Marcel Winatschek

Before We Teach Them Better

A five-year-old’s understanding of love is cleaner than ours. Show a kid a same-sex proposal and they think: if they love each other, that’s good. No confusion, no disgust, no sense of transgression. They haven’t been trained yet to rank different kinds of love. There’s a viral video of this—kids aged five to thirteen watching exactly that scene—and the whole point is supposed to be heartwarming: proof that kids are unprejudiced angels. But it’s sadder than that, watching something so obvious look like a revelation. In a few years, school and the internet will teach them which loves matter less than others.