Childhood as Important Phase in an Individuals Life - Essay Example

Childhood Childhood is one exceptionally important phase in an individual’s life. It is the period when the fundamentals of one’s self are defined and varnished. Everything allied to childhood, little or big, remains a vital ingredient of one’s personality for the rest of the life. It is reminiscent of engraving a note on a tree with a sharp tool --- it never goes away. But the preference of either the tool is going to scribble love on a child’s life or low esteem, is a matter of time. A number of experts, psychologists, and paediatricians are striving to develop better future, upbringing environment, and time to time perfection for children every minute. The scopes have changed, the horizons have expanded. The vitality of childhood is better understood now than ever before. The world is busy trying to figure out what could be done to produce a strong and intelligent individual out of every soul that is born which has more chances of being welfare to the society than the contrary. When we used to be young, our parent’s would tell us stories which never had any relation with the reality. There were fairies that would come to sweet children, princesses who would eventually meet the princes, or we were always the super hero of our bed-time stories. Those were the days which can be labelled as naïve. But as time has moved on, as the world has progressed, children at a very young age realise that these stories are mere pieces of fabrications. They have absolutely no links to the real world and are rather funny. They do not want to play with dolls, but pick up the computer consoles to play the Barbie game online. The dingy cars are no longer the ultimate toys for them, but their robots in their favourite cartoons with weapons of mass destructions are what they can yell ‘WOW!’ at. As Albert Einstein would put it “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Our life can be compared to a brief split of illumination between two perpetuities of darkness. We are unaware of what took place before we were born, neither are we familiar with what will happen in the times to come. Not a lot of people can appreciate the true essence of life hence the exclamation, theres just one life! Whereas, numerous other with a free will and soul would want to experience more that what one possibly can experience in each moment of life. Who taught them all this, and when? Its always hard to maintain the same spirit through out a time, but nothing is ever impossible. Your strengths are given to you in structure of realisations when you are heading towards adolescence. Stating a few re-evaluates from Jamila Gavins book Coram Boy, an imperative issue of teenage pregnancy has been highlighted. The story told is the demand of time in the eighteenth century. It clearly draws attention to the troubles of illegitimacy inflicted on a name’s fate, the troubles and sufferings of the youth, and the constraints imposed on the children of opinionated men. Her book in itself is a rich source of how the society looked at childhood in the eighteenth century. The open minded children of today must feel happy that they were not born in those times. They know so because they have perceived from Coram Boy how important a childs life was then and how important it is now. Rolling back to that time, the children under no circumstances were given the coin that there mothers had gone with them. The brutal truths of child slavery along with infanticide were eighteenth century’s annotations. The fleeting look of Melvin Burgess on children’s of today in his book Junk is entirely different from that of Jamila Gavin. But yet, another hard fact to digest! His book is a story of two children, with dysfunctional parents. One is living on the verge of life’s liveliness under adverse torture of alcoholic parents, the other is living in the hands of parents too unaware of what the child wants, parent’s who rather treat children as a piece of meat, a personal property, and not a living being. Both of them lead astray and fall prey to the adversity. The dilemma of love and no love prevails all over. A true representation of how a huge percentage of children want to spend their lives today. This is a curse of present times, where the parents are too busy that the nurturing of a child is overlooked at its best. Melvin Burgess (2009) explains this ‘opportunity’ the best, stating that: ‘Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opens a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space. All that negative stuff. All the pain... it just floated away from me, I just floated away from it... up and away...’ (p.129) Perhaps, the easy access to peace is hidden in this great delineation of such society adding up in one’s childhood… or may be not. No child dreams to grow up as a junkie. It is the collective ‘effort’ of the parents, culture, society, and the ambiance they all create which adds to a child’s misfortune. Nicola J. Watson’s Approaches and Territories is a rich source of information about the impact of literature in children’s life. Indirectly or directly, literature is always associated with a child’s social life. What a child studies at school, afterwards tend to follow him everywhere. This contributes a permanent part of a child’s behaviour and has nothing to do with the society. At this point, the controversy between culture and society might be of an importance. Writers, authors, journalists are all those who produce the story which become a basis of an agenda. A fact of an opinion, an opinion in a fact. Media plays an important role in how our children want to think today. Back then, the parent’s made children’s life miserable, and now when they parents are actually striving to give them a better future (with exception of a few) the children themselves have opportunities too many to ruin themselves. It concludes that the stories depict the society of then and the society of now with their respective idiosyncrasies and unconventional behaviours. But this is not necessary that stories popular at different times tell us exactly what a society thinks about childhood because parents in all times want to up bring their children to their fullest, but a story where a child falls in bad habits and destroy himself does not necessarily explains that by then the childhood was a thing of utmost ignorance. It could be a mishap by chance or a work of fiction or a brought to light issue of a certain group of people. All the parents want to make their child the best, and put congenial habits in them with the best development possible. They tell them stories of others as well as their childhood, to cure their faulty habits viewing that it may give their children a chance to know what faults life will offer them sooner of late, before hand, and avoid a repetition of them. They tell them from the beginning that the world is a very pleasing place to stay within, and serene and what not. So much manipulation leads to disrupting a child’s mind. It is not necessary that he may learn always from those stories. What parents forget here is the fact that these stories are mostly those fairy tales that only look good but when applied in reality, do not have good outcomes. Everyone has their own experiences and not everyone may fall into category that the parents might want to put them in. Every child is not the same and their habits are always somewhat or totally different from each other. For instance, a child who is naughty and whose parents want to change him would tell him stories that ‘oh, the neighbour’s kid does this and that and he is too good’. This unknowingly creates a feeling of vengeance in him. Also they might force him to change that can destroy his personality. The need of hour is not to look for the sorts of mistakes parents have been committing all this time but to maintain a stable liberation in conjunction with proper set of restrictions and check and balance on children giving them the due attention they deserve. Childhood is conceivably best defined by Ben Okri “We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. Its just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it was a riddle, and fulfils the dream in ways we couldnt have expected.” Read More