Why do we forget the “elephant in the room”? Many articles are coming out these days on childhood and seek to circumscribe the roots of the evil that gnaws away at our little ones. Sometimes the tyrant child, sometimes the failing parent, sometimes the incompetent teacher, also the degrading screens. Everyone passes by there.
Children are described as tyrant kings, supposedly perverted by video games or hypnotized by social networks, today’s great villains easily designated by adults: adults just as kings, incapable of getting rid of their precious “intelligent” digital appendage , unable to deal with minimal frustrations which now lead to rage, recrimination, threats, in an all-powerful “it’s my right”. The adult is in a temporality of everything, immediately, rapid and satisfying.
But let’s not digress and talk about the children. Indeed, that (them?) is the problem.
These little ones not having self-generated (not yet at least), they are therefore the fruit of what we call “parents”. Sometimes judged to be disengaged, lax, too much or not enough, parents seem to be for many the supreme culprits for the failure of childhood. We should even, as in France, punish defaulting parents with fines to “make them responsible” and remind them that, as a police chief says, “with children, it’s a good slap in the face and in bed”…
The school obviously does not escape the designation, and the striking teachers would then be responsible for academic delays and future failures. We will also be able to file a complaint a posteriori for the failure of our big one in a few years because of the delay in 2023…
“Virtual guardian”
Screens and networks, obviously, are a real plague, but let’s question what makes young people prefer to rush into this virtual life, where they still have the leisure to be what they can no longer be in real life (adventurer, explorer, builder) and express an impulse which, usually, was expressed in (real) play with friends and in nature. Why do our adolescents prefer to escape the difficulty of human relationships? What was ultimately taken from them in the real world that they so eagerly seek it elsewhere?
As many sociologists point out, parents, well “advised” by advice warning against the dangerousness of the world, have little by little repatriated their offspring into the family cocoon to avoid them all danger: the outside, nature, others. It was then necessary to find a virtual guardian which was called television then video games and is now called cell phone.
Virtual merchants have made no mistake in offering ever more incredible worlds to access a vibrant life in just a few clicks. Who would resist such a call, especially with an immature brain and the initial tacit consent of the parent?
The merchants… We come to the elephant in the room, which no one is talking about.
A dangerous paradigm
I recently met Michel Vandenbroeck, a Belgian doctor of educational sciences, who has just published Parenting in our neoliberal world. There he is, the elephant. This book could be retitled: “Being a child in this neoliberal world”. He talks about the commodification of childhood thought in economic terms and “human capital” to invest for an expected return on investment! He recalls that, in educational sciences, one of the most cited authors is Nobel economics winner James Heckman, whose econometric tool proves that investing in childhood and its development brings a significant return on investment. .
Children are victims of this crazy rush of their development in a capitalist, productivist and all-out efficiency dynamic. It’s about making children grow very quickly, even if it means doping them when they don’t respond well enough to the process of force-feeding and intensive agriculture. Accelerate the temporality of childhood to very quickly make them autonomous, reasonable and… adults.
In short, help them “in all kindness” to heal from this rotten stage that would be childhood. Like curing an illness…
This is what we don’t name enough. Parents, teachers, doctors, adults, all are stuck by this cultural hegemony that they try to resist from time to time, but which they also unconsciously encourage. Because we have all internalized the idea of individual responsibility for childhood and easily point to culprits. Sometimes it is “just” the child who is guilty, the child who is not capable of conforming [à ce qu’on attend de lui] (and in this case, I arrive at the end of the chain to “repair the malfunction” after having labeled it and then sometimes medicated it).
If no one is guilty, we all have a responsibility to say stop and get out of this dangerous paradigm that sacrifices childhood. Faced with these very practical individual responsibilities, the State constantly disengages, leaving us to flounder in the mud below.
So, as I call in my essay, let’s creatively disobey and develop local and citizen actions to escape this hegemony. Let us remind those who (do not) want to hear that childhood is not an illness.