We don’t love our children
Whatever we may claim: we don’t love our children.
Do you feel personally offended now? We all know lofty words are little more than air if they aren’t turned into action. You have to put your money where your mouth is. And judging by our deeds, there is no other option but to conclude that, in this society, we are either consciously lying, or unaware of the fact that we are lying. Frankly, I don’t know which one is worse.
If this society loved its children, it would place their well-being above that of its older generations. Instead, they now come last. We are sacrificing their future for whatever it is we deem to be more important.
This is notable in the way we are managing the C*-crisis, jeopardizing everything our youngsters need to grow, in favour of those who by comparison have already lived full lives. It is also notable in how we are (not) managing the climate crisis, holding fast to our current collision course with the planet, passing the bill for our boundless neoliberal expansion to them without thinking twice.
I am a little over forty years old. My generation, and all those older than me, are financing the quality and length of our lives with those of our children’s. That goes for both the C*-crisis on a short term basis and the climate crisis on a somewhat longer one.
I do not want this. It is perverse. But being conscious of this fact isn’t enough. Just like everyone else, I am a tiny cog in a huge machine and I am desperately wondering what I can do to make some kind of meaningful difference to change this.
I can write, perhaps.
There is a reason why we remember the first fifteen years of our lives so much more vividly than everything that comes after. It’s the same reason time seems to accelerate as we age. Children have a different sense of time — living almost exclusively in the ‘now’ with its stretching of moments and emotions — and therefore they experience everything that happens to them much more intensely.
What is little more than a few months of confinement and constraining measures to us, adults, is a grey sea of endlessness for children. When we were young, a school year felt like an eternity. Now, we are surprised to find a full year has gone by in the blink of eye — again. Everything we take from them and every burden we put on their shoulders on top of it, is far heavier on them than it is on us.
Healthy development isn’t something you can just ‘catch up’ after a period of trauma and deficit. We know this. And yet, in the way we approach both C* and the climate crisis, we favour everthing and everybody but our children and youngsters. The economy, the statistics, society’s development and progress, the life expectancy of seventy-year olds… it’s all more important than what they desperately crave. We have scaled back everything children need to develop into genuine, complete, functional and healthy adults: social exploration and high-quality education, vigour and joy, spontaneity and a sense of wonder. The capacity to breathe freely. Peace of mind. Clear water, nature and forests, biodiversity.
Ironically, for adults, life ‘as usual’ continues to go on more or less ‘as usual’, even during C*: we can go shopping, we have jobs, we can even go on holiday if we’re stubborn enough. Casino capitalism is flourishing as never before, multiplying the fortunes of the uber-rich in a heartbeat while millions of people who were until recently able to stay afloat are now pushed into poverty.
Surely, a lot of adults are also struggling now. But not as hard as children are. We have a different sense of perspective, exactly because we have lived longer. We can even allow ourselves the luxury of imagining the future. Yet again, the dreams we harbour are in no way concerned with the well-being of our children. We are dreaming aloud of everything we want to catch up on, not only social closeness but also bouts of pure compensation consumerism, as if there are no mass extinction or rising sea levels headed our way at all.
No, we do not love our children, even while we insist we do.
We confine them to their homes for impossibly long stretches of time while they aren’t even sick, leaving them to figure out their school work by themselves, while lacking both the equiment and support for the task (something for which parents and teachers are usually not to blame — they are genuinely trying to help but are chronically running out of time, resources or energy themselves). Over the course of the last ten months, we have allowed children’s learning disabilities to accumulate, the number of cases of child abuse to multiply by four, and the despair, depressions and suicide attempts by children as young as twelve to skyrocket.
Our children and youngsters are the ones who will suffer the consequences of our choices and our behaviour, somewhere next year, in the next decade or the next century. By then, most of us may already be dead. Perhaps that is exactly what we are counting on, subconsciously.
Renowned Belgian university professor and child psychiatrist Peter Adriaenssens once said the most remarkable thing in a (pre-C*) interview, when presented with the claim that is was appaling how many of our elderly were withering away, abandoned in retirement homes with their adult children not paying them as much as a visit. He flatly stated: ‘A parent needs to deserve a child’s love.’
As long as they are (very) young, our children look up to us with a boundless sense of trust and forgiveness. Their loyalty doesn’t waver, regardless of how we treat them. But their love is not something we have a right to claim, a clear-cut biological law of entitlement. If we want to be worthy of our children’s love and respect, not only today but later also, when they have grown into adults whom we have to look in the eye, we’d better start changing some of our ways — drastically.
