Are We Poisoning Our Children?
Laurie Lee published his celebrated work “Cider With Rosie” in 1959. It tells the story of his early life, growing up in the 1920’s in a small Gloucestershire village. It has sold over a million copies and is still in print.
The story tells of his early life and the life of the village, some violence, some brutality, some eccentricity, some life and some death.
Referring to the book in the seventies Laurie said he felt that life had not really changed a great deal in the intervening fifty years but that our perceptions of life had been changed by the media. He felt that the proportion of antisocial, criminal or abusive behaviours had not changed significantly but that the media were responsible for using their influence to sensationalise events. What may once have been the shame of a single village, and thus been dealt with at a local level, was now paraded before the whole nation.
Thus an incident involving a child in Cornwall will affect the behaviour of parents in Thurso who, goaded by the media coverage, will assume that unless they redouble their efforts to protect them, their children will suffer the same fate.
Laurie Lee suggested in the seventies was that the actual level of risk had not changed but that since it sells the newspapers we had become accustomed to their stories and therefore believed that there were now threats hiding behind every lamp post.
Whatever the truth in Laurie’s assertion it is certain that we now are very nervous about letting our children play unsupervised, not least because of the disapproval of our peers who see unsupervised play as evidence of neglect.
Today it is very easy to keep children indoors because we can get on with our own lives secure in the knowledge that our children are being electronically supervised by DVD’s, WII, PlayStation or the Internet.
Since they are not outside they cannot be preyed upon and we cannot be accused of neglecting them.
So our children are now growing up in complete safety in an environment as devoid of human contact as we can make it. True they still have to go to school but by driving them to the gates and picking them up afterwards we minimise their possible interactions with other human beings. We are doing our job as responsible parents and with our protection our children grow, leave school and enter employment.
Once at work our children are then inevitably forced into contact with other human beings and we face the possibility that having never had to deal with these complex interactions before, they may be completely unprepared to deal with the resulting relationships. Work relationships, social interactions, partnerships.
Having failed through a lack of experience to interact successfully with other human beings one response is to retreat into the safe virtual world of their upbringing where the consequence of any failure is a simple game reset. By retreating even further from real life our children become removed from the sort of feedback that keeps us sane and functioning in a dynamic world. Without that feedback there is no anchor in reality and their increasingly bizarre virtual world begins to seem more real.
By protecting our children from perceived threats of harm during their childhood we may, from the best possible motives, be sowing the seeds of their future dysfunction.
By not allowing them the opportunity to experience and learn from the infinite complexity of human interaction while they are growing up we may be failing to allow them to gather the skills that they need to function as normal productive members of society.
Protecting them from our perceived threat of evil while they are young may be creating in them a predilection for evil when they are older.
