Ideas - Protecting childhood innocence is a disservice to kids, argues expert

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

We should move away from this idea that childhood should be filled with innocence, safe from the knowledge of difficult things argues Critical Cultural Theorist of Childhood Julie Garlen. Kids do experience difficulty, even in the best of circumstances, and she suggests they need the tools and language to navigate the lives they are living. Constructing childhood as a time of innocence limits children's opportunities for growth and learning.

Whose take do you trust during this election cycle? I'm Rosemary Barton, CBC's chief political correspondent. At Issue is also where I listen and learn from the very best. Chantelle Bair, Andrew Coyne and Althea Raj. They are political heavyweights. They write and talk about politics for Canada's biggest publications and broadcasters, and they help shape the national conversation. So if you're looking for people who can connect the dots, cut through the spin,

check out the at issue podcast every week, wherever you listen. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. What kind of responsibilities do you have at home? So helping my parents, cleaning my room, cleaning up the kitchen, putting plates out, and that's all. It's hard work being a kid. Taking on responsibilities, learning the rules, understanding boundaries, being too young for so many things, being too old for too many others. People I know sometimes listen to me like adults

because sometimes I pick right decision most of the time actually and sometimes I say something silly because I feel silly and then they don't agree. We all have a face that's very silly at some point. And it's good because then you're letting out all your energy and then you could have a better good night's sleep because you get tired from laughing. It's really important to laugh, isn't it? Yeah. We imagine childhood as a time of blissful ignorance, safe from the knowledge of difficult things.

Childhood is a container, keeping the monsters at bay, where children can experience wonder and happiness, free from stress and worry. But who does this idea of childhood innocence protect? What kinds of things do you do for your brother? I help him sometimes. I help him do his work. I help him, I don't know, sometimes it gets a little bit emotional. I'm kind of his emotional support thing, you know. We're calling this episode, Losing Childhood Innocence, and ideas producer Naheed Mustafa

asks what would happen if we reframe childhood, letting go of ideas of childhood innocence to talk instead about the actual lived lives of children? So I'm going to ask you to give me a summary argument for why the preservation of the idea of childhood innocence is not a good thing. Okay, so let me start by answering that question with a bit of an explanation about what I mean when I am talking about innocence. My name is Julie Garland. I'm a professor of teacher education

at the University of Toronto in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. And I'm a critical cultural theorist of childhood and curriculum. So innocence is not constructed in a binary sense in that it's the opposite of innocence is not meant to be corruption or wantonness or evil. And so when I think about innocence as a social construct, when I talk about interrogating it,

I don't mean that we should flip innocence on its head and then suddenly open up childhood to all sorts of harms and evils. But that's often the way that people think about childhood in sort of a binary sense. You're either a child or you're an adult. You're either innocent and not knowledgeable, or you are corrupted by the evils of society, and you have certain knowledge that we think of as being specific to the adult realm.

And so just to clarify what I mean when I say innocence is that I'm talking about this cultural attachment to the idea that an innocent state of being in the sense of ignorance, not being aware of life's difficulties or adversities, that this is meant to be the appropriate condition of childhood and then it's the best way to be a child is to exist in a blissful state of innocence where you're not subject to harm of any kind or even the slightest of difficulties or experiences of adversity like stress or disappointment and so on. And so that's the, that's kind of the nature of innocence

that I'm speaking of when I talk about innocence as being not a positive thing when we think about the larger structures of society and social justice. So the reason that I suggest that we should reconceptualize childhood in a way that allows us to think beyond innocence as the ultimate condition or ideal for childhood existence is that when we focus on shutting down dialogue in order to protect children from adversity, we actually silence ourselves

on social injustices and we don't leave space for the recognition of the real difficulties that are inherent to childhood. And Aidan, what do you think is the hardest thing about being a kid? And what reason dealing with other kids, why? It's mainly because the main social impact of just being a kid, other kids' morality, let's just say, it- obviously this isn't most kids, but

