This article is published in number 13 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until March 30, 2021
I am grateful every day for having grown-up children, who, even if they suffer and paw for the limitations of the pandemic, do so in a way that I can understand and somehow share, an almost adult way. And I often think of how sorry I would have been if they had lost a year of socializing, school and play when they went to elementary or middle school. Why children often do not understand who they are and how they really are. We just try to protect them and educate them as best we know, but we struggle to really understand them, to see them for what they are, perhaps because they are so different from us adults: a little magical, mysterious, unpredictable. “What happened to the children?” it was written on some banners that appeared in various Italian cities during the first lockdown, when schools closed for the first time and the lives of children and young people disappeared from public discourse. What happened to the children (Piemme) is also the latest book by the journalist Annalisa Cuzzocrea, correspondent of the Republic and is an exciting investigation into why children and adolescents have not really been seen by the government struggling with the Covid19 emergency. As if they were invisible. Those of Cuzzocrea are meetings with psychologists, writers, economists, demographers, sociologists, directors, teachers, parents to try to understand what are the reasons for the invisibility of childhood and adolescence in this country. Definitely a political problem; but also a cultural problem. A habit of seeing children as “baggage below”, that is appendages, entrusted exclusively to the care of parents: non-citizens with rights. And if everything is delegated to families, the state feels relieved of the task of dealing with it. Why the more the child is central, almost obsession with the family unit, the more the company withdraws and does not consider itself obliged to provide any service, to accommodate any need.
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