Читать книгу The Secret of Happy Parents: How to Stay in Love as a Couple and True to Yourself - Steve Biddulph - Страница 20

Today a big battle is raging, perhaps the most important struggle of our time. On one side are economic rationalists, including many in departments of Early Childhood at universities, who believe childhood can be professionalized, streamlined and mass-produced to fit the modern world. On the other side, there are those of us who think that love cannot be bought, or hurried, or squeezed into ‘quality time’, but must be hard won, eyeball to eyeball, skin to skin, between every parent and every child, over years and years of loving and learning.

The battle is for a loving, timeless, individualized and whole childhood. The danger is that kids become lost in our materialist quest, caught in our competitive madness, homogenized into crèche-raised, insecure yuppie rugrats; the shopping centre fodder of an impersonal and conformist world where you are measured by your designer labels, and love, commitment and sacrifice are forgotten.

The debate about putting young babies into long daycare is an obvious aspect of this, as is the battle for parents – including fathers – to be given family-friendly working hours. Corporations – not governments – run the world now, and ‘love’, ‘community’ and ‘family’ are not often in their vocabulary.

Young parents haven’t got the time to BE parents – caught up in a roundabout of earn-and-spend. In the Third World it is even worse: workers sleep at the factory; children become prostitutes to save their families from eviction from their land.

We have to link up our energies and give each other encouragement and ideas. Parent power is gradually rising, with the realization that we have to fight for the right to parent our children and for a society that puts people before profits, community before convenience. It’s a battle that starts at home, with the decisions we make, but that is linked to the destiny of the whole human race.