some kids' morality can be really... bad. How- how so? Just because they don't really care what other people are feeling they will like if some people you've never met sometimes will just come up to you and be rude sometimes in the hallways for no apparent reason just because they want to be rude especially the boys and then in our class and well in your class yes and then in and just in general a lot of having friends is a lot of now at least

is just going on social media and sharing each other's TikToks or something like that. Yes, I think children and adults worry about different things. I think it depends how close children are to their parents because I think some children also worry about what's happening in the world too. Just depends what their parents are normally telling them. But children, I mean normally, at school I see children worrying about their grades or their, I don't know,

popularity or something or their looks. And adults normally tend to worry about like providing for the family or for themselves with like a little more stress. They worry about like my health because I got six or five teeth taken out and they're really hurt and I have those teeth they really stink and they're really gross they look disgusting so I don't like looking at them and mostly parents worry about like they worry about like um if you get left in the car somebody will steal the car because my dad's car always gets stolen. What kinds of things do kids worry about? They worry like

like my cousin he went to the hospital because he couldn't breathe and... Did that make you worry? Yeah I just figured it out today. I'm going to call, maybe I'll call them like tomorrow or today. What else do you, what kinds of things do you worry about when you think about yourself? What are you worried about for yourself? Like I'm worried that I might get bullied because I got bullied in grade two by a grade one. There's just this idea that it's like, oh, these damn kids. And I think that's such a problem because it's just like, no kid is going to want to

listen to you if you're treating them like a problem. I feel like the main thing that's missing is like a set of shared values. I feel like if an adult wants you to act a certain way and then they take things from you, if the kid doesn't want to act that way they're just gonna find ways around it. But if you teach the kid to have those values instead of like just punishing them for not following, then I feel like naturally they're gonna want to listen to you because they agree with you. Whereas if they don't agree with you, they're just gonna want to listen to you because they agree with you.

Whereas if they don't agree with you, they're just gonna find a way to get around it and deceive you and things like that. What kind of things do you worry about? I kind of worry about my brother getting lost or something and like I kind of, I only worry about my brother about like getting, get bullied at school or getting lost. Sometimes I worry about weird things to my brother where he's going to jump off a cliff or something.

Are there a lot of cliffs nearby that you think you might jump off of? Yeah. Is that, do you think it's because your brother likes to do adventurous things and doesn't always understand? Yeah, because he's really adventurous and he goes every round the place. And there's this one time where he was like looking interested in like this us. I don't know, he's like really interested to stay in and he always kind of does dangerous things. So he's too curious. And so when you worry about your brother,

what do you do about it? Do you tell your parents, I'm really worried about my brother? I usually just keep it in mind because I don't want to share it to others. It's kind of my private thing because when I share it with others I kind of get worried because they might do that to my brother or something like they might tell others and I'm gonna get worried about them doing something to my brother.

So sometimes when we say what we're worried about, it starts to feel like maybe it's more real. And when it's real, when it gets real, I might get anxiety or something. You do have a lot of worries. A lot of worries. I would venture to say that childhood is not actually easy.

I think it's difficult in a lot of ways when you're a new human being. There's so much to learn and to process and to take in as you're sort of becoming to understand the nature of society and how the adult world works. And because you don't have social status and you don't have the ability to necessarily speak out on your own behalf, you're often left to whatever caretaker or adult is there to look out for you, and you're shaped by those experiences in a profound way. And so, I don't think of childhood as being inherently easy. I actually think that childhood is a very complex process that demands more of our attention, and also just a more complex understanding

of human being in general that takes into account the really vast spectrum of knowledges and experiences that we have from birth all the way to death. I think that we think of it, as I mentioned before, in binary terms, in that you're a child up to a certain point and then suddenly you're an adult, and I guess, you know, suddenly life is hard and is bereft of joy,

which is a really sad way to think about adulthood, especially as adults, you know, who are in middle age and, you know, finding lots of ways to experience joy, even in the midst of grief and difficulties that life brings. So I think just to crystallize maybe the reasoning or the rationale behind why I suggest that we should move away from innocence as being our primary objective in terms of how we protect the concept or the experience of childhood is that if you think of an example of a primary

classroom, which is my background being a former public school teacher, if we are aiming to protect children's innocence by keeping their minds away from experiences of difficulty or adversity. That is how we justify the exclusion of topics like racism, for example, in a primary school classroom. And when we fail to provide space for conversations about difficult topics or we think of that as being, you know, difficult knowledge of adulthood. We are actually perpetuating the cycle of racism and inequality because we're not allowing that space for it to be understood or addressed.

