Can childhood survive multiculturalism?

My daughter asked me about gas chambers while I was putting her to bed last night. "Did they really make people dead?" She's in primary school, and had heard a partial story from another kid, and was clearly quite upset about it.

I've frequently been somewhat bemused at an expression that we must protect children from knowing the worlds ills. War, death, rape, violence. And especially sex. :) It is like we must protect childhood itself, not just children, as if there is something intrinsically good about ignorance, naivate, or innocence at least.

This idea of protecting childhood is recent and arguably naive. Go back a few hundred years and life was grittier, enough so that there was no possibility of sheltering kids from seeing much of the intrinsic violence. This is demonstrably true in parts of the world today.

Yet as a parent, I find myself wondering precisely when to introduce some pretty horrific topics. Like gas chambers.

Enter multiculturalism.  Philosophically and personally, I very much appreciate a society in which different ideas can be expressed, which extends for me to ideas deriving from different cultural backgrounds. And living in Californa, I love the cuisine. ;)

But sometimes I find myself wishing that multiculturalism were adult-only, because different cultures will raise their kids in very different ways.  Just as I don't want to raise my kids to believe that so-called female circumcision is needful, nor do my neighbours want to raise their kids to believe that birth control is acceptable. And while I can certainly understand that a Jewish family can very reasonably explain death camps and gas chambers to their child, and want to do so for reasons of race and perhaps family history, I don't appreciate so much their kids taking the story to school and scaring other children who haven't been prepared for it or walked through the topic in any sort of systematic fashion.

This gas chamber incident isn't the first time this issue has come up. Not so long ago my daughter asked me about Santa Claus. Another friend had told her that Jewish people knew a secret about Santa Claus, that he wasn't real.  Arguably it is time for my daughter to stop believing in Santa Claus, but she could well have heard this story a few years ago.

I don't want or mean to be picking on Jewish people - it is accidental, or at least unintentional on my part, that both times this has happened with my daughter it has been a Jewish kid.

But I find myself wondering: in a multicultural society, in which social beliefs and myths are not shared amongst different groups, do we wind up with misbelief?  Is there a sort of lowest-common-denominator, race for the bottom, trend to what kids can believe? Do we trade in some of the magic for grit?

And while I largely appreciate truth over falsehood, in my weaker moments I wish there could be more magic in the world.

tags: childhood  multiculturalism  protecting kids  santa claus  

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