Certainly it's true that kids can get a lot of joy out of something that to an adult seems really small or boring. But the flip side is kids can get totally emotionally distraught or enraged over tiny things. Are these two sides of the same coin, and come from having just a smaller world, where small things can feel very big to a developing brain? Or as an adult with a fully-formed brain and access to the larger worl…
There’s the external trigger and how it fits into their life experience. Something that may be a 6/10 fun for you may literally be the most fun the child has ever had because they have less life experience. Something that’s a 2/10 pain might be literally the most pain they ever remember experiencing.
Which plays into how much practice they have managing these emotions. You get better at dealing with pain and frustration with practice. But no amount of practicing dealing with a paper cut will ever prepare you for being stabbed. Curling a 5lb dumbbell every day won’t get you to curling 100lbs.
But this is also impacted by the options they have available to respond to these emotions. As an adult if you’re frustrated you have the practice, fully realized autonomy, and societal trust to make real changes to address the issues in front of you. You don’t need to deal with this entirely internally. As a child, often your options essentially boil down to “deal with it”. And even as they expand, it takes time to practice with the new options available to you.
So an adult will experience the emotions less heightened and they also have more practice and better tools for handling them. The child will experience a stronger emotion, have little practice in managing the emotion, and few other options to address the overall situation.
Which can easily get into a negative feedback loop. Something is frustrating. The emotion is strong and you don’t know what to do about it. That’s frustrating. You can’t fix the situation. That’s frustrating. Now you’re more frustrated, GOTO 10. Pretty soon the emotions have compounded into something overwhelming.
And a child, much like an adult that hits this point, is going to have a meltdown. I don’t think adults are much better equipped at handling themselves when they are experiencing overwhelming emotions, it’s just much more difficult for them to get there in the first place.
As an adult, I think you can absolutely learn to find more joy in the small things. We have to, by necessity, filter some of the small things out of our days so just being an adult doesn’t become overwhelming. Making a conscious effort to be present and aware can go a long way. This is, I think, what’s happening when people have these mundane experiences with children and find them magical—simply having the child there to point things out and force them to be aware can bring back a lot of that small joy. It will never rise to the same level as the child’s because you come into it with a greater range of experience and it often lacks the novelty, but it can be made into much more than it normally is for you. And you will certainly be dragged down much less by any negative parts of the experience.
Anyway, my two cents as someone that spends a lot of time thinking about this both in terms of managing my own emotions and happiness as well as being a dad… And someone that’s trying _very_ hard to procrastinate right now.