Parenting & Family Quote by Jessamyn West

West slips a quiet provocation into a sentence that sounds almost like an observation from the porch: children, she suggests, are emotionally bilingual in a way adults have unlearned. The line isn’t sentimental animal-loving; it’s an accusation leveled at “grown-up” distance. “Sympathies” does the heavy lifting here. Not intellect, not morality, not language - the metric is emotional kinship, the capacity to feel with another creature without demanding it speak back in the approved human register.

The subtext is about social training. Kids are still early in the long apprenticeship of hierarchy: learning which beings count, which are “just” animals, which feelings are embarrassing, which forms of care are impractical. Animals meet children where they are - immediate, physical, expressive, unedited. Adults, meanwhile, often require performance: eye contact, politeness, explanation, self-control. Of course the child feels closer to the dog than the dinner guest.

West, writing in a 20th-century American literary landscape that prized domestic realism and moral scrutiny, smuggles a critique of modern adulthood’s narrowing empathy. Her phrasing implies loss: if children feel nearer, adults have moved away. It also hints at a political edge. The way we teach children to see animals - as companions, commodities, pests, symbols - is one of the first curricula of power. West’s sentence makes that lesson visible, and a little shameful.