The 21st Century Journey: From Angels to Sullen Adolescents
Our first task, if we are to create a healthy climate for the raising of children, is to deconstruct and reconstruct the way we understand childhood and adolescence.
We’re all familiar with the term ‘Madonna/whore complex’ as a description of societal attitudes towards women. Although Freud defined the Madonna/whore complex in terms of its effect on the sexual relationships between men and women, it has gradually become understood in a wider sense, as an impediment to, among other things, equity, justice and male–female interactions.
We’re perhaps not so familiar with the angel/brat complex that applies to children. Nevertheless, this paradox in the way we regard and treat children is very real, and causes difficulties for them, just as the Madonna/whore complex does for women.
the ‘angel/brat’ complex
The term ‘angel/brat complex’ expresses the idea that children are expected to be pure and innocent, and if they deviate from this expectation, as they always must, they are then portrayed as vicious, evil and nasty. This view is elegantly depicted in one of the most important archetypal stories of our culture: the Adam and Eve allegory.
The King James Bible tells the Adam and Eve story thus:
And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.
Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them.
And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.72
Putting aside the possibility that the story is literally true, I suggest that it has arisen out of the individual and collective unconscious of our ancestors, and illustrates the three stages of life that many people simplistically believe we experience. First comes the purity of childhood, then the unhealthy, unattractive rebelliousness of adolescence, and then the burden of adulthood. Adam and Eve are created, asexually, as the epitome of child-like innocence. They are naked and unselfconscious, because, like young children (or, at least, children as viewed by the originators of the story), they have no understanding of sexual attraction, no awareness that one day their bodies will be sexually interesting to each other. Eventually however, the serpent, easily understood as a phallic symbol, tempts Eve and evokes in her the stirrings of sexual interest. This is consistent with the reality that girls mature sexually at an earlier age than boys, but has of course traditionally been used to cast women in the role of temptresses, seductresses, who can be conveniently blamed for the supposed lustful thoughts and behaviours of men.
Both Eve and Adam eat from the Tree of Knowledge, despite God’s stern injunction against doing so. In tempting Eve to eat the fruit, the serpent explicitly told her: ‘Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’ Sex is clearly the evil of which they become aware.
This development in their lives is synonymous with the universal experience of puberty and adolescence. Adam and Eve have learned that their bodies are sexually powerful. It happens in just a few moments in the story, and, indeed, the dawning of sexuality for young people can seem like a sudden event – teenagers have been known to use expressions like ‘the world got turned upside-down’ or ‘it just came out of the blue’ to describe it.
With Adam and Eve’s realisation comes self-consciousness and shame. Their discovery of sex enrages God, in the same way that a parent in our culture might react to the discovery that the son or daughter whom they imagined to be chaste actually has a sexual identity and is engaging in sexual activity. Adam and Eve are expelled from the place of perfect innocence. They and their descendants are cursed. They lose the possibility of living forever; Adam is told he can eat dirt and will eventually become dust himself. Eve must suffer pain in childbirth and be subservient to her husband; and even the snake is condemned to a miserable existence henceforth and forever more.
As God says, this is because ‘the man is become as one of us’. He is no longer a child; he has passed through adolescence and by so doing has become an adult; he has become a fully mature sexual being.
The equation is clear: to be asexual is good; to be sexual is bad. Worse than bad: immoral, foul, and meriting violent and extreme punishment. This attitude is not unique to Judaism or Christianity but is, for example, echoed in the so-called ‘honour killings’ of girls in some areas of countries like Pakistan.
If we consider the significance of the Adam and Eve story, we see that it serves as an allegory for our perspective on children and adolescents. Tortured by our own dark anxieties about adulthood and sex, and associating the lives of adults with corruption, we long for the comfort that would come, we believe, from encounters with worlds where all is innocent, where the snake is dormant. Many people construct Nature as such a world, ignoring the stalking, hunting, killing and (frequently) savage sexual encounters that dominate the lives of so many animals, birds, reptiles, sea-dwellers and insects.
