The Child In Distress

Parents and professionals who continue to fall prey to cheap tabloid journalism have learned nothing from the childhood tale of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." In the "child in distress" narrative perpetuated in our culture, children are constantly prey to whatever new scary apparition appears on the horizon, and everything must be sacrificed to keep them safe from the next "flying inevitable". One can scarcely go through ten minutes of media without being bombarded by a child in distress. This repetitive narrative of the child in distress, however, only drives the same psychological niche for adults as the "damsel in distress" once did for the chauvenist culture, and is just as flimsy a vehicle.

Being concerned about the actual hazards a child may immediately encounter is crucial to human survival, but we seem to think being afraid of the foretold but non-existent "wolves in the fold" has something to do with it as well. It doesn't. It's a justification we created for ourselves. In general, those who are in their own minds powerful like to perpetuate fantasies of their own usefulness, stemming from arrogance. It doesn't matter who that powerful source is or whether that usefulness is needed, natural, or man-made. For adults, that fantasy manifests itself when we make ourselves feel useful for slaying the demons in our own heads out to possess our children (which probably don't pose any immediate threat to justify such a reaction), regardless of whether such a crusade is actually useful. 

It is hardly a revelation, as Nietzsche and Rousseau described the arrogant fantasy of the powerful in terms of social class in the 19th century, and Mill and Wollstonecraft in terms of indefensible sexism in the 19th and 18th century respectively. But I equivocate it now toward all adults who still maintain this ideology of superiority over all age groups below them despite hundreds of years of evolution on the "dignity of difference" between class, race, and sex. Why the feminists in particular ignored the similarity between the "child" and "damsel" "distress narratives" when they hurled criticism at the old self-serving male fantasy only speaks volumes about the limits of feminist critique. After all, women are adults too, and are served by the repetition of the "child in distress" narrative just as much as men are, if not more.

Instead, the myth of some "age determinism" of superiority and inferiority continues without reproach, with the justification that children ought to aspire to the adult example and adults ought to aspire to the child's. It is just assumed, by adults first and then by children, that this is a beneficial co-dependence between the age groups and that it is necessary, but it is neither. It's not instinct. It's in fact a self-serving ideology on behalf of those who created it--the powerful, the adults. It is created out of adult-centric culture. 

It's easy to see how superiority theories like this breed only inter-group contempt. While aspiring to the adult example as they are expected, children are taught to despise their childish nature, and while aspiring to the child's "innocence" as they are expected, adults are taught to despise their "adultish" nature. Neither is expected to appreciate who and what they are at either end of the developmental timeline, and they take their induced self-loathing out on the other group, be them perceived as superior or inferior. Sentimental sloganeering is constantly depicting children as "wide eyed" and "innocent," and proposing that if only adults could be like that, all our world dilemmas could be solved. While this is hardly convincing, it is pervasive, because adults and children alike will naturally seek out the positive traits of the other for their own sake, and condemn the negative traits of their opponent for their opponent's sake.

So I don't like to ever say one group is better than another group, because typically the group that assumes it is better is only better because it alone set the standard by which "betterness" is tested. Adults have always been powerful. They've always set the standards by which betterness is tested, so by their might alone, they are superior. And what have they done with their power? They've declared that only they are capable of using the power they've granted to themselves, and they remind themselves of this by reproducing the child in distress narrative.

But does not assuming that children are capable threaten to become an even worse imposition on children than assuming that they are incapable? After all, children and adults are different, you say, and wouldn't imposing the adult world onto children be just as bad as imposing the will of adults over them onto them? That kind of thinking, while overtly condemning ageist imposition, further establishes systemic ageist inequality. It is like dropping a weight down on one of two otherwise "conceptually" equal scales. To justify legitimate differences, the two must be given two different narratives? That only works when you can be sure you're not inadvertently disenfranchising one's differences and advantaging the other's in your distress narrative. 

Educator John Holt, in Escape From Childhood, wrote on how the assumption of capability in children only opens the doors for those who can, and does nothing to impose on those who can't or won't, so long as the initiative is voluntarily entered into. Right now, children are automatically involuntarily entered into the narrative as pawns in the adult's innocence game, and are thus stripped of their dignity as women once were, and rendered involuntarily defenseless despite their abilities. What in the chauvinist narrative, as it existed, advantaged a woman's dignity? And if you can't answer, ask yourself, what in the adult narrative of the "child in distress," as it exists now, advantages children? The answer is nothing at worse, or a negligible advantage at best, as perhaps one could argue that the "child in distress" narrative "motivates" adults to care about children. But the assumption of their inability affects every child through repression by its involuntary imposition still, while the assumption of a child's potential only affects those who rise to the occasion through voluntary inclusion, and in doing such, is not repression.

