This article is a transcript of the report of Anna Varga (Chairman of the Board of the Society of Family Counselors and Psychotherapists, Head of the Department of Family Psychotherapy at the Institute of Practical Psychology and Psychoanalysis). Comments of the editors of the Psychologos at the end of the article.
Anna Varga. Features of the socialization of a modern child
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Only infancy is a biological category, and childhood is a socially constructed concept. There was a time when there was no childhood, for example, in the Middle Ages: when a child began to walk and mastered speech, he was considered an adult. We know this, seeing, for example, the paintings of medieval artists, where children are fully included in life, they are present in the lifestyle of adults, watching sexualized interactions. Then there was no such thing as a “child”, and, accordingly, there was no border between childhood and adulthood, there was only a border between infancy and adulthood, and the question of socialization did not arise, i.e. about the education of a person needed by society. Childhood appeared after the most important event — after Gutenberg (1450) invented printing. When the book appeared, there was a prerequisite for the emergence of childhood and adulthood in our understanding.
What happened?
In medieval culture, life was common, joint, socialized, there was a common, predictable future: if you were born in the family of a tanner, then you will be a tanner. The culture of communication was the culture of oral speech. When the book appeared, reading arose as a kind of individual act: a person was one on one with the book. And this created a kind of gap: a person received information alone and had a choice — to share this information with someone, and with whom exactly to share it. This created an opportunity for the development of individuality, people began to differ in some of their inner lives. They began to understand that «my inner life is not the inner life of another.» Accordingly, this immediately created a difference in awareness between different segments of the population — literate and illiterate. Men began to have more information, and it was they who began to develop individuality (in our understanding), which created the prerequisites for the emergence of personality.
The emergence of the book required literacy. A person can learn to speak — this is his biological ability, if he lives in a certain speech environment, he copies it. To master literacy, you need to study, because. it’s not in our gene pool. It turned out that a small part of people are literate and most of them are not, so the task of socialization arises: in order to raise a boy (the society was patriarchal), it was necessary to teach him to read and write. Until he learned to read, he could not be considered an adult, even if he could walk and ride a horse. And after that, he still had to read a certain set of books in order to have the necessary set of information, which was considered at that time a small «gentleman’s set.»
When it became clear that a child should learn to read, then ideas arose in society that there should be some ways to socialize him — if there are boundaries between childhood and adulthood, then there should be ideas of how the transition is made between them. It became clear that a child is not a small adult, and that he needs to be taught somehow. Various theories of learning arose, for example, John Locke, who believed that a child is a blank slate, from birth he does not know anything, he is an empty vessel in which you only need to invest. The opposite theory of Rousseau, who said that the child initially has a certain set and it must be revealed (the theory of natural expediency). These basic ideas are still present in pedagogy.
Over the past 350 years, «childhood», as a kind of understanding, representation has been developing very actively. There was an understanding that a child is not a small adult, but a special person. This means that the child needs special nutrition — there is an industry of baby food; the child needs special clothing; the child needs special classes; they began to observe the child, began to offer him toys, found out that the child is a playing creature — the toy industry is being created. There are children’s — psychology, pathopsychology, pedagogy.
A huge number of people are trying to understand the child, discussing all kinds of theories of development: how the child develops, what stages he goes through, what needs to be done so that he develops more actively. Pedagogical theories are being developed: how to teach him at what age, so that he learns knowledge more easily — before school, in a game developing environment, after reaching school age. Or when a child reaches the full flowering of his intellect (this happens at the age of 14, after which everyone becomes stupid). That is, a huge area of ideas, knowledge, interests has been created, and from this the value of the child arises. A child is such a creature that must be protected: to kill a warrior is one meaning, it often happens in war, to kill a child is evil.
So we lived for about 350 years.
Further, after the war, 50-60 years, a dramatic event occurs — television appears, and then the computer. It has such a huge impact on our culture that we cannot appreciate because we are inside it. This impact on our communication is so strong that it is comparable in its effect to the invention of printing. Printing has completely changed human psychology, created a completely different society, a completely new representation of the idea. Television appears and the main communication becomes a moving picture with its parallel sound. And in order to see this picture and hear the text, you don’t need to study — everyone can do it, a child from one and a half years old begins to see and understand the image. He may not fully decode it, but by the age of five he is able to perceive the same thing as his mother, father, grandfather, etc. And there is no longer a difference in the information that an adult has and that children have. That is, childhood as a social category began to disappear, because the information gap between these human groups disappeared. A child can sit watching TV shows, news — everything is the same as adults. Accordingly, the type of crops changes, because. the knowledge that was useful to parents is useless to their children.