Alternatively, many people hope that an ashram or place of worship or remote country or even a place close to home can replicate Eden for them. Hanging out with Indigenous elders in Outback Australia, with Sherpas in Nepal, with gurus in India, with natural healing centre personal coaches at Byron Bay, with Native Americans in the United States, with the congregation at the Hillsong Church . . . such experiences give some Westerners hope of filling an emptiness they feel but often cannot easily articulate. They eagerly devour any evidence that a sense of inner peace can be gained from these sources. In other words, they seek to escape from the adult lives depicted in the Adam and Eve story as comprising pain and sorrow. They look for a Garden of Eden, in the hope that they can sneak past the allegorical cherubim and flaming sword and get back into that place of perfection.
Frequently they revere fantasy worlds, such as Camelot, Rivendell, Hogwarts, Shangri-La. Sometimes fantasy and reality coalesce – for example, the name Camelot was colloquially applied to John Kennedy’s White House despite the far-from-perfect behaviour of some of its residents. Lobsang Rampa’s The Third Eye and other books were thought by millions of Western readers to be the authentic experiences of a Tibetan lama, and caused many people to develop an interest in Tibetan Buddhism, but were actually written by a British plumber who had never been to Tibet.
Many people look to the past in their search for a utopia, invoking the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, the decade of their childhoods, engaging in nostalgic reminiscences about playing unsupervised for hours on end, roaming on foot or on bikes, swimming in the river or in a dam . . .
There may be truthful aspects to these attractive images, but they conveniently overlook harsher realities of the golden past: the contemptuous treatment of women, the overuse of corporal punishment, the frequency of sexual abuse, the number of people injured or killed in accidents, the levels of alcoholism and nicotine addiction, and the emotional poverty experienced by many.
innocence versus evil
We are surrounded by simplistic images redolent of purity and innocence. Forrest Gump, Mr Chips, George Bailey (It’s a Wonderful Life), Dorothy (The Wizard of Oz), Anne of Green Gables are fantasy creations, but are among the most beloved iconic figures of the last hundred years. Children’s picture books, TV advertisements and saccharine movies frequently feature cuddly grandparents, cuddly koalas, cuddly stockmen in Driza-bones, cuddly nuns singing sweet songs in the Austrian Alps. On TV ads, houses are overwhelmingly white, gleaming so brightly that I assume every wall and every item must be brand new and scrupulously polished. Clean-cut well-scrubbed families engage warmly with each other, usually in the white-walled kitchen with its white benches, or around a white table where they eat together in a glow of mutual affection. Difficult moments with potentially rebellious teenagers are dealt with swiftly and surely by decisive yet good-humoured mothers. Great mates play funny pranks on each other, causing everyone to chuckle heartily.
Norman Rockwell’s paintings of warm-hearted American people in idyllic scenarios resonate with Australians as much as they do with Americans. And in contemporary picture books there’s a closely related, ideologically correct world. Fathers knit and do laundry, look after children and play non-violent games with them (kite-flying is popular). Mothers drive bulldozers and lift weights. Wise Aboriginal people squat under trees telling wise stories as they munch on yummy shellfish and bush tucker. Everybody cares about the environment.
Many adults are powerfully and neurotically attracted to these worlds. We know the attraction is powerful because these images are so often promulgated by advertisers: the people in our culture who are among the most skilled at manipulating the popular psyche. Some of the images are used even more often than sexual ones to sell products – notably banking services, telephones, and, rather oddly, alcohol and gambling.
We can say the attraction is neurotic when such images are used frequently, obsessively or addictively by people who can’t cope with reality. Upset and confused by the complexity of modern life, they slip away into a world that not only is unreal but has never been real. The almost pre-lapsarian world of picturesque stockmen, omniscient parents and anthropomorphic animals, for instance, is a lie. Not always a bad lie, but always a lie.
The strength of the need to believe in the lie can also be seen in public attitudes to figures who, for various reasons, must be viewed as perfect – Diana Spencer, because she was the archetypal fairytale princess; Mother Theresa, another incarnation of that impossible paradigm, the perfect virgin-mother; American presidents, the omnipotent father figures. On the day of President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, a middle-aged male American was shown on a television vox pop with tears in his eyes, shaking his head and saying with deep emotion, ‘I love Bill Clinton; (pause) I just love him.’
