| “Kids — what’s the matter with kids today?” So ran a song I recall from the 1960s. Nobody could sing such light-hearted words today. As the UNICEF Report on Child Welfare and Happiness suggested last year (News, 16 February 2007), there is a great deal the matter.
It placed British schoolchildren as the unhappiest in 21 countries surveyed in the Western world. And the situation appears to have got worse: the months since have seen a stream of bad news, from rising obesity levels to reports of murders of and by teenagers.
We can, however, take heart from various initiatives to counter these trends, particularly the Children’s Society’s Good Childhood Inquiry (News, 25 April). There is also Jamie Oliver’s six-year campaign against the rubbish and chips my grandchildren were being served up for their school dinner, and, going back further, the clear-sighted reflections on this theme offered by Archbishop Rowan Williams in Lost Icons: Reflections on cultural bereavement (T. & T. Clark/ Continuum, 2000).
When the UNICEF report was published, media pundits gleefully set about rounding up the usual suspects: working mothers; liberal, permissive parents; and the age that spawned these iniquities, the self-indulgent, irresponsible 1960s.
Yet I find it hard to see the connection here — especially with regard to the pressures placed on children by the commercially driven values of the market economy. The rampant materialism of present-day culture weighs most heavily on young people, who are targeted by images of the “right stuff”, and yet have no independent economic access to it.
We should, however, analyse more deeply our young’s seeming inability to resist what is clearly bad for them. They are not simply helpless victims of adult folly; they have to bear some responsibility for their plight. The nature of this responsibility is a question that needs to be addressed in a way that seeks neither to stigmatise today’s youth, nor to minimise the misery some of them endure.
I would suggest that there might, after all, be something the matter with kids today, as the song says. I can think of no other way to account for the UNICEF’s report that only 43 per cent of British young people find even their peers “kind and helpful”.
Yes, one might well say that the unkindness of the other 57 per cent derives from growing up in the “me-first” society that their elders have created. But, if it is all society’s fault, we have no way of giving due credit to the 43 per cent.
I suggest that young people themselves are frequently drawn to the tawdry and the second-rate, because I know that I am. We all are, because of what Christians term “sin”.
I DO not, however, find the Church much help in all this. Bodies such as the Children’s Society have responded thoughtfully to the crisis in childhood, and there is plenty of evidence that Christian thinkers continue to wrestle with the nature of sin. But there appears to be no point of contact between these two discourses; so we have no meaningful way of speaking of the sins of youth.
Part of the problem lies in the language we have inherited. The teaching about original sin, as propounded by St Augustine, is repellent to the modern mind. It is not the sin part that we have difficulty with, so much as his assertion that we are born with it — “sinful from my mother’s womb”, as the psalmist put it.
This feels like a denial of small babies’ unutterable loveliness, and the tender protective love they call forth in us. Yet this is to confuse vulnerability with innocence. The tiniest baby comes equipped with precision-honed survival techniques. Some of these, if not entirely charming, such as crying, are sure-fire ways of commanding attention. Others, such as the milky toothless grin at 3 a.m., are so totally endearing as to ensure that the weary parent will get up and do it all again four hours later.
As babies grow up, their survival strategies become harder to read, and hence to respond to, with total adoration. When a three-year-old pulls her hand away on a busy street, and, even more so, when the turmoils of adolescence kick in, Augustine’s description of the human wills and affections as “disordered” does not seem so wide of the mark.
If Augustine is right here, and if children are not preternaturally good and incapable of doing harm (which is what “innocent” means), then they have to be included among those who stand in need of grace and redemption. They have since been placed with adults in this category by most of our ancestors (since the notion of infant innocence is a product of the Romantic movement).
Here there are difficulties again, though. These arise not from the theory of original sin, but from the ways it has historically been applied to children. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” are words to send shivers down the spines of progressively minded people.
Rightly so: good Christian people have inflicted appalling brutality on children for the slightest offences, on the pretext that it was for their own good. But the obligation to treat them with tenderness and respect does not depend on a belief in their original innocence.
If it did, and if children were perfect, adults would find themselves reduced to the job of providing necessary goods and services, but surplus to requirements in the moral field. Thus we would become passive witnesses, condemned to see our children’s lives in terms of a falling-off from the promise of perfection they once represented.
Yet childhood is not a static state; it is a time of growth. A good childhood is one in which children are free to grow into, not away from, this promise. True personhood, for Christians, means becoming children of God, heirs to God’s promise of redemption.
Like adults, children need to be redeemed from all that prevents us growing more fully into the image of the God in whose likeness we are made. It is only when we take hold of the idea of redemption as a process, in which adults and children are implicated from the very beginning of life, that we can begin to discern what we should properly expect of them, and they of us, at each stage of life’s journey.
Susan Dowell is a theologian who is working on a book about childhood. |
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