And it's only the children in that classroom who have the privilege of not being exposed to racism in some way that are actually insulated from that idea. Maybe the children who are experiencing it don't have the language to discuss it because we are not talking about it and we're silencing those conversations. But the children who are experiencing racism have a deep understanding of it. Maybe they don't have the academic language to be able to call it what it is because we're not discussing it with them. But certainly they're experiencing

that in their own lives. And so my opinion is that shutting down dialogue around adversity and difficulty in the lives of children perpetuates those harms that more children experience than not. And I think that it delays the conversations about social justice inequality that we should be having from an early age if that is what we value in our society. COLLEEN O'BRIEN You've talked about what the term childhood in a sense means. Can you also talk a bit about what it doesn't mean, which in some ways may actually be more important for the conversation we're having? Yeah, so I think that, and I mentioned before

when I was talking about how I kind of operationalize the concept of childhood innocence, that to, childhood innocence in my perspective is a state of, you know, blissful not knowing, not being aware of adversity, essentially. So we're not talking about it in a religious sense or, you know, I'm not suggesting that a child is either innocent or that they're, you know, doomed in terms of salvation or something like that. Like, it's taken out of those terms, but it more appropriately applies to this idea that we want to hold childhood as a container apart from adulthood in which these adult experiences

of adversity are kept separate. So that because there's a belief that that is the most appropriate condition in which childhood can thrive. So this would be the best condition for childhood would be one in which they were completely protected from any sort of harm. And so it's important to note that I personally don't advocate for harm against anyone. I don't condone violence against any human being, children included. So to say that we want to disrupt this notion of innocence is not to say that we would like

to make children's lives miserable or to promote the idea that they should be subjected to harm by any means. I think the important thing is recognizing that actually they do have rights as human beings that entitle them to agency, to bodily autonomy, to have consent over the ways that their lives are lived. So I think that in a sense, it does not mean children, or disrupting innocence is not to suggest that children should be subjected to harmful things. I think the point really is to understand that children do experience difficulty, even

in the best of circumstances when a very privileged child has the opportunity to be insulated somehow from a lot of life's difficulties. Maybe they haven't experienced poverty or they haven't experienced not having a home to live in. They haven't experienced racism. But even for those children, they experience disappointment. They experience sadness.

We can't control what happens in the world that causes us grief. And when we focus on the idea of innocence as being the sort of perfect state of being, we don't allow space for processing and understanding what it is to feel grief and to feel sadness or frustration or disappointment as children. In one of your papers you wrote, rather than protecting children from harm, innocence constructed as blissful ignorance of adult social realities renders children more vulnerable to the very dangers from which we seek to protect them. That sounds counterintuitive, so can you explain how

that works? Yeah, so I'll use the example since we, this has been in the news, we've been talking about the the ban on social media in Australia. I'll use the example since we, this has been in the news, we've been talking about the ban on social media in Australia. I'll use this as kind of an example to illustrate that point. So we understand that there are potentially some harms that are happening on social media, that adolescents are being particularly impacted by these experiences, whether that be cyberbullying, whether that be exposure to body image, imagery, things like that, that these are areas of influence and understanding where this is impacting adolescents.

