An Unpsychology of Childhood
Don’t you hate it when people talk about having ‘grown up’ conversations — or being ‘adult’ — in a way that you know means they are pushing aside the possibility for imagination? There is something so stilted and pompous about a self-conscious ‘grown-up’ — and yet these are the people who often hold power and influence in our world.
Perhaps this will not always be the case? Perhaps we are seeing a cultural change — one in which the child in us all is given more leeway? After all, the ‘childish’ attributes of curiosity, spontaneity, playfulness, wilfulness, joyfulness, love, honesty and seeing the world with a broad eye (the ‘infant lantern’, as opposed to the ‘adult spotlight’, as Alison Gopnik puts it) are the very things we all need to be successful people (not ‘adults’ or ‘children’ as categories) in the curious and difficult times to come.
This is where I find much of my work focussing at the moment. Maybe its because I’ve become a Grandpa for the second time (welcome to the world, Ellie!), and maybe its because I echo Martin Shaw’s concern that even the best of us grown-ups may have become: “…too busy getting our chakras balanced to tell them (children) stories, take them for walks”. Perhaps its because I know that my granddaughters, and their contemporaries, are going to have to negotiate a difficult path in a world that we so-called ‘functional adults’ have made for them.
Whilst constantly claiming that ‘adulthood’ is where we want to be, our culture is trapped, ironically, in what Martin Shaw calls the posture of a child. “The last thing our children need”, he writes, “is to be raised by kids with the faces of adults”. We need, he adds “to understand the labour of raising something”.
So, in the third issue of Unpsychology Magazine, the paradox of childhood takes centre stage. Childhood as seen from the perspectives of adults who haven’t forgotten the wonder of their youthful imagination, and who are prepared to take on the big responsibility of championing young people as people with will, soul and agency.
The magazine will be published in June — with a larger format, more pages and a cleaner design than before — and it promises to be full of treasures. There are some amazing pieces — poetry, fiction and non-fiction — all speaking from the adult to some little piece of childhood that has been put aside. Our culture is big on telling parents — and children — how things should be, but not so great at listening to the wonderful lessons that children can teach us.
One of the great myths of childhood is that children are somehow undeveloped — proto-humans whose eventual person-hood (read ‘adulthood’) is dependent on the nurture they receive (on the one hand), or the genetic hand they have been dealt (on the other). Yet research by Alison Gopnik and others gives a lie to this — for her, infancy is the Research and Development phase of the self — a time when the mind is most active, broad, inquiring and dynamic.
And anyone who has been a parent or grandparent like Toby Chown and Anna Bianchi (who both write movingly in this edition) will know the truth in Patrick Harpur’s words from A Complete Guide the the Soul: ‘Every mother looks at her child from both points of view: even as she watches him or her grow and change, she also recognizes the same personality which, often to her amazement, was complete and fully formed at a very early age, even at birth.’
What I wanted was writing that is read by adults that passionately champions children; that is created with an intellectual humility that allows us down to a child’s level — to crawl about the carpet or forest floor a little, while at the same time taking on the labour of raising our kids, and preparing them to face the world we have created for them.
Jay Griffiths writes emphatically for children. She tells us that children have friendships and love affairs with plants and animals — wild and tame — and that their messy, grubby dramas are born out of a magical awareness of connection that tragically — for most in our post-modern culture–is gone or faded by the time we reach adolescence. Her wonderful, final chapter from Kith will be reprinted in full in Unpsychology Magazine #3.
She tells us that child’s world is one of connection; not just attachment to others in her social network, but also to a wider ecology of self. The child is embedded in an experiential ‘now’ that brings together seamlessly her original self, her expanding social world, her affinity to nature, and her relationship with the space she lives within. The thing that holds all this together — as Julia Macintosh and Penny Hay will both highlight in their essays— is imagination: the ingredient that we adults also need to make sense of our troubled, ever-changing world. The child’s world always holds the key to the future.
The future has long been the concern of educator Dave Hicks — and in his latest book The Climate Change Companion — an extract of which will be printed in the magazine (and which you can download in full HERE) — he asks us to consider a new future in which the realities of climate change are accepted and faced. Our children deserve this too — that we do not turn from the mess we adults have made, and co-create stories with them about how we will live in times to come.
There are poems and stories too from inside the child’s world from Paul Feldwick, Bethany Rivers, Kate Pawsey, Tanya Shadwick and Rachel McGladden and a rich and beautiful allegoric piece of fiction from Jim Carter. Riches from within and around childhood, then — and perhaps a foundation for new stories of childhood to be told.
The call for submissions for this issue certainly tapped into a rich vein of writing, and so I’ll also be publishing a range of supplementary materials — some new essays online (at medium.com/soul-making) and poetry in a special free supplement that will come with every purchase of the magazine. This will contain some of the wonderful poems that were submitted this time, but couldn’t be included in the print edition.
And if you’d like to support Unpsychology, then please consider taking some copies to sell or even sponsoring the edition (or asking your organisation to do so). And of course, please buy your own copy when it comes out in June. We’re hoping for a very special launch in Bath — more news on that when it emerges! Contact me at steve@21soul.co.uk for details.
