Over Winter Break, one of my cousins threw food at me after we happily spun around the dance floor. He’d recently turned five. What the hell happened?

Anyone who’s spent time with kids — whether siblings, cousins, family friends’ kids or campers you’re responsible for — knows that children can be odd cookies. Beyond their sweet mush of innocence, they can be pretty brutal. 

Kids say mean things about your hair, clock your questionable clothing choices, expose the unspoken tension between you and a family friend, rummage through your purse or, on a particularly inspired day, throw paint at you. 

It’s true, that after a certain age, the frequency by which kids start blowing raspberries at you decreases. But there’s a kind of mercilessness phase of childhood that nobody really talks about: being college students. 

At first, it seems unfair to equate grown adults — people who vote, (likely) pay taxes and can help themselves to their own plate of food — with a bunch of vile preschoolers. And yet the more time I spend in college, the more I realize that our habits as children merely manifest in more discreet versions of the same exclusion patterns and bad manners. 

Nasty toilet seats, clogged drains, odd smells shifting through the vents and, if you’ve ever been to a female-only bathroom, hair — lots and lots of it — stuck on unreachable parts of the wall. Evidently, college life forces us back into our old preschool habits of needing somebody to pick after us. 

Hygiene jokes aside, wandering through corridors at club events or attempting to make friends at Greek house parties, you’ll start to notice the scariest thing of all: College is a playground. Preprofessional groups, networking clubs, publications, sororities and fraternities. It’s a game of who plays with who, and we love it. Often, we call it “recruitment.”

Think about it like that scene from “Mean Girls” where Cady gets her first hallway tour. On the right, there’s the people that’ll be willing to play with you and toss the ball over. Next, there are the people you probably should not invite to your game, but it’s fine if you join theirs. 

Somewhere else, there are the people you’d probably like to play with, but have to go through an extensive process to get an invite. And lastly, there’s the people you definitely should stay away from and — someone will warn you about this — you must dodge their frisbee pass like the devil. 

While our new college playground is in no way as violent as that of a bunch of 6-year-olds (thankfully, we don’t often see people pushing one another from slides or throwing punches), it remains a stressful, obnoxious place. 

College can be brutal, too. It’s a world of backhanded compliments, inconsiderate alarm blasts, inexistent dining hall etiquette, passive-aggressive Snapchat texts and extraneous, multistep club applications. 

The truth is, we’re all complicit in it. We select our friend groups, “rush” our societies and later shuffle through freshmen to take over our executive positions. We drop our plates in the dining hall, throw copy paper in the toilet and litter when it’s convenient. We all have at least one person we’ve spoken badly about with our friends. 

But the thing about playgrounds — real ones — is that cruelty is rarely the end of the story. Kids cry, sulk and occasionally rip each other’s Barbie heads off, but they make up minutes later over a shared juice box. They don’t keep score for long. They forget quickly, forgive easily and return to play as if nothing happened. Their harshness exists alongside an impressive capacity for gentleness — a softness that reappears as quickly as it disappears. As much as they are mean, kids can be incredibly kind.

Maybe we need to give each other some of that same grace. We are still learning how to exist alongside one another, how to share space, how to include without posturing and how to compete without excluding. 

Perhaps we have something to learn from “mean” kids. Our bad manners don’t mean we’re doomed. They mean we’re unfinished — it’s what our parents liked to call our “growth period.” 

Maybe, like kids on a playground, we’re still growing, albeit awkwardly, into the people we will be after graduation. And growing up is hard. 

It’s no wonder we don’t want to do it alone.

Alexia Sextou is a Medill sophomore and author of “Margin Notes.” She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.

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