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.

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.

How Not to Corrupt Children

How often do we hear about the various forces out there corrupting children and then ignore the fact that despite all our fretting very few are ever actually "corrupted"? It's no mistake that people do this--the fear of children being corrupted sticks in our heads better than when they actually are. Imagination takes precedence over sight. In reality, the majority that grow up to be average adults easily pass right through the social cognition of most people and the few that are corrupted by these forces usually don't constitute any real threat to civilization anyways. So why are we spending our time fretting?

Here's an example I stumbled on today. Children's films are often dripping with various political messages or ideologies. When filmmakers decide to make a simple story out of a series of plot devices to push a certain message (such as "save the rainforest"), with a few New Age beliefs mixed in, suddenly you have a lot of angry adults hemming and hawing about the "leftist propaganda" smeared all over children's media and how every child who sees it is going to grow up corrupted by it inevitably. Likewise, mix in some religious elements or conservative ideologies, against homosexuality for instance, and suddenly there's an outcry from the other side about how children will grow up to be intolerant. Either way, it seems children are always "raised" by the adherents and "corrupted" by the opposition--two trajectories defined by adults, not by children.

Each side of the adult divide seems to have it's own ideas about what a vile thing political correctness is, they just can't seem to identify what exactly is politically correct. Have you then ever stopped to wonder about whether or not the kids are actually corrupted by such implicit "propaganda" or "intolerance?" Such a question doesn't normally factor into the binary vision of most adults so long as the other side is seen as the politically correct oppressor and the corrupter of the youth. In reality, the children who are supposedly being fought over to win their hearts and minds either don't care about these implicit messages or don't understand them anyways. This isn't to say kids don't or can't understand these things, it's just to say that these adult perspectives rarely factor into their daily lives as much as they do the lives of adults, who are more personally served by such trivialities.

And even if they did factor in, it's not like children are on some moving platform where ideology is pumped into their open head at one end, stored for a while as they move along, and then emptied into the world when they drop off the other side without any permutation or elaboration by the child themselves in the interim. Lest we forget, it's quite the contrary. Young people are constantly challenging the ideologies they are exposed to. Would we as adults want it any other way? Should they not be exposed to a variety of ideas and given time to hash them out in their own heads? Are we more afraid of corrupting children or of letting them think for themselves?

In this case, the last thing we ought to be worrying about is exposing our children to a certain ideology in fear that they will inevitably follow that ideology without question straight to their dying bed (what an unrealistic expectation, but such is the adult). What we really ought to be afraid of is cheating them out of a good story by filling it up with self-righteous, shoe-horned, one-sided politics, ethics, or other  ideological claptrap. Give them a good story and the morals will always flesh themselves out on their own. Children have the ability to reason. They're not going to become New Agers or homophobic simply because some animated character in a movie they saw when they were six espoused those views. If they are going to get that way, it'll be for other reasons entirely centered around their own will and the social rewards surrounding belief. And most likely, 20 years from now they'll be right along side you calling out the shallow ideology in children's media just as you do, as will their children 40 years from now. Nothing ever changes.

The only corruption that takes place is just how pervasive the protective paranoia over children becomes after the first 30 years of life.