this past week hosted two special Back to School Nights.
During my Back to School Night remarks, I spoke about the purpose of childhood.
A picture of my children recently popped up on my phone. It was dated September 2, 2014, with a caption that could have read: Capitol Hill Day School first day of school: 3rd, 4th, and 7th Grades. The image immediately brought me back to that moment. My kids are now 21, 22, and 25, and this past weekend, we attended our 12th and final college family weekend.
Childhood goes too fast. It feels particularly rushed at this moment in time. I very much empathize with the challenges parents face today. As I have shared previously, the pressures on humanity feel unique, and I deeply worry about the direct and indirect impact those pressures have on children.
I recently came across a line from the Tom Stoppard play, The Coast of Utopia: “Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child.”
Childhood should be joyful and playful. It should be a time when children experience wonder, make friends, and explore their interests. Children are funny and insightful, naturally empathetic and compassionate. Inevitably, childhood also includes disappointment and sadness. Children say and do unkind things. They struggle, try again, and make mistakes.
Children are also naturally curious. They have an innate drive to learn and make sense of the world around them. Childhood involves critically discussing literature and history, grappling with challenging mathematics, and engaging in scientific inquiry. Learning should be intellectually stimulating and experiential. It should invite children to ask questions, follow their curiosity, wrestle with complexity, and discover that they are capable of more than they may have initially imagined.
This is all part of the purpose of childhood. And as folks who care dearly about the healthy development of children, I believe we must demonstrate the patience, grace, and understanding to help children to navigate all of these experiences, good and bad, with agency and autonomy.
A fellow head of school recently wrote something that resonated with me: “This is one of life’s paradoxes. We make decisions for our children because they don’t yet have good judgment. But they develop good judgment by making decisions. Their choices will be imperfect, and sometimes just wrong. That’s part of the process.”
Childhood does have an end. Though, as my own children sometimes remind me, being an adult doesn’t necessarily mean you stop acting, on occasion, like a child. But getting to the end is not the point of the journey. I agree with Stoppard’s character: a child’s purpose is indeed to simply be a child.
To be curious, to play, to wonder, to make mistakes, to ask questions, to experience joy and disappointment, to learn, to grow. At the critical stage of childhood, a stage that moves too fast, I believe we at Capitol Hill Day School set children on the best path not by rushing them toward the future, but by allowing them to be children for as long as possible.
