Where has the adventure and romance of childhood gone ? Where is that utopian country - once the domain of children - of days of dawn to dusk playing, building dens, wide games in the woods, dressing up, playing Mums and Dads, making things your parents couldn’t afford to buy and pledging lifelong loyalty to friends ? Many believe the new experience of childhood is cocooned within four wheel drive people carriers, computer games in the bedroom, designer birthday parties and the avoidance of strangers and this all with an intent to protect our children from a dangerous community which is probably as much of a fantasy as the memory some of us sustain of a childhood where the sun shone all day and if it rained it did so when we were asleep. None of these notions represent a truth and there have always been children who have not experienced a childhood of the kind many of us fondly “remember.” Children who have suffered poverty, the loss of parents, who have lived through war and violent civil unrest, and those who at an early age become the primary carer for a parent have been deprived of a childhood. For these children life has always been about harsh adult reality and seldom about play and so they have missed a great deal.
Yet it is a curious phenomenon that most political manifestos, and the majority of therapies which claim to be life changing and life affirming promise the achievement of an elysium whose very perfection most red blooded human beings might view as anathema, while children who have nothing, deprived of play and love cannot even imagine those things which most of their peers take for granted as part of what is naturally given to them in life. Vulnerable people are too often seduced by promises of joy tomorrow which are rarely fulfilled. Like memories of an idyllic childhood, political and therapeutic promises can be unreliable.
In the new issue of the goodenoughcaring Journal which goes online on June 15th there is no promise of Avalon but there are ideas and examples about how life might become better for children and adults who have encountered difficulties. In an array of articles, stories and poems representing life as it is lived, John Burton, Kay Cook, Cynthia Cross, Thom Garfat, David Lane, John Molloy, Jan Noble, Jane Kenny, John Stein, and Jillien Viens write about the joys and tribulations of childhood, parenting and caring. Also in this edition will be the winning entry of our writing competition which is a short story by Tiffany Dawkins. An additional item will be the publication of Charles Sharpe's interview with Leon Fulcher and Thom Garfat. (First posted 7th, June, 2010)
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