Vanishing innocence

Is there such a thing as an innocent childhood nowadays? Or is it just a relic of the past that no longer exists?

I was an innocent child for most of my childhood. My parents always tried to shield me from the horrors of the outside world. And then as a teenager my boarding school also hid the outside world from me.

It was only when I started work as a journalist that I was rapidly exposed to the outside world and its atrocities - homelessness, poverty, crime, war and everything else. I was profoundly shocked for a while.

It was normal when I was a child to preserve children's innocence, their cheerful outlook, and spare them from the sort of appalling things they weren't psychologically equipped to process.

But now, because of so many news outlets and so much social media, children are coming up against the outside world and all its barbarities at a very early age.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I would say it's a bad thing because young children who haven't yet cultivated the necessary cynicism or detachment or composure to take sickening horrors in their stride can find them extremely disturbing.

I'm sure this premature exposure to the outside world is partly what's causing the epidemic of mental distress among young people. But how to put the genie back in the bottle?

The outside world

I suddenly had a eureka moment. I realised my idea of the "outside world" was all wrong.

For some time I've been feeling a bit depressed about the state of the outside world with all its horrors and brutality and inhumanity.

Then it came to me that actually I know next to nothing of the outside world. It's so complex and intricate and enormous that I can't possibly know more than a minute fraction of it.

I might think I know all about (for example) climate change or the polar ice cap or deforestation but I'm kidding myself.

Even what I do know is mostly what the media tells me. And that's often highly suspect. Firstly they only tell us what they think is important, secondly they put their particular slant on it, and thirdly they sensationalise everything. Which means even that tiny bit of knowledge is very unreliable.

So what I refer to as the "outside world" is either a heavily filtered media offering or my own mental picture of the outside world. Neither of those is anything but a sketchy idea of the real thing.

In which case feeling depressed about the outside world is irrational because I'll never have a complete picture of it, and I'm therefore feeling depressed about something that's mostly unknown and unknowable.

So I should stop feeling depressed about the "outside world" and save my dejection for something manifest and tangible.

Simples!

Before smartphones

I was astonished to read that 91 per cent of 11 year olds have a smart phone, and 20 per cent of children own them by the age of four. A lot of parents try to prevent their children from owning a smart phone, because of all the obvious dangers, but that's hard when most of their school mates already have one.

It's hard to imagine what my schooldays would have been like if I had a smart phone. I didn't even have a landline never mind a smart phone. It meant that I very much lived in a boarding-house bubble, completely removed from the outside world. There was no TV or radio or newspapers so world events passed me by. We were discouraged from wandering around the adjacent town so there was little chance of making outside friends.

If I was at school now and I had a smart phone, above all that would connect me to the outside world. I could keep up with world events, check out websites that interested me, keep in touch with my family, get advice on personal problems. But at the same time I would have access to all sorts of undesirable websites promoting porn or anorexia or racism or dangerous drugs or simply plausible misinformation.

On balance I think that despite the deprivations I experienced I probably had a healthier childhood without a smart phone and without all the hazards it would have presented me with. I could enjoy simple pleasures like reading and walking without being glued to that beguiling little screen.

And there was something to be said for not being constantly in touch with my family and all their oddities.