At various times in my career, usually when one of us was dealing with a difficult case, my colleagues and I would start talking about the impact of the patient’s childhood, on their current condition. This invariably led to a conversation on the purpose of childhood and how best parents and their children should negotiate it.
To some people it might seem a pointless topic to have discussed; after all everyone knows what parents are supposed to do for children don’t they? It’s been self-evident since time immemorial and the basis of how society is ordered.
Well, it depends how you view parents and children, and the State’s view of children and the role of their parents has undergone a dramatic shift in the past forty years. Biologically speaking, a child is an immature adult. Because of the physical impossibility of giving birth to a fully developed human, all babies are born needing to complete their physical and mental development outside the womb. The people responsible for the creation of that child are usually expected to take on this task.
Once this has been accomplished and the child has achieved maturation, he/she is a fully fledged adult human. So far so good. Now we have another child, successfully brought to maturity and ready for the world.
Except that for more and more children, it just doesn’t seem to be happening and changes to parenting styles pushed by the State mean that a traditional childhood leading to maturation, will become as rare as hens teeth in the not so distant future.
But why is this happening? Surely as a species we should want as many of our offspring to achieve maturity and go on to successfully propagate themselves so that humans can continue to thrive? If you look at primitive civilisations, this is deemed so important that rituals have been developed to mark the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood and completing them meant being able to accomplish a successful transition. We used to have them too years ago.
Some rituals could be quite hair raising such as bungee jumping or spending several nights alone in the jungle and being expected to come back with a lion, or other dangerous animal; but some were of a more social nature, such as getting the key to the door at twenty one. Another more recent ritual that used to exist in this culture was when your father deemed you mature enough to borrow the family car. Or, as I’m sure some readers will remember, the first time your dad asked if you wanted to go for a drink with him.
The adjudicators of these events were either parents, or tribal elders.
However, hair raising or not, they all share the same things in common. In order to transition to an adult state within the group, the candidate had to demonstrate that they had acquired certain skills that were tested by the rituals. All these “trials” centred around the management of a person’s emotional responses in various situations and their ability to problem solve, negotiate and read a situation . Even something as simple as getting your own key to the family house was based on the predication that you were mature enough not to be swayed by emotional manipulation and so would not put the family home in danger.
In the sixties, when the idea of youth as a distinct category from both childhood and adulthood emerged, these rituals were still adhered to by most people and those that had completed them, felt pride in being introduced and accepted into adult society. It was seen as a thing to strive for.
In other articles, I have spoken about the lack of maturity in a population making people more susceptible to manipulation by those in charge; but there is another more sinister side where parents are actively prevented from bringing their children to maturation by a lot of State sponsored but very subtle changes to the nuclear family. As I have said before, brain maturation does not take place until the age of twenty-five. Years ago, this was acknowledged, and children did not inherit or take charge of their affairs or vote until this age. Reducing this to twenty-one, and then to eighteen was a way of bringing children into the adult world sooner than they should have been and overriding the need for parental availability. I believe that sixteen is now considered appropriate by this government for children to be inducted into adult pursuits, such as voting in the government of the country.
I’m not sure what year it was, but the first and greatest change that impacted the family as it was understood was the acceptance of two wages instead of one for the granting of a mortgage. Unfortunately, this was the first step to house prices rising to accommodate the change. As a result, more women had to either get a job or stay in work, in-order for the family to afford to buy a house or rent one, and the assumption that at least one parent, usually the mother, would be more or less constantly with the child as it grew up fell out of fashion.
The constant bombardment of women from the eighties onward to believe that they were not fulfilled if they did not have a career and stayed home to raise the baby took hold and women who stayed at home were scorned, as being either unambitious, lazy, or under some man’s thumb. The fact that they were doing more important work than any equalities executive wasn’t even considered.
