A Country Called Childhood

October 6, 2014
Griffiths (Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time), who has lived in and studied a diverse range of indigenous cultures, here addresses the “loss of childhood” (a term taken from a Cambridge University study) in wealthy, industrial nations. Griffiths believes this has happened because children have lost touch with their “kith,” which is to say the natural world, due to today’s omnipresent consumerism. She proposes a sensitive approach that will endow our children with a love of play and the freedom to explore nature. The combination of a sociological perspective with a lyrical style makes this a seductively readable work, each page peppered with references to cultural icons, authors, philosophers, historians, and other great thinkers. Chapters expounding happily on poet John Clare, Mark Twain’s Huck and Tom, and Kipling’s Mowgli are followed by darker sections about how corporal punishment, obedience, and a loss of metaphysical freedom can damage developing psyches. The independent state of childhood the book depicts as existing in the otherwise disparate indigenous societies of West Papua New Guinea, Australia, and North and South America, where children create their own tribes and exercise self-reliance, seems almost impossibly utopian, but Griffiths convincingly argues that it is real and can be achieved in developed nations.

September 15, 2014
Griffiths (Wild: An Elemental Journey, 2006, etc.) focuses on the lives of children in her continued exploration of the role of nature in giving meaning to our lives. "Why are so many children in Euro-American cultures unhappy?" asks the author. "Why is it that children in many traditional cultures seem happier, fluent in their child-nature?" Griffiths goes beyond the current debates on child-rearing practices-e.g., overstructured play, too much time online and too little quality family time-and examines what she considers a more fundamental flaw: the separation of children from a natural environment. After all, "human nature is nested in nature which co-creates the child." These days, writes the author, children "are enclosed in school and home, enclosed in the cars to shuttle between them, enclosed by fear, by surveillance and poverty and...rigid schedules of time." They are prevented from testing their environments by a risk-averse, overprotective society. Griffiths compares the stultified lives of modern children to her own exuberant Welsh childhood, when she and her brothers engaged in all the mischievous joys of being young and nearly carefree. Still, she also finds her own childhood to have been flawed. Although she experienced greater freedom, she lacked contact with the wilderness. In contrast to the relative constraints on her life then, she points to what she considers to be the greater freedom of young people growing up in traditional cultures-e.g. the !Kung children of the Kalahari or the Ye'kuana of Venezuela. According to the author, these children receive more maternal nurturing and close attention in the first years of their lives but then are encouraged to learn self-reliance at an earlier age. She contrasts the consumerism and "the protocol of ownership" that children learn today to the wisdom that children living in traditional cultures absorb by knowing "the words for varieties of trees or birds." A provocative critique of modern society.

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