And so if we choose an approach, so an approach that would be consistent with this protective logic of innocence would be to just keep them completely out of that world, which again, I don't think is a very efficient or effective solution and sort of abstinence approach to social media by just saying we're going to shut children out of social media altogether until they're of age that they can handle it. First of all, there's many workarounds that our adolescents are quite savvy enough to be able to find ways to do that. But in terms of the passage that you mentioned, what we're doing in that sense of just shutting down the dialogue about what is happening is delaying their entry into that world of

social media, and that could be applied to other things. So if we, let's say that we don't want to have conversations with children about gender identity or even about sexual health until they're a certain age, we pick, you know, arbitrarily pick an age that we feel like is appropriate. We're just delaying that opportunity to have that conversation and to prepare them with the skills that they might need to be able to navigate situations where they might encounter harm. So for example, let's say that you have a 16-year-old who's never been exposed to social

media, has never had a conversation about it because it's not relevant if they're not on there. Why would we be talking about it if we've insulated them from that experience, then when they do enter that world where they're seeing this imagery, thinking about body image or fashion or Sephora hauls or things like that, what are all of these different trends

that we see on social media, when they encounter that world, they still don't have the skills to navigate that and to advocate for themselves or to think about their own well-being. And so the suggestion that I'm making in the passage that you shared is that by shutting down dialogue, we actually render children more vulnerable in the sense that they don't know how to prepare themselves for people who seek to harm them, and they don't know how to prepare themselves for people who seek to harm them, and they may not know how to respond or how to ask for help or how to ask for support.

So we don't like to have conversations with young children about some of the really hard things that happen in the world. It hurts us. You know, we don't, we don't, we hate to expose them to that because we hate for them to learn at such a young age that the world can be a difficult place. But when we don't have those conversations, if our children do encounter situations like someone who seeks to harm them, maybe they see certain imagery online, perhaps they encounter porn and they don't know what it is, you know, and we haven't had those conversations to help them understand where we stand on those issues, how they can

advocate for themselves, that they can talk to us about those issues, then we're kind of robbing them of that self-advocacy piece, you know, where they're not expecting those things to happen, they're not equipped with language to address the situation when it happens. And just like a simple example you think of, you know how in school we do drills. Let's say we do a fire drill. Fires are scary. No one wants to be in a fire. That's a very scary thing.

But we prepare children for that because we know that that's kind of, you know, this is kind of an objective social reality. Fires happen. They don't necessarily aren't necessarily caused by bad people or whatever. But we prepare children to be ready for that. We give them information about how do you keep yourself safe in this situation. And we don't think of that as being a dialogue that we would shut down even with young children, even though it is scary for them. But when it comes to other topics, we choose not to bring those things up because we feel that somehow the knowledge of the

existence of certain things will be, will corrupt the children in a way that will distance them from the experience of childhood that we would hope for them to have. So that's what I mean in terms of, you know, making them more vulnerable is that we are depriving them of the opportunity to develop language and skills and critical thought in order to address difficult situations when they arise. You know, setting a curriculum for a school is a heavily politicized thing now. Maybe it's always been, but it gets taken up in a different way today. And so when you're looking at that space about, you know, what to include in children's education, what not to include, what are the kinds of narratives that are driving those choices today, do you think? Well, I think that I've been thinking a lot about this idea because one of the issues that I think is really difficult to grapple with right now in thinking

about reconceptualizing childhood or the hope of that would be that in order to promote a society in which school curricula, for example, might take up difficult or controversial issues, we would need to exist in a society that values critique. And I think that in this particular political moment, we can see that compliance is being valued over critique. And that's not new.

I don't think that that's a new innovation in terms of educational history or political movements. I think that the entire system of public schooling was established on a foundation of a desire for compliance among certain people in the world in order to maintain the status quo. I think that education has always really operated in that way and it's functioned the way that it was intended. But I think now more than ever, we see that, especially with what's happening in the US right now, this crackdown on critique,

and especially in terms of the media, that when the media becomes an echo chamber for the powers that be, when there's not an opportunity for different voices to be heard, for different perspectives to be shared, I feel a little bit hopeless in the sense of how we might see that filter down into school curriculum in the sense that we will see more of the same desire for compliance and patriotism, nationalism, a desire to exclude some of the more difficult and troubling aspects

of history in order to tell the narrative of greatness, you know, in order to maintain the status quo. Well, social media is highly addictive. I've really seen it in schools. Some kids not even as a substitute to hang out with each other, they just go scrolling on their phones and stuff. So I'd say that social media should be blocked out until you're about 16, but adults should maybe talk about social media and what it can do to people.

