How to give childhood and adolescence back to today’s children and young people
Being a child today allows potential that was unthinkable in the past but also entails the imposition of ever new and uncontrollable dangers. The intervention of Francesco Provinciali, former MIUR inspection manager and judge on. Milan Juvenile Court
The 20th century had opened up as a century of childhood, a sort of investment in the future in an era in which traits of modernity shone through: a utopia later refuted by two world wars, the Shoah, genocide, marginalization and the exploitation of children and young people, starting from the world of early work, to endemic poverty, despite the germination of the long season of rights culminating in the Universal Declaration of the United Nations and the Charters of international bodies.
Today, its opposite is added to the peculiar trait of childhood and adolescence as anthropological places of marginalization: the logic of incorporation into the ethics of adulthood behaviors, favored by the explosion of new technologies, precocious adultism, from the spread of drugs, from the crisis of the institutions responsible for the formation of the younger generations, above all the family and the school.
In the background lies – and here I agree with Umberto Galimberti – the Heideggerian intuition of “thinking that counts” and of the “god of money” as the driving force of the world and a parameter for reconsideration of life itself.
This "new algorithm" of existence resets childhood and adolescence as protected places of innocence and hope, gratuity and joy of the experience of living, age of study and preparation for life, contexts detached from the commercialization of a humanity sick of self-centeredness and unregulated, legitimacy, ethical relativism, permissiveness, utilitarianism as a paradigm of choice and saturation in the totalizing present of the entire existence. Everything moves against Gelassenheit , the serene abandonment, with detachment, towards nature and the seasons of life.
Today minors enter a sort of unexplored and unknown universe, sometimes impenetrable, with sequences of contamination facilitated by the casual use of technologies and smartphones, real access keys to the unknown, where virtual life replaces real life and with it the values handed down for centuries by the pedagogical tradition of learning methodologies of culture and its constitution in us.
Being a child today allows potential that was unthinkable in the past, there are advanced and inspired regulatory protections and forecasts but it entails the imposition of ever new and uncontrollable dangers: in fact, they are the most affordable customers by web criminals, by sellers of death through drugs cheap accessible chemicals with lethal effects, from the magnets of the many toy towns, where they, the new Lucignoli, live misleading experiences, from slot machines, to the abuse of alcohol, to the availability of money that they obtain by trading their own body, from early sex, to cyberbullying, to extreme games that defy death ("you have to look her in the eye" they say), to violence as the prevailing relational category, to indifference towards study, school and its teachers, facts that are not objects rarely of derision and physical aggression.
A reversal of values that postulates rights and freedoms without duties and without rules.
The new model of life of the kids of our time is a sort of gigantic and mutable media casting where the subject is recited, in a reshuffling of roles and identities that has an anticipatory value with respect to the physiology of the experiences of previous generations.
At the crossroads of the most heinous human behaviors there is often a distortion of childhood and adolescence, there are places where the emulation of the faults and defects of adults generates paradoxical situations: think of the diffusion of weapons among the very young, even in So-called civilized countries (in some states of the USA the first rifle is given to adolescents under the Christmas tree), others where minors are militarised, prostituted, are part of criminal gangs, used for organ transplants.
But also "simply" abandoned: in orphanages stripped of any affection, in the favelas, in the most degraded suburbs, waiting to be adopted, overcoming bureaucracies and vetoes that keep them away from the warmth of a family for many years, sometimes forever.
But you don't need to go far to discover atrocities and violence, abandonments and disputes, exploitation and material and spiritual misery.
How many unaccompanied minors cross foreign borders? How long will they remain in this condition of anaffective isolation? What is being done for them?
It is enough to open a house door to discover domestic violence suffered or witnessed and abuses, suffocated and silent in the most degrading squalor: growing up these children will metabolize an intuitively losing conception of life, their childhood and their adolescence will be bypassed by age by an external world made of abuses and examples that could become negative life lessons, in turn repeatable, such as emulation or revenge, where values such as affection, loyalty, friendship, dignity will be replaced by violence in all its multiform and negative changes .
What interface does society offer to the family and to the school to spread good examples and inspire feelings of guardianship and protection, to facilitate their educational task?
Looking around we observe a desolate landscape, where the archetypes of good example and good are disappearing.
I don't know if today the gesture of Ettore of which Luigi Zoja writes, of the father – that is – who raises his son to heaven and entrusts him to the benevolence of the gods so that he grows up better than him, is still a common practice.
The decline and crisis of the father figure in contemporary society are one of the main causes of the lost innocence of children.
I remember what Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote: “I learned that when a newborn baby squeezes his father's finger in his little fist for the first time, he has captured him forever”.
And in my heart I think of this contact as a need and a lifetime commitment.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/come-restituire-infanzia-e-adolescenza-ai-bambini-e-ai-ragazzi-di-oggi/ on Mon, 21 Nov 2022 07:46:35 +0000.