Something I've never really understood...

[vulgarweed]

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.)

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_silverfox/]

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."

[zillah975]

"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.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_silverfox/]

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 ...