The Kids Are Alright

A small interruption to my postings of pictures taken in New York - the news of research by Barnardo's prompted this one. Read the BBC report for a fuller view of their findings, but essentially they polled adults on their attiotudes towards children and found that more than half of adults regarded children as 'dangerous', and believed that children were roaming the streets behaving like animals. Hugely upsetting stuff, and I'm going to have a rant about it:

Children learn their behavious from somewhere, and that somewhere is the world around them, controlled by adults. By blindly projecting (mostly) groundless fears onto young people, adults themselves are creating a negative environment for childhood development. We brand children as hooded hooligans, vandals and criminals and some reward us by behaving in the way they are expected to. Respect for children (as for each and every generation) is vital if we want their respect in return, and respect breeds empathy which in turn breeds good behaviour.

It isn't children who send men to fight wars, perpetrate terrorist acts or cause environmental ruin. And just to point out the obvious: children are naturally idealists until put down by the adults around them. Listen to childrens ideas about the world and they point out the things that we should never allow - homelessness, hunger, war, pollution, animal abuse, economic disparity, all the human-made ills that blight the world. To children the solutions are often simple, while adults allow themselves to become convinced that the solutions are too complicated to comprehend, and so they watch a soap opera and forget about it.

If we can maintain our childish idealsim we can beat these things: Homelessness? Fill the empty houses. Hunger? Share our food. War? Talk it over. Pollution? Use better technology. Animal abuse? Go vegetarian. Economic disparity? Share the money out more fairly! All simple stuff, all stuff that can easily be poo-poohed by adults, but think about it... why not? Call it communism if you like, but ask yourself "what would Jesus do?" and it's not so dumb.

So. A quick solution for those 50%+ who are so scared of children they'd like to see them locked up after dark:

1 - Go home and lock all the doors

2 - Cancel your subscription to the Daily Mail / Express

3 - Stay away from the rest of us until you feel better - without all that tabloid nonsense in your head, it really won't take long.

Postscript: this picture was taken in a park in Bournemouth last week, and fits the theme of childhood well, I think. The graffiti is negative, I suppose, but the love is wholly positive.

The map is here.