Is this why childhood is no longer the happy and protective land I remember? The world indeed has changed, and while I have never been Polyanna I am shocked this change has made everything that was sweet become bitter. All the landmarks upside down.
Just as an example, let me mention that when I was a child the circus was considered a world in which the actors and artists were happy to work as acrobats and trapeze artists or clowns. Then the circus became a difficult world in which hard feelings, envies and hatreds ran freely while the artists strove not only to be great in their specialty, but cruel antagonists intent in their survival. The countryside was beautiful, sunny, the farmers led healthy lives. Now the emphasis is on its difficulties, the long hours of labour, the high costs, the mean rewards. And these are only two examples. It seems what was taken positively before, now is considered negatively. Neither is completely right.
It is not that I think all was sugar and roses and now it isn’t. I think things were pretty much as they are now, but the emphasis, of those living in those worlds, and especially of those looking into those worlds was totally different.
Is this applicable to childhood now? When I read interviews with young people of many walks of life, I often think young people are intent in giving themselves a traumatic childhood. It must mean an extra point or two when trying to call attention to themselves if they can plea psychological hardship, or whatever.
Still, thinking about the lives they live, maybe they have been cheated out of their childhood, the type of childhood that grants the personal resources needed to lead happy and fruitful lives. Maybe they are right in saying they have suffered traumatic childhoods, although the trauma and the drama is not what they claim. The trauma might be just that they have not had a childhood they can recognise as such.