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.

Predator Panic

Our modern culture is fixated on child molestation, predation, kidnapping, and pedophilia. It is obsessed with the concept of children getting picked off and preyed upon, and there is no low the media won't stoop to, no far-fetched connection they won't try to harmonize with, and no half-baked conclusion they won't try to draw, in order to connect child molestation to every depiction or reference to children and childhood in popular culture, whether real or fake. Children in fiction as well as life seem to exist solely to perpetuate the narrative of "predation and rescue," or "child in distress," if only to soothe the guilty adult conscience for the state of society, but the repetition of this narrative has its unforeseen consequences.

Children and youth still have no standing or legitimacy for themselves under the predation narrative, because it exists for the benefit of adults. Such thoughts do not flow from the spring of respect or dignity, and only produce the tainted waters of iniquity and conceit. It may even get to the point where we can't bring children to mind without conjuring the imagery of abduction and molestation, abuse and dismemberment. Such a schema is not child-centric, or even child concerned, since it only exists for the adult's purposes. Predator panic is a function of selfishness. It soothes the adult mind and guilt. It's about justifying the decadence of adult indulgence and maintaining adult control of youth. Why do you think vigilantes latch onto it with such zealotry and demagoguery? Selfishness is their raison d'etre. Why do you think victimology is such a profitable market? It is a sickness, and many have already fallen prey to it. But I suspect its time is slipping away, and soon the tide may turn and we may see a generation more immune to the sickly fascinations that prey upon the mental defects of this current one.

This molestation fixation is neither healthy, nor does it benefit children anything. In fact, it may even be one causal factor influencing our reactions toward minor misconduct, particularly toward minor sexual expression, formed in zealotry and expressed with draconian simplicity. Easing the worried mind, troubled by the constant thought of destruction, becomes the highest priority when all we are lead to believe is that destruction is everywhere. The moment we lose sight of reality, we lose a hold of our future. And if children are our so-called future, inhabiting reality, you'd think it would behoove us to keep our minds firmly rooted, rather than let them drift to fantasize the inevitable destruction of children and childhood at every turn of the page, every flip of the channel, and every thought in the head. Some are rooted well, still others are out to sea.

In any case, fixation on child endangerment by its ceaseless repetition in our thoughts and culture does nothing to stem the tide on actual child abuse, which has no total abatement, nor does it actually inform us of the reality of it. Instead, this fixation only contributes toward the increasing infantilization and marginalization of all young people by the paranoid and restless adult psyche. Teachers may have their own "teacher's pet" without gaining the assumption of pedophilia. Coaches may still pat their players on the back without gaining the same assumption about their motivations for doing such. Boys may still be allowed to perform in Catholic church choirs, and sign up for Boy Scouts without the need for viewer-hungry tabloid journalists to assume potential child abuse connections between everyone involved. Girls may be allowed male tutors or mentors without the need for bureaucratic entanglements -for if we were to suspect all men of being pedophiles when it comes to working with girls, we may as well outlaw every daughter's father, every niece's uncle, or every sister's older brother as well.

When we have broken up enough families though, disallowed enough youth from community outreach organizations, and severed all bonds between adult and child in society, do you think our fearful minds will finally be at ease, even then? Do you think that children will be safe, even then? It takes a perverse mind, a sick mind, to look upon that which has no sexual or abusive context and contrive out of it "sex abuse of children," so even if every draconian reaction were set in stone, that perversity already there would only continue to infect and grow. It takes a healthy mind to look upon things for what they are and see them for what they are--to look upon children and see them as children rather than "potential victims." Children grow into adults, and will serve the future. "Potential victims" only serve the current paranoid adult's darkest fantasies.

The Forbidden Toy

In the last post I made the argument about the fallibility of adult cognition in both the extreme (cults) and the everyday, which should not be such a watershed. By the same extension, the same behaviors can be seen in children, but once again reproduced and expressed through "smaller means." Exactly what is meant by "larger" and "smaller" is a relative question pertaining to the existential, psychological, and biological differences we associate (via imperfect "adult-centric" cognitive schema) between childhood and adulthood, but children can be shown to be no more infallible than children in forming their thoughts about the world, relative to their cognitive capacities to do such.

One way the action of cognitive dissonance has been observed in children is characterized by an experiment carried out by Aronson and Carlsmith (1963), where children were asked to rank a selection of toys from the ones they found the most enjoyable to the least. After they were ranked, the experimenter would take a toy the child liked and leave the child alone with it in a room. Half the child subjects were told that they would be severely punished if they played with the toy and the other half were told the punishment would be temperate. Obviously they weren't going to punish the children.

