Childhood's End
Do you remember those lazy, hazy days of your childhood? The long afternoons spent scrumping for apples and catching sticklebacks in a jar? Then finding some smugglers in their secret hideaway and alerting the local policeman before cycling home for tea and crumpets?
Well, perhaps not. Childhood was never as we remember it, still less as we would like it to have been. But that doesn't mean it has not been - and could not be - better.
Last week, over 100 luminaries including psychologists, teachers and children's authors signed a letter to the Daily Telegraph expressing their concern about 'the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children's behavioural and developmental conditions'. A week later, Rowan Williams helped to launch the Children's Society's Good Childhood Inquiry, which aims 'to renew society's understanding of childhood for the twenty-first century to inform, improve and inspire all our relationships with children'.
The problems, it seems, are numerous: junk food, clever, cynical advertising, sedentary, screen-based entertainment, over-competitive schooling, threatening public space, devalued parenthood, lack of time with adults.
Such a list may sound very miscellaneous, but in reality these disparate factors are connected by this single thread: our moral confusion about childhood. What do we envision childhood to be? Are children adults-in-waiting, or is there something qualitatively different about them? Should we be preparing them for employment, for parenthood, for citizenship - or should we downplay the idea of preparation altogether? Are we in danger of using adult categories to understand (and thereby misshape) childhood?
In our struggle to answer these questions, we might also take another perspective. 'Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,' Jesus told his disciples (Matthew 18.3).
Before we lose ourselves in the debate over what precisely Jesus meant by this - should we be innocent? trusting? humble? expectant? - we need to notice something more obvious. Jesus brings the child into the foreground, literally and metaphorically. The child is the one from whom the adult disciples can learn.
Just as children were sometimes chosen by God in Old Testament times when adult institutions failed (think of Miriam, Samuel, David and Josiah), Jesus uses the child to challenge our preconceptions and invite us to see the created order anew.
In our zeal to redeem modern childhood, we should not overlook childhood's capacity to redeem us.
Nick Spencer
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