Protecting the idea of childhood innocence is a disservice to kids, argues expert
Critical cultural theorist Julie Garlen says childhood should be framed by ideas of justice not innocence
*Originally published on April 8, 2025.
Google 'childhood' and the images that come up feature laughing children running through a field; little girls playing hopscotch at a park; friends giggling and whispering secrets. The sun is always shining and everyone is happy.
These images match up with how we imagine childhood as a time of blissful ignorance safe from the knowledge of difficult things. We think of childhood as a container where monsters are kept at bay and children can experience wonder and happiness, free from stress and worry.
But who does this idea of childhood innocence protect?
Not kids, according to Julie Garlen, a critical cultural theorist and professor of teacher education at the University of Toronto. She argues framing childhood as an experience that ought to be innocent in the sense that it should be free of difficult knowledge or being unaware of adversity creates a reality where the complex and complicated lives of children go unacknowledged.
"We're not talking about [innocence] in a religious sense. I'm not suggesting that a child is either innocent or that they're doomed in terms of salvation," Garlen told IDEAS producer Naheed Mustafa.
She adds that children have rights as human beings that need to be acknowledged. They are entitled to have some power and control over how they live their lives.
It's important people understand that children do experience difficulty in life, even in the best of circumstances, said Garlen.
"When a very privileged child has the opportunity to be insulated somehow from a lot of life's difficulties — maybe they haven't experienced poverty, or they haven't experienced not having a home to live in, they haven't experienced racism.
"But even for those children, they experience disappointment. They experience sadness. And when we focus on the idea of innocence as being the sort of perfect state of being, we don't allow space for processing and understanding what it is to feel grief and to feel sadness or frustration or disappointment as children."
Being a kid isn't easy
Childhood is a time of tremendous learning, of figuring out one's relationship to others and to the world.
But, Garlen says, because children don't have social status in the way adults do, they don't typically have the ability to speak out on their own behalf.
"I don't think of childhood as being inherently easy. I actually think that childhood is a very complex process that demands more of our attention, and also just a more complex understanding of human being in general that takes into account the really vast spectrum of knowledges and experiences that we have from birth all the way to death."
Garlen gives the example of racism to illustrate the vast gap between framing childhood as a time of innocence and the reality of many children's lives. She points out that it's becoming ever more difficult in a time of political polarization — which politicizes school curricula as well — to talk openly about difficult subjects in the classroom.
There's a prevailing narrative that children should be shielded from things they "can't understand," despite the fact that many children are exposed to racism on a regular basis. And it causes them a great deal of distress.
"We are actually perpetuating the cycle of racism and inequality because we're not allowing that space for it to be understood or addressed. It's only the children in that classroom who have the privilege of not being exposed to racism in some way that are actually insulated from that idea," Garlen explained.
"Maybe the children who are experiencing it don't have the language to discuss it, because we are not talking about it, and we're silencing those conversations. But the children who are experiencing racism have a deep understanding of it."
We prepare kids for scary things
Garlen is clear that saying we should not primarily think of childhood as a time of innocence "is not to say that we would like to make children's lives miserable, or to promote the idea that they should be subjected to harm by any means."
But, she says, shutting down dialogue makes kids more vulnerable.
By refusing to acknowledge that kids have difficult experiences and silencing challenging conversations, it makes it more likely that children may not know how to respond, or how to ask for help, or how to ask for support when they encounter something they don't understand.
"If our children do encounter situations like someone who seeks to harm them, maybe they see certain imagery online... and we haven't had those conversations to help them understand where we stand on those issues, how they can advocate for themselves, that they can talk to us about those issues, then we're kind of robbing them of that self-advocacy piece."
She likens this challenging dialogue to fire drills. They're scary but it's still important to prepare children.
"We know that that's an objective social reality. Fires happen. They aren't necessarily caused by bad people but we prepare children to be ready for that. We give them information about how do you keep yourself safe in this situation. And we don't think of that as being a dialogue that we would shut down even with young children, even though it is scary for them."
Childhood is individual
Garlen says there is no one way to think about what childhood should be.
Childhood exists in many different ways and so the idea that a very Western cultural ideal of childhood as a separate existence that is blissful and unaware simply doesn't exist for most children.
"I think that by giving them opportunities to be informed and to think critically about what is happening around them is a much more effective way of equipping them with skills that they may need to navigate adult life, rather than just shutting down the dialogue and keeping them separate from those conversations."
Download the IDEAS podcast to listen to this episode.
*Produced and written by Naheed Mustafa.