Later the experimenter would remove the punishment, saying that there would be no repercussions from playing with the toy. The children in the moderate punishment condition were then less likely to play with the toy, even though they now understood there'd be no punishment. On the other hand, the severe punishment group were more likely to play with the toy once the punishment was lifted. When asked why, the children in the moderate condition expressed more disinterest in the toy, even though at one time they had ranked it as one of the most enjoyable to them. The children in the severe punishment condition expressed even higher interest in the toy than they had initially.

The conclusion from this study represents a concept called overjustification. The children in the severe condition had what is called a good "external reason" for not playing with the toy, because they believed they'd be punished severely if the did, even though they still found the toy as desirable. When the punishment was lifted they were more likely to play with it. The children in the non-severe condition had an "insufficient external reason" for not playing with the toy, so they had to make up their own justifications against playing with it. They had to convince themselves to find the toy less desirable, and therefore resort to not playing with it. Either way, children's internal feelings towards a toy were influenced based on how their beliefs about what the ramifications would be of playing with it, and once those beliefs turned out to be false, they had to resort to justification in order to suppress the effects of the disconfirmation. The stronger the effects of disconfirmation, the more justification is needed.

This overjustification for the children in the moderate condition when observed in childhood appears to result in a child's forced compliance (usually with an adult), and when observed in adulthood, results in the more extreme forms of social cohesion, shared social schemas, adult compliance (as seen in the Milgram studies), and all sorts of applications in social psychology from hierarchial structures like the military and government, to how adults formulate their laws and regulations or whether they resort to obeying them, and in the most extreme cases, where psychosis is involved, the formation of cults and other shared delusions (Festinger et al. 1956).

All this goes to show how children react in situations when prophesy fails. As is seen in adults, the stronger their personal conviction, the more they'll seek to justify their conviction retroactively when it doesn't pan out the way their beliefs where structured initially. Children behave much the same way. Any attempt to label children as cognitively handicapped in comparison to an adult is ignoring the similar expressions of the very same falibilities adults express.

Kids and Sexual Suggestion

It's not so much a problem that children are exposed to sex early, it's the way they are exposed to it. People seem to prefer exposing sex to kids coyly and comically on a regular, daily basis, rather than honestly and factually in small doses. Society is still hung up about sex, and so (after decades of declining standards over the acceptability of its suggestion) has been going to great lengths to throw sex into everything "suggestively," failing to find suitable any honest and accurate depictions of sex acceptable for viewing by children.

So if we have to be concerned about anything (and I don't think we do anyways), it would be that kids are getting the wrong idea of what sex is, and the real implications of it. A child can watch a commercial where a bikini woman opens a beer bottle with her "parts" while serving it to a leering man, and it is completely acceptable, but it is thought that if that same child saw even just the image of a vagina, or a penis, he or she is going to be traumatized for life. Neither is traumatizing. To view one as more hazardous than the other is mere superstition, and just an indication of how backwards a child's everyday reality is in the 21st century.

Expose them to sex early, sure. Expose a child to sex suggestively, sure, but counter it with exposing them to sex as an uncensored reality as well. If we leave it up to parents to pick the time when their children are "ready" to see an accurate portrayal of sex, the kids have already had 15 or so years of seeing sex as a series of untruthful, amoral, absurd, sexist, and exploitative imagery, and will likely have a misunderstanding about the word. It will all have to be unraveled and untangled before any discussion about sex as a real thing with real implications can be presented.

All the parental controls in the world are not going to stop the abundance of media from seeping into a child's everyday life, so it's best to just confront the issue early on as an inevitability. Show and tell them the honest truth about sex the way one would if asked any other question concerning human biology, and move on--tailoring the lesson to their developmental comprehension. Censorship of reality doesn't work, all it does is turn the illusion into reality.

A Small Noise

Remember the old joke about adult power: "a man farts at a kid's eye-level"? I've been thinking about aphorisms of empowerment geared for kids, to get them thinking about non-destructive ways they can influence their own destiny and those around them, and this one I just can't seem to shake. Tell a kid you know to go in easy but leave a big impression--to be a small noise but leave a big stink. You could say, it's contrary to being 'loud and proud,' and it cures their pinkeye.

It is better to disorient one's oppressors in a creeping blaze of controversy than to open fire in a physical gunshot that can be easily deflected and get the bigger guns brought in. The mightier opponent doesn't have to know they've been marked until they are consumed in it. It's like allowing the fire in a young heart to spread on its own without calling attention to oneself as the arsonist, or the "shooter."

There will always be some who adore the attention that comes with being 'loud and proud', but in the end, the small noise from the undetected rebel always stirs the largest influence. It is what the adults will call subversion. It is control taken where power is given.

Tell a kid they got to be "silent but deadly," and they'll understand and appreciate it--the ready ones.

