Is Childhood Dead? That is the ominous question raised by the current issue of Focus, the magazine produced by the organisation for returned development workers, Comhlamh.
A quick flick through the statistics and you'd certainly think childhood worldwide had been well and truly annihilated: 73 million children under 10 are working in mining, prostitution and agriculture; infant mortality rates are soaring. With around 80 ongoing armed
conflicts around the world, children are recruited as soldiers and suffer horrific injuries from landmines and artillery bombardment; they are orphaned, killed and raped. So much for the idea of childhood as a time of security and carefree days spent playing in the sunshine. According to Robin Hanan, co-ordinator of Comhlamh, "in all societies children would historically have been protected. But when a society is under stress, those sorts of protections start to break down and children are the first to suffer.
"We decided to look at the issue of childhood globally, including here in Ireland, because increasingly the world is becoming one place - one market, linked by one mass media - where childhood is under pressure."
Mind you, the idea of childhood as a lengthy period entirely separate from adulthood is quite a recent one. According to Noirin Hayes, head of the school of social sciences at DIT, "childhood as we know it today began to emerge around the 1800s. Children have always worked in agricultural societies, but with industrialisation we started getting children working outside of the family and community setting, where they would have had a degree of protection. In the 1800s one of the earliest recognitions that children had specific needs came in the form of the Factories Act.
"Nowadays in western society we are generally having fewer and fewer children, they are more likely to live past infancy and our attention on children has become more and more focused."
With that focus has come an emphasis on the needs and - more recently - the rights of children. But the experience of childhood is something which varies from country to country and child to child. "In China, for instance, where some families can only have one child, that one child has the individual attention of parents and two sets of grandparents - which will inevitably affect how childhood is experienced," Hayes says. "In countries like Ireland where the economy is doing very well, childhood has changed quite radically," she explains. "Changes in economic policies and society have given rise to changing ways of rearing children. Increasingly childhood has become more formalised; there are more planned activities but, in a sense, less choice and freedom. "While we do place an emphasis on the needs of our children, I'm not sure to what extent we have stood back to understand childhood, and to what extent we impose an adult view. Parents, as has always been the case, are making a lot of choices for their children - generally with the best interest of the children in mind but frequently motivated by the parents' needs."
ON A GLOBAL scale, the articles in Focus refer to the abuse of children: in Tibet, living under the terror of a "40-year cultural genocide programme" imposed by China; the horror witnessed and experienced by children living in Rawanda; the "many millions of children (who) are involved in work which damages their health and wellbeing". According to Hanan, "the breakdown in community, poverty, globalisation and war are all sources of trauma for children internationally." The importance of creating structures which foster childhood is an issue Hayes says we need to look at in Ireland as much as anywhere else. "In the past the upbringing of children in Ireland was largely left up to the family," Hayes says. "But the fairly rapid change in Irish society, with respect to family types, employment and mobility, has impacted on family life and childhood. "Society now has a responsibility to look at how it is helping parents with their children. We have probably been a bit too complacent about how we are meeting the needs of children."
The pressures on children in developing countries are frequently very different to the pressures facing Irish children, but there is a similarly urgent need to ensure they are all accorded their basic rights, Hanan says.
Most countries in the world have ratified the UN Convention on Childrens' Rights, a set of standards which all countries should meet, he adds. "The convention outlines basic human rights such as the right to life and adequate food and shelter. They are rights which cut across all cultures and they should be accorded children across the globe.
"As yet, I wouldn't say childhood is dead, I would say it is under pressure - from child abuse to all sorts of exploitation by commercial interests. We have to look at rebuilding support systems which recognise the needs of children and their communities - and how within a range of societies, we can ensure childhood is protected."
