BEING AFRAID IS ALL PART OF GROWING UP
BE AFRAID: Childhood is full of terrors
Wednesday October 29,2008
By Jennifer Selway
BACK in the days when the Soviets and the Americans were regularly testing atom bombs, they exploded two devices simultaneously, knocking the Earth off its axis and sending it on a collision course with the sun.
This is the premise of a terrifying science-fiction film called The Day The Earth Caught Fire, starring Edward Judd as a Daily Express journalist who begins to receive reports of weird weather around the world and uncovers the terrible truth.
Panic grips the globe as the heat increases and the pavements start to melt.
The film was shown on TV in the mid-Sixties when I was about 12 and it terrified me. If there was an unseasonably warm day, the sight of adults blithely rejoicing in the sunshine made me want to run about the streets shouting: “Can’t you see, you fools? We’re all doomed. The Earth’s going to fall into the sun.” It was only my other profound fear, the fear of looking silly, which stopped me.
A new report from Ofsted, the Government’s education watchdog, on children’s fears says that they are plagued by anxieties and uncertainties about their future, about exams, about bullying, about their bodies, about everything really.
One educationalist, Sue Palmer, author of a book called Toxic Childhood, commented: “In the past, adult worries were kept to the adult world – adults read about them in newspapers but children were largely kept away from that and had their own playground culture.”
How true is this? It seems to me that this is a nostalgic and highly selective view of childhood: a world where children lived in a state of hapless innocence. Their only worry was where the next skipping rope was coming from. In fact, children take life very seriously.
The best children’s books are the ones that portray them not as carefree but as courageous and resourceful, taking on everything the world can throw at them, whether it’s the Famous Five or Jacqueline Wilson’s Tracy Beaker.
My generation grew up under the shadow of the Bomb. We were very scared. Each generation has its own hellfire and damnation scenario.
Ours was nuclear destruction, whereas children today worry about the environment. They are equivalent terrors. As a very small person, I listened to news reports of atomic bomb tests with details of radiation clouds that were probably coming my way and would make my hair fall out.
When the Cuban Missile Crisis threatened Armageddon I maintained an air of studied insouciance. I composed letters to President Khrushchev begging him for world peace. Years later, my daughter wrote to Tony Blair asking him to stop climate change.
This Ofsted report talks about “children as young as 10” being gripped by anxiety. Ten? By the age of 10 my friends and I were already veteran worriers. “There’s going to be another war,” my friend Maurice informed me. “It will be called the Icelandic Cod War and we will all be blown up.” It was 1958, we were both in the kindergarten. I remember it as though it was yesterday.
It’s certainly true that today’s youngsters are subjected to a continuous din of information, a blizzard of visual stimuli, an onslaught of commercial pressures. It foists adult silliness on them in a way that we never experienced.
Yet, in a quieter age, we suffered from the opposite. Information was sparingly provided, rarely relayed in ways which would be understood by a child. The silence of a dark winter’s afternoon could breed apprehension in way that today’s children couldn’t possibly understand.
What’s more, older generations were not encouraged to talk about their angst as young people are today.
Maybe there’s too much talk now; too many hearts worn on sleeves. Back then, there was certainly too little. Our stoic generation didn’t want to worry our parents.
Fear accompanied by fear of embarrassment are the stuff of childhood. Many adults find this unpalatable and would prefer to imagine our offspring enjoying years of trouble-free innocence.
But of necessity youth is marked by a series of scary “firsts” that have to be encountered and overcome, like scaly dragons lumbering in from the adult world.
And in talking about childhood anxiety, are we too ready to medicalise and formalise what is not a problem as much as a necessary part of growing up? I am sorry our modern children are such worriers but that’s the human condition for you.
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