A friend of mine gave his 11-year-old daughter a pair of sneakers the other day, thinking she’d be pleased. She was not. She became agitated when she saw the label and told him, “I can’t wear these, because of child labor!”
It took half an hour of Internet research for him to persuade the girl that her anxieties were unfounded, and that Nike did not enslave small children in remote foreign places.
What’s a pre-pubescent child doing, panicking about the industrial origins of her shoes? She’s behaving obediently, internalizing the urgent, incessant adult talk of danger and crisis and bad things happening.
“She worries about the repercussion of her smallest action,” her father sighs, “what she eats and wears, and even where she goes.”
The Cold War may be over, but American children are ducking and covering more than ever. They’re not crouching in fear of nuclear conflagration, as in Soviet days. They’re not even ducking to avoid a wild-eyed jihadi with a dirty bomb.
What they fear is — well, what don’t we teach them to fear?
Children are worried about global warming and logging in the rain forests. They’re anxious about the plight of the polar bear and the manatee. They are fearful of genetically modified foods, of trans fats, of salmonella in tomatoes. They dread the lurking stranger: Even small children are now trained by parents and teachers to detect the luring techniques of pedophiles.
Children who have been slathered from infancy with super-SPF unguents are scared of getting skin cancer. They’re scared of lung cancer, too, thanks to childhoods infused with anti-tobacco propaganda. A child we know holds her breath, like a superstitious peasant passing a graveyard, if she catches even a whiff of cigarette smoke.
Children in especially right-on households may balk at salmon that is not wild-caught, yogurt that is not organic, and coffee drunk by parents who are insufficiently aware of fair-trade practices.
This anxious, defensive crouch is just terrible. Of course life is beset with uncertainties, perils and injustice — and the occasional stogie-smoking passer-by. But when hasn’t it been?
Children deserve to know that the world is here to be enjoyed, that it is full of adventure and beauty, and not some depressing pit of pollution and seething social inequity that they are despoiling every time they fail to turn off a lightbulb.
American children in particular ought to know that they are fantastically lucky to have a seat at the greatest banquet table in history.
The vast majority of American children live like sultans, with comfortable beds, few chores, diets of dainties, and doting parents who whisk them from one interesting venue to another.
They ought to be encouraged to look about the world with dash and optimism, not apologetic guilt for the footprint they’re leaving behind.
There’s something horribly cringing in the fashion of minimizing one’s effect on the world. By all means, we can conserve energy, but must we inflict our eco-alarmism on children quite so wantonly? Suicide is the quickest way to reduce your effect on the environment, as someone said. That’s hardly a helpful message for the kiddies.
We have friends in Canada who are so intent upon leaving only mouselike traces behind that they have confined themselves voluntarily to a single square mile.
This might sound charming: Two people sacrificing whatever swagger and swashbuckle they might have enjoyed, so as to compensate the cosmos for the rest of us stinking parasites.
Yet isn’t it awful, that centuries of human achievement should produce such guilt? The square-milers make me think of a cartoon vacuum cleaner that eventually sucks itself up its own tube and vanishes with a little “pop.”
Adults are free to live in as shrunken a preindustrial manner as we like. We perhaps ought to think hard about the sustainability of this, and the fairness of that.
But we should stop devolving these anxieties onto children, because they haven’t yet had their own kick at the can.