Enid Blyton, like many writers for children, was often made to fit the archetype of the wise, gentle storyteller. In the Melbourne Age on 20 January 1992, a photo of Blyton with her two daughters was captioned ‘Enid Blyton in 1949 with two of her greatest fans, daughters Gillian, left, and Imogen’.73
A different perspective can be found in Imogen’s autobiography, A Childhood at Green Hedges. Her memories show vividly the startling discrepancies that can exist in our society between illusion and reality, image and substance:
On Saturday mornings, my sister and I would go down to the lounge to collect our pocket money, sometimes augmented by pay for small gardening jobs such as weeding. It was on one of these occasions, when I was on my way to collect my sixpence, that I came upon a new piece of knowledge. Something that one of the staff said to me made me realize that this woman with dark, curly hair and brown eyes, so different from my own mouse-like appearance, who paid me just as she paid the staff, who was in fact the absolute ruler of our household, was also my mother. By this time I had met mothers in stories that were read to me, Enid Blyton stories included, and I knew that a mother bore a special relationship to her child, from which others were excluded. In my case the pieces of the puzzle failed to fit together. There was no special relationship. There was scarcely a relationship at all.74
Public adoration of these humans falsely cast as mythical heroes and gods is matched only by public fury when it is discovered that they are normal humans after all. The savagery with which the public turned on Princess Diana when her marriage to Prince Charles began to fail has now been conveniently forgotten, but it was virulent. In 2016 an attractive young Australian woman who had falsely claimed to have cancer was pursued relentlessly by the media without regard to her emotional health, which one might reasonably assume was fragile. Politicians, upon being elected to high office, often with messianic fervour by their supporters, frequently enjoy a ‘honeymoon period’ with huge approval ratings in the polls, but truly is it said, ‘Pity the man cheered by the crowd, for if he lives long enough he will hear the same crowd booing him.’
Particularly powerful to many people is the notion, the lie, of childhood innocence. Children as a generic group are not innocent. On the other hand, it’s true that some children are innocent, as are some adults. I had a grandmother who was ‘an innocent’, to use an old-fashioned expression. Her delightful nature seemed unaffected by the many difficulties with which she had been confronted. Awful experiences had not embittered her.
All children can be kind, generous, loving, selfless, self-disciplined, imaginative, honest, trusting and brave. Some of these qualities are popularly understood to be manifestations of innocence. But as anyone who knows children (powerful word that, knows) can testify, they can also be manipulative, dishonest, sexual, selfish, jealous, destructive, malicious, sly, greedy, cynical. Just like adults.
In May 2017, a pop concert in Manchester England was targeted by a suicide bomber, who killed 22 people, including an eight-year-old girl. In response, The Sun newspaper in Britain split its entire front page into two columns. One, headed ‘PURE’ was a photo of the child; the other headed ‘EVIL’ was a photo of the suicide bomber.75 The Australian Prime Minister at the time, Malcolm Turnbull, responded in Parliament to this awful event by saying, ‘This is an attack on innocence. Surely, there is no crime more reprehensible than the murder of children.’76
Words like ‘pure’, ‘innocence’ and ‘evil’ need to be considered thoughtfully. It should be recognised that powerful and wealthy countries around the world, including Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, have, through ill-considered invasions of dubious morality, caused havoc in many countries in recent decades, and have directly and indirectly caused the deaths of many people, including children, and the displacement of millions more. These tragedies are not generally acknowledged by world leaders, including Australian Prime Ministers Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison.
It’s perhaps also worth noting that the lives of men are often considered, by implication, as having less value than the lives of women and children. Hence, many newspaper articles contain sentences such as: ‘15 people were killed, including seven women and children’. If we do the mathematics, we realise that the other eight people killed were men, whose deaths apparently do not need to be highlighted.
Even lower on the scale are soldiers, leading to media references to ‘innocent civilians’; for example, ‘Many innocent civilians were among the casualties.’ The remaining casualties are, by implication, guilty people; viz. soldiers.
