Childhood, Fear, and Trust

by Jerry Kroth, Ph.D.

Here in the paradise of Mexico, I observed two very different children, one Mexican, one American, both about four years of age. The Mexican boy was obviously not from Puerto Vallarta but some inland village. He and two older sisters were exploring the beach in one of its most dangerous places. This area is not a beach at all, but a rocky, boulder-strewn minefield. I wouldn't walk in that tangle of stones even if the tides were out, and there were no waves. But on this day, the tides were lapping at the rocks which were wet and covered with slippery moss. The stones were glass-smooth, but their green covering makes them unpredictably slicker.

Our rock dancer, however, just glided across those boulders from the water back to the safety of the beach and back again, as if taunting the sea and challenging it to catch him. His agility was staggering in the face of the four-foot waves which seemed as eager to catch him as he was to jump from their reach. This completely naked little boy was the image of freedom, and yet the level of danger was really, in my gringo eyes, quite substantial. There were no life guards. For the longest time, he scurried over twenty rocks at a time and then darted right back to safety with a yelp of joy each time he had outsmarted the entire Pacific Ocean.

Later that day I was sitting on the sand in front of a luxury hotel. A North American woman brought her little boy out. He was covered from head to toe, a red bonnet, shirt, and pants. He was allowed to play, but only as long as he remained on his blanket which was the size of a normal bath towel. The only part of his body exposed to the sun were his cheeks which his mother smeared with white goop. He played with his many plastic toys. The boy, however, did not run, jump, show any exuberance. He never ventured from the protected enclave of his blanket, never touched the sand, and his expression was one of mild curiosity about the contents of the beach bag.

First, it would seem a fruitless task to tell the North American mother that children need to play, to be free, to explore, "be themselves," investigate, be curious, even whimsical...to play like little puppy-dogs, wrangling, tangling, and jostling with one another. Good luck! Her boy is to be raised carefully and cautiously. To suggest she let her child be a little boy is like telling her to invite her son to risk melanoma, drowning, kidnapping, infection from debris in the sand, and a host of other chimerical misfortunes. Such an invitation might also be thought of as subtly reinforcing traditional sex role stereotypes which steer little boys into hyperactive, testosterone freaks transforming them into aggressive, outgoing, rambunctious, ADHD-Dennis-the-menaces.

Maybe this mother wants to raise a "new" kind of child, not the traditional boy with a worm in one pocket and a shell collection in the other. We would probably have more success telling the mother of the poor, naked, spontaneous, Mexican child that by swimming without clothes in dangerous rocky places without sun blocker is likely to cause numerous close encounters with life-threatening events. This second alternative would be resisted, surely, but I believe it has a far better chance of being adopted. In the United States, the "land of the free," the message about personal freedom, play, anarchy, spontaneity, being oneself, "going with the flow" were ideas awkwardly espoused in the sixties and expounded by hippie-theorists, but they seem increasingly passe today.

But are we really talking about some counter-culture philosophical movement? This is just a little boy skipping across boulders to a deliciously awaiting ocean expressing a freedom that many of us knew in childhood and lost. It is simply childhood: unbridled, uncensored, uninhibited living. It is old, ancient, and everyone knows what it is -- except those who have forgotten or pretend they cannot remember. It is spirit, beauty, exuberance, human nature at its finest, the golden glowing grace of humanity and childhood exquisitely expressed in movement, dance, and unpretentious joy. And the greatest enemy to the full, evocative expression of this central element of living is fear, mistrust, and foreboding.

Psychiatrist Alexander Lowen's Bioenergetics, comes close to the target. He describes how a naturally joyful child comes into adulthood by passing through myriad checkpoints of criticism, admonishments, rules, frustrations, deprecations, evaluations, cautions, and asundry punishments. The result is that, with time, the child loses that unique effervescence all children at one time or another had. Lowen considers this the beginning point of adult neurosis. His therapy specializes in the rediscovery of the body, which is not that far distant from the rediscovery of childhood. Children sitting in front of television, inside, alone, become blunted and sedentary, overweight, and even show elevated cholesterol levels...all bequeathed from a restricted, inhibited, and increasingly virtual childhood.

I asked one of my graduate classes how many became angry in the last five years at anyone. All raised their hands. Then I asked if any acted on that anger physically by pushing or shoving someone towards whom they felt angry. There were no hands raised. Then I asked what kind of response we would get to the same series of questions if they were posed to a classroom of fifth graders? Most agreed these ten year olds would express their anger physically and shoving matches, not in the last five years but in the last five days, would not be uncommon. Clearly the difference between childhood expression of feeling and its adult suppression are obvious, but inverse, correlates.

