Kids These Days… and tomorrow?

How do you feel about children? I ask because it seems to me the world is divided into those that love them and those who loathe  them, unless they are well behaved and ‘seen but not heard’  as I remember being assured we should be when I was a kid.

I have always rather liked children myself, so I suppose it is no surprise that much of my early career, starting when I became a young Mum and unable for a few years to contemplate being free in the evenings to continue working in theatre, involved me in what Robert Lang called ‘baby drama’. 

Robert was a lovely actor, married to Ann Bell who starred in ‘Tenko’.  I had worked with Robert at the Chichester Festival Theatre where,  like me, he was invited by Laurence Olivier to be a founder member of the new National Theatre Company at the Old Vic near Waterloo Station.   

“How did you end up in baby drama?” he asked.  We were in a BBC radio studio a few years on, and I was playing a child.  Not sure whether it was a boy or a girl but I had rather cornered the market in children’s voices by then, often working with other young women like Miriam Margolyes who played little girls.  I also presented ‘Listen With Mother’ regularly, ‘ Poetry Corner’ and on BBC Schools’ Television a programme called ‘Watch’ for 7year olds, an age I particularly like.

I had loved listening to stories on radio when I was little, as do children today who have the benefit of a story read to them at bedtime, even in this age of computers.  There is nothing like the spoken word to stimulate imagination, teach empathy and open up a world of inspiration and creativity.

These days, when I can, I trot down the road to our C of E Primary School and read with year three.  They are seven and eight year olds, still wide-eyed, rarely cynical and thirsting for knowledge.  Their individual reading abilities are widely different. Some are still reliant on picture books or comic strips while others are devouring quite  sophisticated texts for their age.  We sit in a corner of the library, which actually is not the quietest part of the school, surrounded by shelves and shelves of brightly illustrated books to tempt and captivate them.  Children constantly come in and riffle through them.

One book read to me the other week was about the sky, full of planets and space craft, falling down.  It was about a world occupied by aliens with great drawings and lots of words in dialogue boxes to read.  One of the alien characters was, I thought, called Al, short for Alan or the like, but the young man reading for me knew better.  To my surprise he read it as AI (short for Artificial Intelligence)!

I didn’t say anything but I thought, now that really is a sign of the times.   This surely marks the fact that new technology is already accepted by the really young whilst the rest of us are grappling with the AI full-out.  As we quickly learn, AI is threatening to dismantle our careers,  interfere as we attempt to compose on our laptops - well it annoyingly does me whenever I go into Word -  has replaced cashiers at the check-out and even more annoyingly the ability to speak on the phone to a human being at our surgeries, or any organisation it would seem these days.  

This is all so unsettling and frustrating and particularly worrying for anyone wanting to share their humanity with others and not sit in a darkened room with only an IPad for company.  So getting back to what I was saying at the beginning, do you like children because if you don’t I think you might consider changing your mind.  After all,  we were all children once and it is important we accept the responsibility as grown-ups to look out for them and protect them in this worrying technological world, a world they cannot help but accept unquestioningly, unless they have the opportunity to communicate with adults and work things out.

They need to be taught critical thinking to survive a world of mixed messages and so many alternative truths!   They need encouragement to ask questions of you, and you must ask questions of them.  The excellent TV drama series ‘Adolescence’ spelt out the importance of communicating with the young to combat dangerous grooming. 

So, yes, I do like kids.  They are the future. Why not join the gang!

Jean Rogers