Because the adult narrative often disenfranchises youth and solely advantages adults (as it exists for their benefit), it shouldn't be tolerated as the sole paradigm. The narrative should only be justified when the inequalities between the age groups, or gender groups, or race groups, don't "consistently" manifest themselves along traditional power differentials. If the child is "always" the disenfranchised one, the meek one, the one being saved, when positioned in the distress narrative, and the adult is always the one in control, always the one doing the saving, then it is unjust inequality being represented. Likewise it would also would be unjust inequality if, all things being equal, it was assumed that only black children did poorly in school and had to be rescued by whites, or if it was assumed that only women become jeopardized and need to be rescued by men.

Unjust inequality is the imbalance between groups that exists due to human assumption rather than natural occurrence. It is one thing for natural inequalities to present themselves--for a black child to do poorly, for a girl to do poorly, or for a child to be controlled by an adult--but if any of those are the only paradigm ever shown, then one group is being unfairly advantaged while another group is being disenfranchised consistently. Individual variation is a good measure of natural inequality. If individuals vary from person to person, then all are equally being served and all are varying in their response. If a whole swath of people aren't being served to begin with, then there is no variation, just one group advantaging while another group is disenfranchised. That is not an acceptable "difference."

But adults have more self control, you say, and better cognitive skills, and superior strength. Should not adults take the initiative to rescue the weaklings? Of course they should, but only because it is intuitive that those who are strong look out for and protect those who are weak, and not simply because they are adults. If a child or young person happens to be strong and capable enough to take the initiative, why deny them only for not being old enough? To continue to misrepresent strong and capable young people as meek and defenseless only implies that one favors infantilizing them, and all the repercussions that causes, over empowering them, and all the benefits of that.

After all, it's not about believing one group is better than another group, it's about recognizing the differences between the two and affording them respective to their individual ability. The weakness of the adult narrative is that it ignores the possibility that capability is a human trait that everyone possesses to some degree, and instead tries to claim "capability" as its own entirely, and therefore the term "humanity" as well. There is nothing wrong with an adult taking initiative for a child in distress, so long as we recognize that there's also nothing wrong with a child taking responsibility for another child in distress, or an adult in distress, if they are capable of doing so, and we should depict all scenarios accordingly.

The question becomes whether or not children benefit from the adult narrative of "the child in distress," or if they are just the recipients of neutral, natural circumstances. Perhaps adults are inspired in some way from the repetition of the narrative to nurture their children, but even still, this isn't a satisfactory motivation. The best display of the adult's weakness is their need to justify their position of unquestionable authority (their so-called "maturity") by fantasizing about distressed and endangered children. If adults were truly matured, they would feel the requirement and responsibility to nurture the young the young people's sake, without having to resort to storytelling cliches that serve only their personal sense of pride, and ego.

Coming of Age

"In the suburbs I learned to drive, and you told me we'd never survive." 

It is only a matter of time before all living things come of age, and it is no different for human civilization itself. Civilization is a living thing played out over the course of generations. Just as an organism is a collection of cells that duplicate, exist, and deteriorate over a course of the organism's lifetime, so too are individuals within civilization. It was only a matter of time then before the same uncertainty of directionless ambition befell civilization as it does to individual human beings, when they become conscious of the need for self preservation in the face of a seeming non-existent reason to be doing such. This is to say that in coming of age, our reason to continue on both as individuals and as a species comes from our own directive, rather than by the guiding intervention of higher authorities.

It is now up to us to go to the doctors when we are sick, go to the movies when we desire entertainment, or go to pray when we desire some direction, and we accepted this new found responsibility with unsteady enthusiasm, slowly learning how to possess it but never truly understanding fully how or why we must. Why must we grow, go to school, go to college, go to work, get married, buy a house, have children, raise children, grow old, and die--always in that order? Where is this cycle of our existence taking us, these technological advances, the growth of cities, the automobile, the spread of suburban sprawl, the instance of communication? Does any adult know where their life is headed? The only inevitability is death. Does the certainty of death mean we need to fill the brevity of life with something rather than nothing in order to make use of time? Is our civilization destined to die too?

