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OUR LOST IDYLLIC CHILDHOOD?
By Dr. Stephen JuanMany today wring their hands and bemoan: What have we done to our children? They pine for some romanticized lost era of childhood innocence and happiness. From the ancient Greeks onwards, each generation expresses similar views. Each worries about the future and wonders out loud if it will be the last generation. The most prominent advocate of this view today is Dr. David Elkind, professor emeritus at Tufts University. His 1981 book THE HURRIED CHILD, recently re-issued in a deluxe 25th anniversary edition (De Capo Press, 2006), is considered the most powerful representation of this romanticized view of childhood. To Elkind, the childhood in the past was much better for the child’s development and our society. Yet today, Elkind argues, we are pressuring children to grow up too quickly thus placing them and our future at unknown risk.
In a sense, the childhood romantics have a point. The world today is very complicated. It is dangerous too with some 50 wars currently being fought around the world. Much of the world today lives in poverty and nine out of ten children are born into a “have not” family. Our nation debates its identity and ponders its uncertain future. Our cities seem more hostile, our neighbourhoods more fragmented, our families more insecure. Children are under unprecedented stress and are growing up more quickly. All of this is true.
The more distant the past, the more attractive it is remembered. We tend to remember the good things and forget the bad. Psychological mechanisms accomplish this and it is to our psychological benefit that we allow it. Denial is comforting.
But are the romantics right? Was childhood better in the past?The U.S. historian, Lloyd deMause argues in THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD (1974) that “the history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to recover” and that the further back in history we go, the worse it is for children. DeMause has spent a career documenting this “nightmare” of childhood in the past in a very impressive manner and analysed its consequences on the wider national and international levels in such books as THE EMOTIONAL LIFE OF NATIONS (2002) and the forthcoming THE ORIGINS OF WAR IN CHILD ABUSE.
Most children in Australia today live in reasonable comfort. Fortunately, the majority of children do not experience violence, do not live in poverty, and do not suffer psychological pathology. Certainly there is great stress in this age, but no age is without stress. And the forces threatening children today are no more formidable than those of earlier eras--probably less so.
For one thing, Australian children today are more likely to survive into adulthood than ever before. If you are dead, your loss of innocence is irrelevant.
In 1900, about 20 out of 100 children died before the age of one. Today, this number is about less than 1 in 100 (8.1 per 1000 live births). Better nutrition, better sanitation, better housing, and better public health generally have brought about a truly remarkable and unprecedented improvement in the survivability of children.
Vaccines have rid Australia of the disease scourges that have plagued childhood of earlier times: Tetanus, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, polio, rubella, and mumps, Hib meningitis, hepatitis B, malaria, and others. If one gets tetanus, one has a 40 per cent chance of dying. Today it kills 800,000 babies each year throughout the world---but virtually none in Australia.
Antibiotics have saved untold thousands of Australian children. Prior to the early 1950s, a small wound such as a scratch by a rose bush could lead to a generalized infection with Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes resulting in a horrible death.
An Australian girl born today can expect to live to be 83 and boys to 77. This nearly doubles the life expectancy of children a century ago.
Today, we are better educated than ever before. Australia enjoys a 99 per cent literacy rate, a 94 per cent school attendance rate, and a high school and university graduation rate among the highest in the world. Children today are computer literate---the first generation ever to achieve this. This allows access to the world's information---a commodity growing geometrically and casting human ignorance to the four winds forever. As no other generation before, children have the world's knowledge literally at their fingertips. Furthermore, our teachers are better trained than ever before. When compulsory public schooling began in NSW some 130 years ago, most teachers were barely literate. Now, they all have university degrees and many more than one.
There is evidence that children today are getting smarter too. For example, measured IQs may be increasing over what they were a generation ago. The so-called “secular trend”, first revealed by New Zealand psychologist Dr. James Flynn, indicates that Australian children now perform 15 to 20 points higher on standard I.Q. tests than the generation tested in the 1940s and 1950s.
The standard of living of the typical Australian child is the highest it has ever been. Measured in constant dollars, the amount of goods and services that Australians have consumed since 1950 is equal to that consumed by all previous generations. Since the mid-1950s, there has been a near doubling in both the gross national product and personal consumption expenditures per capita.
Life for kids today is many things, but never boring. Kids today have far more toys, books, clothes, and choice in what they do for entertainment when they are not working. Girls are no longer denied access to traditionally male sports, training, jobs, and other pursuits. Boys now learn that it is no longer a sin to cry. In Australia today, inclusion and diversity are the buzz words. Life-style choices are up to the individual and with conformity being optional.
In a hectic, fast-paced age, children too lead crowded lives. But this is by choice---by parents, by families, and by kids themselves. In earlier times, there were no options. Having options is a definition of freedom.
Although Australian children are notoriously great consumers, consumer goods may not buy happiness. In fact, studies of happiness indicate that the main determinants of happiness in life are not related to consumption at all. Years ago Dr. Michael Argyle, a psychologist at Oxford University, expressed in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HAPPINESS (1991) and idea that is still fresh today: “The conditions of life which really make a difference to happiness are those covered by three sources---social relations, work, and leisure.” Given these criteria, it is difficult to measure whether or not kids are any happier today than they were one or two generations ago. However, whenever attempts are made to measure this, such surveys invariably reveal that “satisfaction” and “dissatisfaction” remain fairly constant from one generation to the next.
In many ways this Australian generation is liberated in ways unimagined in previous times. For example, now the division of labour in families is less based upon sexist lines. Parenting is becoming more equally shared. With mothers in the paid workforce just as often as not, this generation will be the first to enjoy mothers who are in-the-world equally as much as in-the-home. And fathers gain equality too. Today we allow men to be warm, soft, and emotionally nurturant. Gone is the day of the emotionally distant father---uninvolved in the day-to-day affairs of childrearing and who regarded his economic function as breadwinner as his sole family duty. Fathers can now publicly hug their sons---and even kiss them---without it being deemed “unmanly”. The acceptance of the house husband today is as revolutionary as acceptance of working mother was thirty years ago. In any case, families today are deciding for themselves how they will structure relations. Relationships can be gay or straight, families can be nuclear or blended, society is pluralistic not singular. There are many blueprints from which to choose.
Whilst Elkind might criticize today's parents for preparing children for the outside world when they previously protected them from that world, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Over-protection is just as much a tyranny as over-exposure. Although they are capable of collapsing under stress, children today are in many ways extremely competent in dealing with stress. Developmental psychologists call this “resilience”. Some claim that we almost always underestimate children's abilities to cope, even thrive. If children are growing up earlier these days, perhaps it is because we fail to recognize their powers and desires to do so.
Our big challenge is to bring the promise of Australian life to every Australian child. We should address youth unemployment, homelessness, family breakdown, and the growing problem of wealth disparity. We must find the so-called lost generation of Australian youth and guide them towards a hopeful direction.
We require a balanced view of children today. We need not yearn for some mythical romantic lost childhood ideal---nor attempt to turn back the clock to what may be a creation of a faulty memory.
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