The greatest change of all, however, is not that children have lost their innocence. Alice is upset during these changes, however, and finds them to be saddening and uncomfortable, much like a child during puberty does. Louisa had endured a tremendous number of losses in her life and did not have a safe arena to express and work through the grief of these losses.
Where can we see the children’s loss of innocence and faith in others?
I asked him to whisper in my ear what he thought the word meant. But the child who is capable of developing guilt feelings when he considers doing something which is 'bad' has a signal system within himself which will warn him and inhibit the act. The sight wouldn’t normally surprise her very much, if it were not for the rabbit’s waistcoat and pocket watch.
As the child grows older, true maturity, defined by an ability to share, to sacrifice, to be generous, to love unselfishly, and to nurture and care for children of his own, may prove elusive, and in its place, attention-seeking and narcissism become the characteristics that define his adult life. Alice is upset during these changes, however, and finds them to be saddening and uncomfortable, much like a child during puberty does.
What Will It Be Like When the Lockdown Lifts. The loss of childhood innocence, so to speak, is shown in the absurd physical changes Alice undergoes by eating and drinking what Wonderland offers her. It was television that first penetrated the protective cocoon and thrust the long-hidden outside world into women's and children's lives.
And for a divorced or working parent who cannot be around in any case to monitor the child's behavior, it is less a matter of preference than of dire necessity.
That is, if cultural influences encourage repression of children's sexuality, the child's consequent appearance and behavior may inspire the adults around him to act in a more protective manner. These losses include loss of childhood, loss of innocence, loss of faith in God, loss of hope in a higher power, loss of family relationships, loss of self-esteem, loss of personal power, loss of self, and loss of the ability to feel pleasure in life.
Among humans, neotenic traits are the child's outsize head relative to the rest of the body, his outsize eyes relative to the size of the head, the short, rounded proportions of his arms and legs. Consider the outcome of certain progressive schools founded on misguided understandings of Freudian theories that sprang up during the early days of the psychoanalytic movement in the 1920's and 1930's. And yet a decline in supervision is not the entire story. While the impact of Freud's ideas upon the practical realities of child rearing may have served to diminish some of the traditional boundaries between childhood and adulthood, Freud's own view of childhood, as it happens, was a highly differentiated one. Nevertheless, while social change cannot be reversed, it may indeed be modified and made to work better for families. Parents are adult, children are children, and different rules apply to each group. The Age of Protection did not end because of a deliberate Page 20-21 decision to treat kids in a new way; it ended out of necessity. Dr. Spock's unquestioning assumption that the child is essentially different from the adult becomes clear if we try to extend the prospanking argument to adult human relations. As a Denver fourth-grade teacher reports, ''Kids are a lot freer now. In an instant, Alice is on her feet and jumps down the rabbit hole behind it. The liberation movement as well, gaining momentum in the mid-1960's played a role in bringing children out of their former seclusion from the adult world. This parity between adults and children forms a hidden base of today's less authoritative style of child rearing. It serves the growth of civilization by allowing the child to devote his childhood to learning instead of to the development of his sexual capacities. Maybe it is the garden of Eden to which she is not granted access yet due to her youth, or it might symbolize adulthood itself. In other words, if the sex drive were allowed free expression during childhood, the child wouldn't be able to apply himself to less exciting tasks such as memorizing the multiplication tables or learning the five principal products of Brazil. The rabbit hole, in that regard, might symbolize the beginning of the maturation process she will undergo for certain. Can parents today, sensing uneasily that something is missing, try to recreate the different sort of childhood that they themselves once were granted? There are obvious neotenic behavior patterns among humans just as there are among birds or beasts, things children do that differ significantly from things adults normally do. But television was not the whole story.
Reading your well-written breakdown of this book makes me want to go back and reread Alice Through the Looking Glass.