Is childhood more complex for young people to navigate these days?

Talking to my grandchildren I realise life in school in the 1950s and 1960s was relatively uncomplicated. 

True, there were kids who didn’t quite fit in; I remember one who was blamed in fourth grade for stealing lunches in the cloakroom, and carried the stench of that accusation for years in a way which must have been uncomfortable, particularly as it was never proven. 

Personally I think anyone who loitered in the cloakroom in those days needed to have their head read because they were dank smelly little corners, not fit for purpose, overstuffed with school bags and wet sandshoes; and personally I’d have thought that anyone delving into our school bags, at the bottom of which might lie the festering remains of a squashed uneaten banana or pear, deserved a medal for courage. All I can say now in retrospect is that she must have been hungry. And I can now put that into a totally different context, which makes me ashamed of our childish cruelty to her.

There were, too, odd little jealousies and flarings of competitiveness. 

My own sporting career was chequered because I was one of the two last choices for the school baseball team, and I was competing against the niece of the former principal of the school, and for some reason that seemed to be an important aspect of the selection process.  

My biggest heartbreak was being ‘best friends’ in Year 7 with a girl who had a number of other ‘best friends’ around whom she flitted as she chose. One day she would spend her time with me at recess and lunchtime, and we had great times together; the next day she’d be off with someone else. It was my first intimation of betrayal and I got used to my heart breaking over and over again. It wasn’t in my DNA to understand what was happening, and it was especially painful because she and I sat next to each on either side of the small corridor that divided our desks, so the on- offishness of our relationship continued throughout every day.

The happiest day of that year was when she passed me a note in class– I remember it so clearly, it was written with a red coloured pencil – where she informed me that she was leaving the school and would be going to another school the following year. I realised immediately that I would be free at last, and a great weight was lifted off me, not sure it was off my brain or my heart! 

She did leave as promised, and we corresponded intermittently during high school, but it was pretence on my part because I wanted to forget the heartbreak and I couldn’t actually offload it anywhere. So that flimsy and ultimately false correspondence gradually faded away, and was lost completely during our early married years. Strangely enough, and I don’t remember the circumstances, when we were in our fifties, we met up again and discovered that we were actually soulmates. 

But before I could feel safe, I had to tell her about the traumatic time I’d had in Year 7. 

It was news to her, but she was able to look back and recognise her younger self, an insecure child who had taken out her own unhappiness on me. The remembrance brought us closer together and today I count her as a real ‘best’ friend, with whom I can disclose my most intimate thoughts, an emotional connection which she reciprocates.

Back then at school we were a homogenous lot: Caucasian, mostly from educated middle class families. School fees might still have been the biggest expense in more than half the families, but parents on the whole had good jobs that weren’t going to disappear overnight on them. There were several Jewish girls in each class, but we hardly understood their differences, except when Pesach came around, because they looked just like us. 

The only girls who stood out in the whole school were two sisters of Chinese heritage. I suspect it was hard for them at times, and they no doubt suffered some thoughtless acts of racism, but, in looking back, they were, under the superficial difference, as Australian as the rest of us, since they’d been born here. 

And of course technology as we know it today didn’t exist. 

Television only became part of our lives in the 1960s, and our lives were far more innocent and untroubled than those of my grandchildren who must run the gamut of all of the above, and many more issues than we could have dreamt of, through the enlarged and overblown prism of social media. 

In discussion with my grandchildren, and having observed them as they tumble out of class at the end of the day, I’ve become aware that their lives contain issues and understandings that only became part of my consciousness when I went to university. 

They are now dealing, each in their own way and at different levels of intensity, with various forms of bullying, interacting with children from different parts of the world, some of them refugees who have fled with nothing much and even less English from terrible situations. 

They now are face to face with environmental and changing weather patterns, with wars in all their horrific consequences playing out in nightly television, they have the experience of pandemics and enormous changes in the way people interact with each other, and with technology shouting at them from every angle. 

Not only that, the simple fact of being male or female has become a clouded issue. 

Of course it was always there for some, but now it’s part of their childhood, and they have to deal with their own uncertainties and the mental health issues that this raises. I think they have been thrown into clouded and worrying times that make me look back at my own childhood as pretty tame and easy.  

All these thoughts of the past and the present swirled around me when I began exploring the life of the second most endangered butterfly in Australia. And in some respects, Holly, the narrator of my new novel, Azita and Me, which came about because of the above mentioned butterfly, bears within her the seeds of my own childhood just as much as she is plunged into contemporary life in Australia. 

I wanted to confront some of the issues, but not head on, and not in a violent form. 

For me, it is important to have hope and project optimism rather than violence, anger and the sense that we are living in apocalyptic times. I hope I’ve done that, and that reading the book will help many children at an extraordinarily important and delicately balanced time in their life to navigate with more confidence than despair through the turbulent times that lie ahead.

Find out more about Azita and Me here.