Naturally, one would expect and believe that childhood and its accompanying attributes are those of tenderness, innocence, and obedience. These attributes must then, by the guardians of the child, be cultivated in ways that benefit both the growing child and society at large. But can we truly say that is the case today? We cannot brush aside the marvellous work that guardianThe beautiful paradox of growing up is that you work and dream so hard to become an adult with principles, hobbies, values, and whatnot only to then realise that the child was the destination all along.
I came across that idea about a decade ago and have since lost track of who first proclaimed it or where I encountered it. I have, however, worded it differently in the way I have come to understand it. Coming across it sparked an urge to expand on it. Nevertheless, it is a fact, and an inevitable one. The child is the destination and parents around the world do to ensure that obedience, tenderness, and innocence are directed toward good ends. Yet I cannot help but observe the fast erosion of that space in recent times. A shrinking that has gone largely unremarked and unaddressed, swallowed by the noise of progress.
Truly, nothing is new under the sun. There is no problem faced by the child, or the space belonging to them, that has not been thought about, written about, or debated. All is known. But it will not stop me from lending my voice to the matter.
I often view these attributes — tenderness, innocence, and obedience — as neutral in themselves. They are not inherently virtuous or dangerous. They are instruments, and it is the driver who dictates their purpose and destination often through influence. A child’s obedience in the hands of a devoted parent becomes discipline and security. That same obedience in the hands of an exploitative guardian and world could become something far sinister. Having established that, we must now reckon with the fact that these attributes have been tampered with and encroached upon, interestingly, not always by accident, but often by design. This error, and this deliberate act, has brought with it woes that have spread throughout the global populace.
I often see the child as one of the stages or, for greater understanding, a process in the journey of man. The child does not merely pass through life on the way to becoming an adult. The child teaches. The child carries within them a kind of wisdom and lesson I often view that the adult, in their frantic accumulation of experience and responsibility, tends to bury. Going out into the world and witnessing several circles and societies brought to my attention the troubling reality that the child is no longer being learnt from. The lessons that the process of childhood brings along with it have been forgotten or indeed, deliberately subdued.
There is something quietly catastrophic about the age we inhabit, an age in which the pursuit of financial and material interest has become so consuming that humanity itself has been quietly demoted. We chase markets, metrics, and monetisation with a fervour that was once reserved for meaning. In that chase, the child becomes either a liability or a commodity. Childhood, which ought to be protected as one of the few remaining territories of pure human experience, has instead been annexed by adult ambition. We speak of investment in children, but what we increasingly mean is investment in what children will one day produce, not in who they already are.
This brings me to what I consider one of the gravest dangers of our time: the uninvited initiation of children into spaces that do not belong to them. Initiation, as I have come to know in its truest and oldest sense, is a sacred passage, a deliberate, guided movement from one stage of life into another, undertaken only when the individual is ready and the community is prepared to receive them. But what we are witnessing today is a corruption of that passage. Children are being initiated by screens, by markets, by adult anxieties, and by social media platforms engineered for adult psychology into realms they have neither the tools nor the years to navigate. This is not a rite of passage. I call it an ambush.
The consequences are not abstract. A child initiated too early into the theatre of adult desire, adult conflict, and adult commerce does not simply grow up faster. Something in them is foreclosed. The natural unfolding of curiosity, wonder, and moral formation is interrupted, and what fills the gap is not maturity but mimicry. We then wonder, in later years, why so many adults seem emotionally unformed, why cruelty spreads so easily online, and why empathy is increasingly described as a skill to be learned rather than a quality to be preserved.
Compounding this is the quiet disappearance of children’s spaces themselves. Kids’ shows, the playground, the unstructured afternoon, the empty lot, and the unhurried library visit, amongst others, are fast becoming relics.
Salute to those individuals who still strive to preserve these spaces.
Nevertheless, physical spaces designed for children are being repurposed, defunded, or simply never built. The imaginative space of childhood time without agenda, play without product, is being colonised by structured activity, digital engagement, and the performance of development. We now measure childhoods the way we measure quarterly returns. And in doing so, we have made the child a project rather than a person.
Wrapping Up with Key Insights
The danger to society in all of this is not distant. It is already here. A society that does not protect the space of childhood cannot produce adults who are whole. You cannot harvest what you have refused to let grow or what you did not grow. One of the essential laws of life.
The tenderness, creativity, and moral imagination that make civilisation liveable do not appear from nowhere in adulthood; they are carried forward from a childhood that was allowed to be itself. When we erode that, we do not merely harm individual children. We diminish the collective reservoir from which all genuine human progress is drawn.
The child is not a problem to be managed, an audience to be monetised, or a small adult waiting to be unlocked. The child is a destination, the point to which all our striving, if it is honest, eventually returns. To protect childhood is not sentimentality. It is the most serious work a society can undertake. And we are, at present, failing it.
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