What Children Need

Last week, on Tuesday to be exact, I had the supreme pleasure of going to two different local public schools and singing Holiday Songs with some six classes of kindergarten through 5^th grade. The happiness it gave both me and the children went unreported in the midst of my computer breakdown. Here I can only call back the echoes of that day, but in light of what’s happening for children these days, it’s worth reporting. It’s worth a bit of reflection. It’s worth a moment’s pause to consider. 

 

When it comes to child-raising, there are no good-old-days. For most of human culture, childhood was a short-lived experience lasting exactly as long as the child’s ability to help out with work, be it farming or hunting or going to the factory. With the advent of mass literacy, children were funneled often into schools, prolonging their special status as children before entering the work force in their teens. In the United States, this continued on through the 1940’s.

 

By the 1950’s, with some post-war prosperity and more and more young people continuing on to college, childhood was prolonged yet further and a new phase of teenage-hood identified by the rise of rock and roll, rebels without causes, Holden Caulfields dreaming of being the catcher in the rye. The young ones were still mostly innocent, playing freely in the park with their friends with no adult supervision and watching their counterparts on TV getting in trouble for chewing gum in class or telling a little lie to their parents. Andy would show Opie how to be a good person and learn to do the right thing, Ward and June would help Beaver and Wally understand how to be nicer to each other, adults in general were looked up to as models of civil behavior. 

 

By the 1970’s, parents tried to be friends with their kids, marketers began to move in to create a hunger for consumption and if the President could lie (though back then, still with consequences!), respect for adults started to diminish. Parents were not adults to look up to, but siblings to hang out with (what Robert Bly calls The Sibling  Society). With the loss of a vertical dimension of knowledge and wisdom, the entire culture became like clueless gangs trying to initiate each other. A recipe for disaster, as all proper education and initiation requires the guidance of those who have walked further down the path. 

By the 80’s and 90’s, America’s lust for profit at all costs shamelessly addicted kids to fast-food and violent video games and $200 sneakers and the filters on TV and movies began to crumble. As Neal Postman notes in his book The Disappearance of Childhood (published in 1994), childhood depended upon secrets surrounding things like sex, violence and the things in life that trampled hope, secrets that were now wholly available to children both through media and parents sharing too much with their kids. (Little could he predict back then how the Internet would expand that 100-fold, with a six-year-old able to type “porn." The consequences of these multiple disregards for the health and well-being of our children are staggering. In his book The Soul’s Code, published in 1996, depth psychologist James Hillman reports: 

 

“Of the 57 million children living in the United States, more than 14 million are living below the official poverty level. The United States ranks below Iran and Romania in the percentage of low-birth-weight babies. One of every six children is a stepchild and half a million make their ‘homes’ in residential treatment centers and group and foster homes. More children and adolescents  in the U.S. die from suicide than from cancer, birth defects, heart disease and pneumonia combined. Each day, at least 1 million ‘latchkey  kids’ go home to where there is a gun. This is in addition to all those in treatment for attention deficit disorders, hyperactivity, obesity, defiance, bulimia, depression, pregnancy, addiction…” (p. 84)

 

This from some 30 years ago. I shudder to look up today’s statistics, but virtually can guarantee they are far worse in each of the above categories.

 

Robert Bly’s book The Sibling Society, published the same year as Hillman’s and two years after Postman’s, notes:

 

“what the young need—stability, presence, attention, advice, good psychic food, unpolluted stories—is exactly what the sibling society won’t give them. As we look at the crumbling schools, the failure to protect students from guns, the cutting of fund for Head Start and breakfast for poor children, cutting of music and art lessons, the enormous increase of children in poverty, the poor prenatal care for some, we have to wonder whether there might not be a genuine anger against children in the sibling society.” (p. 132-33)

 

In short, what children need, what we all need (truth, beauty, love) is exactly what we’re refusing to give them. 

 

 Where does healing begin? Everywhere and anywhere it can. From restoration of social programs, resisting the Republican’s move to dismantle some of our child labor laws, accountability in the entertainment industry, attention to poverty and health care, all these big ticket social and political solutions, to the more intimate and more manageable things like restoring genuine arts educations in schools and parents and teachers becoming the kind of adults children need. (More on this in a future post).

 

To bring this all back to me singing songs with kids who I had never met, but felt instantly at ease and friendly with. Not exactly their “friend” in that sibling-society way, but an adult who knows how to play like they do and also knows how to work like they’re learning to do. One who knows the songs and poems and stories they need to know and has the skills that they will need to learn to not only sing, but sing well, to accompany themselves coherently with an instrument, to learn how to tell a story with dramatic voices and rhythmic energy. One who models how to be fully present in the group, how to invite both their participation and ideas and fold both into a given activity, one who allows for silly and serious to live side-by-side, who can laugh and have fun but also get seriously quiet and even shed tears in their presence. Within the first minute of our time together, we’re already connected as a group and it gets better from there. I am giving them exactly what they need and it’s coming back to me and giving me exactly what I need.

 

How do I know this? From the energy of their singing, their smiles and laughter, the twinkling eyes, their bright ideas freely shared, their rapt attention for 45 minutes and one girl pleading when it was over “Don’t go!” And another who handed me a little slip of paper, someone I had never met before:

 

Of course, I’m not the best (whatever that means) but it was her way of saying that I’m an adult who understands how to give kids not what they say they want, but what they so deeply need. 

More testimony to follow.