vulgarweed | Something I've never really understood...

the concept of "innocence" and why it's valued so much.

Usually when you see it thrown around online, it's got to do with sex (as if fetuses haven't been caught on ultrasound wanking in the womb). But it goes deeper than that - I just got into it with someone on a message board about a 14-year-old upset by studying history of genocide.

Urk...I read Anne Frank's diary at 11--after that I started reading every book and encyclopedia entry that I could find about the Holocaust, including lots of crying and nightmares and staring at death camp pictures, trying to understand what happened to her, for she'd become an "imaginary friend" to me, as characters in beloved books always do.

That was almost three years after the months I'd spent staring at the TIME magazine cover with all the pictures of the bloated Jonestown bodies on it, stealing it from my parents and trying to wrap my brain around the concept of people killing themselves...just because I knew my mom's best friend had killed herself 2 years before and she was still grieving - I'd overheard my parents talking about it at night, and they'd given me a dumbed-down "child-friendly" version of why Sally was gone, but just because I was little doesn't mean I was dumb, and I was well aware my mom was still crying about it sometimes.

I don't get it. Why is "innocence" considered worthwhile? Isn't it just a sentimentalized version of ignorance? If I hadn't been aware of intense human suffering in childhood, would I have any sense of social conscience or empathy now? It ALL starts young, or it never happens at all, right? (Believe me, I've met people who never empathized with victims or knew poverty or tragedy as kids. I don't envy them and I wouldn't trust them as far as I could flick them with two fingers.)

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anxiety, confusion, disillusionment, disappointment

But is there a magic age when you're free of these? I can't remember if I ever have one. certainly all my concrete memories involve them to some degree, even my very earliest one of being on a table being diapered and being afraid of falling off.

There IS no state of freedom from these feelings AFAIK.

And WHY do we feel this need to "protect" children from fears and anxieties? If they don't have "adult" ones (fear of death or failure or competition), they just develop or construct their own. Seems to me kids get more neurotic by being ignorant, and you end up with people deathly afraid of sex or of God's wrath. Who needs more neuroses in their life?

Well, I'm no degreed expert, but I know I was well aware of death and the related fears and griefs by age 7. I know I was thinking about death and walking around in the rain in my little galoshes and crying and trying to make sense of it all by then. I wasn't getting a lot of help from my mom but now I know better than to blame her, because her own Mom died when she was 10. She had major unreconciled issues too.

**More** information at the time would have helped me, not less.

I'm still a bit sheltered in that I have yet to have a close relative die (by some miracle, I'll tell you). I understand, I guess, the desire to spare your kids the same pain you're feeling. I would just hate to think I was causing my daughter or son MORE pain by leaving them in the dark.

My god, how do parents balance those decisions at ALL??

Well, I was there when my WWI vet GGF passed on, and I was actually SO grateful for that --that the Masonic hospital was so family-friendly (which, at the time, meant letting children in). I know he liked that he had four generations there. I know that I played a small but meaningful part in letting him think life went on.

I hate the fact that kids are shielded from death now. Why? It happens to all of us eventually!

Hmmm, I'm thinking traditional fairy stories were and are often used as coping mechanism and education for children, whether they are some form of innocent or not. "Look! Horrible things can happen to children like you! Here are ways of dealing with it." To what extent the cleaning-up of fairy tales has affected the education of children and their "innocence", I can only theorize. :\

My god, how do parents balance those decisions at ALL??

Carefully and responsibly. We sometimes use dart boards or dice.

Coin-flip, occasionally? Hahaha, I can remember being little and my mom doing "pick-a-number" with me and my sister...suddenly it becomes clear what she was doing. XD

I feel like I've just violated some sort of sacred parental trust now. I bet they'll take my membership pin, too. D:

*sobs uncontrollably*

:)

MAHAHAHA!!! Kind of like that, "You'll understand when you're a mother" or the "You don't get eyes in the back of your head UNTIL you're a mother" type of secrecy.

I won't let them know you spilled. *zips lips* ;)

you end up with people deathly afraid of sex or of God's wrath

*applause*

Have to agree with you. I have memories of acute horror and concern about environment disasters (which I latched onto as a subject for some reason as a child; Captain Planet ahoy?) when I was around eight, and things kind of escalated in my thought process from there to other subjects. If I didn't start getting seriously thoughtful and worried about the world as young as I was, I don't know if I would have turned out to be the person I am today. O.O

Yeah - I see no value in trying to "protect" children from this. My dad's a park ranger, and was always very attuned to environmental issues, and that's very important to me now. Why hide this from children? They will inherit the world, start them on understanding what needs to be done as soon as possible, right?

Same with me. It's been a family tradition to watch the world news together every night for as long as I remember. It means you are conscious of things like environment problems, famines, wars, crimes etc by the time you are five at most. And I can't help but feel that's a good thing. If this horror just doesn't happen (in this disgusting Ignorance-is-Bliss way so many people seem to adopt nowadays), how can we ever hope to change things? Only strong feelings can give birth to resolve. If you tell a 15-year-old for the first time that the rain forests are dying, you'll get something like, "What rainforests? I've been living well enough without caring about them so far!" for an answer.

But is there a magic age when you're free of these?

No, but parents and teachers like to pretend. At least mine liked to tell me that I didn't have a care in the world and expected them to fix all my problems. (While I was wishing I hadn't been born so my parents would have been spared having to deal with my 'unfixable' problems.)

"A child doesn't have stress." and "There is no such thing as depression in children." are nice easy responses when somebody tells you your child is stressed or depressed.
Oh, and of course the well tried killer phrase in teacher's training when asking how to deal with a disobedient child: "Children don't do that."

"A child doesn't have stress." and "There is no such thing as depression in children."

O_O

People SAY that??

Holy crap, I was depressed from about age nine through most of college.

A child doesn't have stress I've heard from several people including my parents' when that was a psycholoist's diagnosis of my problems when I was nine.

The other one came from a coworker when we were reading a statistic about the numbers of depression cases at various ages and I complained that it only started at age 20 or 25.

Holy crap, I was depressed from about age nine through most of college.
I think I was switching between just unhappy and actually depressed through all of school. It'd be really interesting to see that complete statistic ...

Something I've never really understood...

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Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

Re: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

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