My son is 7 weeks old today. If I was writing this blog properly this would be all about sleepless nights, estrangement from the life I once knew and hilarious anecdotes about nappies. Instead I have been thinking about other things. In particular the burden of having 'the chat' with my son has been weighing heavily on me. Many have observed that modernity has robbed children of their childhood. But it's a prudent fact that no child is too young to be safe from the dangers of the world. The baleful reality is that no matter how awkward it'll be for both of us I am just going to have to tell my son that Donald Trump will indeed be the next president of the United States of America.
I was put in mind of this topic by a friend lamenting on social media that she feels the time has come to tell her 5 year old daughter the facts of life and regretting that by doing so the Age of Innocence will be in full retreat. It is almost certainly a hallmark of my inexperience as a parent that I am baffled by British birds and the bees anxiety. If you find sex embarrassing, anxious making and shaming then I can see why telling a small child about it would provoke just those feelings in you and the child. If on the other hand you think it is fun, wonderful but something worth approaching in an adult way there is a good chance you will communicate those attitudes to your offspring.
Children can't possibly understand adulthood but the mere fact that they are surrounded by giants suffices to give them a clue that theirs is not a permanent state. Sex, drugs but maybe not rock'n'roll are properly left to adulthood or at least liminal adolescence. Pretending they don't exist, however, is what in ages past left girls menstruating in horrified confusion.
Childhood is, nonetheless, undoubtedly a time of innocence and the preciousness of that is acknowledged universally. Every child born is innocent of hate, of violence, of selfishness, of jealousy and of pride. No parent worth the name would wish to introduce these concepts to their child until it is absolutely necessary. Ignorance of the ills of the world is worth truly treasuring because it is an innocence that must and will one day be lost; ideally not until a child is old enough to reason with human fallibility.
I have no anxiety about one day telling my son where he came from. In contrast I already have minor panic attacks about one day explaining how to reconcile atheism with an acceptance of the divine, whether monogamy is a virtue, and how to change the spark plugs.
Economists often like to explain the complexities of macroeconomics by recasting the national debt in terms of household income and expenditure. Bizarrely this approach has never translated as a prism through which presidential candidates can and should be assessed. We like in Britain to ponder whether a politician is someone we could go for a pint with. I venture that in future there should be a babysitter test for presidential candidates. Of the many things I so ardently esteem about Barack Obama is that he so palpably understands and fulfils the responsibilities of a parent as this delightful sequence of images demonstrates, he is an adult who gets children, what they want and, much more importantly, what they need.
In contrast the next President is an adult who is a child and a child whose innocence of the sins of the world was long ago stripped from him. And I'll bet that wasn't from having 'the chat' too tenderly.
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