The Difference Between “Kid” and “Kiddo”

Dr. Jill Biden

Like millions of left-leaning Americans, I felt queasy when shitty journalist Joseph Epstein called presumptive First Lady Dr. Jill Biden “kiddo” this past weekend. Epstein delivered the unearned nickname amid a string of sobriquets lumped on Dr. Biden in jumbled succession, like the repartee in a 1930s screwball comedy. Maybe Epstein thought he sounded like Clark Gable. Instead, he wound up sounding like a patronizing dickhead.

My opinion about this incident is extensively documented. Yet I’ve realized my initial response overlooked something. I said the word kiddo “demonstrates bad faith.” Yet afterward, I remembered the summer of 2017, when Donald Trump, Jr., son of the President, admitted meeting with Russian state agents to purchase dirt on his father’s campaign rival, something he’d previously denied. Several politicians and pundits rushed to Junior’s defense, calling him “a good kid.”

Junior Trump was 39 years old, married, and a father of five. Dr. Biden is seventy years old. Both are, in the eyes of the power establishment, still kids.

At first blush, these two uses of “kid” seem contradictory. Epstein used the word kiddo to undermine Dr. Biden, and with her the entire educational establishment that tacitly rewards women. Multiple sources, including President Trump, called Don Junior a good kid to shield him from culpability for meeting with America’s state enemies during a bitter campaign. The word which tears Dr. Biden down, somehow protects Junior Trump from consequences.

Yet, thinking about it, I realize these two uses overlap remarkably. To call someone “kid” or “kiddo” makes them small, defenseless, and needful of adult guidance. The word kid conjures images of a newborn baby goat, still wobbling unsteadily, requiring its mother for food and protection against a world swarming with predators. Kids, whether human or goat, need adults to prepare them for an innately hostile, even violent, world.

Sure, the attitudes with which one claims adult superiority over a purported minor differ. Epstein’s vulgar diminishment of a grandmother with a terminal degree is noxious, compared to the Trump Administration attempting to keep Junior a permanent adolescent. Besides, Epstein isn’t Dr. Biden’s father; parents can, arguably, claim parental protection over adult children. These shouldn’t be mistaken for equivalent events.

Donald Trump, Jr.

Yet they share one important presumption: some people never, somehow, become adults. They have protected adolescent status well into adulthood, willingly or not. This week’s political shakeouts have demonstrated how that happens in national politics, but it isn’t unique to that domain. Criminal law has revealed how some people become adults at absurdly young ages, while others remain children for literally decades.

Back in 2014, Cleveland, Ohio, police shot Tamir Rice in a public park because he was playing with a toy gun. The officer who pulled the trigger claimed he couldn't distinguish Rice’s toy from a real gun. Importantly for our purposes, he also claimed he thought 12-year-old Rice looked twenty. We’ve heard similar in the shootings of Laquan MacDonald, Michael Brown, and other Black children. Somehow, he always “looked big for his age.”

By contrast, convicted Stanford rapist Brock Turner was nineteen years old, and therefore a legal adult in all fifty states. Yet even after tearful witness testimony and international outcry, the judge nevertheless sentenced him to a fiddling punishment, asserting that Turner was a child and therefore not culpable. Like Junior Trump, Turner is shielded from legal consequences (but thankfully not public censure) by his permanent adolescence.

White people are protected by childhood’s cloak, even if, like Dr. Biden, they don’t want it. Black people, by contrast, have adulthood thrust upon them early. Our society’s definition of childhood innocence is White, frequently fair-haired, and innately female, as any boy whose father thought he needed to “teach you to be a man” can attest. If you’re White, and especially if you’re a woman, you’re a child forever.

Meanwhile, we watch the ideological retreat of a President whose notorious midnight Twitter tantrums, complete with schoolyard name-calling, have perhaps permanently cheapened the Executive Branch. At age 74, his arrested adolescence doesn’t just embarrass him, it jeopardizes global security. This product of permanent White childhood has made humanity less safe, perhaps forever.

Admittedly, secular Western society lacks adulthood rites. Where traditional cultures had programmed events when children became adults, we lack that now, except in religious enclaves. This means extended White childhood is likely to get longer and more destructive. Because if nothing happens to turn the child into an adult, nothing will stop the entitled child demanding the teat, even if they don’t want it.