At my university there is a swimming pool. The entire pool area is made of cement. There are no tables, no grass, no sand, no shade, no trees. The pool is marked off into "lanes" and while there may forty people there, one can barely discern any noise. There are few conversations. Those who are swimming are wearing the latest gear, swimming "gloves," and spandex suits and goggles. Almost everyone seems to be "working out."

It is as if the entire population of swimmers is composed of driven, goal-directed, serious, athletes-in-training, and pool membership excluded everyone except Type A personalities. There is no sense of play, or joy, only an over-riding sense of work, exercise, regimen, discipline, and endurance. No one runs and jumps in. No one yells and screams. There are no "yelps," no "belly-flops," no mothers or fathers "frolicking" with their children, no "teasing," "splashing," no "gags" boys play on girls, not even "pranks" men play on women or women on men, no "dunking;" no one picking anyone else up and throwing them in the pool. There are no lovers embracing in water, no kissing.

It is silent, sleek, clean, quiet, concrete, professional, and incredibly antiseptic. That is the university pool and, metaphorically, the pool into which America's childhood drowned.

In Mexico old men on Sunday afternoons get into the sea with their grandchildren and play, simply play, and you can see they are playing. They are not baby sitting, nor offering "enriching experiences." They have never lost the capacity to play.

One would be hard pressed to decide who is having more fun, the children or the grandparents. They are giggling and splashing and smiling about equally when I watch them. North Americans sun themselves lying about in military fashion in rows of lounge chairs, but I have never seen them lie at the water's edge, like Mexican old and young do, and just let the waves push and pull them in and out of the water like a beached whale buffeted by the sea. I did that as a child, and I distinctly remember it.

Norman O. Brown said sublimation is the search in the outside world for the lost body of childhood. The "lost body" is what we are unconsiously searching for, but when we do, it is at the behest of the ego and under its auspices. Sublimated entertainment has replaced play. We take courses in scuba diving, parasailing, snorkeling, water skiing, deep sea fishing, whale-watching, but have forgotten all about "floating."

To return to childhood, to the body, to instinctual wisdom is the seminal issue. Do we really need to learn how to breathe, to float or to play? Taking a course in such things begs the question and continues the control-freakishness of an already over-sublimated ego. Losing contact with childhood -- grace, joy, spontaneity, and abandon -- has major social consequences. One begins to fear the sun, the breeze, animals, the night. Life becomes phobic and populated with danger at every turn. I often hear Americans in hotels sitting around telling stories to each other of how someone was attacked by a shark, how so-in-so developed hepatitis by walking barefoot, how a woman was raped and robbed by strolling near the seaside at night. I'm sure that somewhere there is even a story about floating and how an undertow spirited them off to oblivion.

These horror stories are told by the ton on every beach, a kind of echolalia of the eleven o'clock news. The sub-text, the "deep structure," the embedded yet delusory cognitive schema here is "be careful, be cautious, take care of yourself" -- no one else will -- and above all be ever-watchful for predators. Tales of fear and woe proliferate in our society for the purpose at the conscious level, of protecting the child from danger, but at the unconscious level, to keep one at a distance from inner feelings. At bottom it is a war against vulnerability. In childhood the creatures who were one's allies, friends, and neighbors are now "aliens," "intruders," "pests," or "pestilences." Be careful, be cautious, trust no one! Never pet that puppy dog, you have no idea where its been!"

Some young people are acutely aware of the fear-market, ignore the news and escape its cautiousness by catapulting themselves back into childhood using a few illegal levers. But recovering the joy, abandon, and freedom of childhood is not the same as getting stoned or partying till dawn at a Rave under acid. Acting-out and "doing it in the street" is as sublimated as parasailing, a brash attempt by the ego to forcibly find release. Contrived drug-induced impulsivity is not the same as the playfulness we knew in childhood, anymore than hashish-elicited laughter generates the same harmonics as innocent contagion of a child's giggle.

A large number of adults, however, have succumbed to fear propaganda. They remain safely cocooned in the fortresses they call home, wary of their neighbors, poised to anticipate danger, terrorism, mad dogs, and neighborhood rapists at every turn. But can we truly insulate ourselves from the vagaries of life with a full compliment of dead-bolt locks, alarms, emergency numbers, insurance policies, protective gear, Rottweilers, and plenty of sun blocker without at the same time injuring our inner nature, our instincts, our children, and our capacity to play?

Jerry Kroth, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in Counseling Psychology at Santa Clara University. He is the author of Omens and Oracles : collective psychology in the nuclear age. New York: Praeger, 1992. This article is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Psychology Unshackled: from political correctness to a new century of inquiry.

02/25/00

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