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.

The Tethered Master

If only the mature people could see how incredibly childish they are. In the back of an adult's mind, they seem to know it implicitly, but always defer to the cultural expectation of the authority placed on them. The expectation they use as a catch-all justification for all age-iniquity is that the adult is limited by their responsibility, tethered by their professionalism, constrained by their worry, and tied down to the standards of conduct and pretense, and that for some reason, are and should continue to be, the masters of this planet solely by virtue of this fact.

They are slavish masters, it would seem, if that makes any sense. The one who is the most tethered, the most constrained, the most limited, is the one who grants him or herself the most unconditional respect. How much ego does it take to crown oneself master of a planet and then call children "egotistical" for claiming ownership of every toy they see? It takes the full maturity of a person's faculties to even know how to stretch logic and justification so far that even carrying a self-applied burden can somehow now become a "virtue," and yet it's what adults do every day. They anoint themselves "masters" to make themselves feel good about being slaves. It's childish human nature through and through.

They envy childhood and demean children. They go from believing fairy stories to looking down on the creatures who do, and instead grow up to indulge themselves in their own fairy stories--fairy stories of the child molester behind the face of every man, fairy stories about the constant hidden menace to their young in the world, fairy stories about the hazards of the air, the sunlight, the water, the ground below their feet, the sky above their heads, and the immanent destruction of what they love in that space. They'd sooner take their child out of that space if they were told by their cable news parents that "air" was deadly.

They're pacified by their parent media, like children, are told when to feel good, when to feel sad, and when to feel outraged at all the right parts in the fairy story, by musical cue, by expert editing--close faces, black and white, blurry images--and it works on them. They gasp, they panic, they clutch their children close and push others away at the behest of an invisible force, and all when they are told to, and all for the sake of saving themselves from the tedium of being "adult," to justify such a malignant position of authority because they know without it they would have no reason to do so.

They dread their quickening decay, their inevitable death, and in so doing decide to deny life to the young to spare them of any and all fate the same. They manufacture inhuman hardship for children in the effort to maximize their little one's comfort, convince themselves they are in the right, and then pat themselves on the back for their so-called selfless ingenuity in fleeing from the fear and guilt that rides their lives for doing it. That is the modern human adult at play--a child having his way when he's wrong.

Adults set the standards by which they judge themselves and others, and by that fact alone, are powerful. It is arrogance, but it is human. Being tethered to responsibility does not equate to virtue, as the Sword of Damocles teaches us, but an arrogant human mind in seeking to justify its doomed and slavish position of personal limitation, will ascribe to it "virtue" to save itself. Likewise, being carefree as children are said to be (which also is not the case, children are far from "care free") does not equate to its own assigned virtue. Once again, an arrogant human mind in seeking to justify the deprivation of rights and dignity to children, will ascribe to childhood the virtue of innocence, and the lack of virtue when comparing it to that of an adult's.

That is to say, an adult looks at a child's reality by way of distance and when in comparison, assigns their own reality to virtue by deeds (for them, a superior method of human appraisal, because children are supposedly deemed incapable of willful deeds), and assigns a child's to virtue by its mere existence--as one subservient, humble, and incapable of willful deeds (ie. innocence). These are not truths about either reality, but arrogant presumptions made by adult psychology. They are human, and therefore childish, things to presume. They are a part of human nature, but they are not justifiable.

The Kids are Alright

The kids are alright. The only threat to children, if one can even call it that, is too much fretting about threats. Most parents understand that there are two directions we can thrust our concern at as to what is harming kids--the immanent (actual) and the potential (possible). When a child is drowning--that is to say, when a child is facing an immanent threat to their state of being--it seems asinine to direct our attention instead toward the potential hazard of them scuffing their foot on a rock at the bottom of the pond. For instance, no one says when a child is drowning, "Save that child, he might scuff his foot on a rock underwater!" That would be misdirected priorities.

That is clearly the case when the immanent threat outweighs the potential threat. One might excuse such misdirected fretting if the immanent harm and potential threat are of equal magnitude of danger though (if that's possible), but not when the child is experiencing no threat outside the imagination of his onlooker. These are not equal terms though. It is clearly unconscionable to think the potential for harm is more deserving of our attention than direct endangerment in here and now. That is to say, the potential for harm does not always necessitate an impulsive response from the adult or peer, but on the other hand, that immanent harm always does. Direct endangerment of a child, be it physical abuse or otherwise, is nearly always more deserving of our attention than potential, social and culturally-based perceived "threats" we have to be reminded to worry about.

This is all very well and good to say, but sometimes it is understandable that deciphering immanent hazards to children from potential ones is difficult and subjective. What is an immanent harm and a potential threat? Ultimately, potential threats are just that, potential, in it either hasn't happened yet, is happening and may just not be causing any damage to the child, or is happening whether we know its effects or not. Chances are, if our children are being bombarded with so-called destructive media messages for example (a potential threat to them), beyond our knowledge as adults, our reserve for panic isn't going to do a bit of difference in assisting us to save them from harm's way--not as it would if the threat was immediate. Children are going to be receiving these messages invariably, whether we remain ignorant of them or are running around trying to sanitize all that their eyes rest on.

The issue is, if a potential harm is causing some so-called threat so minor that parents, even with all their so-lauded "intuition," don't even notice it without having to be reminded to pay attention to it via the news media, then it by no means deserves the shock and worry that we ought to be reserving for actual immanent harms that children, and adults, can find themselves in the middle of, where the effects can be anything but minor. For example, childhood obesity is a much more hazardous threat, and an immediate one in many cases, than the potential for that obese child to be abducted--but which do parents and the media fret over more? Which inspires more legislation, despite fewer deaths? Abduction is sexier than obesity, when it comes to the mainstream culture, evidently.