Accordingly, along with new technologies, two points arise. First, the volume of information has become approximately the same for children and for adults. There has been a lot of information. It has led to the fact that the experience that a young man needs is not in the hands of his ancestors. In the Middle Ages, the type of culture was called post-figurative — children, growing up, try to be like their ancestors, and it is believed that the ancestors are the bearers of the rules, the concepts of good and evil, morality and wisdom. With the advent of the right amount of available information, adults are not an authority for the child in this sense, so the type of culture changes. The culture in which we live is called prefigurative: a child, due to the greater plasticity of his mind, often has more information than an adult. For example, a grandmother cannot use email. mail, so she asks her grandson to help.
The second moment — there was a «liquid» or «fluid» reality. The term was coined by Sigmund Bauman, a well-known sociologist who wrote a lot about how our society has changed. Now stability is not a value. If earlier everyone tried to create the world, so that there was a stable territorial, human environment, so that things could be inherited. Now this is true only in relation to antiques, everything else has no value. No stability is needed, now you need to be mobile, move geographically, be free. The world has become very unstable, because there is a lot of information and we have no way to evaluate it and understand what information we need.
Thus, we have a new version of a person, which is called kidalt — an adult child (short for the English kid — a child and the English adult — an adult). This term was proposed in 1985 and since then it has acquired new details. This is a person who loves fantasy, cartoons, gadgets. The prototype of the scammer Peter Pan, who never grows up and has all the features of a child: he is cheerful, carefree, cruel, lives for today. Those. this character is fully adequate to the «current reality» in which we all now live.
Total uncertainty reigns in the world and everything becomes interchangeable: people, things, connections. This is greatly helped by the Internet, which, after TV, has hammered the last nail into the coffin called «childhood» because on the Internet there is an opportunity to make connections and not create your own individuality. On the contrary, the Internet allows you to destroy this individuality, create different alter egos for yourself, take all sorts of nicknames — no one needs or is interested in you with your individuality. If you play a game on the Internet, only your moves are interesting, it is not interesting what you think, all the more so it is very difficult to understand how you feel. The safety of communication on the Internet is important — you can express anger with impunity. And if you look at the number of meaningful statements and the number of angry kicks in the comments, then the latter win. These are eroticized interactions that the Internet gives freedom to because there is anonymity.
In such a society, we have children. What to do with them? What happens to socialization? How to take into account the peculiarities of our time in the upbringing and education of the child?
Childhood disappears not only because there is no informational boundary between childhood and adulthood. It also disappears on a psychological level: children have ceased to be a value. Babies remain valuable, but children no longer exist. There were films about harmful children. Previously, for example, there was the film «The Exorcist» about a child who was possessed by the devil. Now there are films that children are devilish offspring in themselves, this is their nature. Previously, it was believed that pedophilia is a terrible thing, now the scandal with Pletnev does not bother anyone: yes, a pedophile, but he is a musician! It does not horrify us, as it would have terrified 20 years ago, and he does not hide it, as he would have hidden 20 years ago.
There is a world of scammers — the same clothes, the cult of youth, a bunch of articles that a person was going to age beautifully, but then he ran to a plastic surgeon. This is a world where the child does not need to be treated with care, it can be used sexually, it can be used as a model in advertising.
What happens? No need to teach the amount of knowledge, because this is all the child can find on the Internet. No one needs a school education, you just need to learn to read. You don’t even need to teach reading and writing — the computer will correct all errors. He does not need to be taught calligraphy and does not need to fight for good handwriting — he will still knock on the keys.
The school stopped educating children
The school is absolutely inadequate to the requirements of our time, because it is still obsessed with the idea of stuffing a sum of knowledge into the child. And now we have a colossal school day of 7 lessons, then the child comes home with a bunch of homework. Watching modern children, I understand that school years are the most difficult in their lives. He still does not have physical strength, attention has not yet been formed, but he is wildly busy. Since the type of culture is changing, and children and their parents are usually people of different generations, parents have very high anxiety, they do not understand what is happening, what they can give the child, except for pocket money. As Bauman said, «parents are people who give me pocket money.» From this anxiety, parents begin to rush into the theory of early learning: at 3 months the child is shown letters, at 2 years he is taught to read. It is useless: it does not advance child development, because until the age of 3, child development is promoted through the development of dexterity and fine motor skills. The knowledge that they are trying to give him — maybe he will learn it, but this will not make him more competent, faster and will not develop his brain. His brain develops at his fingertips: development comes from eye-hand coordination. But there are few educational psychologists, and there are many development circles, and since anxiety in society is great, parents try to reduce it by dragging their baby to all sorts of activities, thinking that they are giving him something.
