Contemporary Childhood: Terror, Containment, Community

Contemporary Childhood: Terror, Containment, Community Last January, as I rocked my brand new grandchild, Emily, in the relative safety of our home, I meditated on the plight of parents and grandparents in other parts of the world and tried to imagine their terror. Emily dislikes loud and sudden noises, just as all babies do. What must it be like, then, for Iraqi parents and Israeli parents as they try in vain to calm their frightened children day after day, night after night, amid deafening, lifethreatening explosions? Emily screams with all her tiny might when she is hungry. What must it be like for Kurdish parents or Ethiopian parents without the essentials to feed and shelter their children? For that matter, what must it be like to be a homeless American parent trying to protect and to provide for one's children in a shelter or on the street? My impressions before the flickering screen as I rocked Emily are all too readily verified by grim statistics. In his report. The State of the World's Children 1990, James P. Grant, Executive Director of UNICEF, writes that after a century of unprecedented progress in improving conditions for the world's children, the final decade promises advancing poverty, malnutrition, ill health, and illiteracy for the children of half the world's countries. Grant notes that this shameful circumstance results almost entirely from the fact that the world's governments devote half of their expenditures to maintaining the military and to the servicing of debt. According to Grant, the 145 billion dollars spent on the military in developing countries in 1988 alone would be sufficient to end absolute poverty within the next ten years. With that sum, human beings all over the planet could provide food, shelter, water, health care, and education for themselves and their children (1-3) . To pay for the military, the world's poorest children have been forced to sacrifice normal growth, health, education and their lives. In 1990 the Convention of the Rights of the Child was finally brought before the General Assembly of the United Nations, a document establishing minimum standards of protection for children's survival, health and education. The document urges all the nations of the world to establish children's rights to survival, health, and education as the first among each society's concerns and priorities. At present we are tragically far away from these ideal conditions. Every week one-quarter of a million of the world's children die of easily preventable diseases (Grant 4) . The President of the United States asserted early in his administration that "our national character can be measured by how we care for our children" (Grant 5) . Yet by the end of this year at least one-half million children will be homeless in the United States. The President succeeded in a fashion in the Gulf, but he has violated virtually every campaign promise concerning policies to enhance the quality of life for the nation's children. In all 27 areas affecting the lives of children—poverty, education, housing, health, child care, child-labor violations, safety—conditions are worse than they were two years ago (Chan and Momparler 44) . These overwhelming images of contemporary children's suffering the horrors of war, famine, poverty, and disease assault us daily. It is too hard to take it all in. The helplessness and pain make us feel too powerless, too implicated, and too vulnerable. More than one children's writer--Maurice Sendak and E. Nesbit prominent among them—have assured us that their powerful depictions of child life come not from observing and studying actual children but from maintaining a potent contact with their own childhoods. Contemporary critics would assure us perhaps that such a connection is actually impossible; what we do is to reconstruct, reinvent, halfremember , half-create our childhoods. And, moreover, we are not even in charge of that; ideas of childhood are really socially constructed myths to be used by the power-elite to oppress actual children. I admit all of these liabilities. Undoubtedly my remarks will deconstruct themselves or perhaps self-destruct by the end. Nevertheless I begin with my own childhood experience because knowing and telling...