There are few greater gifts a person can receive than a loving childhood filled with meaningful experiences. Inversely, there are few greater curses a person can receive than a childhood deficient in love and meaning. If you did not have the fortune of a good childhood, there is a sense of sorrow that can bubble up as an adult when you see children who are being raised well. I felt this a while back when I was visiting a church and they happened to be showing a presentation of what the homeschooled children had been doing over the past year. This presentation was fantastic. I saw the children building things, spending time in nature, using power tools, going to museums, and having tons of cool experiences. Truly, I am filled with joy in knowing that these children are loved by the adults in their lives, and I wish this for all children. Yet there is a bit of sorrow mixed with that joy when I look back at my own childhood, which lacked a lot of these positive experiences.
Looking around at the culture, I can see that the joy of childhood has been, and is being, stolen from the majority of young people. If you do not believe this, try going for a drive around your neighborhood before school starts. Do the young people you see waiting for the bus look excited and filled with enthusiasm for another day of learning about the world? One would find more joy and life in a cemetery.
Perhaps this loss of childhood is why many people my age tend to be drawn to childish things. Recent examples of this include McDonald’s Adult Happy Meals or the trend of so-called “Disney Adults.” Our culture rarely produces meaningful childhoods anymore, but it is rife with opportunities to market cheap parodies of childhood.
Now, I’m not saying that adults can’t appreciate things that are “for children.” I agree with C.S. Lewis, who, when criticized for writing and enjoying fairy tales, said, “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” It is when a love for childish things morphs into self-indulgence and self-centeredness that problems arise. Trying to soothe the hurts of a lost childhood with consumerism only leads to regression into endless adolescence and eventual disappointment.
It is necessary to take time to sit with the sorrow we feel from childhood. I suspect that a great deal of the struggles that people have as adults are rooted in past hurts that were never healed. For many, the solution seems to be to bury the pain. Work, media, shopping, drugs, alcohol, and many other things are used to help us ignore our pain. Yet, none of them ever seem to work. We must first be willing to acknowledge pain. However, acknowledging our pain can lead to despair if it is not coupled with action.
What can be done? How does one recover from a lost childhood? Rather than focusing on one’s self, more people should consider investing their time and energy into helping others, especially young people. Perhaps now more than ever, young people are in need of reassurance that there are adults that genuinely care about them. I have been trying to do this by volunteering to lead a youth group and teaching children at the church I go to. Having opportunities to invest in young people has been a great blessing to me. I cannot stress enough how important it is for older generations to step up and mentor younger generations.
Even more important than mentorship is the creation and maintenance of environments in which children can truly thrive. The best way to accomplish this is through a stable family structure. Children need a father and mother who love each other. They need consistent, patient guidance as they learn how to live. They need meaningful life experiences like the ones I saw in the homeschooling video. These things are not always easy to accomplish with today’s economic and social pressures, but people of my generation must at least be willing to try. There is simply too much at stake not to.
There is no rewind button for life. No second chance to experience childhood. Although we cannot change what happened in the past, we can still choose how to respond. We can make the choice to provide encouragement and support to today’s young people. In doing so, we may redeem our own childhoods and build a better world together.