Passive Resistance

Children break the cultural bodily boundaries on a daily basis. They exert their sexual, physical, gritty nature and the world shames it. Since no exploratory sexual behavior, outburst, nose picking, burp, or fart goes without reprimand for the first six years of life, no matter how much it's encouraged by looser mores, children spend the next six years using each one of those things in pointed attacks of retaliation and resistance against anyone they see as a worthy target. Having absorbed shame for their bodily needs and functions long enough, they stand the message on its head and use them to cast shame on others. It doesn't matter if the target is a sexually active youth's distressed parent, an illness-faking student's easily swayed teacher, or a nation's policy against violence in its schools (as we'll soon see). Children will quite literally hold their breath until they pass out to make a parent bend to their will.

This commentary comes in light of a now-annual phenomenon in news. In the mix of reports regarding the effectiveness of Zero Tolerance in public schools, we're treated to a slice of absurdity disguised as comic relief. It seems something as innocuous as "disturbing class" in the right context, if expressed with enough disdain, is considered violence and can and will result in a kid's arrest. Not even a kid's intestinal gas can be tolerated, so long as he emits it derisively and obnoxiously enough. Disruption like that no longer warrants only disciplinary action, but a police cruiser, handcuffs, a booking, and a police record, because kid farts are weapons now, officially.

Sometimes the only way to lay bare a system's faults is to cause a passive stir like this and force the system to abide by its own rules. And seeing as kids currently have no rights to free speech, what other way do they have to voice dissent than to hurl their bodily needs like weapons at their captors?

The use of the body is resistance expressed through non-violence. It's the willful glorification of self-degradation because the system can't degrade them enough on its own. For certainly, their bodily functions, including sexual impulses, are the one thing a child truly does own. The mind can be bent many different ways, behaviors can be controlled and redirected, but the need to void, the need to shed, to have intake and output, is entirely theirs, and theirs to do with as they please. It's the one thing where if it were controlled, the powers controlling it would cease to have a living child to control, and therefore, cease to be in control. Passive resistance plays with an authority's ability to control in like manner.

So let's reexamine the power of a kid's body. The body is one way our kids express comfort with their peers. They use their body to produce kinesthetic, athletic, and scatological feats, and express early masculine or feminine identification. They use their body and its functions as learning experiences in pro-social behavior, human bonding, manners, and taking ownership for their actions. The body is as much a projection of personality and talent as it is a depiction of their health and well being. It's a source of great pride. More importantly though, a kid's body presents options to them--needs, desires, excretions--that can be delivered decisively anytime and place, command instant attention, and express personal control--the root of all individual sovereignty.

So let the kids be free to be gross.

Cute Power

Adults have power by the position they've granted themselves in society. Children have control though, over themselves and their immediate environments. Even if a child is strapped down, their ability to control the hearts and minds and the weaknesses of adults remains in check, given to them by adults for their lower, demeaning status in society, and taken for themselves in spite of it. Thus, it stands to reason that the adult is constantly at war with the child's ability to flex their control, and the child is at war with the adult's ability to exert their power.

The power of the adult is brought on like an overwhelming force, it exudes from their pores, taking with it all of its purely socially constructed edifice--the "this is how it is" stamped firmly on the ground like a boot print after a stomping. It is something very physical, very absolute, like God's word, and doesn't hold itself up to question. Inversely, the control that children hold over themselves is internal, it comes forth in their cuteness, and like nymphets and faunlets, they use it to their advantage to gain the favors of adults. They take control by disobeying the overwhelming force, if not directly, subtle and meticulously. They are the insurgency.

Children use cuteness as a means to gain access to an adult's weaknesses, just as adults jump on children's weaknesses to exert power over them. And with recent research suggesting the same parts of the brain are activated when responding to something cute as when responding to something sexually appealing, it's becoming very easy to determine what motivates an adult to do such. Dominating a child's cuteness stimulates reward centers in the adult's brain. The feminists are fond of saying that all sex is merely an act of conquest, and if it's true, then we can understand why child abuse is never going away. They're addicted to the drug of power. They'll slay the dragon and then be the ones putting on the claws. By attacking predators and not granting children the ability to control their dignity, they are only pleasuring themselves.

They are taking from the slug perverts what is socially evil, and using it to exert for themselves over children what is socially acceptable, for the very same reason--pleasure.

What we believe is that children should not only understand the amazing control they have over themselves and their destiny, and over other people, just like any other human being, but also find the power connected to being small. Advertisers have known for as long as there have been advertisers that picturing a sweet-looking child can make an adult spend money. Governments know that invoking children, or depicting children in advertisements can influence the passage of almost any legislation or even help in the election of our leaders (see ad "Daisy" 1964). The media knows that depicting a child is a ratings booster, normally if the child is depicted as traditionally helpless.

Despite all this popular usage, if children could be made aware that their cute face can melt the heart of an adult, get them to swoon and smile, get them to lend an organization money or not shoot a dictator when surrounded by the likes of them, then there is power in that face. Power that is given, controls, but control that is taken, is powerful.