From the Wikipedia article Pain in babies:

As recently as 1999, it was commonly stated that babies could not feel pain until they were a year old (…)

It was only in the last quarter of the 20th century that scientific techniques finally established babies definitely do experience pain – probably more than adults (…)

(…) babies exposed to pain in the neonatal period have more difficulty in areas like bonding between mother and child, later contact with health professionals, personal and social psychological well-being (…)

(…) adolescent aggression and self-destructive behaviour, including suicide, may, in some cases, be attributed to the long-term effects of untreated neonatal pain.

Due to the inability to speak or the side effects of the illness, it may be difficult to receive a proper diagnosis.

Until a few decades ago many children underwent medical procedures, including open heart surgery without any anesthesia, other than a muscle relaxant to keep them still. Imagine yourself as a baby, with adult strangers in scrubs digging inside you, while you feel everything, and you can’t move.

“Even if they feel something, they’ll forget it”, they said. My sister was 11 months old when they removed (burned off) a wart from her nose. Now she’s fifty, and she states that she remembers; and to this day she avoids doctors.

Well, I am questioning the “emotional immaturity and lack of life experience” of prodigies. I think that’s a myth, just like the lack of pain in babies. I’ve seen adults, including musicians with the apparent emotional immaturity and lack of life experience of a toddler; and I’ve seen five-year-olds with an emotional baggage and experiences rivaling that of an average adult’s. They just didn’t have the vocabulary to express their feelings. Or they repressed them.

Many prodigies can acquire the musical vocabulary of an adult musician in just a few years, and some will express themselves in music better than in their native language. Better than many adults after decades of study and practice.

But people of the same age, both adults and children, can have very different levels of education, emotional maturity and life experiences. Regardless how hard society tries to press us in the same molds, there will always be differences between individuals.

So don’t overestimate adults. And don’t underestimate children. Especially prodigies.

You might have a point, at least from your perspective, with today’s children, many of them shielded from the real world in pink-padded prison cells. The lack of life experience was forced on them.

But even they have real emotions; the prison cell in which we’re raising them becoming their real life experience… until some will break out from their prison, some will be released without knowing the laws of the jungle out there; and the jungle will hit many of them hard. Repeatedly, where it really hurts. You and me will never fully understand their emotions and experiences; but their generation will.

I’m still confident that if we’ll somehow survive this century, psychology, especially child psychology (still in diapers today) will grow and evolve to a level where our grand-grand-grandchildren will find a healthy balance between protecting their children and preparing them for life. Or who knows, maybe they’ll rediscover it.