Is it worse for Harry or Dudley at 4 Privet?

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 96867

djrfdh wrote:
> I think it's a miracle that Harry survived at the Dursley's to ever 
> get to Hogwarts! You have to wonder, just how he was treated as a 
> baby, since he was only one when he came to Number 4 Privet Drive.  
> If he was ignored and kept in a closet, how did he learn to walk? To 
> talk? To be polite? To be able to interact with others? Surely, 
> Petunia must have bestowed "some" kindness (perhaps when Vernon was 
> at work?) on Harry. I still believe she isn't as mean as she would 
> have us....but more likely Vernon....think! "Blood is thicker than 
> water" has a curious ring to it!


Carol:
It's possible that Petunia treated Harry reasonably well as a small
child (up to the age of five or six), not actively abusing him and
(fortunately for him) not indulging him, either. I'm guessing that it
was only when he started showing signs of being "abnormal" (magical)
that they relegated him to a closet--though he would always have been
treated as a sort of stepchild--fewer and cheaper presents than
Dudley, etc. I think he first became aware of it when Dudley got a
shiny new bicycle or tricycle and he didn't (a memory from the first
occlumency lesson, IIRC). 

BTW (and I know a number of people will disagree with me), Harry did
actually acquire some benefits from his rather deprived childhood.
Unlike Ron, he can flick a spider off his socks without fear. He's
used to them, just as he grew used to his cupboard. Children,
especially wizard children, are more adaptable than we think they are.
Think of the children from non-Western cultures who have grown up in
mud huts, or those (Muggles) from earlier centuries who had no
electricity or indoor plumbing. And our parents or grandparents and
great-grandparents were almost certainly "disciplined" using corporal
punishment, yet most of them grew up to be decent, hard-working, even
loving people.

The Dursleys, as I've said before, apply a double standard with Harry
and Dudley, an indulgence that they mistake for loving and nurturing
with Dudley and an old-fashioned, rigorous spare-the-rod,
spoil-the-child mentality with Harry (though they don't actually beat
him). I'm sure they tell themselves (as old-fashioned parents did)
that it's for his own good to punish him. We know they believe that
punishing him will suppress his magical tendencies and make him
"normal" like them. It's very much like the old idea of washing out a
child's mouth if he swore or told a lie: he'll learn his lesson and
won't repeat the behavior for fear of that particular punishment. (I
remember reading somewhere--I think in a work of nineteenth-century
fiction--about a child who had the end of his or her tongue snipped of
with scissors for telling a lie. Now *that* was child abuse!)

Carol, who thinks that Harry's childhood is no worse than Jane Eyre's
and better than David Copperfield's