I’m not sure who examines the life of each civilian to establish whether she or he could be fairly described as innocent, or the life of each soldier to establish whether he or she should be described as guilty. The premature death of any person, soldier or civilian, man or woman or child, is likely to bring grief to someone, and should leave us all with a sense of loss: a life unlived, possibilities unrealised, potential unfulfilled. Truly did John Donne write: ‘Therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’77
Every day in the United States an average of seven teenagers and children are killed by guns. The writer Gary Younge chose a random day when ten young people were killed by guns, and in his remarkable book Another Day in the Death of America examined, one by one, the stories of these ten youngsters. He reflects on the culture that allows this seemingly-without-end slaughter, and goes on to make a point that cannot be emphasised too frequently or too strongly. For countless centuries countless people, including but not limited to warmongers, demagogues, religious leaders and so-called ‘ordinary’ people, have been all too ready to rank wounded and dead people according to criteria like age and gender:
But dwelling on children can be calculated. In not only emphasising their vulnerability but also declaring their inherent innocence and insisting on their angelic nature, one moves them from a ‘protected’ to an elevated category: it shifts the emphasis from the availability of guns to the moral purity of those they might be used to kill.78
Younge reminds readers of the death in 1955 of fourteen-year-old African-American boy Emmett Till, savagely murdered by two white men because he had supposedly acted in a cheekily flirtatious way towards a 21-year-old white shopowner, whilst in her store. The two white men were acquitted by an all-white jury. Younge points out that an article in Life magazine attempted to condemn Emmett’s murder by emphasising the moral purity of Emmett’s father, Louis Till, saying that the man ‘had died in the military during the Second World War’. The magazine went on to say that Emmett’s father was ‘killed in France fighting for the American proposition that all men are equal’.79 However, the death of Louis was not that of a wartime hero. He was executed during the war – in Italy, not France – for murder and rape. Younge rightly says that this has no bearing on the death of the fourteen-year-old Emmett. ‘No child should have been so brutally slain whether his or her father was a pimp or a priest.’80
The assumed ‘purity’ of children is contradicted by this story, told by an adult reminiscing in a Sydney newspaper: ‘And I remember my eighth birthday. There was one girl I just left off the invitation list, but Mum invited her. So I stood waiting at the front gate, and when she arrived I took the present and told her to go home. She went off crying.’ It is also contradicted by poet Eric Rolls, when he wrote in his book Celebration of the Senses: ‘I was astonished to learn when our children were all under seven that they had named the Dorset Horn rams according to their sexual capacities. There were Greedy, Clumsy, Shy, Big Balls, Weary, Slowcoach, Jealous – several more.’81
Over the years I’ve been told many stories by kids, including a boy who reminisced how in Grade 1 he regularly pretended that he’d wet his pants so he could get out of boring classwork; a girl in Grade 4 who paid blackmail money to two classmates so they wouldn’t tell others that she’d started menstruating; a boy who for his birthday was tied to a tree by his friends, who then climbed the tree and, despite the boy’s pleas, sat there for twenty minutes dropping raw eggs on his head. The eggs cut his head so badly that he needed eight stitches.
Whether these are learned behaviours, or whether they indicate some kind of innate corruption, is irrelevant. The important thing is that this is the way children are. And these behaviours are incompatible with our notions of purity and innocence.
innocence versus ignorance
The mistake many people make, I think, is to confuse innocence with ignorance. All children are ignorant – relative to most adults, anyway. But there’s a complex dialectic at work here, and by understanding it we will understand a good deal more about children, the issues in their lives, and the passion with which people debate these issues.
The dialectic is this: that the people who desperately believe in and proclaim the doctrine of childhood innocence are, at the same time, contemptuous of children’s ignorance and exult in the power their ‘knowing’ gives them over children.
Consider these four stories:
1A Grade 1 child in Show and Tell: ‘Dad and Uncle Jack got a new car last night, and they were in the garage all night painting it a different colour, and they even put new number plates on it.’
2A four-year-old, when her parents went next door for a few minutes, decided she would help them by cleaning the sitting room. To do the job quickly she went outside and got the garden sprinkler, brought it in and turned it on.
3A four-year-old asked his pregnant mother, ‘Mummy, when the baby’s born, does it come out naked?’
4A child in Longreach, Queensland, years ago, upon hearing of the first Sputnik flight, asked, ‘Mummy, does Sputnik go below heaven or above it?’
These stories have a number of things in common. One is that adults can be relied on to laugh at all of them. And underpinning their laughter is always this awareness: ‘We’re smarter than they are! We know and they don’t!’
