A loving mother, a hard-working father, a warm, good home, surrounded by sunlight. Conventional poetry idealises childhood as a golden age. Most literature and memoirs, however, also tell a different story. Of fear, conflict, anxiety and guilt. Often it is only adults who have the words to say what children felt.
     There are countless examples. In Marcel Proust's novel Remembrance of Things Past, a little boy waits, his heart in his mouth, to see if his mother will give him a goodnight kiss or not. In Thomas Mann's novella Disorder and Early Sorrow, a child carries, alone, an enormous burden of guilt. From the point of view of the writing adult, the roots of all feelings, including the heavy, difficult and negative, lie in childhood.

I had just started school, in 1956, when a general strike broke out in Finland. Of course, I did not understand what was at issue. My parents listened closely to the radio. There was a sense of uncertainty in the air. My mother had given me an exercise book on whose pages I wrote, in faltering letters, 'The SAK is worried, the king is worried, the emperor is worried' (the SAK is the Finnish Trades Union Council). In the adult world I could sense anxiety, although I did not understand its reasons. My litany, however, demonstrates that the issue was wider than my own family and immediate environment.
     I cannot imagine how the wider world is felt in children's lives today, in the prosperous western countries, in which television and the internet are part of the everyday reality that surrounds them. But there are still more children in the world who experience its terrors directly; children who, because of war or hunger or natural disaster, lose their parents, their brothers and sisters, children who have weapons thrust into their hands when they are barely of school age.
     The tsunami in south-east Asia affected Finns, for there were many Finnish tourists in the area as well. Of them almost 200 will never return home. On a world scale, the number is small, but fear, horror and grief are not mathematical quantities. The presence of Finnish tourists in the disaster zone brought the distant destruction close to home; this is not a law only of information, but of personal feeling.
     The way the news was treated in the media raised the question of whether it is right to broadcast, in daytime and early evening, reports and pictures of the disaster zone, when children are there to see and hear. The argument concerns almost all news reporting, and it is indeed worth asking whether it is not the role of parents to supervise what television their children watch. But when it is a question of major matters, wars and disasters, it is not enough to press the off button, because children will sense the restlessness, anxiety and fear of adults.

Unfortunately, just at the time of the south-east Asian disaster, the tele-vision showed Mimi Leander's film Pay It Forward (2000, based on the novel by Catherine Ryan Hide). Little Trevor invents a pyramid theory with whose help goodness in the world can be multiplied. The theory works, but the boy does not know it: he has not dared champion his friend. When Trevor does so, he is attacked with a knife and dies. Such a role, of carrier of responsibility, of little soldier, is not something I would wish on any one of the world's children.
     It is the responsibility of us adults to carry children over the water, like the St Christopher of legend.


Kristina Carlson
Editor-in-Chief