Respecting children= respecting our future

Being a new mom keeps me very busy, so I don't always have the time to blog, but it certainly has given me a lot of inspiration. My daughter Raelin just turned 5 months old, and every day is full of discovery for her. A few days ago, she found that she can reach her feet and that her toes are interesting to look at. I see dramatic changes in how she interacts with the world almost daily, and it amazes me to no end.

I spend a lot of time lately looking at my earliest memories to more easily understand how Raelin experiences the world. I remember little things, like how when my mother picked me up her hands dug painfully into my armpits. She never realized she was doing this, of course, and in her mind she was being gentle by not squeezing too hard around my chest. So I try to be mindful of those little things.

My parents played a lot of Raffi's music for me as a child, and I wondered whatever happened to him. It turns out that he now runs an organization whose philosophy is as follows:


Child Honouring is a philosophy—a vision, an organizing principle, and a way of life—the children-first way of sustainability.

It starts with three givens:

• The primacy of early years—early childhood is the gateway to humane being.
  
• We face planetary degradation that is unprecedented in scope and scale—a state of emergency that most endangers the very young, and that requires a remedy of equal scale.
  
• This crisis calls for a systemic response in detoxifying the environments that make up the world of the child.
  

Child Honouring is a children-first approach to healing communities and restoring ecosystems. It views how we regard and treat our young as the key to building a humane and sustainable world. It is a novel idea—organizing society around the priority needs of its youngest members.
The essence of the vision is expressed in A Covenant for Honouring Children and its underlying principles.
Its spirit is invitational—a call to imagine and create a diversity of child-friendly cultures. A child-honouring society would show love for its children, and thus for all of us, in every facet of its design and organization.

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Buddha is attributed with saying, "What's done to the children is done to society." I fully agree. I have seen people do or say things to kids that they would never say to another adult, and not even bat an eyelash. I'm not even talking about cases of abuse or anything dramatic, I'm talking about little things, like continuing to carry on a long conversation after a child starts fussing, until it turns into a tantrum. The adult gets angry at the child for "making a scene" and tells them to stop crying at the count of 3, "or else." If someone twice your size told you to do something at the count of 3, "or else," how would you react? The adult has also made it clear that a) the conversation was more important than filling the child's needs right away, b) the opinion of bystanders observing the "scene" is more important than the child making it clear that his needs have not been met, c) that because adults are older and bigger, they have the right to make threats. Little things matter.

One of my greatest passions is the study of comparative mythology/religion. I believe they are all paths to the same goal, and that if you strip away the metaphors and symbols (i.e. anything that has a describable form) the same truths are unearthed.

Matthew 18:3 reads: And [Jesus] said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Buddha said something similar with regards to reaching Enlightenment, and alchemical psychology "processes" past memories to purge the practitioner of "lead". The Egyptian goddess Isis had a throne on one of her headdresses, and her son Horus ruled as a god from her lap. I'll let you interpret all that for yourself. Even if the spiritual mumbo-jumbo is not your cup of tea, it can't hurt to take a trip down memory lane and see what you dig up. You're likely to come out of it all a better person.