So we’re laughing at their mistakes. We’re laughing at their ignorance. We’re laughing with the pleasure that comes from this proof of our greater status and power; the comfort that this gives us.
Much – perhaps most – laughter in our society has this mocking edge. In each of these stories the children are simply trying to get it right. They’re experimenting with language and concepts. They’re trying to figure out why Dad and Uncle Jack were behaving so mysteriously, how to clean a house like the adults do, the manner in which babies are born. They’re trying to understand abstract concepts like God and heaven.
Laughing at children who are trying to figure it all out is one of our most widespread and damaging cultural traits, and the more contempt adults have for children, the louder they laugh. The laughter is not well received by children. The very tone such adults use when addressing children is always patronising: ‘You are ignorant but I may let you have another jewel from my treasury of knowledge.’
If we accept that children are not automatically innocent and angelic, that they are complex, subtle humans who are trying to overcome their ignorance, trying to acquire knowledge so that they can move to the positions of strength that the knowing adults seemingly occupy, then we can get a clearer idea of the difficulties they face in our culture.
The unconscious thought processes in many adults operate like this: ‘The world seems so dark and difficult. It frightens me. It’s some comfort to imagine that there are pure, innocent places – the countryside [hence the attraction of James Herriot’s Yorkshire, and ‘Banjo’ Paterson and Ian McNamara’s outback Australia], sweet Fairyland [Enid Blyton’s Toyland, James Barrie’s Neverland, May Gibbs’ bush], beautiful Camelot [Buckingham Palace, John Kennedy’s White House] – and the innocent world of childhood.’
But they go further: ‘My children – and by extension, all children – are still living in childhood’s pure world. I must keep them in it. To let them out is to let myself out. I will use my power to lock them in there and hide the key. And I will oppose any adult who tries to give children the key.
‘By doing this I ensure that, though I must stay in this dark troubling world, part of me at least will (vicariously) be safe in the secret garden.’
I read somewhere that ‘protection is the oldest form of sexism’. It’s a wise statement, encapsulating the way men justify their oppression of women by pretending to themselves and others that they are protecting women – usually to stop them having sexual experiences, which, in such situations, men want to monopolise for themselves. But protection is more than that: it’s the oldest form of repression. Adults frequently excuse their repression of children by claiming that they’re protecting them. The adults are not mature enough, or brave enough, to confront the real reasons. And they’re reinforced by neurotic media monster stories about paedophiles, kidnappers and murderers (‘A depraved beast is stalking the streets of Sydney . . .’), which they read anxiously and avidly, to reassure themselves that their repression of their children is legitimate, ignoring the unchallengeable fact that if children are going to be abused or assaulted, it will almost always be by a close family member or friend.
A big problem for our society, for all of us, is that we believe children can will bad habits out of themselves. We believe it about ourselves too. The message from religions, from parents, from teachers, has always been that if we try a little harder, work at it a little more, put in that extra bit of effort, we can erase our envy, lust, greed, laziness and other nasty habits. They will cease to be a problem for us. We can get them right out of our system.
Children are constantly being told: ‘Stop being so selfish!’ ‘Don’t be greedy.’ ‘You’re very lazy sometimes.’ ‘It’s time you started thinking more of others.’ ‘You could do better if you tried.’
Ah yes, we could all do better if we tried. I remember watching a principal at a school assembly in Gippsland as he shouted at the Year 12 students: ‘Not one of you is working to your full potential.’ He was right, but then neither was the principal working to his full potential. Neither was I. Nor were any of the teachers present. Nor is anyone in the world.
In their attempts to excise their ‘bad’ bits, people sometimes go to extremes of self-criticism: abstract representations of the hair shirts, self-flagellation and physical mutilation practised in earlier times. And when we fail, and when children fail, as everyone inevitably does, to fix matters, it means that we just haven’t tried hard enough, that we are in fact failures. Somewhere out there are the good boys and girls and men and women, and further out still are the saints.
Graham Greene, in The Power and the Glory, created the memorable character of the whisky priest, who at the end of the book is shown to be on the path to veneration and perhaps even canonisation, despite his alcohol problem and the fact that he has fathered a baby. The story could be seen as showing that canonisation is a deeply flawed process, or, as I prefer to see it, that even a man so deeply flawed has saintly qualities. I think the whisky priest is one of the saintliest figures I’ve encountered in fiction.
