LIsten to your deeper self

Hugh Lunn recorded his childhood adventures in Brisbane of the 1950s in Over the top with Jim. I have delighted in his remembrances for they struck many chords with the childhood I shared with my brothers and sisters. But for all the hype attributed by 50 year olds to their idyllic childhoods, our lives were not lacking in tragedy. Many families had fathers who never returned from war, or who returned as shadows of their former selves, strangers to their families. The ravages of polio were not uncommon still. There was (often public) condemnation for unwed mothers, divorcés/divorcées, living outside of marriage.

A room full of rocket scientists could argue that childhood is the same – but they would all be wrong. Quite wrong. There are some aspects to childhood today that should give us genuine anxiety. Some of these are touted in the newspapers and on television on an ongoing basis: lack of exercise, poor gross and fine motor skills, obesity, struggling literacy and numeracy, poor self-esteem, lack of resilience – and there are clear links to long hours of television viewing, repetitive violent and sexually implicit videos (and occasionally explicit) and video games. Children are overindulged because of parent guilt about work and the little quality time spent with them. Children’s rooms resemble toy shops: they are overstimulated; children do few jobs about the house and often lack the capacity to accept responsibility for their actions. Children expect to be treated as small adults, so much so that many forget to distance their emotions and behaviour in the presence of other adults, showing a lack of deference for age and of respect for others in the loss of self-control.

And we adults have changed radically too. The easy-going, Australian way of life that we dream of, exists less and less. We are constantly anxious about our children’s achievements (sleeping, speaking, walking, playing soccer/piano/tennis, learning to read/write/dance/sing/do maths/ride a bike/make a bed), make their lives busy, plan you-beaut holidays that keep everyone on their toes. We suffer from road rage, sports rage …

The more that our world becomes fractured, the more we seek to understand who and what we are called to be. In a word, we seek integrity. In the search for truth we need to align ourselves with God’s divine will. How do we discern what that will is for us? The key is to listen – to our deeper selves, to each other, in prayerfulness and reflection. In this way we can inform ourselves what our children most need, not what we most want to give.