2:47am July 30, 2014

I really, still, don’t like the idea of people “losing their childhood” or “not getting to be a child”.

I think because it feels very privileged and culture-bound.

There’s this idea that childhood is a time when people shouldn’t have any major responsibilities, where they should be free to just play and learn some stuff but mostly not have to do anything serious, or not have anything major riding on whether they do something or not. And that only as they grow up, should real responsibilities be added, in a carefully controlled fashion of course, ending with adulthood (or, at most, mid to late adolescence), where real responsibilities begin.

And that’s true for like… middle and upper class Western kids in very recent history.

It’s not true in all cultures and all classes, and it’s not even universal in the group of people I just described.

I had a caregiver with fibromyalgia who was worried that her kids “didn’t get to be kids” because they were 6 and 8 years old and already cooking their own breakfasts so she would be able to lie down for a bit in the morning.

And just… no, it’s not going to scar anyone for life to make their own breakfast, and if it does, they’ve got problems beyond breakfast-making. Although honestly, I think her kids are going to be messed up, not because of her fibromyalgia, but because she’s an asshole who’s abused at least one of her other clients (who lived in the house with her, but who she banned from touching the fridge and banned from the house at certain hours and wouldn’t even let come back to the house when she shit herself at work and needed a change of pants). She also believes herself incapable of abusing power because she’s “not that kind of person” – even after what happened, and even after her lying to APS about it and being believed so that she could get away with it and the client could get more of a bad reputation (even though there were witnesses… our state has one of the shittiest APS departments in the country, apparently).

Anyway, back to the main topic…

I know that there are things that children shouldn’t be forced to do, and often are, in a lot of places.

But I also know that this weird idea about childhood being a thing where you just sort of float around doing what you want except for maybe homework, is recent and confined to certain parts of certain cultures. And the world has gotten on without it fine, for a very long time. This idea that this is just what children should “naturally” be doing, and that anything else will result in irreparable damage, just pisses me off.

So when people say “He didn’t get to be a child…” or “I didn’t get to have a childhood…” I just think “a childhood according to who?”

And I just can’t make myself be very sympathetic to that. My childhood wasn’t like that. At all. I had a lot of problems that most children don’t have. In fact my childhood was downright miserable.

And I think there are things about my childhood that could have been different, should have been different. I never should’ve been molested. I never should’ve been abused. I never should’ve seen the inside of an institution, or been threatened with lifelong institutionalization. I never should’ve been bullied. I never should’ve had bullies pretend to be my friends. I could go on, and on, and on, about things that should’ve been different. Really should’ve been different.

But none of those things mean I didn’t get a childhood. I got a childhood. It was no less of a childhood for not being carefree and idyllic. It was a fairly common type of childhood for people like me. And it sucked in many ways, but the problem wasn’t that it “wasn’t a childhood”.

And as an adult, I don’t have to somehow make up for losing my childhood, because I didn’t lose one, I had one. But if I went into therapy they’d probably try to convince me that I never had a childhood and that I had to do various things to make up for the childhood I never had. They’d probably especially focus on the adolescent part of my childhood, but the earlier part was pretty shitty too. I remember actually thinking, when I couldn’t have been older than 8, that the idea of childhood as idyllic was a lie and that I would always for the rest of my life remember what childhood is really like.

Anyway, I don’t feel robbed of my childhood, and I don’t think encouraging people to feel robbed of their childhoods is a helpful thing to do. Same with the idea of being robbed of any other life phase.

Especially since the idea of being robbed of a particular life phase seems to often come back to disability. Either you were robbed of your childhood because you were disabled, or because your parents were disabled. (Double points if you supposedly “had to become the parent” just because you had to do some more chores around the house to make up for the fact that your disabled parent couldn’t do them very well.) Someone once told me they were being robbed of their young adulthood by having to be my primary caretaker. They said something like “At my age, I’m supposed to be finding myself and goofing off and doing a bunch of things without a lot of responsibility on my shoulders, not taking care of you.” Which, yeah, the situation we were in was shitty and I regretted it as much as they did, but that was a crappy way to put it. And a false way. They could only get away with that view of young adulthood from being an upper-middle-class white American university student.

Anyway… it all leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I didn’t miss a childhood. I had a childhood. And it wasn’t that different than the childhoods a lot of people have. I don’t think idealizing childhood, and then comparing non-ideal childhoods to that ideal, helps anyone. And even though my childhood often sucked, I don’t draw the conclusions from that about my current life, that a lot of people would.

But I seem to be in an extreme minority there. And I think this is probably something that originated in therapy culture, to take a wild guess. It’s certainly repeated in therapy and therapy-inspired settings often enough.