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Section 23
Adult’s Who Don’t Have Time - Children, Unimportance, and Depression

Question 23 found at the bottom of this page
Test | Table of Contents

Kurt Hahn observed that contemporary youth were suffering from the “misery of unimportance.” In earlier times they were indispensable for the survival of the family unit. Working in the fields and shops beside their elders, they built a life and a nation. Experiences in extended families and cohesive neighborhoods made cooperation an everyday occurrence. They young and the elderly helped one another, and large families offered abundant opportunities to give and receive love.

Today, all of this sounds like a fantasy island. Now cousins are just photographs in an album and grandma is a three-minute transcontinental call. Our homes are fitted with security devices and our yards are cordoned off with fences to protect ourselves from our neighbors. A school in California secures funds for a concrete wall around its playground to protect children from stray bullets fired by warring gangs in the housing project across the street; nobody mentions that most of the occupants of the project are also children, since that is on the other side of the wall.

While youth long for a feeling of importance, adults persist in infantilizing them. They typical approach to the cries of boredom from youth is to build them a new playground or teen-town where they are told to go and play some more. Today, little is asked of young people except that they be consumers. A vast industry serves youth with schooling, entertainment and goods of all kinds, but there are limited opportunities for the young themselves to produce goods and service for others.

Various national commissions have recently recommended that young people become involved in community service activities. This is a promising idea, but it raises the question of the amount of time youth are presently allocating for volunteer work. A study by the Search Institute asked 10,000 young adolescents the following question: “Think about the helpful things you have done in the last month-- for which you did not get paid, but which you did because you wanted to be kind to someone else.” Three-quarters spent less than two hours helping others in the previous month; this includes a third of the young people in the study who sad they had done nothing at all. A quarter were involved three or more hours during the previous month. One might conclude from this that volunteer work is not presently a major force in the development of responsibility in contemporary youth.

Deprived of opportunities for a genuine productivity, lured into consumptive roles, young people come to believe that their lives make little difference to the world. Those who feel the most powerless develop distorted ways of thinking which psychologists label as “external locus of control” of “lack of personal efficacy.” They feel like helpless pawns following somebody else’s script rather than authors who can write the drama of their own destiny. They believe they are but victims of fate or the whims of powerful others.

Perhaps the most damaging proof of the child’s unimportance is the shrinking amount of attention from adults who “don’t have time.” Steven Charleston, a Native American professor, discusses this tyranny of time in Western culture. We have been fooled into believing time is real; it isn’t, of course. It is an invention of the human mind for describing change and motion. Not until very recently have humans ever tried to govern their life activity by numbers generated by a tiny machine. The great cycle of seasons and of the day, the natural development of growth, these were time. The rest is only as real as we want it to be. And as demanding.

Charleston says we can see the tyranny of time in our lives by listening to how many idioms we have invented to describe something that doesn’t exist: We make time, save time, spend time, waste time, borrow time, budget time, invest time, manage time, until in exhaustion we call time out. In contrast to time, relationships are real. They exist in the intimate spaces of our lives, when we narrow the distance between ourselves and others. Family, friendship, community-- these are the bonds of reality.

Today these bonds are being torn apart by the hands of Western time. We have a new idiom for that, a new “time word” to mask the continued destruction of love in our society: it is called “quality” time. Now not only are we quantifying time, we are qualifying it. We are willing into existence the illusion that love can be measured by seconds or minutes; that “human relationships can be made warm in the microwave of quick encounters.”

We cannot care for children in convenient time; we can’t learn from our elders in convenient time; we can’t maintain marriages in convenient time. The result of adjusting our lives to the fiction of time will inevitably be empty adults, lonely elders, and neglected children.

“Personal Reflection” Journaling Activity #3
The preceding section was about Adult’s Who Don’t Have Time. Write three case study examples regarding how you might use the content of this section of the Manual or the “Positive Reinforcement” section of the audio tape in your practice.

QUESTION 23:
According to Steven Charleston, a Native American professor, what is the most damaging proof of a child’s unimportance?