7. The Children of the 21st Century

by Joan Almon

We stand at the edge of a new century and new millennium. For today's children and youth it will be 'home'. They will feel themselves more a part of the 21st century than the 20th, and their gifts for this life will be put to use in the next century rather than the past one. Who are these young people of the 21st century? How can we understand their gifts and their struggles?

Today's children and youth are full of contrasting - and sometimes puzzling - qualities. Writers in the United States call them Generation X, the 'x' standing for mysterious and unknown. Now they are being recognized as an amazing generation, and the press says the 'x' stands for extraordinary and exceptional! They are known to be unusually caring and compassionate about the earth and about human beings. Even at young ages, today's children want to devote themselves to helping others.

There are remarkable stories of children creating large international organizations to be of service to others. One such young person is Craig Kielburger of Toronto. At age 12 he was so moved by the story of a Pakistani child chained to a rug loom all day, that he traveled with a mentor through India and Pakistan meeting child laborers. He then created an international organization for helping such children called Free the Children. Today Craig is 17 years old. Last year we invited Craig to address Waldorf teachers in North America and asked him to speak about youth today. His words live strongly in me. He said, if you do not help today's children serve others by the time they are 10 or 11, you will lose them to the shopping malls. By this he meant that materialism will grab hold of the children unless we find ways to help them serve others, which is their greatest wish.

This is the wonderful, even awe-inspiring side of today's youth. But there is another side to their lives, as well. Within the economically developed countries, and increasingly around the globe, this generation has been heavily influenced by a growing commercialism that shows little concern for human life or the well-being of the earth. As a result, large numbers of children suffer from illnesses which are relatively new to childhood and which are growing rapidly like an epidemic around the world. What are these conditions that so influence childhood today?

In the United States we saw the first signs of danger in the 1970s when it became evident that children were becoming very nervous and stressed. One U.S. psychologist, David Elkind, described in his book, The Hurried Child, that he was seeing far more children under stress in his clinical practice than he had seen before. In general, they came from hurried homes with a hurried lifestyle where children were expected to function as if they were much older than they were. For a long time it seemed this was an American problem, but in recent years the same conditions have spread to Europe and elsewhere, and one sees more and more children under stress. European press articles, for example, speak of growing mental illness in children, growing language problems and a rapid increase in obesity, among other problems. The latter is generally related to a sedentary lifestyle too many hours spent in front of television, video and computer screens.

In his books, David Elkind also pointed out that if the conditions leading to stress were not eliminated then the stress would go deeper inside the children and would manifest as various illnesses. This has been happening. In the 1980's, more and more children developed food allergies, and asthma rates doubled over the previous decade. In the 1990's the focus shifted to hyperactive disorders and depression. Millions of American children have been put on psychotropic drugs to calm them or lift their spirits. Recent research shows that the rate of prescribing medication for these ailments doubled for two to four year olds in the early 1990's. One feels outraged that children as young as two are showing signs of depression and are being drugged for it. Now as we enter the next decade, we hear more and more about autism and violence. The state of California announced a 237% increase in autism during the past ten years. At the same time the United States has witnessed growing incidents of children taking guns to school and shooting other children, while lesser forms of aggression, such as bullying, have increased considerably.

In the past we have watched the physical environment grow toxic as the air and water were poisoned through pollution. Now it is childhood itself which is becoming toxic. One feels that childhood is no longer a safe or healthy world for children. But there is no other world for them. We must make childhood a safe place again. Just as we have learned how to clean up the physical environment, we need to learn to clean up the unhealthy lifestyle that is polluting the lives of children. There is no one single cause of the problems. The answers lie in the total environment which surrounds the child, the physical environment, the social environment, and the cultural environment, including schools. Each has grown unhealthy, and the combination is proving lethal for many children.

Today's physical environment is so laden with pollutants that even mother's milk, which contains the environmental chemicals digested by the mother, now shows dangerously high levels of toxins. In addition most foods are laden with manufactured chemicals. Air and water are polluted. It grows harder to provide children with sound basic nourishment that is untainted with dangerous man-made substances, some of which are seriously endangering their health.

In addition to the devastation of the physical environment, many children also experience a deterioration of home life which is increasingly hurried and stressed. Parents are fearful about raising children for the new, fast-paced culture, and put enormous pressure on their children to grow up quickly.

In general, today's children are overstimulated and have far too little time to relax and absorb life through play. This is further complicated by the hours spent in front of television, video and computer screens. During all this time children are absorbing other people's imaginations and ideas and having little time to develop their own. This has a long term effect on their sense of self and on the creativity of their own minds. In general, today's children grow up in a faster paced environment with less opportunity for human contact and warmth. They suffer from this.