One of the main differences between potential threats and immanent harms is that specific steps can be taken to respond to immanent harms in a practical, reasoned way. You can take your time with it and find a solution to the issue (proper diet and exercise, in the case of obesity). With "potential hazards," there is only so much preparation one can do because half the damage is manufactured in our minds. The only steps we can take to reduce the potential damage are whatever our minds can dream up ("stranger danger" survival strategies, for instance). It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy though. We might say, "thanks to our best efforts to keep children indoors, we have reduced sun burn--and because it has worked, we can be proud of ourselves," even when other solutions could have been less restrictive (sunblock for instance). Now that example is a bit sarcastic, but it shows exactly the kind of misdirection and self-delusion that preventionists often engage in.

Children are either being harmed or they are not. If they are not suffering in some way emotionally or physically, then they are probably not being threatened by whatever our guilty personal demons can dream up to haunt their developmental trajectories. This is true whether it be violence in video games or satanism in daycares. Often is the question asked "what is X doing to our children", but I want to know, what is X doing to parents? Is your child X's concern or is she yours?

The issue isn't so much about protecting children's innocence, because they won't be innocent forever anyways, no matter what you do to protect that artificial edifice built around them. The issue is about making that inevitable transition from one point of relative ignorance to another go as smoothly as possible in light of learning and exposure. With a potential threat, one has time to sort out solutions in working around it, and children will grow up healthier for having learned how to do that. It's not X that harm's children, it's the lack of an authoritative adult or peer presence there to give X appropriate context. If you want healthy, strong, independent human beings from your children, show them what sex is. Rather than focus on tying up the so-called "profanity apologizers" like perpetrators, we should be focusing on the kid's perception of what the they have set into the world. There are those who take responsibility, and those who assign responsibility, and only the former parenting style produces a strong human being.

When you say that children don't have a right to be harmed by something (something minor that is), you're saying they don't have a right to learn about how to deal with minor threats. Children should be free to learn about anything and everything in the world in all his beauty and ugliness, so long as it is presented to them in a way their ability to reason about it will be able to work around. Most kids grow up alright despite a whole slew of threats both real and imaginary throughout their developing years. This is true for life in general. The only ones who don't probably had no role models, or had their rumps cushioned on every fall.

A Risky World

Human beings are terrible risk assessors, but parents are the worst at it. Sooner or later if you challenge them on their ability to judge the risks they subject their kids to, you will hear the retort that they are entitled to their instincts, whether correct or incorrect, because evolution created them. They are just carrying out nature's will by expressing righteous indignation against society's usual suspects, and you are in the wrong for even questioning them. Their imperfections are untouchable.

With shrugging shoulders they grudgingly accept the faultiness of their instincts, because every action one can do with a child entails some risk, not just "the usual suspects." Those "usual suspects"--kidnapping for instance--are one in a million occurrences. The silent killers--automobile accidents for instance--happen every day a million times over. Parents who sweat with anxiety over the exceptionally rare ignore the mundane, regardless of the risk. This is not just a parental problem, it's a human problem, and that negligence costs lives. When superstition takes over critical thinking, parental reasoning is no better off than the child's, and both are at its mercy.

For instance, parents have a right to be concerned about their children's access to guns, and whether or not to allow their child entrance to a house where it is known a gun is kept. This is a matter of evolutionary insight. They have a right to be concerned especially if any unsupervised time could result in a bullet wound for their child or someone else's, even despite their best efforts to preach on gun safety. It is a real concern, but to outright bar access to the house for their child on those grounds alone, is more of an expression of anxiety than it is a reasoned approach to a palpable concern.

Assume there's a swimming pool at this aforementioned house. Statistically, the child is many times more likely to drown in that swimming pool than to accidentally shoot himself (988 drownings to 134 firearm fatalities in children between the ages of 1 and 19 in 2010, according to the US CDC). So to bar attendance at the home due to the proximity of a relatively minor risk, at the ignorance of a much more substantial risk, seems foolish, even by these typical "evolutionary/instinct" parental arguments. If one is looking to bar access due to the presence of a risk, it would make more sense to do so because greater risks are involved--the greater the risk, statistically, the more we ought to be concerned. This just goes to show that what gives parents a break in their anxiety has less to do with what is safe, and more to do with what is common--the bottom line being, not every house owns a gun, but swimming pools are everywhere. That which is ubiquitous, gets ignored. That which is rarer, absorbs more attention.

Kids are being barred from walking to school on the fear that they will be kidnapped off the side of the road. It's a rare occurrence that is indeed regrettable, but one wonders if these same districts and parents concern themselves at all with the more present risk of driving a child to school. Once the child enters a moving vehicle, the risk of them becoming injured multiplies significantly (4,044 motor vehicle fatalities in children between the ages of 1 and 9 in 2010, the most prevalent form of unintentional death in children according to the US CDC). Just because the parent or the district is in control of the vehicle and is physically present does not mean risk has been averted. More automobile accidents happen in the 7am rush hour on the way to school than kidnappings. So if we are of the "evolutionary/instinct" parental mindset, that even statistically minute risks should lead to such large-scale sweeping legislation, should we not counter even greater threats (such as children even being allowed to enter vehicles) with even more unbearable legislation?

If not, then we may just have to conclude that every action we take in the world is hazardous, and that we all have lives to live as human beings in a risky world, even kids. If they aren't able to live a respectable life as a human being--a child--then there will be unintended consequences no parent wants. Any parent who prophesies the death of their child every day (who does not have immediate reason to do so) would do well to stop investing in redundant safety mechanisms and instead invest in some therapy to rid them of their anxiety disorder before it does any harm.