On Lying to Children

We teach children not to lie. We teach them that lying is an act of cowardice and an affront to the dignity and respect that others deserve, so of course we feel comfortable lying to children. We actually seem to enjoy holding the truth over them, just out of reach. We invest energy and years into feeding their delusions only because they are willing to accept what is being told to them. This is their nature, as is human nature when sources beyond our direct involvement or understanding (the media, government, laws...etc.) dictate how we are to think. But how much more human potential could be unlocked if we valued the truth as much as we value maintaining a child's delusions?

The child molester lies to his victim to gain access to their trust, but just imagine what that child would do in that situation if the child molester had told the kid the truth upfront. Image if what society told our trusting children was the truth also, and what kind of change that next generation could bring about in the world as a result of knowing the truth. If the truth could save a child from trusting a child molester, then truth could save a child from trusting our kindly police, teachers, parents, and society in general as immediately. Imagine for a second how many children would be saved. Imagine how many could be saved from committing the hypocrisies of adulthood if they were told as children to loathe corporate and political hypocrites as much as they are told to fear "strangers." 

The next time someone respects a child's dignity, it will be because they will be telling them the truth. And while it's true that "the truth hurts," how much pleasure do lies, sarcasm, and delusions bring? How much disillusionment and disengagement could be spared in our young adults if as children they were reared from the start to know how the world is and what it will take to change it? Imagine how many children could be saved from learning the lies of our fast-money, sex-obsessed, violent, materialist, culture of selfishness and sin from all those back-window sources, if we as adults could be there at the front door to greet them with the truth when they asked for it? How many could be spared the draconian sentences of the law for naively exposing themselves to each other if they could be told upfront how the law does more to punish them than it does to protect them? 

Empowerment is the enemy of ignorance, and it is given with the truth. It does no child any good to have the truths of life withheld from them, even the most unfriendly truths. For instance, everyone says "death is a part of life," but no one wants to accept that a child of theirs is ever going to die. People either deny to themselves the fact that children are living entities capable of death, or they deny to themselves and to their children the fact that living things have to die, in order to keep their emotions on the issue intact. They have to lie to themselves to justify stripping the humanity away from a child in the process of protecting that child's delusions. Delusions that keep the child a corporate slave, for instance, do little to nothing to empower them, no matter how much "girl power" or "guns and ammo" you get them drunk on, but the truth will always set them free. 

Every lie to a child is also a lie to the one perpetuating the lie. The one confusing the maintenance of ignorance for the "safeguarding of innocence" is lying to herself. The liar is only safeguarding themselves from their own anxiety. The liar is only safeguarding their authority and control over a child's will born out of their fear of the world. Conversely, the one telling the truth to the child is the only one doing everything the liar has convinced herself she is doing. The one telling the truth is actually the one doing the protecting, respecting, and sparing of the child from grief. If a child is capable of asking a question, they are capable of hearing the truth as assuredly as they are capable of hearing a lie. The air does not discriminate one from another. 

Paper In and Paper Out

It's simple social engineering. Paper goes in and paper comes out. Paper is the object we use to shuffle children across the bottomless pit--the deeper it goes, the more we feel the urge to build them a bridge made out of it. Bureaucracy is the function that has replaced a human being's love for teaching a child with a delicate utilitarian mechanism, and paper is its food source. The industry that has replaced our charismatic ambition to care for children runs on, and for the sake of, money, permits, licenses, and paperwork. Somewhere between the mandates, the sign-in sheets, and the health codes, children are left stumbling around without direction, cared for but not cared about. Paper is the first and last concern.

Somewhere in time, the ancient practice of pederasty was replaced by pedagogy, and when that happened, it was declared throughout the land that no more will people work with, live with, teach, or care for a child based on their personal ambition to do the best work they can for the life of a child. When fears gave in to bureaucracy, any notion of doing one's work out of love was swept under, and all that remained was cold, effortless, mechanistic, faceless, formation. A comfortable embrace was taken away for a wire frame. The soft cloth was just too dangerous. It is at that point, sometime in the Industrial Revolution, when people stopped caring because they wanted to care, and only if they had to.

When once it was love begetting good works, it has become paper begetting paper. Paperwork begetting profits. Good men shirked off. To give in to accomplish such desire to work with kids within the system is to give up your compassion for doing such. It's to surrender to paper. Professionals are paper people in a paper world.

It's Johnny's Birthday!

Child worship expresses itself in probably it's most overt ways within the modern family. In a classic framing exercise, we could easily picture mother and father as the child's clergy, busying themselves maintaining their idol, singing its praises, and saluting it on the yearly anniversary of it's birth with a grand festival, where "it" refers to inhuman nature of the thing being worshiped--something indeed quite beyond the physical organism that a child really is.

To be clear, celebrating birthdays is not wrong minded, but it could be argued that the degree of lavishness they assume (usually at the behest of parents more than anything else) is only a depiction of the modern fascination and obsession with blowing children up to twice their normal size. It's only amazing they can manage to keep their feet on the ground.

At one time only the wealthy sons and daughters of self-important dignitaries and noblemen celebrated something as mundane as the yearly milestone known as a birthday with lavish parties. In the modern world, that distinction is reserved for every child. It seems the younger and less aware the child is, the more lavish the festival commemorating their birth has to be. We give them Jumperoos on their second birthday and yet still don't allow them to vote by their 16th. We're very good at blowing children up to be demi-gods alright, we're just not very good at deflating them back down to our size.

And then we expect our adolescents to begin coming down from Olympus on their own, to live like people for the first time after being restricted within the socially constructed walls of heaven all their lives. Suffice it to say, when their eyes finally shoot open at first to the world made not of dreams but out of the fear and desperation surrounding them, only one reaction seems appropriate at first--disillusionment. Some get over it. Some don't.

And then for the sciences to suggest that such a reaction is biochemically induced in its entirety, rather than the inevitable result of a demigod stepping down from his golden throne, it only reeks of same preferential prejudice that failed to let him be human in his first 13 years of life. The fact of the matter is, as far as the perspective from which research on the maturation of teens is conducted (one of squinted-eye observation), the child is no longer a child, and therefore in no more need to be worshiped. Is it no coincidence that once "playtime is over," the demonization of young people begins?

(A tip to George Harrison in the title.)