People would often refer to childern as "pure" and the "most innocent creatures on earth" while adults are evil and cruel.
But when I think back on my life so far, which isn't a long period of time, I find these statements to no quiet match the truth
In my experience, and not just mine also the story's of my siblings or friends past backup my thesis, I would almost say it's the opposite. When judging my life stages I can simply say that my time in kindergarten wasn't the "time of my life" it was rather harsh
but nothing compared to my time from elementary school to 6th grade, why? Its simple. Because children are cruel. In kindergarten I regularly got picked on but I didn't take it as seriously even thought I felt really bad about it. Then, when entering elementary school it was the worst time of my life. I was literally bullied and lost my friends because I was "uncool". But it wasn't my case alone, when you pay close attention to it you will notice that the younger they are the more cases of bullying happen. The older I got the less I experienced it or even notice it in my environment. I'm not saying that children are bad and heartless monsters while older adults are angels because that's totally not the case but children are quite frightening. Why would a pure childs behavior be like that? That's a difficult question, it definitely has more than one factor. On the one hand it could be the influence of the environment which is their family, neighbourhood or these days also the TV and social media. Children pick up ways to talk & behave and of course try to use them also sometimes without knowing the right context for it too, so it can happen for them to sometimes laugh at the wrong situations or even be rude without reason. On the other hand I would go as far as saying that children are born with out a sense of sympathy. Of course it is still unclear with which psychological abilities a human is born with and which have to be learned in their lifespan but to plainly explain my second thesis, which will be far from covered in this quick mentioning, when assuming a human is born without the ability to emphasise with others it will first have to gain that "skill" in order to do so they play. Children learn most of their competences through playing, for this specific abilitie I want to point out how common roleplay is, while doing so they put their selves into the situation of a different person and experience their point of view and emotions. This process of gaining sympathy can lead to different results, so it can happen that people are able to feel different amounts of sympathy. While one fully understands another's feelings a different person can't understand those at all due to his lack of sympathy. In extreme cases where a individual is completely unable to empathise with others, because they possibly never learned it or are unable to learn it, those cases are called "sociopaths". So if my second thesis was true that would mean that all newborn are sociopaths, which isn't necessarily as bad as it sounds. So as a conclusion I would say yes children are quite cruel and frightening sometimes, but that is mostly due to their lack of understanding the weight put on their actions, they act which out understanding to differ between "good" and "bad" most learn to over come this while others grow up with it so it can result into these bad adults we detest while in their childhood they could be forgiven those actions since they "didn't know it any better" but suddenly when they became adults it becomes unacceptable.