Medicating children

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri May 25 05:13:53 PDT 2001


Joanna Bujes wrote:


>1) We live in an industrialized/fragile environment which makes it
>almost impossible for children to be children....to have energy and
>to expend their energy.

Isn't it only richly industrialized societies such as the USA that make it possible for individuals to have "childhood & adolescence as we think we know them"? Production of social relations that give rise to _long_ periods of childhood & adolescence (during which individuals are not asked to take on social roles & tasks aside from being children/adolescents, playing, learning, etc.) among the working class, beyond the offsprings of the bourgeois & the petit-bourgeois, is part of the democratizing process of capitalist development.

In contrast, in pre-industrial societies, even the very young (if they survived the period of infancy) worked & therefore had social roles that went with work, as they still do in many poor nations.

In other words, childhood & adolescence are erstwhile luxury goods that have become cheaper through mass production, though they are still too pricey for all the young people in the world to enjoy.

Yoshie



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