At a time when the world is safer than any in history, children are being taught that they live on the brink of a variety of existential threats
Fifty years ago, American TV personality Art Linkletter hosted Kids Says the Darndest Things segments on his House Party show, a CBS radio and television feature that ran for 25 years between 1945 and 1969. During the segments, Linkletter interviewed precocious children under the age of 12, mostly about their family lives and the foibles of their parents.
There were no child climate experts to interview, no nine-year-old boys in drag to document as they participated in pageants wearing heavy eye makeup and lipstick, no F-word spewing and dildo-waving pre-teens in movies like Good Boys to muse about.
Even as late as 1998, when comedian Bill Cosby briefly revived Kids Say the Darndest Things, the result was another stream of often hilarious malapropisms, neologisms, downright silly childish observations along with cloying and sometimes boring repartee on how the world works in the minds of seemingly articulate children.
In one widely viewed segment of the Cosby version now on YouTube, a five-year-old tells him that a cut on his finger has healed and gone away. Cosby asks where it went. “England,” replies the child.
Nowadays, in 2019 media, children not yet in their teens are asked much more serious questions and their answers treated as important declarations of deeper understanding.
For the rest of this article: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/terence-corcoran-from-innocents-to-anxious-activists-what-are-we-doing-to-our-kids