Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.
– Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society
What lies behind our obsession with childhood at a time when the birth rate has been in steady decline for over four decades? Earlier this year Joanne Faulkner argued in The Australian that our adult fixation on childhood is driven by a distorted view of childhood innocence. She blames Rousseau for this. It seems Faulkner believes that Rousseau fastened the grip of innocence on childhood in the way he accorded childhood with the purity of nature and the child with a blank slate. But, this combination is threatened by the menacing influence of culture – by society. Men are not evil, they become that way. As society becomes more complex, so does the task of protecting children against such a fate. And this complexity makes parenting more fraught and the task more urgent. In sum, childhood has not simply become a ‘central focus of adult hopes and anxieties’ but an ideological category that shapes all forms of moral and political discourse and action.
It is increasingly difficult to criticise policy or speech enacted in the name of children’s innocence without being labelled heartless or a pedophile sympathiser. The emotional investment in childhood hides manipulation.
The appeal to childhood innocence reveals far more about adults than about the nature of children. Children become a screen on which adults play out fantasies of a world without work, conflict or competition. This permits an “innocent” enjoyment of their “simple” attitudes.
I’m not sure I entirely agree with the idea that adults are living out childhood fantasies through children, but there’s no doubting childhood is a powerful ideological category because of the distorting influence of its imputed innocence.
Having said that, Faulkner seems to fall into the trap she set for these ideologically blinded adults. More…
The discussions over at Club Troppo on the future of education have certainly sparked my interest in the topic again. It started with Nicholas Gruen’s brief reflections on why Web 2.0 has not revolutionised education, why it should and how it could. In response, Ken Parish submitted his own personal experiences of adopting new technologies to analysis and critical scrutiny. Immediately, alarm bells rang off about a sort of technological determinism – an erroneous view that I corrected. But, what was lingering in my mind about their analyses and proposals was a submerged and, in my opinion, a problematic reliance upon individual initiative and resourcefulness as the catalyst for change and improvement. I want to offer a more considered response to their views.
This first part will address the specific points raised by Nicholas Gruen and part 2 will speak to the issues discussed by Ken Parish.
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I love Twitter, but a lot of people I know who are Twitter users are often baffled by the small number of people I follow. I’ve never had a good or consistent answer to people’s enquiries into my lack of connections. But, today, as I realised how unmanageable my saved searches on Twitter are getting, a simple answer dawned on me: I don’t follow people, I follow hashtags.
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Michael Chandler, a Canadian research psychologist, has received a lot of attention for his work demonstrating how culture moderates the suicidal behaviour of First Nation Canadians. It’s been cited approvingly by many Australian academics examining the rate of suicide amongst Indigenous youth. In particular, Chandler and Lalonde’s 1998 article published in Transcultural Psychology highlights the findings of decades worth of research. I reproduce the abstract here for your benefit:
This research report examines self-continuity and its role as a protective factor against suicide. First, we review the notions of personal and cultural continuity and their relevance to understanding suicide among First Nations youth. The central theoretical idea developed here is that, because it is constitutive of what it means to have or be a self to somehow count oneself as continuous in time, anyone whose identity is undermined by radical personal and cultural change is put at special risk of suicide for the reason that they lose those future commitments that are necessary to guarantee appropriate care and concern for their own well-being. It is for just such reasons that adolescents and young adults – who are living through moments of especially dramatic change – constitute such a high-risk group. This generalized period of increased risk during adolescence can be made even more acute within communities that lack a concomitant sense of cultural continuity which might otherwise support the efforts of young persons to develop more adequate self-continuity-warranting practices. We present data to demonstrate that, while certain indigenous or First Nations groups do in fact suffer dramatically elevated suicide rates, such rates vary widely across British Columbia’s nearly 200 aboriginal groups: some communities show rates 800 times the national average, while in others suicide is essentially unknown. Finally, we demonstrate that these variable incidence rates are strongly associated with the degree to which British Columbia’s 196 bands are engaged in community practices that are employed as markers of a collective effort to rehabilitate and vouchsafe the cultural continuity of these groups. Communities that have taken active steps to preserve and rehabilitate their own cultures are shown to be those in which youth suicide rates are dramatically lower [emphasis my own].
It’s a persuasive thesis and it has reaffirmed to me just how much sociologists could learn from psychologists of Chandler’s ilk. What I found especially insightful was the theoretical and empirical breadth and depth with which Chandler proposes his theory of the relationship between identity and suicide. Chandler has used his psychological theory of identity to demonstrate how suicidal behaviour is more of a risk when self-continuity is unstable. Given the disruptiveness of adolescence, Chandler and Lalonde use this theory of self-continuity to show why adolescent suicide is relatively high compared to other age groups. But when Chandler confronts the relatively high rates of suicide in Indigenous populations compared to non-Indigenous people he turns to an extension of his theory – his concept of cultural continuity - to explain this difference. As compelling as this argument is, I want to point to some problematic sociological assumptions that, I believe, recommend a very different conclusion. What I want to suggest from Chandler and Lalonde’s work is that communities that have taken active steps to adapt and modify their own cultures (to some extent) are shown to be those in which youth suicide rates are dramatically lower.
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