Children

Children and adults have come to inhabit two separate though related worlds. Children, understood as adults-in-the-making, occupy the realm of childhood that they are supposed to leave behind as they enter the realm of adulthood. Yet the adult seems to be more entangled in childhood and notions of the child, given the continuity of a developmental trajectory where the child and childhood continue to live on in the adult albeit in the form of an inner child. The child and childhood, then, are not left behind, but they are filled with projections of memories and fantasies of a past which perhaps never was the way the adult remembers and imagines it to have been, but to which children nevertheless must live up. A parent's wish that his or her child may have it better, that his or her child may live in a better world, often fails to actualise, in particular due to those entanglements in which children are caught up and which stifle their attempts at crafting a world outside the adult's control and steering. The hope for children, then, becomes a deferred one, that once they have grown up and out of childhood, the world awaits – if they make it to this point and if they are able to let go of their own entanglements in and inheritance of an adult world that retains them in its patterns and parameters that they have adopted, (re)creating a world of oneness in which a child's world is tenderly nestled.

That this inheritance includes the teleology of growing up provides the child with a thought system that posits growth as the successful passage of developmental stages throughout chronological time, which appraises the child's passaging and acquisition of a mind-set in line with the adult’s. The child here is monitored precisely because the adult is still caught up in childhood and notions of the child, where the child's pursuit of a world different from the adult's challenges the latter's investment in his or her own world so deeply rooted in notions of the child and childhood, even dependent on the child for its definition. This rootedness in the child and in childhood stems mainly from the discourse of psychoanalysis in which the child has made its predominant appearance in the twentieth century.