This is not correct. I remember having a sense of shame when I was 4 when I tried to hurt another kid. Kids will also hide the things they do wrong, because they know it is wrong.
No. They hide the things they do wrong because they learnt there are consequences and they dont want to get caught.
And they do care about right and wrong.
I accidentally killed a baby bird when I was little. It still hurts when I think about it.
Some kids are indeed savages. But not all of us.
Or they know they'll be told it was wrong. Children start knowing nothing then they slowly absorb what they're told again and again, and what they see around them until they feel it. They go from knowing nothing, to knowing what the adults told them, to internalizing that and feeling it rather than just knowing it (maybe these 2 concepts fully overlap in other people's minds).
But until they do get all of that, they'll spend a lot of time plucking wings off of insects, burning ants with a magnifying glass, pulling the cat by the tail, or throwing rocks at dogs and frogs.
My parents filled in some details, some of which I did not remember.
And yeah, I remember the emotions I felt.
You disagreed with sevenzero when they claimed that concepts like violence and right and wrong are actively taught by parents instead of being innate to children. Assuming you read all three lines of sevenzero's comment before disagreeing: the perspective of your 4-year-old self is not a reliable source, because 4-year-old children cannot accurately differentiate between innate or taught feelings.
I recall seeing a TV show where they studied very young people by putting them in right and wrong situations, and they definitely knew what was right and wrong.
How could a person who was taught social concepts of right and wrong since birth ever hope to reliably determine which parts of said concepts in their own mind are innate, and which aren't? Human minds are infamous for being terrible at introspecting their own mechanisms at the best of times.
> I recall seeing a TV show where they studied very young people by putting them in right and wrong situations, and they definitely knew what was right and wrong.
Unless said very young people were raised by wolves, chances are that they've been taught these concepts since birth as well. You can't determine the innateness by only looking at people who share this bias.
Selective breeding of foxes has turned them into social animals.
It is important to understand our own human limits. We cannot reason our way through our own minds, we can only accept our biases and try to work around them. But the first step is being humble enough to accept that human intuition is no substitute for actual research.
Most of your memories and everything you think of now about early childhood were formed long after it. They were created from bits and pieces of real memories, stories, backsplanations for things that happened later, retrospective, etc. Even if you had now an accurate debug dump of your child brain, you'd still not be able to process that the way you processed it back then.
Your kid brain was a black box, a CPU with a different architecture running code that you've never before or since. You later tried to recreate that code for the CPU you have now, based on input from others who've also never seen that original code or have access to that type of CPU. And you are certain you recreated it accurately?
Yes.
I try to help him understand this slowly, but a lot of "play" can look violent to my eyes, and I struggle to remember that. A 3 year old just doesn't see it that way yet, and that's fine. But it's hard to remember that in the moment.