Journal Entry #5

Questions are always raised about childcare and customary youth behaviour. "Do we overprotect our children," or, "When should we let go?". Many people believe that every aspect of the world is dangerous. This sort of ideal often leads to dangerously protective behaviour, and does not properly prepare children for the real world by the time that they start living on their own. I do not aggree with this type of parenting. Instead, I believe that, based on the average North American youth, children are often overprotected and should be given a larger degree of exposure to the real world as we know it.

At a young age, an infant is like a blank sheet of paper. It can have many amazing things written on it over the course of it's life. It can move through life clean, dirty, or with something branded into it. Unlike paper, however, it becomes stronger with age. Infants must grow an immune system while they are young, and the only way to grow a proper immune system is to be exposed to that which you can become immune. Things like certain flu viruses and common germs are important to ingest while young, because if you end up ingesting these things when older, the impact will be much more severe. That is why it is important to strengthen that piece of paper to it's fullest potential, lest something come by and tear it in half (not to be graphic- it's just paper).

Sheltering a child can have social repercussions as well as health effects. Children that have been sheltered become shy, preventing the child from seeking friendship. This may lead to a lonely lifestyle. Those that do not become shy, often seek other sheltered youth to connect with. This further limits the number of people with whom they may develop friendships. An effect like this does not always last an entire lifetime and often changes around the last few years of highschool, but it degrades the quality of life for a child during the prime of their youth.

The world needs creativity. In a sheltered lifestyle, boundaries become it's enemy. As an actor, I am strongly influenced to believe that children cannot be sufficated by paranoid guardians waiting for the next big epidemic scare. The boundaries placed on radical youth can be important, but their restriction on creativity leads to lack of culture, artistry, and - most importantly - imagination. The death of imagination charges the downfall of humanity, and the prime of youth is it's salvation (not to sound preachy).

This ideal of parental protection has only developed over the last two hundred years. Before this, there was not excessive need to protect a child from the horrible things that occur in the world. This is one reason why child protection is so prominent in our society, as well as why it may be taken to unreasonable levels. Every parent is unique as an individual and every child needs to be treated differently, but the restriction that is often presented by modern parents on the freedom of youth is no less than a crime.