The ages of mankind are testaments to the fact that civilizations rise and fall, that there are periods of life and periods of death, where even in death there is life in relative limbo. The only constant over the spans of centuries is change, a change of relative societal place from one time to another with the same human nature dictating our choices. There was no more certainty we were making the right choice all the time, as when it was dictated to us absolutely, so there spread only fear that we were constantly making the wrong one. The 20th century was so ruled by uncertainty that it inspired more visceral demagoguery than any other era. Any study of parenting advice in the media, for instance, would unearth a world where everyone had their own certainties in the absence of one universal one.

The internet has magnified this phenomenon. For evidence, all one needs to do is conduct a simple search for the words "your kids" or "your children," and you'll inevitably find many diverse things preceding those words: how to do X for your kids? how to keep X away from your kids, what does X mean for your kids?, and other abstractions, all reinforcing the notion that all things invariably pertain to your kids just because yours are the ones being addressed all the time, every day. Coming of age in a culture that has itself come of age means accepting enslavement to the will of the consensus. Where certainty creates ignorance, uncertainty produces anxiety. We live in the age of anxiety, and it's a crippling force on civilization.

Running with the Egg

For all the fretting that adults do foretelling the demise of human civilization based on the behaviors and interests of children in the present, what good has it done the human race? There's this error in our reasoning that suggests the way a child is today inevitably predicts with straight line accuracy what the child will be like as an adult. If the child is playing video games or preferring their virtual social life to their surroundings, it's seen as if we're destined to have a future where all are strapped in to a virtual existence from which there is no escape and human civilization is once again doomed. Adults may even take pride in the action of stripping a child of their opportunity to engross themselves in the media of the times, thinking that by doing so they are single handedly saving the future of humanity. What self aggrandizing pride is this?

What human beings typically lack is the ability to foresee a future for humanity no different than the present, not better, not worse (as far as these basic grievances are concerned). There's this thinking that if a boy is allowed to play violent video games today, that the society he grows up to participate in will be one that looks the other way on gun crimes (as they had been exposed to so much of it). They do not factor in the humanity of their own children when forecasting the downfall of human decency. They figure "once a mindless drone, always a mindless drone," when their child was never a drone to begin with, but a person capable of reason.

There's a failure to foresee the likeliest of all possible futures, one where the children of today grow up to become adults who will themselves be fretting over something else the children of that time have been exposed to. Despite this trend happening every generation for hundreds of years, adults seem to think this is the generation that finally breaks the cycle and destroys society. Every generation is the end of the line for us, whether it be caused by rock and roll music, video games, rap music, drug use, internet, cell phones, or anything else adults have had trouble understanding.

Let's not fret over what children are involved in today en mass--individual children we can at least talk to--because en mass they simply are not as fragile as adults think they are. In 50 years time, many of the adults alive today will either be dead or elderly, and the world will be a much different place than it is now. The issues and problems of today will either be long resolved, or will cease to be major problems--the preoccupations of today will not last forever. The children will have grown up into similar versions of the adults that came before them, with all the same fretting, perhaps only about different trends.

In 50 years time, the children of today, who have grown up in a totally different world than the previous generation, will inevitably take the trends of today and expand upon them in the future--and no amount of restricting them now is going to stop this from happening. Children change over time, they don't stay children forever. They grow up and become the next wave of adults doing exactly what the previous wave did, only responding to different wind shifts.

Each generation gets its one shot to move the world and society along on the track before handing what it has created off to the next batch of people to do what they please with it. The passage of the earth from one generation to the next is like the old "running with the egg" race, where one player passes an egg balancing on a spoon off to the next player, who then takes it a ways before passing it off to another. The object is to not crack the egg, which for our illustration represents the earth. The thing is, adults do not trust the player they are handing the egg to continue seeing the value of keeping it intact. What happens though is the next generation always does anyways--as they go off to become that society, while the previous generation becomes too old and too dead to really see how their progeny has defied their expectations, time and time again.

So please, be not troubled, because the first one now will later be last, and the last, first. There is no better or worse, no more depravity or social isolation, or whatever our anxiety makes us imagine--there is only progression through time. Children are going to rule the world someday and move it in directions we can only fathom, and they're going to do it regardless of how much fretting is done about how they've been picking their noses today.