Kid Gloves

It is almost a cliché. Children today don’t have the independence their parents and grandparents did. Those who walked to school on their own now walk with or drive their kids. “Come home when it gets dark” has been replaced by “Stay home unless Mummy or Daddy is with you.” Risk taking is forbidden, not rewarded; risk aversion has become a universal tendency.

In L’Enfant vieux (The elderly child), Stéphane Kelly attributes the change to an aging population. “In a society that advances in age, a dour tranquility settles in, the citizens retreat to the private sphere, preferring to be sideline observers of a democracy of spectators,” he writes. “Without realizing it, most residents become passive and timid; this process contaminates even the youngest.”

The predictable book — or, at least, what I had expected — would have been a rant on how young people have been cosseted and insulated from the risks and rewards of the world outside the family and the playground. And while there is a bit of that — Kelly is a teacher and a father, after all — this is a much richer text. It is a sweeping look at the societal trends that have brought us to where we are today.

Kelly traces the emergence of the therapeutic society or, as the American sociologist Philip Rieff called it, our “therapeutic culture.” In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, from 1966, Rieff examined three heirs of Sigmund Freud: Carl Jung, D. H. Lawrence, and Wilhelm Reich. He argued that the therapeutic ethic seeks to help us overcome guilt and shame, particularly with regard to sexuality. Rieff concluded, according to Kelly, that there was a cultural war under way between the elite, which had renounced its responsibility to transmit moral commandments, and the rest of the population, which continued to cling to the traditional conception of the moral order.

From Rieff, Kelly moves on to the essayist Lionel Trilling and the sociologist Daniel Bell, who described the defeat of bourgeois culture and the victory of a “culture of opposition” in universities, museums, publishing houses, and the news media.

Kelly then looks at the historian Christopher Lasch and his book The Culture of Narcissism, from 1979, to reinforce his point that the moral or the religious has been replaced by the therapeutic in Western society — and that the shift has had a significant impact on parents. (In doing so, he includes a brief commentary on the television series Mad Men.) “Altogether, medical power has not stopped encroaching on parental authority,” Kelly writes. “From their entry into daycare, children are examined, diagnosed, rapidly stuck with ‘intervention plans’ that borrow a lot of medical language; this therapeutic work continues in primary school with very relative success and efficiency, given the number of pupils in difficulty in primary and secondary school.”

Essentially, educators are now therapists. “The school has become,” Kelly writes, “a place dedicated to healing and caring for children.” The acquisition of knowledge has become secondary to emotional development: “Previously, the school promoted the phrase ‘I think, therefore I am’; from now on, it’s ‘I feel, therefore I am.’ ” This emphasis on emotions ignores the fact that teachers have no serious training in psychology, psychiatry, or medicine.

The victory of the therapeutic — in the family, the neighbourhood, the local community, the school, even the church — has been bolstered by the digital economy. “Attention merchants” have successfully captured “the attention of the young (and the not so young) in making them literally ‘drug addicts,’ intoxicated by screens and from now on often deprived of a normal life, in particular of a social life as we once understood it.”

Kelly wonders what price we are paying as a society “when the majority of the population is conditioned to spend a large part of its life advancing not in concentration and attention but rather in fragmentary consciousness subject to constant interruptions.” The result for young people, he argues, has been catastrophic, with a collapse in the amount of time they spend with friends after school and on weekends. The effect has been serious: according to a study by the American psychologist Jean Twenge, the likelihood of depression in adolescents rises dramatically when they spend more than two hours a day online.

“Many parents complain about the tyranny of screens,” Kelly writes. “But this is a symbolic revolt, theatre to make them feel better; in truth, they threw in the towel long ago. For young people born at the beginning of the millennium, life happens inside. Nothing happens outside. They explore the world, they travel, they navigate, via the net, from their bedroom or in the basement, even on the weekends.”

When young people do play, it tends to be under supervision — whether by soccer and baseball coaches or by music teachers. “This is good,” Kelly concedes, “but it is not free play, where no formal structure limits the creativity of children or adolescents.”

Two-thirds of the way through L’Enfant vieux, Kelly tells the story of his own childhood. Born in 1963, he was the son, nephew, and brother of masons, and at fourteen he became a mason apprentice, learning to make cement, carry heavy stones, and clean up at the end of the day. Then, as he grew older, he would escape in the evening, explore, and hang out with friends — activities that have become rare with the current generation of children and teenagers. Even sexual activity among young people is down.

After this depressing summary of the risk-averse environment of today’s children and adolescents, Kelly makes some recommendations. Children should be encouraged to play outside on their own: “Taking more risks as they move through childhood and adolescence forms confidence, judgment and a capacity to handle dangerous situations.” At the same time, moms and dads should exercise their authority as parents: “This gives the child a feeling of security which, little by little, gives him the courage to leave the house to discover friends and invest in new spaces which will help him grow.” Finally, given that Quebec’s two solitudes have become a thousand solitudes, a collective effort at social reconnection is necessary.

What might have been a simplistic rant is instead an erudite look at what we have become as a society, both in Quebec and throughout the Western world, over the past century. Changing course will not be easy.