I agree with you. The only problem is even I think on TikTok there actually was like a 16 age limit but if your parent lets you go on like they can just make an account for you that's that says you're 16 and over and it doesn't matter. I look at how I was raised, I didn't have any social media and then I look at a little bit younger kids and how they have like this YouTube and they have like easy access to this and their attitude and like motivation is like completely shifted like,

they're like, I don't know, I feel like I agree that social media is really messing up a lot of mental health for younger kids. But when you say that social media is frying a teenager's brain, I think it's frying a teenager's brain just as much as it's frying an adult's brain. I think that yeah, they're in this stage in their life where they're developing and their morals and stuff are becoming solidified and they're learning more about themselves. Yeah, of course.

But I think social media is rotting my brain just as much as it's rotting a 40-year-old person's brain, a 50-year-old person's brain, a five-year-old person's brain. I think it's just bad regardless. I don't think it's just like bad regardless. I don't think it's like just the kids that need protecting. There's plenty of research demonstrating the impact of social media on children and their mental health. Canadian research has shown the constant stimulation of scrolling contributes to trouble focusing. An American study of 12 to 15-year-olds found that kids who spent at least three hours a day on social media faced twice the risk

of negative mental health outcomes. But Julie also thinks about how movements to clamp down on it fit into a broader history of moral panic around children's access to information. And so, you know, over time, there've been many critics who have bemoaned what is happening to childhood in this moment, you know, childhood is disappearing. And that goes pretty far back.

So even to the evolution of the penny press, for instance, there's this really interesting relationship that happens between media and between this idea of the control of information. And I think that that's really like the idea of the control of the flow of information is really essential to thinking about this particular construct of childhood as being a space of innocent ignorance. So when the Penny Press came along and these newspapers, these tablet-style newspapers

were funded by advertising instead of through subscriptions or political funding, there became this fear about how information was going to be received not only by adults but also children because they could easily access them in the streets. They could pick up the tabloids and if they could read, they could read that information for themselves. And so there's always been this growing fear, I think, in modern times about the flow of information, the distribution of information to a broader audience. And so I think in some ways, over time as technology has shifted so dramatically, we have less and less control over the flow of information. We have less control over the experiences that children have in terms of when they come

to know certain things and how they come to know certain things. And that generates a lot of fear. And I think that we see that reflected, like the idea of, I mean, honestly, you could think about this current political moment as being a moment of moral panic around the state of democracy or the state of the world or the economic stability and things like that. It's similar to that idea that something is wrong with society. And so children often just become sort of the scapegoat, I guess, in the sense of like they are the future, you know, and in order to secure a particular kind of future in order to maintain a power dynamic that exists and that seeks to continue to exist, then we have to make sure that children

are molded and shaped in a certain way according to a certain agenda. So I think it's all very much related and I think there's a really interesting intersection between the history of media, the distribution of ideas, the control of the flow of information, and the way we think about childhood. I think those are all really interconnected. Julie Garland is a critical cultural theorist with interests in childhood, education, and curriculum studies. She's based at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC news app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayad.

I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4, I'm back with a brand new series of history's secret heroes. And he tells her that she will be sent to France as a secret agent, she will work undercover, and if she's caught, she's going to be shot. Join me for more stories of unsung heroes, acts of resistance, deception, and courage from World War II. Subscribe to history's secret heroes

wherever you get your podcasts. It's not like children are just mindless creatures like any other features. They still have thoughts and feelings and all that and they do have a sense of self. So when I hear that they don't know what they're doing, I feel like that's more of something a parent would say if they wanted a certain path for a child to take.

