Here's why Stoics said kids have no emotions
No emotions before reason
Some ancient Stoics believed that young children don't have emotions. They insisted that children don’t become fully human until seven or so.
At first glance, this view is outrageous. But before immediately dismissing it we need to understand what they meant.
For the Stoics, emotions are value judgments cemented as beliefs. They are decisions about how to respond to impressions of value. Crucially, and we don’t talk about this much, for the Stoics, this decision necessarily requires language. For example, if you are afraid of something then you believe that it can hurt you and can express that in words. It’s not just a feeling of unease.
Emotions are deeper than feelings. Feelings are pre-rational and don’t require language, unlike emotions which require the exercise of our reason. Young children have feelings, but they aren’t mature enough to experience emotions – at least according to the ancient Stoics.
The insight here is that emotions require value judgments.
Emotions are not just “moods” or “sensations.” The evolutionary psychologist Randy Nesse recognizes this when he defines emotions as:
Emotions are specialized states that adjust physiology, cognition, subjective experience, facial expressions, and behavior in ways that increase the ability to meet the adaptive challenges of situations that have recurred over the evolutionary history of a species.
This isn’t exactly the Stoic view, but what it shares with the Stoics is that emotions like sadness, grief, hope, anger, joy, and fear are multi-faceted. There’s a reason why the Stoics created their own classification of emotions – because they are complicated things. Whether or not the claim about children is correct, it draws out this key aspect of the Stoic philosophy of emotion.
What’s core for the Stoics here is our value judgments and cognition. When you are emotional it’s not just “how you feel” it reveals “how you think.” Emotions are not passive things that happen to us, but the outcome of how we interpret the world. The emotions we invite reveal who we are.
“Boys fear trifles, children fear shadows, we fear both.”
Seneca, Letter 4
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