On Children

One of the most interesting properties of the changes underway, in our identity and our relationships, and our shift from a focus on orthodoxy and orthodox life situations to more paradoxical ones, is the changing experience of children. Children are at the heart of the change going on, and the current generation of young children will be the lever that shifts us out from under the rule of orthodoxy.

Paradoxically, our relationship to our children remains simultaneously both one of the more taboo subjects, and one of the areas where people have the most to say. Children remain, for the most part, one of the groups of people with the least amount of power over their own lives. It is all too easy to assert that children lack the emotional maturity to take charge of their lives, and to use this blanket argument to keep the status quo. The reality is starkly different - some children develop emotional maturity at an early age, and overall there are shifts and changes in how much and what kinds of maturity emerge over time. The landscape is constantly changing with children, and so a "one size fits all" argument simply does not apply.

Also, the idea that children should be kept "innocent", that is "ignorant" of key factors that affect their growth and development, is a recent idea that emerged in Victorian Britain and spread from there. The need to keep children ignorant was as much a response to their association with the role of women in that era as it was a social movement aimed at their betterment. In fact, most of the ideas we have about children are recent and developed to serve social, political and economic agendas rather than the well-being of children per se. We should be very careful about what we believe to be "natural" about childhood.

A number of studies have begun to emphasize the fact that families are becoming less centrally organized and less structured as a function of duty and authority. "The modern family being classically founded upon duty (central value) and the principle of authority to settle relationships between individuals, its main features are opposed to those of the contemporary family. The latter, which started to emerge over the sixties, is characterized by both the prevalence of parent-child relationships symmetrization and the emergence of the search for immediate pleasure. The change from parental authority to consensus as a principle ruling the relationships within families leads to many consequences later noticed through changes in the construction of the child's psyche along his development and in the relationships dynamics....When consensus is at the center of the family, and according to concrete meetings with the other offered by the thousand and one situations met in the daily life, the aims and satisfaction modalities of the child's impulses will evolve into a relation often based on either strength or seduction." (Lazartigues, Morales & Planche, 2005)

This particular study highlights the fact that parent-child relations have changed to become more symmetrical - the child is increasingly viewed as a "decider" in his or her own right, on a par with adult deciders, or at least with negotiation rights. However, the article also emphasizes the focus on immediate gratification, the characteristic of the children of the baby-boomer generation. The growing importance of the environmental movement and other changes under way suggest that later generations of children will be less focused on immediate pleasure and more focused on a balancing of personal and social need.

Children are still raised within an expectation of orthodoxy, even though the family situations in which they grow are becoming more diversified. Each child believes their family situation to be representative of everyone else's, a kind of prototypical experience of family that is assumed to be valid generally. Ensuring the children recognize the paradoxical uniqueness of their particular family arrangements will be predicated on the cultural paradigm shift to paradox relationships. As the upcoming generations of adults embrace these changes, each in turn, their children will become more attuned to both the differences and the similarities of their own family life to that of others.

It may even be the case that the experience of conformity and difference as experienced by children and adolescents will change as a result of this broader social awareness. Although some of this may be necessary experimentation with social versus personal identity, it is likely that the experience is also fuelled by overly orthodox family attitudes that are felt to be a straightjacket by young people as their sense of identity emerges.

As children and adolescents become aware of their identity, the nature of their surroundings will affect their ability to recognize and work with paradox. When functioning within orthodox social arrangements such as the nuclear family, but also single parents and other situations that are promoted as typical, or within peer groups, young people learn to repress those aspects of themselves that are not recognized within the orthodoxy. This becomes part of their shadow self. Later, as an adult, the shadow self will come to haunt one and a number of ways that are both significant but uncomfortable, and that have large consequences for society as a whole.

Some creation of a shadow self is probably inevitable, but to the extent that a young person remains attuned to the contradictions involved in personal versus social life, and is allowed or encouraged to remain aware of the unconscious repressions that may be in play, it may be possible to avoid some of the worse excesses of a strong but unacknowledged shadow self that plagues our current society.

A strong and unacknowledged shadow self emerges when we are forced to suppress elements of our behaviour that are considered to be inconsistent with current orthodoxy. Acknowledging our shadow self is a characteristic response related to accepting our own inconsistency. The human psyche is a jumble of different, distinct processes - the feeling of unity and integrity is an illusion. Instead, there may be any number of inconsistencies, gaps, contradictions, or exagerations in our ongoing functioning. Furthermore, there are several distinct sub-personalities within each of us. In addition, these distinct processes and personalities mature at different rates when we are young, and hence the inconsistencies and so forth will mutate over time. To the extent that our children learn to accept this about themselves, and that we as adults acknowledge them, our ability to function more effectively and develop social and communal structures that are more holistic and balanced will likewise grow.

The evidence is becoming incontravertable - the social and psychological experience of children is changing. It has already changed significantly over the 20th century. It is now undergoing an even more rapid change, from one generation to the next. Recognition of this is key to understanding the changes in how the world functions that are coming into play. Not only this, there are opportunities to affect the change as it unfolds. There is an urgent need for a broad group of individuals to understand these changes, how they will likely affect our social and institutional structures, and what we may do to steward or guide these developments as they unfold.