“He was not sentimental about children. It wasn’t that he disliked them, for he usually found their rascally ways to be rather charming. He felt a pang of remorse that they would have to change or be forced to change into something else, something more socially acceptable.”
Martha Grimes’ character Ned Isaly in Foul Matter.
And again:
“He was watching a woman with light hair watching the little girl, who, with great care, was transferring earth from ground to pail. It was one of those childhood activities that adults can never understand because it’s pointless. But then that was its attraction–to be doing something where the point lay simply in the doing of it.”
And there ends life’s lesson for today. Now off to do something with the kinder just for the point of simply doing it.
Nothing By The Book 
Lovely!