“Please use your liberty to promote ours,” wrote the
Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi over a decade ago, urging people to
take a stand against companies doing business with Burma’s military dictatorship.
Part of what is great about the courageous Aung San
Suu Kyi is that she makes us ponder not only the injustice of daily life in
Burma, but other injustices that are closer at hand.
Many of us living in England are enjoying numerous
freedoms which are at the direct or indirect expense of young children. The
liberation that is brought by mobiles, smart phones and music players is paid
for, in part, by the babies and toddlers who are being pushed around the
pavements, parks and shops by parents and other adults whose ears are plugged
with white earphones or covered by big retro headphones. These children,
strapped into place, stuck in a forward-facing position, have no hope of
gaining anyone’s attention. The children must live in a state of isolation
whilst the adults enjoy the connectedness of their mobile and social networking
on the go, or the pleasures of their music.
Likewise, there is a type of freedom for adults that
comes from being able to wander round a big supermarket or store, touching and
holding things that feel beautiful, or smell good to eat, or are packaged and
branded in ways that have been made exciting through advertising. But how close
to impossible it must feel to a small child, to be able to reach and touch, but
not to have. How can we expect children to be enticed and delighted by adverts
shown between their programmes, but to leave the shops empty-handed, without
those longed-for branded products? No wonder so many toddlers and young
children lose control of themselves whilst out shopping, descending into fury
or hopeless crying.
For every adult who enjoys the ability to get into a
car and travel freely, there may be a child who spends so much time strapped
into a car seat that she loses the liberty that comes from being able to crawl,
walk and run.
We
like to think that we care deeply about the children, our future, but in so
many respects our freedoms are being paid for through the restriction of theirs.
How often do we use our liberty to defend and promote the basic rights of the
child?
First published in Nursery World
First published in Nursery World
Hi Julian! I've started following your blog a while ago... It's Interesting what you've written; I do agree to an extent with what you say about children's freedoms & particularly what you said about parents constantly using iPhones / iPods etc struck a chord with me (as I'm partly that parent!!). I do wondrous though, more widely, whether we can usefully separate children's needs & rights from the particular context they are raised in (which at least up to a point creates those needs, rather than just acts as the environment which needs to fullfill them). A need can't be seen as a we'd if in the first place it has never existed as a reality that's now missing...Does that make sense?
ReplyDeleteSorry about the typos; damn iPhone autocorrect!!!
ReplyDeleteHi Julian
ReplyDeleteYou are in danger of writing
a Toxic Childhood 2.... i think this is
your first posting i have not enjoyed.
Who knows what is the realtionship between
the distressed child and parent in the supermarket,
or the parent with child in buggy?
Lets not feed stereotyped or prejudicial
behaviour in any form
Interesting comments. Maria, I agree that "need" is not absolute, often produced by social/cultural context. But are there wider needs and rights children have? The UN rights of the child? Children need food and warmth ... but I also like Bowlby's comment that children need love as much as they need vitamins and I suppose I think attention comes in there too. Let sure about "Toxic Childhood 2" - that made me choke on my coffee when I read it on my phone. I think my argument is different to Sue Palmer's because I do not go for the crass class-based position - this isn't about an underclass of some type, this is all of us with our phones and cars. The argument about the child in the supermarket is not about the parent - it's about the system, which creates a big shop where everything is grabbable, so we want more and more - and how can any child cope with that? Supermarkets, marketing, iPhones and cars - this mass-production of desire and consumption of our attention is not, I would argue, a good thing for young children.
ReplyDeleteI think there's a huge difference between a 'need' and a 'right'. As for rights: I don't really find a UN rights of the child approach useful to understand social / cultural & psychic realities. And of course, not useful to understand everyday family life. I also personally don't find Bowlby's approach particularly useful, so no, I would disagree in a wide sense with the idea that children 'have a right to love' although I would agree that they 'need love'. Of course, the question then becomes what does love mean which is so complicated, and ultimately can never be described accurately on an abstract level. It can only be worked on with every individual family, I think; and what can be 'worked on', in any case, is never love (whatever that means) but behaviours & psychic realities that may be amenable to change.
ReplyDeleteOn a social level though, I do agree that the everyday life our children inhabit- with gross consumerism ('everything grabbable' as you say) and with little independent time to roam freely outside is a problem and is a result of lives in cities, I suppose. But as we were discussing once in the past, there's no use in romanticisinig a supposed idealised past (which never really existed anyway). We can, at most, fight for particular things in our own communities.
But there's also another side to all this: why not see the constant use of iPhones by parents as an opportunity for children to 'be alone in the presence of another' as Winnicott says, to develop their own imagination & make use of boredom (while the parent is ignoring them)?
Just some thoughts...