The challenge for today's families is to create a calm and centered lifestyle where each individual is given space and time to grow while at the same time building family as a social body. It is not easy to take each person's needs into account, and often the needs conflict with each other. At such times, deeper conversation and sharing is called for to get to the heart of what is needed. There at the heart there is usually a solution for meeting each person's real needs in such a way that the social fabric is strengthened. If, on the other hand, we simply allow modern life to dictate our family patterns, then we will find ourselves more and more isolated from each other.

In addition to the physical environment and the home environment, there is a third which profoundly affects children and this is the school. Here, too, one sees growing problems for children. At a Waldorf conference recently, a school doctor from Holland spoke of schools being sanctuaries for children, safe places where they can grow and develop. Unfortunately, too often schools have become places of stress for children rather than sanctuaries.

To some extent this has always been so, but today, as pressure grows for children to learn more at an earlier age, the stress has increased greatly. In the United States, for example, kindergartens today are radically different from those of 30 years ago. Then children could play and do artistic work and perhaps receive a mild introduction to the alphabet and numbers. Today the state requires that children master the beginnings of reading before they enter first grade, not during first grade as previously. To help them attain this goal, five year olds must stop playing and concentrate on the basics of writing and reading. Yet children's rate of development has not changed significantly. They become ready for reading and other academic studies between ages six and seven. Then and now it has been the same. Demanding that they read at five does not change their pace of development. It only adds stress to their lives.

The assumption, of course, is that this early learning will give children a head start in life that will be beneficial to them and to society. Yet after 30 years of pushing primary school education into the kindergartens and nursery schools, there is no evidence that early academics help children. Indeed, there is evidence that starting children too early with writing, reading and arithmetic may slow them down mentally, as well as emotionally and physically.

In Germany, in the 1970's, there was great enthusiasm about early academics. Play-oriented kindergartens were being rapidly transformed into academic programs. Then a study was done of 50 play-oriented kindergartens and 50 academic kindergartens. The children were followed until fourth grade when it was shown that the children from the play-oriented kindergartens did better than those in the academic kindergartens in every area measured physical, emotional, social and mental development. The results were so convincing that the German government changed all the kindergartens back into play-oriented kindergartens. Yet in countries like the United States, the trend towards academic work for four and five year olds continues to escalate. The entry of computers into kindergartens only intensifies the emphasis on academic learning more fully. The result is that children spend far less time playing and developing oral language and social skills. There is growing concern about how difficult it is for many children to learn to read. Yet parents, educators and policy makers are unwilling or unable to look at the fundamental problem: that education is no longer based on a sound picture of child development.

Throughout the world there are also positive examples of education well-suited to a child's healthy development. I am most familiar with Waldorf education, for I have worked with Waldorf early childhood education for nearly 30 years. In Waldorf education we seek to understand child development and allow that reality to stand behind all decisions on curriculum and school life. The teachers are greatly helped by the deep insights into child and human development offered by Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Waldorf education.

In addition to providing appropriate education for children, Waldorf schools also stress healthy lifestyles for the home. The fruits of this were revealed recently in a Swedish study comparing several hundred Waldorf students with a comparable number of state school children. All lived in the same town and were of similar social and economic background. Yet the state school children showed far more signs of allergies than did the Waldorf children, and the researchers concluded that a wide array of factors were at work. The Waldorf children tended to be less immunized than the other children, they relied less on antibiotics, their diet was healthier as was their overall lifestyle. The researchers concluded that the more 'Steiner units' in a child's life, the less allergy was present.

The impetus for founding the Alliance for Childhood originally came from Waldorf educators and school doctors. They witnessed the steady decline in children's health and felt they must reach out to parents, educators, health professionals, researchers and child advocates who cared about the well-being of children and were deeply concerned about the current trends. Out of a series of meetings the Alliance for Childhood was born, a partnership of individuals and organizations who work together on a variety of issues. The mission of the Alliance is to focus on the difficulties children face and bring about social change so that all children will have the opportunity for a sound childhood.

For more information about the Alliance work, one can visit a website at: www.allianceforchildhood.net

or write to: Alliance for Childhood, P.O. Box 444, College Park, MD 20741, USA
or in Europe at: 18 Heubergstr., D-70188 Stuttgart, Germany.

Joan Almon is co-chair of the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America and a founding partner of the Alliance for Childhood. Contact:

E-mail: JAlmon@erols.com