These changes lead to a revision of the roles of children and adults. Children were no longer protected from the adult world by their parents, until they were sufficiently developed to deal with it. They were expected to fit into the adult world from birth and in order to facilitate this, the state talked of young people, their needs and rights as separate from that of their parents, which the State would uphold on their behalf. One of the prime examples of this sort of thing was the impassioned speech Greta Thunberg gave to the UN when she accused them of stealing her childhood! Of course, they accepted this as it fitted in with their plans.
In the present, most children are treated as adults when convenient and children when not by both the State and their parents. For a developing person this confusion is harmful to say the least. Poor Greta is now in her twenties and yet developmentally speaking, there is no difference in her now, from the child who was feted at the UN. Doomed to be forever an adolescent is the real tragedy of Ms Thunberg, not climate change.
The idea of a child as an immature person who needed to be mainly with their parents until they reached maturity was being totally sidelined. Anyone could do it as long as they weren’t cruel or abusive according to theSstate so parenting as an exclusive activity was no longer needed.
At this point I need to remind my readers that humans are a species of primates. Our cousins and ancestors have always lived in small family groups and the females give birth and suckle their young, keeping them close for years after they are weaned in order to teach them the skills to achieve maturity without coming to too much harm. The males protect the group and make sure the group stays stable enough for this to happen.
In spite of all the manipulation that has gone on over the last forty years, most women, if asked confidentially, would love to stay at home with their child and look after them, at least until they are in their teens. Truth be told, most children would like that too. Children, when they are born know who they belong to. They tell this, like all primates, by touch and smell initially and then by sight. If something awful happens to mum and dad, they can be reared successfully by family members if available or by caring adults through fostering or adoption if not.
But we are not talking about this, we are talking about parents who are never encouraged to properly connect with their offspring, let alone set aside several years of their life to bring them up. This would interfere too much with the needs of the State.
Developing roles in society should be worked out with the continued health of the nuclear family as its goal, not the needs of employers or globalists, or individual ideology. Our society today is developing as a way of providing manpower in predictable numbers for the elites at the expense of everything else. One of the saddest things I came across in my practice were parents with acute anxiety because they could not afford childcare for the whole week and the consequences were that one of them would have to go part-time meaning they would not be able to afford a holiday. The child as an expensive addition to the couple is common in today’s world.
But why should people need childcare. Instead of paying millions to childcare companies to look after children, why not pay one of the parents to do it? Far cheaper and encourages emotional bonding. Usually this will be the mother, because no matter what social scientists say, the mother is the person most biologically and emotionally equipped to raise the child through early and middle childhood. The father usually comes in as the main player in late childhood to ensure that maturation takes place and introduce his offspring to the adult world.
The main reason that children fail to reach maturity in society is the salami slicing of the nuclear family by the State, making it impossible for most people to adopt it for both financial and social reasons, even if they want to.
This has resulted in children being denied the ability to create their own world, where they can safely negotiate their way through their development, protected by an adult exclusively focused on them, and forced to enter into the adult world before they are ready.
Children are becoming feral in the sense that they are grown enough to keep themselves from starving to death, but nowhere near developed enough to carve out their own identity and life in an increasingly complex world. Greta Thunberg is a prime example of this arrested development. Traditional role models such as parents and older members of society are seen as having nothing useful to teach them and their one goal is to emotionally express themselves at every opportunity, demanding that their immature world view is accommodated without question. Luckily for them, through the internet in particular, clever advertising and TV. programming packed with acceptable avatars, they have several ready-made lifestyle options to choose from to shore up their current position, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter to them in the short term.
The protection of their parents has been removed from children under the auspices of respecting their rights by the machinations of the State, to be replaced by a State which has no interest in them as individuals.
Lessons that their parents would have taught them, such as managing emotions, being polite, accepting that you can’t always have what you want, forbidding them to engage in situations that are too adult for them etc.; have been obliterated in a blather of emotional incontinence, my truth and my human rights.
Poor children. Isn’t it time we fought for their right to maturation, as good parents should?