It is necessary to take into account the peculiarities of child development, especially up to 5-7 years, while biological infancy is in effect. They exist and they need to be known, not violated. Do not think that if you teach a five-year-old child 3 languages, tennis, and ride a horse, then he will grow up with you a happy person prepared for life. No, this is how parents extinguish their anxiety, but they do nothing for the child. Competencies need to be taught. A school could do it, but teachers don’t know how to teach it. That is: not to read, not to write, not the sum of knowledge in geography, history, but one must learn to search for information, work with information, systematize and analyze it, learn to formulate and discuss. These competencies are more effective and more widely useful than the sum of knowledge in history — the child will find it all if he needs to prepare a report for school.
Parents have ceased to be agents of socialization. If earlier, in a post-figurative culture, parents had common activities with their children, and people saw the meaning in the poem: “a little son came to his father …”, now a little son will not come to his father with the question “what is good and what is bad? » — the father will be the last person whose opinion he will be interested in. He will ask this question to those people with whom he communicates on the Internet, and there he will receive an answer. That is, parents lose their authority, as people are more literate, life-competent, etc. Emotional bonds between parents and children have become weaker. When a child is a baby, everything is preserved, because biology works there. The child grows up, closes the door and sits facing the screen. He does not want to spend time with you, he is not interested. The distance between parents and children has increased. Previously, only in adolescence (we understood) that a child may not want to go somewhere with his parents, now the child is traveling, but he takes a laptop with him. Improving life is not good for the family, in a sense: what can people do together if they don’t have to survive? Have fun and eat. When it was necessary to do something for the common survival of the connection were much stronger. And the child saw the cooperation between mother and father, how functions are distributed in the family, he understood how the connection between generations works. Now a grandmother comes to her grandson’s birthday with money and, in principle, nothing more is needed from her, no one needs her, because the child is raised by a nanny. In addition, the number of divorces and binocular families has increased — parents divorced and remarried, but they remain parents in relation to children. If this is not a wild divorce, then the child can be in the mother’s family and in the father’s family. It turns out that children live in several families at the same time, respectively, their attachment to their parents is blurred. As a result, we can say that the experience of parents is not useful to children, since they are people of different cultures.
The agent of socialization is now the Internet. There is communication with peers: now the world is dangerous, you can’t let a child go to any yard — let him sit at home. He sits at home and communicates on the Internet, and this suits him too. He forms “we” — these are either contacts in the social. networks or people with whom he plays online. On the Internet, you can get advice, support, get to know each other, and there you can create the desired image of yourself. And we get a child who constantly sits on the Internet. Parents are horrified by this, but in terms of statistics, this is the norm, it happens all over the world. Family psychologists come to the conclusion that socialization on the Internet is a normal variant of socialization.
On the other hand, only the family can give the child emotional upbringing, which the child cannot receive anywhere. These are the qualities that he needs in this «fluid reality». The family can make infancy right: give health to the baby, teach him to enjoy the movement and then he can start playing sports. Maybe, up to 7-9 years old, to instill their own tastes, values: if he likes to listen to music, then he can infect a child with this, etc. And, of course, a sense of basic security: the child should not be humiliated in the family and should not observe any violence, neither physical, nor sexual, nor emotional.
The emotions that are in the family are what the child imitates, this is not psychology, but biology. If he sees in the family how it is customary to react to this or that event, how people express anger, tenderness, support — he will learn this. The difficulty is that we do not know how to teach this on purpose, because we live in this, and the child lives with us and copies. It is not included in any general process, because families have reached the standard of living, not survival. When the family survived, there was a common process, more powerful ties. Now the family «lives», the child is brought up by a nanny, and together with his parents he only has fun.
What to do?
First, to abandon the idea of education and come to the idea of cultivation: you need to raise him, give him health, a sense of security, until he grows and breaks away enough that he can take care of himself. Teach him what school doesn’t teach — socially approved activities: tennis, football, languages … Show a piece of the world while he is still traveling with you. Keep contact for the sake of contact: a grown child will not necessarily let you inside, but you don’t have to quarrel with him, you need to limit yourself to questions — “how are you? everything is fine?». This should be a superficial contact, but it should be so that in difficult times the child can turn, so that the quarrel does not stand between parents and children.
And the last thing is to leave the child to his fate.
Comments from the Editor
The editors of Psychologos sincerely respect Anna Varga, but cannot join her conclusions and recommendations. Parents who want and know how to raise their children do it. It is possible and it should. It is possible to educate a teacher in oneself, it is quite realistic to master the methods of raising children (there is nothing incredible in this!) And to become for children — not just loved ones, but also — parents with authority. In good families of the Internet, children will have as much and as much as they need for the development of the child, and if parents competently build their communication with children, children talk to them and listen to them. Parents can be an authority for children if they set such a task and they have something for their souls. Dear parents, the family is your territory, the children are your children, and there is no need to pretend to be helpless victims. If you love your children and stand for something, as parents, you will cope with all the difficulties that Anna Varga realistically described, and you will definitely raise smart, developed and decent children.