Through the Eyes Of Children

Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young the music issued at the lips . . . Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful and inviting.

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush . . .

-- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

CHILDHOOD: THE DELECTABLE LAND. Like Cardiff Hill, it lies just far enough away from the adult mind to be dreamy, to shimmer with a sentimental abstraction -- if one does not recall it too precisely. Childhood, where everyone begins, has the power of myth. Big people are gods, and the world is magic -- or terrifying.

Like myths of Eden, the stories of Huck and Tom endure in the American imagination. But they have a dark side too. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck's journey in the Delectable Land is also a drama of alcoholism, child abuse, young runaways, social breakdown, violence, hypocrisy, racism and a child's struggle to understand right and wrong in a society that has lost its bearings. Huckleberry Finn is still the best book about American childhood, as contemporary as a milk carton bearing the photograph of a missing child.

Only sentimentalists have ever considered childhood to be a kingdom of untroubled innocence. Today there is more trouble for children and less time for innocence than in recent generations. The problem is not so much that children have changed. The world has changed. Writes Dr. Robert Coles, a psychiatrist and author who has studied the lives of the young for more than 30 years: "Children have always been, and still are, a mirror to us -- ourselves writ small." Ourselves have changed.

It is both the best and the worst of times for children. Their world contains powers and perspectives inconceivable to a child 50 years ago: computers; longer life expectancies; the entire planet accessible through television, satellites, air travel. But so much knowledge and choice can be chaotic and dangerous. School curriculums have been adapted to teach about new topics: AIDS, ADOLESCENT SUICIDE, DRUG AND ALCOHOL ABUSE, INCEST. Trust is the child's natural inclination, but the world has become untrustworthy. The hazards of the adult world, its sometimes fatal temptations, descend upon children so early that the ideal of childhood is demolished.

Crack, for example, is far more addictive and deadly than marijuana, the drug of a different generation. Strange fragments of violence come flashing out of the television set and lodge in minds too young to understand them. In New York City a five-year-old and his friend argue about 1) whether there is a Santa Claus and 2) what Liberace died of. In New Orleans a boy in first grade shaves chalk and passes it around the classroom, pretending it is cocaine.