The Loss of Childhood Innocence

There they sat, mother in her late 30s and child at no more than 10 years old, conversing at a volume level that one couldn’t entirely ignore in an otherwise quiet coffee shop. The mother was sharing stories of her ex-boyfriends with her daughter. The child interrupts, “I see that look of longing in your eyes.”

“The one who got away,” the mom sighs.

The girl looks concerned before pleading, “I don’t want him to take you away from your beau.”

“No, he’s long gone now,” the mom utters with unconcealed regret.

As the hour goes by, the child is also shared the story of the Charles Manson cult and various Stephen King synopses by the mother whose shirt does not properly contain her breasts.

It’s an odd spectacle, but it can’t be too far outside what has become typical. The relationship wasn’t of parent-and-child, but was more indicative of a friend talking to a peer. There was no attempt to protect the innocence of the child, or to simply treat the child as such. These seem to be bygone concepts now.

There’s something so wrong with this picture, yet it’s often considered virtuous in the modern world to treat one’s child as if there’s no distinction between us—treating the child as just another friend in a series of them, or worse yet—as one’s personal therapist. Doing so actually means denying the child what she needs most: parents. A child should be made to feel safe in her home, with her parents. That couple should be the constant in her life that she does not doubt, and in which she feels safe. The “sharing” by the aforementioned mother was merely a protracted way of telling the child that she is unsafe, and that her circumstances are volatile and unstable. It’s the opposite of what a parent ought to be instilling.

Under the pretense of helping children by not being like the ‘rigid’ and ‘authoritarian’ parents of bygone eras, we deny them the protection that they need and deserve. They are denied the things that make us feel safe and give us an understanding of our place in the world: a functioning hierarchy and a sense of an ordered existence.

An expansion of this ideology about youth is that we pretend that children know more than they do, and that their decisions reflect well-reasoned, experienced judgments. Hence, the political movements to lower the voting age and to encourage children to mutilate themselves when they are confused about their sex. Ironically, at a time when scientific research on the brain has shown us how the (decision-making) prefrontal cortex of children is literally still growing until about age 25, we assume on the social level that children can make irreversible decisions, and we increasingly burden them with adult problems.

A child like the one described earlier obviously does not have the mother-father dynamic that she ought, and perhaps will never know what that’s supposed to be like. Sure, she can read about healthy families later, and the differences that it makes in one’s development, if she decides to read through some psychology journals later in life. But she’ll never know what it would have been to have a stable home with a father that she can depend on, and there’s a tragedy in that privation. It’s shameful on behalf of parents who voluntarily put their children in such situations.

There’s a further privation in that the daughter isn’t experiencing a true childhood — truly, a time of blissful ignorance. It seems naive to think that this method of raising children by acting like they’ve already been raised won’t have consequences. What is it to have never known innocence? To have no blissful memories of joyful play to look back on, and to therefore desire to hand on those experiences of levity to one’s posterity. There’s something pure about not knowing how bad the world is, and how bad people can be. Hence why throughout Christendom, we have desired to protect that in children.

Perhaps, a child can handle the story of the Charles Manson cult, but should she have to? Should we encumber young children with horrific realities, beyond what they need to stay safe? Is there no cause to protect? But we don’t value the innocent or the good anymore. In a relativistic world that condemns only those who condemn, it’s considered offensive to value the pure. That’s judgemental, after all. Who would want to protect innocence except someone with an old-fashioned sensibility about virtue and purity?

By heralding vices as expressions of ‘freedom’, we fail to see virtue or innocence as worth protecting. Instead, we mire what is good and call it progress. Our devaluing of childhood and children is a reflection of the perverse elevation of vice. It is an enactment of the urge to pull the innocent down to where we are, lest they remind us where we ought to be (Matthew 18:3-5). It’s not a moral act to taint a child, but an evil one that is bourne from the refusal to see the grotesque in one’s reflection.