A friend in Brazil explained how hard it is right now to live through the pandemic and quarantine, plus deal with a fascist government. As a coping mechanism, she explained, you become cynical and make fun of everything.
She was elated, however, to have found she is pregnant. That, of course, is what the care of children can offer, even demand — that we look past current travails and believe that what lies beyond will be better. These extraordinary times require that both parents and responsible political leaders weigh up different possibilities in the best interests of their charges, without any guarantee that they will arrive at the right decisions.
That has been particularly true about the decision to return children to school. For many SA parents the choice is an impossible one. If you’re having to get to work to put food on the table and there are no childcare alternatives, or the only nutritious meal they receive happens at school, your children are going to school.
All the evidence suggests that infected children suffer Covid-19 only mildly. And, while the evidence on this is less definitive, they are rarely vectors. So concerns for children’s physical health can be met with some equanimity. My larger concerns are for the extent to which their altered environment will forever shape their outlooks. My son’s school could not have demonstrated greater concern for its pupils and their community. Yet in his new school environment my six-year-old sits in an area taped off to demarcate it as his exclusive space, his mask permanently affixed, his temperature continuously monitored. What little break time there is is scrupulously monitored to ensure the requisite social distancing.
These measures are in line with global best practice, but seem to me to undermine what I have assumed to be some of the best principles of parenting and childcare. As not even the most conscientious parent (and I am certainly not she) can possibly consume all the parenting materials available, I contented myself early on with a fairly simple parenting philosophy: as we can’t possibly know the future our children will inhabit we need to teach them two things — to have sufficiently developed social skills so that they can interact and make connection with a diverse range of people, and that they have the tools to critically analyse information they receive.
In SA especially it has never seemed possible to be the type of Manhattan mother who sanitises every conceivable surface so her child never encounters a germ. Here the overall ethos has been that germs are good, early encounters are not to be feared and often actively encouraged, that immunity and immune systems are thereby strengthened. Interactions with people and the possible exchange of germs are not to be shied away from.
But I wonder if all that becomes harder to grasp if your earliest independent forays into the world have you masked up and inhabiting protected, exclusive spaces, and if these early experiences will entirely unwittingly breed suspicion of others and their capacity to infect and endanger.
Right now we’re being offered virtual mediums as a replacement for actual human contact, but that seems potentially to undercut the second of the principles. As Paul Graham insightfully observed on Twitter: “Every zoom call worries me more about how democracy can function in a virtual world — information exchange, voting — maybe; creating shared meaning and building consensus — not so much.”
Those capacities of creating shared meaning and building consensus and their inverse — the rejection thereof — are fundamental to critical evaluation. It’s hard not to see how children reared on a surfeit of virtual interaction will not suffer a deficit of critical faculties.
This period may of course be only aberrational, its measures exceptional. That must be the fervent hope of every well-intentioned parent and leader — that they can get their charges through this storm safely and without long-term scars.
• Fritz, a public interest lawyer, is CEO of Freedom Under Law.
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