Childhood used to be a precious time, for fun .Time for day dreaming, time alone to use imagination, time to play; time to just be a kid. That we had before we became teenagers and began preparing for our lives as adults.
Innocence rightfully belongs to children. The love of play. the love of learning. the trust of loving adults should be the whole world for the children in our care.
Unfortunately in this precious time ,One feature of our very modern world is our inability to retain a hold on innocence for children. We are quickly losing the warmth and security of the childhood years,
childhood is in danger of being lost as more and more parents are creating killer schedules that keep the child busy intentionally for them to be able to focus on their jobs or other aspects of their lives. Children are quickly taking second place in their parents lives
Is it possible for the boundaries between adulthood and childhood be once again restored? Can parents today, sensing uneasily that something is missing, try to recreate the different sort of childhood that they themselves once were granted? In an Age of Preparation, can individual parents hope to bring their children up protectively?changes in family stability and employment patterns, most notably, along with the increasing dominance of television in children's lives cannot be reversed. We will never return to the oldstyle family with the bread-earning father and the childlike, stay-at-home mother minding the house and kids. Nor would we desire such a step backward. alyhough it cannot be reversed, it may indeed be modified and made to work better for families.
An understanding of the irreversible consequences of family on children's lives will cause parents to readjust some of their original goals for marriage, and to focus greater attention on their children's well being than on those ambitions, desires and dreams of personal fulfilment they had when they were single. The future holds the possibility of a variety of partnerships for both men and women, only some of which will be seen as conducive to the raising of children.
Perhaps an understanding that children and adults are not equal, and that children do not prosper when treated as equal, will encourage parents to take a more authoritative position in the family.
If you are given the heavy burden of knowledge before you have the capacity to deal with it ,it becomes burdensome, because it requires mental and psychological work to deal with it the results may be those distressing signs parents and teachers are observing among children today: confusion, fear, feelings of incompetence. Children grow up not really able to deal with difficulties, and they learn that the best way to deal with problems is to escape, through drugs or drink or whatever.''
Because of the knowledge, independence, ''adultness'' that characterise so many children today especially, it appears, those who have had to ''grow up faster'' because their parents have divorced or are both absorbed in their careers, it is easy to get the impression that children are also more mature these days. Indeed, the child growing up under more protective, old-fashioned circumstances may seem more ''bratty,'' more ''spoiled,'' more demanding than the hardy, self-sufficient child of absent parents. But while a certain level of independence achieved when a child is forced to take care of himself much of the time, it is not the same thing as maturity. As the child grows older, true maturity, defined by an ability to share, to sacrifice, to be generous, to love unselfishly, and to nurture and care for children of his own, may prove elusive, and in its place, attention-seeking and narcissism become the characteristics that define his adult life. While those children whose childhoods are enriched by a bounty of adult experiences end up the poorer for it, those ''poor'' protected children have received a treasure in disguise - one, however, that will reveal itself only when they have grown up.
Perhaps the recognition that we are denying our children a real childhood will restore how we relate to the children of coming generations.
