Grumpy Bulldog: Foiled By Those Meddling Kids!

After watching "Super 8" I Tweeted that if movies have taught me anything it's that when a crisis happens we should just let a group of plucky teenagers handle it.  Briane Pagel (aka whyihatepeople) Tweeted that that sounded like a blog entry.

Make it so!

I don't know where the trope of kids being smarter than adults originated from.  Peanuts?  Little Rascals?  Scooby-Doo?  But it's a pretty common thing now when you have a movie about kids/teens that they're the ones who know what's going on and fix things, not the adults who are supposed to be in charge.

In "Super 8" there's a group of five middle schoolers making a movie when their science teacher crashes his truck into a train, derailing it.  While the grown ups are either running around panicking or trying to hush things up, it's those meddling kids who find out what's really going on and fix the problem.

Which at a time when Congress seems like it's a bunch of first graders anymore just sitting around calling each other names and getting nothing done, made me think that really we should just find some plucky kids to run things.  It works in the movies, right?

Though are kids really smarter than adults?  It depends to some extent on the kid and the adult.  There are probably little geniuses who are way smarter than me.  There are also some kids who are dumb as a box of rocks--and some adults too.  But in general I think when you have these kind of stories the idea is that the kids might not be smarter, but they're more open to new ideas.  Their minds are more imaginative and creative because they (most of them) haven't been exposed to all the shit of the real world that generally flogs all the joy and wonder out of an adult's brain.

It's like when my brother and I were kids we'd come up with all sorts of stories with our action figures.  Now if I pick up an action figure I don't really know what to do with it except put it on my desk and look at it.  This was about the best I could do:

My Batman toys.  They're doing...something.

OK, part of that is just embarrassment because when you're a grown up you're not supposed to play with toys anymore.  Let me emphasize that for people like my brother:  when you're a grown up you're not supposed to play with toys anymore.  Unless you're playing with a kid.  Then it's OK.  Now I see why my brother had a kid.

On top of that, kids haven't also been indoctrinated yet with all of our hatreds and prejudices.  Which again might be a good reason to reverse the Constitution and make it so no one OVER 25 can hold elected office.  So it's easier in some ways for them to work together to find a solution to the problem than for the adults.

Anyway, when you're writing a story for kids/young adults I suppose this trope is a good idea because you're aiming the story at kids/young adults and they don't want to read that the grown ups are smarter than them.  They want to be the heroes!  That's something to keep in mind then.