Contempt of children

[dolorosa_12]

This article, which I found through BoingBoing, really made me angry. In it, a mother describes being phoned by the police because she'd allowed her nine-year-old son to ride on a train alone.

"He – Izzy — has ridden this route solo a dozen times before. It’s a straight shot on a commuter train and, as always, he was being met at the other end by his friend’s family. But today’s conductor was appalled to see a boy riding alone.

For some reason, the conductor wouldn’t talk to me, even though Izzy called from the train when the ordeal began. The man had no interest in hearing me state what Izzy had already been telling him: We believe a child of 10 is perfectly capable of taking a half hour journey by himself.

So instead the conductor and his superior got off at Izzy’s stop and then, as the train just sat there (I’m sure no one was a rush to get to their families on Christmas day), they awaited the police. I got a call from the friend’s dad who was waiting to take Izzy home. “We cannot leave the station,” he said.”

'Why not?'

'The police have to decide what to do next.' "

It reminds me of an interview I did earlier this year with John Marsden:

“So people say, ‘don’t let children climb trees,’ or ‘you mustn’t write books where people are given realistic portrayals of the darker aspects of our society’. I get an educational magazine from England and they were describing a recent problem in a primary school where the local council had banned the grade one class from hatching eggs in the classroom because the school couldn’t guarantee that the eggs would be free of salmonella. You get things that are just completely insane, just being rapidly incorporated into normal education and child-raising.”

Marsden feels that such insanity is tolerated and even encouraged, by adults who feel a lack of control in their lives and set about, like bullies picking on the weak, constraining and restraining and infecting children with their fear.

“I think partly it comes from a contempt for children and adults enjoy the power they have over children.
“And children are very easy targets because no matter how bad a parent is, very few children will ever find the courage to confront a parent because the consequences are so awful that the child can’t confront them and will just have to tolerate the excesses of the parent.”

Dark days indeed.

Comments

[cereswunderkind.livejournal.com]

Greedy lawyers have to take their share of the blame for this. Much of the so-called "nanny state" doesn't come as a result of do-gooding, but from a fear of litigation.

I could go on for hours about the awful effects that western capitalism as it has developed since the 1980s have had on us, but I'd just sound like a ranty old man.

[romen-dreamer.livejournal.com]

I'll second the accusation of litigation. People wouldn't be so worried about making the tiniest mistakes if they knew how to solve problems without the assistance of lawyer and jury.

There's also the related fact that responsibility for children used to be left up to parents. Kids used to be able to ride trains (including my brother, a mere decade older than me), play in the woods, use potentially dangerous tools and chemicals, because their parents had taught them not to do stupid things and how to avoid other people doing stupid things. Now, our society is seen as so very vulnerable that children must be encased in bubble-wrap and "protected" from any physical or mental stimulus until they grow up and are then thrust out into the real world completely unprepared for what they'll encounter. And then some people wonder why those so-called adults seek escape in excessive consumption and television watching and other methods of escape.

Oops, let a bit of a rant out there. Probably a lot of what Peter avoided saying. I have no fear of sounding like a ranty old woman :P

[dolorosa-12.livejournal.com]

I suppose another thing is the lack of any kind of community outside the home. It used to be that if a child was playing outside in the local park or whatever, all the adults around would feel a kind of collective responsibility, and would keep an eye on other people's children. Now, there's this strange attitude that you must never speak to other people's children, whether in friendly conversation, to warn them that whatever they're doing is dangerous, or to tell them off.

This has the double effect of actually making things more dangerous for kids (because no-one besides their families or paid carers are looking out for them) and rearing a generation of children who don't know how to talk to any adults besides their parents.

I could rant about this for hours. There are so many things wrong with the the general social attitudes to raising children. Even in the 90s when I was growing up, things seemed a bit better, but that might've been because I was living in a nice middle class suburban town with quiet streets where people tended to build up a sense of community in their particular streets. That is, I was living in a bit of an anomaly.