Robin Klein, in Hating Alison Ashley, gives us a young heroine who seems perfect, but late in the book we find out the truth about the saintly Alison Ashley: she is a deeply unhappy child, whose goodness is a desperate attempt to control her surroundings and please an unpleasable and uninterested mother. The more controlled someone is on the outside, the more out of control they’re likely to be on the inside: hence Lisa in my books So Much to Tell You and Take My Word for It, described by her friends as the ice-woman, is at grave risk . . . as we eventually learn.
In schools we constantly give children the message that it is awful to be selfish or cruel or vulgar or dishonest or covetous. We ignore the truth, which is that all human beings, including us, the teachers and parents, have these aspects, no matter how much we try to deny them. I remember a school staff meeting during which someone began the familiar chant about the problem of students arriving late for assemblies and for classes. Other teachers joined in, I suspect because that’s always a comfortable, easy and satisfying thing to do in these situations, to complain about the bad habits of young people. There was a problem, however, on the occasion of that staff meeting, which I eventually pointed out: more than half the teachers had been late for the meeting.
Some adults deny supposed negative aspects of themselves by becoming unnaturally sweet – in middle age they may still be speaking in sugary little voices, being super-helpful, filling their houses with potpourri or fragrant oils, sending loving messages to friends on Facebook. I have to say, I find people who assume an unremittingly sweet and beautiful façade almost as disturbing as people who appear to be unremittingly violent and appalling, because neither has been able to reconcile the paradoxes within them. In general, I find the first group more difficult to deal with, as all too frequently they become vicious when they don’t get what they want, but they won’t acknowledge that they are angry. Members of the second group do not dissemble as much.
Some people deny their ‘darker’ qualities by furiously criticising the manifestations of these in others. Children are especially good targets for these people, because children appear to be still malleable, not yet set in their evil ways, and because children, by virtue of their size and relative helplessness, make good targets. Hence schools are bombarded daily by people with agendas about which they feel passionate. When you want to change the world, and no one seems to be listening, where do you go? Why, to schools of course. Many people see schools as amorphous masses of pliant children waiting to be shaped and sculpted into devout believers in the causes espoused by evangelising adults. I am subjected every day to emails and other approaches from groups and individuals who want to come into the schools and give fervent presentations about cyberbullying, schoolyard bullying, eating disorders, transcendental meditation, yoga, feminism, the environment, bowel cancer, Cambodian orphanages . . .
In 2016 I received an email from a fifteen-year-old Australian girl who explained that she was currently in Cambodia with a group from her private school, so they could carry out Good Works with underprivileged Cambodian children. She was seeking the support of Candlebark for this cause. She described how one of her assigned tasks in Cambodia was to teach young kids about issues like stranger danger, abuse and rape. She said that some of the children were victims of these phenomena, but were not aware of it, and added that she felt she was ‘very lucky’ to be able to teach these subjects.
I responded:
I appreciate your good intentions with the Cambodian project, but I must say I was taken aback at the idea of 15-year-old Australians, presumably with no teacher training or qualifications in psychology, teaching children in a third world country about issues like rape. I wouldn’t welcome 15-year-old Cambodians coming into Candlebark to teach our Grade 3 or 4 children, for instance, about health, sexual abuse, and rape. It would seem startlingly inappropriate to me.
I never heard back from her.
we are our good parts and our flaws
Adults, including mini-adults like my correspondent, would be better off working on themselves than frantically projecting onto children. They don’t help children by traipsing off to Third World countries on missions of mercy that seem to be more about giving themselves a short-term warm glow. They don’t help children by preaching the message that it’s awful to be selfish, dishonest, cruel, vulgar, covetous – because that’s giving them the message that it’s awful to be who they are.
Rather, we ought to teach children that all feelings are as much a part of being human as having two ears, a nose and a pair of eyes. And we need to accept these feelings in children just as we accept them in ourselves. In fact, we won’t be able to accept them in children until we can accept them in ourselves. The challenge for human beings is to accommodate and manage our darker aspects in ways that will bring as little grief as possible to ourselves and to other people.