Children Will Be Children Only Once: COVID and the 100-Acre Paradise
Since children have gone back to school, there been a lot of umming and arghing about whether it’s safe to go back to school.
Having lived with my younger brother more closely these last six months since the lockdown, I have seen him become more in tune with himself. What I have also seen is a shift in what it could possibly mean to be a child in this world, as the gap widens between innocence and experience. When I was a boy, for me, innocence was Winnie the Pooh and the 100-Acre Wood and reading Enid Blyton novels. My brother is twelve years my junior and is really the first generation to grow up with the internet. There are a few saying that the Coronavirus pandemic has taken away this generation of children’s innocence. However, I am not sure if there was any innocence there to begin with — growing up with the internet, social media and influencers alike.
At twelve, I had MSN and My Space but his peers have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tik Tok and more, and are more exposed to the ills of the world than I was. I’m not saying today’s 20-somethings grew up without the internet. Simply, we were on the margins of both worlds. Born in 2008, he will never know a world before YouTube. In April 2020, an article…
