"Evil, evil, evil child."
The
social habits of infants are acquired from numerous sources, as in youth we are prone to
influence.
A child of three years, who has a
speech impediment and who appears to be very stupid and
docile even for its age, is naturally not an annoyance to its carers should they provide a composite of
appropriate gestures and behaviour.
Should this child one day approach a young adult with a new behaviour, it should be treated with joy and encouragement depending of course, on what that behaviour is.
For numerous years a child has visited my household every Saturday for an access visit. It is in my opinion a very strange child. It does not talk at all; it sits still, does not cry and will do as you ask of it without a
verbal response.
My mother seems to have trained it to turn on the television, an activity that has been a bit of a joke for some time now.
A few months back this child began to talk at random intervals, shouting out words that were often garbled.
We assumed the child was a "
late bloomer", but was finally learning to talk. It took it a month more before it began to ask for things, and began to develop a basic
speech pattern.
Every person in my house could make this child
laugh except me. It was as if it greeted me with a kind of silent contempt, as if it knew something about me.
I felt stupid questioning the motives of such a young child and so I went without complaint to my mother, remaining wary of something so trivial.
On one Saturday this child was acting like it used to, all
quiet, not talking; just
sitting. I was relieved, it no longer looked at me strangely and my family had given up encouraging it to talk. I forgot it was in the house, and I did my homework while it sat.
I was completely absorbed with my work when the child interrupted me by turning on the radio. I wasn't too annoyed, and ignored it.
The child then walked up to me standing unnaturally on it's tip-toes, began to twitch all over, bending forwards and backwards while its legs stamped furiously. All the while its head remained stationary, staring up at me with a satanic grimace plastered on its face. I was
shocked!
It continued to do this for a period and grabbed on to my legs in the process, but I was
frozen, and admittedly scared.
What could I do? I kicked it off, and ran out of the room to get my mother. I explained what the child had just done, and she went to investigate. I followed her back in the room, and the child was still
acting the same. I recoiled again but my mother just laughed.
I still don't understand why the kid would do
it. My mother thinks it was dancing, but I don't know how it learned to dance like that.
It genuinely scared me, and
months later
I treat this child with the contempt I suspect it gives me.