The "Who do we adults think we are?" Forum

This is a report from a UNICEF forum held yesterday (I think). I wonder what you will make of it? I have interspersed some comments.

What emerged from the forum was a declaration that New Zealanders generally, and professionals in particular, need to start watching their language. People who care about the wellbeing of children and young people need to start following the feminist example of challenging disrespectful jokes and language that put women down, and start being strong about challenging ways of talking that are disrespectful of children as fellow human beings.

Has the 'feminist example' improved relations between the sexes or the level of violence adults are subjected to?

Too often children are talked about dismissively as if their value lay in the adults they will become rather than the human beings they are now. The forum challenges adult New Zealanders to listen to themselves and to not just demand respect, but to give it too.

I thoroughly respect my kids when they act in ways that deserve respect and I try to remember to remark on it to them. When they don't, I let them know.

'Children are often talked about and talked to in ways that are incredibly disrespectful’ says David Kenkel the UNICEF advocacy manager for New Zealand. He went on to add. ‘If you talked about any other group in society in the disparaging and dismissive way that children are so often talked about you’d face serious complaints.’

As well as silly complaints.

This is particularly true for teenagers, we demand respect from them but don’t always give respect in the ways we talk to them and about them. Think about what it must be like to be constantly described as a problem in media and conversation and to be viewed with suspicion when you and friends walk down the road just because of your age?’

I seem to remember not weeks ago many NZers fighting for the rights of young adults as largely responsible and respectable young individuals.

Dr Ian Hassall , New Zealand’s former commissioner for children described how children are loved and cherished in the private spheres of family life but that this attitude and way of talking doesn’t always cross over into the public sphere where too often children are described as if they were troublesome and burdensome. When a phrase like ‘they were no trouble’ is the best praise you can say in public about a child it says something about how the public sphere sees children as needing to be quiet deferential and obedient. Of course they can never conform to these expectations because they are human beings just like the rest of us.

Quiet, deferential and obedient? He's kidding. Very few parents harbour such old-fashioned expectations. It's rather nice if it happens but generally children make noise, think about themselves first and regularly test the boundaries.

These people are really trying too hard.