It would make me feel frustrated if an adult told me that I didn't know what I was doing because we're still learning so yeah. I feel like you're just kind of taking away like telling someone who wants something that they don't know what they want just because they're like young or impressionable is just setting them up to be like unsatisfied like maybe you understand things like better than they do in some ways because they're young and inexperienced but just in completely like disregarding What they say that they want

Just brushing it off because they're young is just like really frustrating because it's like You're never gonna understand when you're gonna know what you want. If you're always being told you don't know what you want Why does that make you feel frustrated to hear somebody say that children don't know what they want? Because we are all growing and when you it's like a phase and you went to that phase once. You went through that phase once. Do you know what you want? Yeah. What do you want? I want a happy life.

In 1982, the culture critic, Neil Postman, wrote a book called The Disappearance of Childhood. He wrote that widespread literacy is what initially created the idea of childhood since children who weren't literate were safeguarded from accessing the secrets of the adult world. But as literacy became more widespread, the boundary between the world of children and the world of adults began to blur. The real crisis in childhood, he argued, began with the advent of mass media, particularly

television. Professor Julie Garland points out that as the panic set in about the kinds of information and images children were being exposed to, including through advertising. There was a strong push for regulation to unblur the boundary between the worlds of children and adults. When we shift into visual imagery, and television, of course, similar to the penny press, is driven by advertising revenue, then the information that children are receiving is coming from many different sources and we don't really know the intention of those sources and we can't always

control exposure to that information. And so this is always intertwined, I think, with politics in the sense that we always see these laws and bills that are passed in order to regulate these industries to the extent that they can be regulated. But we also have that constant tension between, you know, capitalism and the drive for advertising revenue that tends to overpower any of the interventions that we try to implement in order to reform media for children, for example. And so when the advent of television, you start to see the 1980s and 90s, a lot of emphasis on children's programming, thinking about how could we ensure that most of the programming

that is targeted to children is educational, thinking about limits on advertisers in terms of what can be targeted towards children. So you see some concern there for the industry and the way that it is being shaped and understood. But if you move ahead a few decades into digital technology and social media, I've not seen a similar concern in terms of what is the responsibility of society in general to be understanding the underlying ideas that fuel the social harms that are coming from that

digital environment? And what is the responsibility of media corporations to really better understand the impact of their products and their platforms, the ways that they're impacting society. I think that the drive for revenue and capital has really taken precedence over those conversations around what is happening, actually, and what are the larger social issues that are driving these problems that we're seeing. So rather than taking this protective sort of abstinence approach to just shutting things down and shutting children out, I think that in all of these cases there could have been more dialogue around, you know, what is it that we're afraid of exactly?

What are children's experiences really like? How are they experiencing these forms of media? You know, what are they, what reforms would they like to see? What are the kinds of things that are actually meaningful to those audiences that we're making decisions on their behalf out of this fear of exposure. I think children are actually quite savvy in terms of recognizing their own needs in a lot of ways. And I think that we've seen, I mean, all my children are adults, and so they grew up at

a slightly different times in terms of how technology was integrated in their lives. But my youngest son, who is almost 21, when he was a teenager, he was actually quite particular about how much time, and still to this day, like he doesn't value spending a lot of time on social media. He realizes that it takes away from his productivity, that it's bad for his mental health.

And so he's very careful about how he spends his time. And I saw that with a lot of his friends too, that they were being quite thoughtful about how they were using social media. So maybe opening up space for more of these opportunities for young people to kind of advocate for themselves and empower themselves to make decisions. And also to be critical of the powers that be, especially when it comes to the interest of mega corporations that are driving these platforms and the things that we're seeing. I think that by giving them opportunities to be informed and to think critically about

what is happening around them, that is a much more effective way of equipping them with skills that they may need to navigate adult life rather than just shutting down the dialogue and keeping them separate from those conversations. So I think that nostalgia is huge. And I think that we're very often making decisions for children based on what we think childhood should be. It's based on an ideal. It's often based on either our own positive experiences

of childhood or perhaps the negative experiences that we wish for them not to repeat. And it's not to say that there shouldn't be some aspect or some conversation around what should childhood really be. I think that's a conversation worth having. But if that's the only basis that we're using for the decisions that we're making about children's lives, I think we're missing out on an opportunity to engage them in understanding what's happening right now. SONIA DARA-MARGOLIS This idea that we've talked about the tension between what we think childhood should be and what childhood is, and this idea of what childhood should be is also wrapped up historically in race, in gender, in class structures.

