At the heart of this ongoing health crisis, faced with the uncertain tomorrows that await us, we may have had only one certainty: it is the vulnerability of our human condition, it is the extreme fragility of the foundations on which rest our contemporary societies.
This pandemic will fade one day like those that preceded it. But we will have to prepare ourselves to face other crises, crises which will perhaps even multiply. […] The pandemic will thus have revealed the disproportionate toll that the poorest pay during crises. It will have laid bare this silent violence which is created by social inequalities and which makes the most vulnerable bear the heaviest burdens. It will have shed light on these unjust and inequitable asymmetries which structure our societies and are reproduced from generation to generation.
These inequalities are not new. But they multiply, deepen, add to each other and create aggravating conditions through their cumulative effects. Eventually, they become so unsustainable that it’s hard to keep ignoring them.
As this health crisis evolved, it became difficult not to see that the closure of collective childcare facilities was heavily penalizing and especially the least favored in our societies. It’s a hefty bill that they had to pay in various terms: educational discontinuity, restriction of access to essential resources, pause in their developmental process, mortgage on their mental and physical health.
Plurality of childhood experiences
Childhood is often treated as a physiological reality, a well-defined age of life, circumscribed by temporal boundaries, associated with various biological translations: a developing body, a changing size, incomplete teeth, a still immature reproductive system , a still inexperienced immune system, a motor system and senses that are yet to be developed. It is a posture of universality which leads however to combine childhood in the singular. To limit oneself to this posture would be equivalent to considering childhood as a homogeneous experience.
We can concede that children go through a certain number of common stages, but they do not necessarily experience the same childhood. Children who all live at the same time in the same society, at the same stage of their development, rather face very different universes, diverse experiences, and very unequal living conditions dictated by their place of birth, their origin. social status, gender, ethnicity. Childhood is thus combined in the plural, and this plurality of childhood experiences is explained beyond biological reality.
Childhood is fundamentally a social reality. Children bear the stigma of the conditions of their birth. […] These inequalities are also expressed in their bodies and hinder their full development: uncorrected vision disorders, neglected motor and sensory disorders, untreated dental problems, ignored nutritional deficits, situations of violence that affect their physical and mental health.
But beyond the body, these inequalities are also expressed in their minds, in various forms. For many, they will have less access to the cultural, technical and scientific resources resulting from the greatest progress of humanity. For many, they will be confined to the limited horizon of their precarious social conditions. For many, they will be more limited in their hobbies or simply their opportunities to play. For many, they will have to come to terms with these economic, social and cultural hierarchies that exclude them from certain privileges, even from certain rights.
Double Burden
For children from disadvantaged backgrounds, the burden of inequality is twofold: it puts an overwhelming burden on childhood, but it also extends its tentacles beyond childhood. […] We must delve into childhood to find the keys to understanding how these social relationships that generate sex and gender inequalities are produced and reproduced. It is from childhood that these gendered dispositions and these tenacious prejudices as to what is socially defined as masculine and feminine are cultivated and crystallized.
This means that the future of our societies depends on the material and social conditions, the spaces for socialization and development that we offer our children today. This future is first shaped in families. […] The economic, cultural and social capital of parents is important because it determines the living conditions of children and the resources available to them: the neighborhood they live in, the school they attend, the educational path they can dream, the hobbies and games that are accessible to them, the adult practices to which they are exposed, the way in which their family life is organized.
Parents are therefore a central and essential resource. But they do not have a monopoly on the processes of socialization and child development. These processes are shared in our contemporary societies with a set of professionals and other agents organized in various institutions. This is primarily the school, but there are also daycare services, health services, social services, not to mention community authorities.
Children are often led to frequent very early these diversified social universes which expose them to the conditions of a plural socialization. The risk is that to family inequalities, these universes can add other forms of inequalities: inequalities in institutional care that will be decisive for the trajectory of life.
It is perhaps too long a detour simply to say that it is imperative to reduce inequalities during childhood, not only to change the social destinies of our children, but also to ensure a better future for our societies. It is imperative to tackle the early constitution of inequalities to break their reproduction process. It is imperative to undo this vicious circle of injustice and inequality in which too many children are imprisoned in order to eradicate all this misery which overwhelms large groups of our populations: their satisfaction of basic needs which is compromised, their mental horizon which is obscured, their capacity to act which is constrained, their fundamental rights which are violated, their mastery of the world which is restricted, their life expectancy which is shortened.
These miseries are not inevitable, they are not inevitable. They are shaped by our institutions and policies, and we have the power to change them.