I think, besides the obvious, ChildRP outside of comic relief situations is just HARD to do. I portray children NPCs in Dungeons&Dragons play sessions sometimes and I avoid it if possible. Not because they are boring, but because D&D worlds are just as complex and violent as Karakura, and children are strange beasts.
There is lots of developmental complexity that needs to be addressed during childRP... child cognition, child emotion, child social development, these all range dramatically... a 6 year old for example behaves completely different from an 11 year old. Growing up, we tend to forget how VAST these differences actually are and how hard it is to portrait the different stages accurately.
It is pretty hard to overcome your own development stage. Being older brings a whole bag of worldviews and words and emotional processing that you can't simply put on hold, even while roleplaying. Then there is the effort of balancing innocence with intelligence. They are naive but SURPRISINGLY perceptive about other things. It's incredibly inconsistent behavior. A kind of... smart/stupid, that's quite hard to replicate.
They also interact with authority figures and peers and situations in very strange way. Most of us don't remember how we felt towards older kids or even teens during our childhood.
Roleplaying children is probably something for people with younger siblings or in big families, or those who live next to a kindergarten. Next to that, you would probably need to be mature enough to recognize content that is veering inappropriate scenes quickly and shut those down immediately. So you need the OOC authority to dictate boundaries and expectations on the spot. (Which usually works for experienced staff members)
TLDR:
The fundamental tension is that ... truly AUTHENTIC child portrayal requires understanding aspects of childhood that are inherently sensitive.
But it is exactly those sensitive aspects that we need to avoid to portray them safely. Short: It's very hard to do good ChildRP, and extremely easy to mess up.
Still worthwhile to think about why we have certain limitations on this server.
There is lots of developmental complexity that needs to be addressed during childRP... child cognition, child emotion, child social development, these all range dramatically... a 6 year old for example behaves completely different from an 11 year old. Growing up, we tend to forget how VAST these differences actually are and how hard it is to portrait the different stages accurately.
It is pretty hard to overcome your own development stage. Being older brings a whole bag of worldviews and words and emotional processing that you can't simply put on hold, even while roleplaying. Then there is the effort of balancing innocence with intelligence. They are naive but SURPRISINGLY perceptive about other things. It's incredibly inconsistent behavior. A kind of... smart/stupid, that's quite hard to replicate.
They also interact with authority figures and peers and situations in very strange way. Most of us don't remember how we felt towards older kids or even teens during our childhood.
Roleplaying children is probably something for people with younger siblings or in big families, or those who live next to a kindergarten. Next to that, you would probably need to be mature enough to recognize content that is veering inappropriate scenes quickly and shut those down immediately. So you need the OOC authority to dictate boundaries and expectations on the spot. (Which usually works for experienced staff members)
TLDR:
The fundamental tension is that ... truly AUTHENTIC child portrayal requires understanding aspects of childhood that are inherently sensitive.
But it is exactly those sensitive aspects that we need to avoid to portray them safely. Short: It's very hard to do good ChildRP, and extremely easy to mess up.
Still worthwhile to think about why we have certain limitations on this server.
