Children

#5

Children

If, as the proverb suggests, it takes a village to raise a child, modern times have seen the disassembling of that village. As people have been increasingly defined by their economic role and the choices and demands of that role—going off to cities and living on their own—they have left the village behind. Though that village or neighborhood or ghetto may have been confining, the proximity of many inter-connected people along with the common presence of three generations offered the child many opportunities to grow and learn. To expect two parents, or, in the age of divorce single parents, to do the work of the village is to ask a great deal. There is bound to be more anxiety about the child because there is less solace to go around, to say nothing of attentiveness. Watching the television or playing computer games is not so much solace as it is the consolation of passing time with phantom companions. The human connection that emphasizes human recognition and imagination is, by definition, lacking. The degree to which the economic motive surpasses the value of nurturing children is not one that people in modern times have been eager to acknowledge. Why would they?

What replaced the village were the ministrations of social agencies, schools, electronic media, and the tutelage of experts. The last, in particular, seems endemic to modern times. The expert, often sporting a social-science degree, is a modern figure (astrologers were considered expert once upon a time) and referenced at the drop of a troubled hat. As the specialties of modern societies proliferated, experts also proliferated. Such a person would have carefully studied some aspect of behavior and could make suitable pronouncements. Such a person had the authority of knowledge. It is hard to imagine modern times without the talisman phrase “Experts say….”

Children are inexpert, that is part of their charm and vulnerability. Modern adulthood, in contradistinction, is characterized by a sort of rage for knowingness. Into the sieve of the self pours endless news, information, opinion, commentary, and interviews. This is literally a heady state but one at odds with recognizing the child’s native terrain of curiosity and feeling. Through a child’s eyes, and many a harmed adult, society may seem a conspiracy against feeling and curiosity. A child’s tears are the testimony of how inhospitable the world is and how untamed each moment is. Something powerfully affecting resides in that spectacle and something wretched, too. With each fall we scent injustice.

Though we drift on all manner of emotional streams as adults, childhood remains the source of human feeling. For a child each moment of life exists in its own right and is not a moment on the way to other moments or part of a collected story called “my life.” That will happen to the child but not all at once. In the meantime, which varies with the myriad circumstances of each child, there is that special openness and fearfulness that characterize childhood. Adults tend to find this state amusing and vexing in more or less equal degrees. Every child makes demands on every adult, though what is being demanded may be far from clear. Children need adults to help them, that is almost the first rule of life. They also need adults who respect what they offer, not as an amusement or trifle but as a hearkening to the basic situation of our being here—for all our expert words, we don’t know what we are doing. Our explanations come always after the basic fact of our responsiveness. Children are, as the expression goes, first responders.

This is not to romanticize childhood. It is to say that respect on a daily basis for the world of childhood is crucial because we all are children of the earth. However much we assert ourselves as we rearrange the earth, our vulnerability and dependence are constant. Necessity cloaks most adult busyness but the busyness of the child is something else. Existence, in and of itself, is enough necessity for a child. We can say that it should be that way for adults but it isn’t and it can’t. Child’s play is not adult play. That is why the lens of childhood is so important; it reminds and rebukes the adult.

Since modern times have magnified the importance of products and commodities, it is no surprise that children may be seen in that quantified light. Many a parent wants a child to succeed in whatever terms the society defines that success. The pressure on the parent and child is to see the child solely in such terms and turn to so-called experts to abet that success. As children are more and more defined by terms that smack of the scientific (or pseudo-scientific), they become less and less children and more and more therapeutic and academic projects. What the child has to teach the adult may be very easily lost.

One aspect that struck many white settlers of what became the United States was the Natives’ fondness for children. This fondness seems crucial if any society is to strike a balance between the drives of adulthood and the seeming inconsequence of children, their prattle and their play. The innocence of the child is precious, as is the imagination that decorates that innocence. The fact that children can be vengeful, nasty, and vicious speaks to that innocence. When suffering impinges, they announce it. An adult usually modifies that response but a powerless child is immediate. One of the horrors of abuse is that the natural immediacy of the child’s response is suborned by fear. Cathartic energy becomes torment.

Children are the great fresheners of life. To turn the child into something practiced is to subvert the life spirit. The narrowness of the schools that Dickens mocked and that continues to this data-riddled, test-obsessed day is only one measure of how modern, industrial societies choose to belittle children. Similarly, as techno-capitalism proposes, to see children as nothing more than nascent consumers is both sad and degraded. To take the time to heed whatever a child is saying and doing—what could be more important than that? The pangs that women, though some men too, feel each day because they don’t have the time is something close to tragic.