What will their world be like?
I was watching clips of old cricket matches yesterday (don’t ask) with my husband and 10 year old daughter. At the end of the Test Match at Edgbaston in 1981 when England won the match, the crowd invaded the pitch. My daughter couldn’t fathom what was going on – this was so alien to anything she’d ever seen. We told her that was what it was like in the olden days-people did those kind of things.
But it does make you wonder what this means for children. What does it mean that they live in a world where public space and private space is so controlled? Even their first experience of going to nursery is that there are barriers to entering the space.
We went to the Verulaneum Museum on Sunday with my children to look at the exhibit on the Romans. Its a great little museum with lots of interesting artefacts (but too many distracting interactive screens). As we were going round my son kept saying ‘Are we allowed to touch this? What does the security camera say?’ He was joking around, but it was noticeable that this little museum had a camera on every single exhibit. Our children do seem to be growing up accutely aware that everything they do will potentially be caught on camera, and that very little of what they do takes place privately.
Of course, the fact that I am very aware of security cameras everywhere may be having an impact on my children, but the fact that little in life can take place privately must change our children’s relationship to the world around them.