And so I can absolutely hear somebody listening to this show thinking, but what's wrong if we expand it to say, well, all children should be able to have this kind of, you know, innocent childhood. That it isn't just about an exclusive certain kind of child who, in fact, does have this kind of shielded or protected childhood. Like, all children should have it and that including the should somehow reclaims the project. What's your response to that?

So I think of this really influential piece that historian Robin Bernstein wrote about this idea around letting children be children. And she's done this really interesting historical work that I've drawn from many times on childhood innocence and specifically in the US culture, cultural context, thinking about race relations and slavery and thinking about this project of innocence as being intimately tied to white supremacy. So she says in this piece, which was in a popular periodical, maybe the New York Times, she says that the argument to say that just let kids be kids or let every child have this experience of childhood, this innocent ideal that we ascribe to, is essentially to say

let every child be like white children. So she actually ties it to this like racial logic that again, that every child should have this experience of going to the playground every day and these magical experiences of fun snacks and crust cut off their sandwiches. I don't know, there's a lot of things we can think about that would be related to this idea of like, you know, a very innocent kind of blissful childhood.

But what I think about that too is that it first of all, this idea that childhood is magical and blissful and should be a separate container of existence from adulthood is a very white Western construct that doesn't take into account the vast histories of the world and the ways that children have lived for ages and the ways that they've functioned in various societies. In non-Western context, children are given responsibilities. Let's say they might go shopping for their family on their own. They may participate in agricultural labor on a farm.

There's also much less pleasant things that children are subjected to in other places that from a Western perspective, we may or may not agree with. But to say that this one way of being a child is the only way that that should be applied to everyone is not really allowing space for other ways of being a child to exist. So you know, there have been studies where researchers have gone in and talked to children in the global south who participate very actively in the functions of the family. And they're quite proud of those opportunities that they're given and they're quite excited,

you know, for these ways of exploring the world and, you know, just being able to contribute to their family. That doesn't mean they also have fun, you know? I mean, sure, they play and they do games and they learn and they do other things. So I'm not sure that just trying to create a society where everyone aspires to one particular way of understanding childhood is the right approach either. But I do also think that we could be more child-centered as a society in terms of thinking about if we were attending to all children's rights, we might think about opportunities for them to have advocacy, to advocate for themselves in terms of their living conditions,

the support that we give them. In Canada, one of the things that I think about, especially in the context of Ontario at least, is the way that we don't provide food for children in schools. That's such a simple thing. And so if we're going to talk about how could we equalize the conditions of childhood so that all, more children at least, have access to fundamental resources that would be honoring their human rights, so things like shelter, food is a big one, you know, clean water. There's many things that we could do just right off the bat to make those opportunities for childhood to be experienced more equitably, just in terms of access to food and water

and resources and having a say into things like, you know, when children are taken into state care, allowing children to have a voice in how they're treated. And I know here in Canada that specifically impacts Indigenous children disproportionately, you know, when they're taken out of their homes and not given an opportunity to articulate or to express what their needs are, you know. So I think it's maybe not an either or conversation in the sense of like I agree that we could prioritize children's rights in a way that would make resources more accessible to all so that children could at least exist in a very fundamental way without

fear of harm, without hunger, without, you know, lack of access to clean water, with equal access to education, things like that, that we still have so much work to do just in that respect. But I don't think it's a matter of saying that every child should be given the opportunity to just have a carefree experience of never having any responsibility or lacking knowledge, you know, that they may need about the world, because I don't necessarily agree that that is the best approach to raising children in this world.

You know, I think that I value love and care, obviously, but I think that that comes along with honesty and acceptance and understanding and listening to children. And I think that we don't do enough of that, that we don't do enough of listening to them and valuing their experiences and taking those as valid sources of information for how children's lives should be organized. The lens of justice instead of innocence gives us space to think about what kind of society we want to build. I think it really comes down to what do we value as a society?

