By Ellerine Diengdoh
Before we dive in, here’s a quick disclaimer, which is also a confession. The observations that follow are not about all parents or all children. In fact, if I’m pointing a finger, several are pointing right back at me. This piece isn’t a critique of your parenting. It’s an exploration of a pattern I see in the world and in my own home. For the rest, let’s get to the matter at hand.
I have been forced, by the biological fact of having a child myself, to conduct unwilling anthropological fieldwork. My research takes place at strange rituals known as ‘birthday parties,’ a gathering of small, expensive humans. At these events, I have seen things. Not “I see dead people” things, but arguably stranger and more horrifying.
I have witnessed an eloquent eight-year-old earnestly discussing his ‘personal brand’ and another asking my ten-year-old if she has a ‘morning routine.’ When one parent inquired if my daughter had her own YouTube channel, I calmly replied, “She’ll get one right after I launch mine.”
It is from this vantage point of profound confusion that I ask the question that seems to define our time, what, exactly, are we teaching our children to strive for?
What even is striving? Is it the opposite of arriving? So, if you’ve already arrived the moment you’re born….in a climate-controlled car seat, wearing a cashmere onesie, does that mean your whole life is lived in reverse? This is the kind of thinking that keeps me awake at 3 am, agitated and profoundly stressed.
Striving, you see, implies a deficit, a hunger, a gap between what is and what could be. The modern child is born into the ‘what could be’. They gestate in a womb of fulfilled desires, and they emerge, blinking, into a world where the only remaining frontier is tasting a new flavour of water. They are a solution to a problem that never existed. They are an answer in search of a question.
Children now experience soul-crushing depression because their birthday party wasn’t ‘aesthetically coherent’ with their Pinterest board. Their greatest battle was a 24-hour social media detox where they ‘truly connected with themselves,’ before immediately posting about it online.
Our children today are not raised, they are curated. They are a project. We parents, the Enlightened Gladiators of the 21st Century, read the ingredients on a box of cereal and other packaged food, with the concentration, passion and intensity of a bomb disposal expert, but then plug our children’s brain directly into the unfiltered consciousness of the internet for six straight hours. It is like carefully washing a single organic lettuce leaf before feeding it to a goat, and then letting the goat watch television until its eyes fall out!
Our children’s heroes are not people who overcame obstacles, achieved greatness through grit and dedication or artists and creators. Their heroes are curators. People who REACT to things other people have made. They watch people watching people. Their entire sensory input is a hall of mirrors reflecting an infinitely receding void. They are a copy, of a copy, of a copy, of a blank piece of paper.
There is also a new parental anxiety. The fear of our child experiencing boredom. It is treated like a medical emergency, to be immediately cured with an iPad or a supervised sensory activity.
Boredom, as I recall, was the forge. It was the vast, empty wilderness where you were forced to build something- a doll from rags, a tent from bedsheets, a bad poem, a personality. It was the engine of creativity, mostly because the alternative was staring at the wall until it drove you completely mad. Discomfort was the point…it was the grain of sand that forces the oyster to make a pearl. And I can’t help but wonder what you get when you raise a generation of comfortable, un-irritated oysters. I suspect the answer is, just a pile of empty shells.
We were the last generation who knew what was what. We were raised on a diet of mud, neglect and thinly-veiled threats. We didn’t have “playdates.” We had unsupervised gang wars in a ditch. Our toys weren’t toys. They were……things. Archaeological remnants of a forgotten civilisation – bottle caps were currency, bits of rusted iron became swords from space, old tyres were Formula 1 cars, a discarded plank was the bridge over a mighty river and a doll’s head that was – well, it was a doll’s head. It taught us about mortality. We built entire universes out of things the scientific community would nowadays call a ‘biohazard’.
We, were raised by wolves, disguised as parents. We’d fight in the street, then come home and get the beating of our lives for embarrassing the family name in public. Dinner was simple – you ate the lumpy Dal or you starved quietly in your room ( if you had one, if not, you had the great outdoors).
We were sent outside with one simple rule, don’t come back until a bone is showing, and even then, think twice! We got a cut on Monday, stitches on Tuesday. A beating for both on Wednesday.
Discipline for us was a simple, elegant system based on physics. It was about the cause (you) and the effect (a ringing sensation in your ear). We were hit for answering back, which was called insolence. We were hit for not answering back, which was called stubbornness. There was the high crime of ‘jlaw nguid’ (a greedy stare), which could be triggered by merely looking at a biscuit for more than the prescribed two seconds. Then there were the unprompted demonstrations of power, delivered simply because an adult had entered the room, and felt the need to enforce hierarchy.
We were taught to be like furniture when visiting relatives or friends, and we were never in the same solar system as the adults. It was a simpler time.
Yet, we grew up. We survived. We learned resilience, humour and the fine art of ducking slippers.
Our children however, our precious, pre-approved, safety-certified children, what will they strive for, when everything is already theirs? The answer, I suspect, is the one thing we never saw coming.
They will wage a quiet war against the project we made of them, not to build something new, but to find the glorious void that existed before our ambition polished them into a mirror for our second chances, before our pride demanded they reflect a perfection we never achieved. Their legacy will not be an accomplishment, but an erasure.
And the first thing they will erase is our signature…..