To Honour the Child

Raffi urges us to 'turn this world around'

by TOM SANDBORN

In what may well be one of his darkest lyrics, Canada’s poet laureate of dystopia croons ominously:

“We don’t like children anyhow. I’ve seen the future, baby: It is murder. Things are going to slide in all directions.”
—The Future (Leonard Cohen)

Written nearly a decade and a half ago, this jaunty little ditty, with its images of torture, habitat destruction, and doom, could serve as the soundtrack for the opening chapters of Raffi Cavoukian’s important new anthology, Child Honoring: How to Turn This World Around (Praeger, $33.95).

The Canadian troubadour, author, and ecology advocate has gathered an impressive collection of scientists, artists, and public figures—including Lloyd Axworthy, African political leader Graca Machel, novelist Barbara Kingsolver, Riane Eisler (of The Chalice and the Blade fame), and the Dalai Lama (who provides the introduction)—to deliver an impassioned denunciation of the horrors we visit upon the children of the earth. Millions of children are at risk every day worldwide from starvation, the proliferation of easily treatable diseases, the sex trade, wars and environmental degradation.

Closer to home, too many children of the developed world are abandoned to endless hours under the baleful glare of computer and TV screens and are drugged by fast-food grease and sugars. If the landslides of mass-produced toxic food aren’t enough to keep our children in a state of immobilized consumer catatonia, there are always child tranquilizers and Ritalin to keep them torpid. For the children of the world, unless we find a way to turn things around, the future truly is murder.

But this anthology is not just an unrelenting litany of the disasters we inflict upon the planet’s children. The editors (Cavoukian, better known as the singer Raffi, and Sharna Olfman, a professor of clinical and developmental psychology at Point Park University in Pittsburgh and founding director of the Childhood and Society symposium) have something more ambitious in mind.

The book provides rich insights into the latest neurological research (which proves, among other findings, that cuddling and eye contact, love and play are all as necessary as vitamins for the proper development of the child’s brain) and a set of wide-ranging suggestions for reforms of public policy and private behaviour to help people of conscience and compassion create a culture that genuinely honours children and nurtures their potential.

The proposals range from strengthening and extending social policies such as adequate parental leave and decent, publicly funded daycare to dramatic improvements in our regulation of corporate behaviour to reduce air and water pollution, habitat loss, and global warming/climate change, as well as policy reforms to address the near-slavery conditions endured by millions of the world’s workers (many of them children) trapped in the new sweatshops of the globalized economy.

Cynics may be tempted to scoff and dismiss these proposals as saccharine sentiment and an attempt to rehabilitate Rousseau’s notions of childhood innocence and human perfectibility. They will want to argue that social progress comes, when it does at all, as a result of hard-fought, sometimes bloody, and always unsentimental battles, not through New-Age musings about children as angel visitors on a wicked planet.

The cynics will be wrong. To be fair, there are a few passages in this extraordinary book that veer dangerously close to sentiment and wishful thinking, including one essay that makes frankly implausible claims about the innocent and collaborative nature of indigenous African culture— claims that are hard to credit for anyone who knows the history of African involvement in slavery, genital mutilation, and tribal warfare. The warrior kings, for example, who led the bloody expansion of Bantu-speaking people south from Cameroon to the Fish River make implausible models for child-honouring governance.

However, every vision of the future is entitled to some small, inspirational mythmaking. The bulk of this remarkable book is wonderfully free of sentiment and wishful thinking. It closes with Raffi’s own Child Honoring Covenant, a moving blend of hopeful visions of the future and practical commitment to work in the imperfect present. The Covenant and the child-honouring perspective it embodies are well worth the support of anyone who hopes for a truly human future.

Tom Sandborn is a local writer, organizer, and public scold. He was raised in the wilderness by wolves and Jesuits, and is having his happy childhood now.