And I think that this question is really intimately tied to thinking about childhood. I think through all of these moral panics that we've experienced around the loss of innocence and the disappearance of childhood, if you think about that term, moral panic, it's a crisis of morality. But whose morality is it that is in crisis? that we've always seen this insistence on a very like a stable construct of what a Western society should be in terms of the influence of religious ideals and conservative economic policies and things like that. There's a very specific idea of like what society should be and

that benefits a very small portion of the population. And so until we start to see a shift in, I think a demand for the kind of society that we want to have, I'm not sure that I have a lot of hope that these conversations will take place because the desire to shut down that dialogue comes from a place of wanting a certain kind of future for your children and wanting to shape that future through that silence. And so I think that there needs to be a much deeper conversation about where we are as, you know, it's almost in this moment, it's hard to think about North American society because we're so divided right now in terms of where we are.

But I think that in a Western sense, you know, whether that's in the US or Canada or whether they're talking about European context or we've also talked about Australia's policies today, that there needs to be a larger conversation about if children are the future, what is the future that we really want to see? And until there is more of an emphasis on valuing human rights in general, and specifically the rights of children as human beings, not just as future humans, not just as human becomeings, but as human beings in their own right. I'm not sure that we will be able to create spaces to open up those conversations, but I haven't given up hope. I mean, obviously, I'm still, you know, here trying to make this appeal for adults specifically to adopt a more complex understanding of childhood and to think about, at least, at the very

least, I think, the difficulties of being a child and giving space to their children to talk about those feelings and experiences, and an appeal to society to provide more support for children to navigate the difficult transitions of early human being. You've been listening to an episode called Losing Childhood Innocence. Thank you to our guests. My name is Julie Garland. I'm a professor of teacher education at the University of Toronto in the Ontario Institute

for Studies in Education. And I'm a critical cultural theorist of childhood and curriculum. My name is Raya and I'm eight years old. My name is Fais. My last name is Khan and I am eight years old. I'm turning nine on May 9th. My name is Zane and I'm nine and a half years old. My name is Miro and I'm 13 years old. My name is Aidan and I'm 13 years old. My name is Petra and I'm 13 years old. My name is Petra and I'm 13 years old.

My name is Michelle and I'm 16. This episode was produced by Nahid Mustafa. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technical producer, Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nikola Lukcic. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And we'll leave you with some final thoughts from the children about what advantage kids have over adults. I'm Nala Ayed.

When I was like very young, I couldn't learn that much because I kept getting like non-special things on my report cards, but now when I'm at this age, I get A's and A pluses. When I was younger, I didn't really focus that much, and now that I'm nine and I'm in grade four, I focus a lot and I pay attention and I don't really zone out that much. There's a lot of emotional intelligence that I feel like a lot of kids my age have. Like I feel like when I talk to people my age maybe it's just because I'm blessed to be surrounded by really like good people but a quality that I really see is emotional intelligence the way that we talk about our feelings and like now I feel like if

I look at adults and how they were in their teenage years they don't talk about their feelings the way that we do and like a mature context like I feel like I can talk about my, the way I'm feeling without necessarily feeling like weak and I communicate with people very easily. Like if I have a problem, I can communicate it relatively easy and nobody really sees it as like a threat or like seeing conflict as like a crazy huge deal. I think that's something that a lot of kids my age have developed.

Yeah, I'm not saying that adults can't be creative, but I think generally kids can be more creative or imaginative and also have more energy. Aiden? I think generally kids are, they're more self-centered in a way, like not necessarily in a bad way, but since they don't have to worry about as much other than school and work and friends and stuff like that, it's usually a much

smaller picture if you get what I'm saying. Like it's not, they're not looking at the whole world, they're not looking at the whole world, they're not looking at their company, their, how they're going to get their groceries, they're looking at how they're going to turn in their assignment or their friends fighting. That's like, that for them is the equivalent to getting fired at work. You're not my friend anymore. You're fired. Oh.