Suffer the Children

Of course it’s reasonable to worry about our kids.  To push for the best quality of education. To protect them from, well today, everything.

150 Years ago families had 10,12,13 or more children.  It wasn’t until relatively recently that more than half of all children born made it to adulthood.

With that change, brought about by medical and nutritional advances, families have had fewer children until wealthy and educated parents are now having one or two children. Correspondingly the desire to protect children has increased.  One child is far more of an emotional and material investment today than the several children, for whom parents of 100 years ago would have expected a degree of mortality.

Such was the likelihood of dying young it seems no wonder that parents and society should have hardened themselves to the suffering of children.  The treatment of children has changed dramatically over time so that we see a landmark moment that has yet to be recognized as such in the anti smacking bill passed by Labour in 2005.  This bill represents the moment at which a long shift from the normalization of serious violence and abuse of children reached its zenith.  After centuries of the norm gradually shifting towards gentler and gentler treatment the Anti-smacking Bill represented the moment for the first time in all of human history that a society said no physical violence at all was acceptable.

I remember at teacher’s training college reading authors who pointed out in incredulous tones that it was not until the Victorian era that children began to be recognized as – children – rather than just small adults.  I have since found modern cultural bias to be looming large in these researcher’s responses to earlier perspectives of children.  For one thing the lack of education probably meant that emotional and intellectual maturity was not much different from the childhood state for many adults.  For another, prior to oil consumption the economics of survival would never have allowed for children to remain out of economic activity for very long.  The very reason why only the children of the wealthy could become educated.  However there is one much more significant aspect of the analysis of childhood that modern researchers seem to rushed past in their redefinition of childhood.  This is that the greatest goal and objective for all children is to be like adults.

Fantasy play, it may turn out, is simply a means of simulating adult roles and activities before it happens. As with all mammal young play is an evolutionary adaptation that prepares children for real life.  I think adults have been largely responsible for exaggerating the fantasy aspects of childrens’ imaginary worlds.  It is not possible to overstate the importance of adults to children.  Their power and activities are deeply craved and admired by children.  Children I think strive to be adults as quickly as they can and I believe that our modern definition of childhood is creating a lot of problems for young people by sentencing them to a childhood world far longer than they want to be in it.  I think that in dispelling the old world’s view of children as small adults we may have thrown the baby out with the bath water.

The most significant and obvious of these problems is the area of youth drinking, drug use and driving.  These activities are amongst the most sacred of adult activities because they all involve the use of dangerous forces – things that children are strictly separated from.  As we have, by virtue of oil and the automation of labour via fossil fuels, been able to extend the length of childhood, young people have become both dependent and angry at the same time.  I have a strong sense that grossly excessive and unregulated drinking behaviour and wreckless driving derive from a mix of having been locked in childhood limbo, being deprived of real responsibility, developing a false sense of protection, a distorted sense of self worth, a lack of experience with real risk but most of all a complete absence of adult modelling as to how to drink and drive in a moderate and mature way.  This suggests that the answer, or at least part of the answer, to youth drinking issues lies in the opposite direction to policing and age limits.  Children and young people need to be inculcated into responsible drinking practices from an earlier age.  15 Year olds should be able to go to the pub with their parents and friends and have one beer.