Ah children, sweet, innocent, and blissfully unaware children. Dependent on others to safeguard and provide for them while powerful adults protect their vulnerabilities, they float through a mystical haze of laughter and games. Our own memories remind us of such idyllic times. But what evidence do we have to defend such lofty claims? Can we rely on our own suspect memory? Can we accept what we have been told our whole lives and seen played out in countless childhood spaces? “We might quite easily come to the conclusion that the Golden Age of childhood is nothing more than a wistful adult fantasy for a time and place that never actually existed” (Taylor, 2011, p. 421). Worse yet, we are in danger of not only repeating the mistakes we have blithely believed, but now perpetuate and establish them in a subsequent generation, thus claiming them as our own truth. If we do not act, we comply and accept the terms offered to us by a system that resists questioning. The question remains, however, what exactly these ‘truths’ are and how they came to be.
Skepticism
In the western cultures, electronic avenues, social media, and a general disconnect from nature threaten to devour the imagination and creativity often associated with childhood. What has become deadened and lost in adulthood is now being swept away from an earlier and earlier age. Art is condescended on in favor of academia. Children are being raised indoors, only stepping outside to walk on concrete or play on steel and plastic structures adults created who were hell-bent on reducing the dangers of being held liable for damage to a child. Children are ‘educated’ and filled with knowledge that lacks substance so they will look like us when they grow up. Like their ‘schooling,’ their food is filled with empty calories that treat the taste buds yet leave the body unsatisfied, only to be fed a diet of pills to distance adults from their behaviors. When they get a bit older and encounter the boredom of teenage angst, they are invited to breathe filtered and conditioned air for their comfort so they will be persuaded to spend more money when they have the most disposable income. They are protected and not challenged. They are asked for their opinion only to be brushed aside when opinion turns to decision-making. Nadeson notes: “in recent commentaries, one key effect of this is to overemphasise the agency and activity of ‘child’, to ‘responsibilise’ her/him, and to make children not only carry the burden of risk in a risky (uncertain, precarious) society but also be biopolitically marked as ‘risky’” (as cited in Burman, 2013, p. 232). They are greeted with suspicion and fear on the street as adults wait on pins and needles for them to grow up and contribute in the real world.
The Danger
By keeping children and youth proximally close, we have distanced ourselves from their minds and left them vulnerable to a greater danger: being raised outside of our influence and investment. We have left them to be raised by unexamined, socially constructed cultural norms. This is certainly no archetype for creating beautiful childhoods.
A Helpful Analogy
Identifying the danger of a tiger ravaging a village is one thing, it is quite another to sit idly by and teach the children of the village how to live with it while it roams free. It is altogether another reality to face the tiger at the potential of great personal cost and free the village of the tyrannical martinet. Unsettling power imbalances is a threatening action, not in the sense that we have someone to blame, but rather unsettling in the sense that we are asking ourselves to acknowledge that our own upbringing and childhoods were shrouded in possible deceit and oppression. We are asking ourselves to accept that our own loving parents perpetuated a repressive milieux, and the very foundations of our ever so certain worldview paradigms are susceptible to speculation. It is a very powerful tiger indeed. As we have witnessed in historical conflicts where a malevolent dictator was simply replaced by another when the first fell, it is our duty to not replace one tiger with another. It is time to collectively admit that childhood is a prison from which children gradually emerge only to be found dragging the vestiges of bondage and oppression into their own adulthoods. And, incredibly, instead of acting to right this injustice for their own children, they cling to the very same despotic notions and raise their offspring as such. Is this the story that this generation will be known for in the annals of history, or will children rewrite it?
Easier Said that Done
We must identify the tiger and give the children of the village agency to act upon its demise. It must not be adults ‘giving’ children power, but rather adults removing themselves as barriers to children acting. Easier said than done.
References
Burman, E. (2013). Conceptual resources for questioning ‘child as
educator’. Studies in philosophy and education, 32(3), 229-243.
Taylor, A. (2011). Reconceptualizing the ‘nature’of childhood.
Childhood, 18(4), 420-433.