2 - 8 May 2002
Issue No.584
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 2 - 8 May 2002 Issue No.584 |
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Childhood's changing face
As the whirl of politically and economically fed social changes continues to envelop the globe, Yasmine El-Rashidi looks into what it has done to the process of growing up
Childhood has become a funny thing. It once extended well into the teenage years, till one was 13, 14, even 16 and 17. Now it stops -- suddenly. At age10 and 11, little girls seem to hit a wall. The naiveté of childhood vanishes, and they transform, it appears, into little women.
photo: Adel Ahmed
photo: khaled El-Fiqi
The end of innocence: today's world no longer allows children the luxury of a care-free and naive childhood
The final pre-teen year was once filled with "errr's": at the girls and their germs, and the boys that "smell." The gap between childhood and the beginnings of young adulthood -- when girls and boys begin acknowledging and accepting each other's existence -- has seemingly disappeared and the margin of adolescence has shifted significantly.
"Everything about them has changed," says Mona Shawqy, a private-practice child psychologist who spent many years in Great Britain. "Children are no longer what they used to be. They are a lot smarter, a lot more knowledgeable. They are more in-tune with what's going on around the world. They're not as sheltered as they were." In recent weeks, amidst the regional uproar at the unyielding strife of the Palestinian people, Egypt has witnessed an unprecedented political awareness from its youth. Not just the teenagers, but the youngsters too; five, six and seven-year-olds.
"They understand what's happening. They understand that it is not just and that people are being harmed and treated unfairly. They also understand very clearly the notion of Arab brotherhood, so to speak," Shawqy adds.
They are, in simple terms, a lot more 'with it' than their counterparts were just eight or nine years ago. Shawqi thinks that children are having to face reality much sooner than they did in the past, adding that "Childhood, as we knew it, is a luxury today."
A luxury, unfortunately, that few can afford.
"It would do more harm than good to protect a child in the way one did in the past," she says, "because no one else is doing it. By keeping the world from your child you are keeping from him or her a whole world that his peers have already been exposed to. It is like throwing a child into the sea without first teaching him how to swim."
Not smart, one can imagine.
"Standards have changed," says Dawna Peterson, a family therapist at the Community Services Association (CSA), Maadi. "The standards of what used to be on TV are very different from what they were. And yes, I see the manifestations of the media in the way kids are behaving today."
MTV, of course, is a buzzword amidst this revolution of mini-adults.
There is chatter in the background, and Peterson excuses herself momentarily.
"I'm sorry," she says, "I'm trying to coordinate," she explains. School is over for the day, and her children want to go to a friends' house to play. She wants them home by 5:15pm to eat, but they negotiate. They will return two hours later, and have dinner then instead.
"Only if it's okay with their mom," she calls after them.
She re-gathers her thoughts.
"Kids now dress like MTV," she continues. "They imitate what they see, and then their younger siblings or schoolmates imitate them. They want the make-up, the clothes; they want to dance like Janet Jackson and look like Madonna. They are sexualised much younger, and politicised in a similar way."
That is not to say -- as most assume -- that they are fully aware of exactly what is going on.
"They don't quite understand how they look," she says.
The naiveté, in short, is not quite lost.
"It's about imitation. They are playing at being grown-ups. If you look at a rural culture -- village life -- and look at the children there, they'll be imitating the adults by cooking, cleaning -- gardening, if that's what they see. In a more technologically advanced culture," she continues, "they are imitating what I call the 'MTV- values'."
The values, however, take time to fully root themselves in these youngsters' minds. At first, as Peterson explains, it is a mere display of MTV impersonation.
"That's what you see among elementary school kids," she says. "It is in middle school that they start to think about those values."
It is not until the high school years hit, however, that choices are made and values are discarded.
The key to development, maturity and nurturing a mind of one's own, psychologists stress, is experiment, talk, and the ultimate right to choose.
"When you respect your kids and they have the right to speak," Peterson says, "you are teaching them 'I will listen and tell you my opinion. There is a big difference between sheltering and suffocating."
Either extreme, she stresses, is equally harmful.
"One of the saddest things in the world is the children in the war zones," she says, her tone plummeting to one of solemn concern. "They are exposed to too much, too early, and are highly traumatised by what they see. You're dealing with a very different person in that sense. It's not that they have the developmental and mental capabilities of accepting and dealing with everything they have been exposed to," she continues, "but they have been stripped of their innocence. Their sense of security in the world has been shattered."
But of children who, through TV, are daily witnesses to the carnage? That is a very different story, according to Peterson.
"Those watching war on television have a sense it's unreal," she says. "I've watched Men in Black, and Armageddon, just like I have the Gulf War and the conflict in Palestine. None of the images register as quite real. It's the same for children. Only a child in a war zone has their shell of vulnerability crushed. And that," she emphasises, "is where innocence breaks down."
So while not all is lost, childhood over the years has, in essence, transformed.
"You see the changes around the world," Peterson says. "The global technological boom has impacted kids. Imitative behaviour has changed, which has affected how they play."
A study conducted in Palestine last Ramadan, Peterson shares, looked at toy stores and the goods they carried. Relative to elsewhere in the region, the ratio of toy guns to sports equipment, and other kiddie gadgets, was way-off synch.
"Shopkeepers said that they were stocking what parents would buy," she explained. And given grown-ups are walking around with guns, that too is what the youngsters want.
The answer is structure, stability, and the sharing of values, thoughts and ideas with children, Shawky believes.
"I remember when I was growing up [in Egypt]," she shares. "We never really talked to our parents. We had a foreign nanny look after us, and we would sit with our parents only for meals or if there were guests. We weren't allowed to talk. Things are very different now. I have a nine-year-old and a 13-year-old. I discuss things with them. Family decisions take into account their opinions and what they want," she says. "And I make a point of talking to them about everything. If they want to do something that I'm against, I sit down and discuss it with them -- try to reason, show them the good and the bad. Children are very intelligent, and they will compromise. You have to nurture that in them, though. You have to give them chance to develop that ability to use logic and reasoning. That way they can come to their own choices. "
In that sense, Shawky says, you are indirectly helping your children filter through the bombardment of images and values and ideas flung in their faces, and thoughtfully choose their own.
"I firmly believe that kids look for limits," Peterson says. "They operate better on structure. The problem, is that some families go overboard with rigidity and rules, so the kids rebel. Under- structure, on the other hand, leads kids to believe they are prima donnas and the world revolves around them."
Extremes, she says again, should never be options.
"We have a responsibility to our kids," she says, "to make them aware that the world will not revolve around them. And we need to be consistent in our expectations and the values we try to instill in them. We can't indulge them and let them run wild until they are 11 or 12 then suddenly ask them to behave. That's just not fair."
Not fair, not right, and certainly not a tool for survival.
"Raising a child is basically about preparing him or her for the world they will have to face later on," Shawky says. Do you shelter them from the images -- the news? "To some extent, but not entirely."
Everything is relative, Peterson says.
"What you expose a seven-year-old to, is different to a 17-year-old, and different to a 27- year-old," she says. "I'm not telling you to keep things from them, but you need to know what they are emotionally and mentally capable of dealing with."
Israeli brutality against the Palestinians may be harsh, but it is, right now, the talk in homes, communities -- the country as a whole. The gory images, however, are another story. For while they may be fact, and fact equals the future that these children will face, the pictures are hard for even adults to digest. They may be reality, but reality, at times, strikes a little too hard.
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