Outspokenness, fantasy and cruelty in the central phase of mental growth

Susan Orlean's "The American Male at Age Ten" appeared to be a stunning read, especially because of the reporting tone of the text in combination with the various credible details and quotes which make Colin Duffy clearly visible to everyone who has ever gotten in contact with a child in the age of ten. Except for the introductory paragraph, which combines the details to follow in a more experimental way and makes up a playful and attention-grabbing beginning for a text, "The American Male at Age Ten" is an observation in which the author may appear as a figure inside of the story, but seldom as an actual commenting narrator. It was admittedly hard for me to sort out a particular paragraph to comment on, but I finally decided on the following one from page three:

  It happened to be Colin's first day in fifth grade. Before class began, there was a lot of horsing
around, but there were also a lot of conversations about whether Magic Johnson had AIDS or just
HIV and whether someone falling in a pool of blood from a cut of his would get the disease. These
jolts of sobriety in the midst of rank goofiness are a ten-year-old's speciality. Each one comes as a fresh, hard surprise, like finding a razor blade in a candy apple. One day, Colin and I had been
discussing horses or dogs or something, and out of the blue he said, "What do you think is better,
to dump garbage in the ocean or to dump it on land, or to burn it?" Another time, he asked me if I
planned to have children. I had just spent an evening with him and his friend Japeth, during which
they put every small movable object in the house into Japeth's slingshot and fired it at me, so I told
him I wanted children but that I hoped they would all be girls, and he said, "Will you have an
abortion if you find out you have a boy?"

This passage is undoubtedly a highly accurate description of what conversations between children around the age of ten, a phase not only of physical but also of mental growth, can be like. It's both there, the naivety and the limitless, excessive fantasy of the early years, combined with a sometimes surprisingly deep understanding of the world and its problems. The first often leads to a sometimes shocking outspokenness when talking about topics, which in later years aren't addressed that easily because of social conventions and communicative boundaries. It's questions like "Will you have an abortion if you find out you have a boy?" which can make adults stutter sometimes. The adult world has forgotten how to cope with such honesty. Unfortunately, the child of ten will too within a short span of time. What is particularly childish about the conversation between the children though is that they are discussing HIV on the subject of basketball player Magic Johnson and the concrete example of "falling in a pool of blood from a cut of his".

I believe the reader really enters the story because of it's accurateness and again, the narrative reserve of the author. The examples and dialogues are credible and the whole paragraph the result of long and thorough observation of reality.