Someone just posted a YouTube video with the headline, ‘Children aren’t Children Any More”.

The problem with this is that they never were — or rather, every generation’s, or rather, every individual’s conception of child and adult (and whatever in-between stages they imagine) are a little different, though I suspect there’s a broader cultural conception composed of loosely compatible individual conceptions within specific societies, but that’s what shifts a little from generation to generation. So whatever this complainant’s conception is of childhood (and by implication adulthood), it wasn’t quite her parents’ conception and therefore probably not mine, and probably not yours. And her parents’ was not quite their parents’, and so on. Of course, it’s entirely possible that there is a vertical component in the transmission of the concept, so that different families will have different conceptions simultaneously.

One thing that is clear is that representing childhood, as in this video thumbnail, with stacked shelves in a toy store, would have been meaningless to much of the world a couple of generations ago, and to the entire world ten generations ago. Also that the same childhood might be a different thing from different perspectives; to one person this is your child and that usually has too many personal meanings to list. To another they’re a marketing mechanism, or a preaching opportunity, or a supply of labour, or of cannon fodder. The details change, but the last three? Children, sadly, are still the children they always were for those interested parties.

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