"A child too, can never grasp the fact that the same mother who cooks so well, is so concerned about his cough, and helps so kindly with his homework, in some circumstance has no more feeling than a wall of his hidden inner world"

A paradox of childhood unfolds in the contrast between devoted daily care and emotional opacity. The caregiver who nourishes, measures fevers, and patiently corrects arithmetic appears omnipotent in the world of concrete needs. Yet when the terrain shifts to the private thicket of fears, fantasies, and shame, the “hidden inner world”, that same figure can feel as unreachable as stone. Practical love and psychological attunement do not always arrive together, and a child’s imagination struggles to reconcile attentive action with an absence of felt understanding.

The images of soup, coughs, and homework are tangible; they represent competence, reliability, and visible kindness. They also point to a socially sanctioned script of motherhood: to do, to fix, to protect. But the interior life of a child calls for a different literacy, one that hears what is not said, tolerates ambiguity, and honors experiences that may not yield to solution. Where the parent meets the world with tools, the child meets it with mysteries. The wall is not cruelty so much as a boundary between languages.

There is also the shock of individuation. Children often idealize the caregiver as all-seeing. Discovering that a beloved adult cannot enter the secret rooms of one’s mind punctures that ideal and inaugurates a new solitude. The moment is both wound and milestone: painful because it reveals a limit to love’s reach, formative because it makes room for privacy, imagination, and the need to speak for oneself.

The wall may be the mother’s own, built from exhaustion, training, or unexamined hurt. It might be cultural, a legacy that prizes practical virtue over emotional presence. Whatever its source, the child’s bafflement registers a universal truth: care that meets the body and the schedule can coexist with a silence around the soul. Growing up often means learning to translate between these worlds, to forgive the limits of those who fed us, and to seek or offer the kind of listening that turns walls into doors.