Children Apart: What Their Place in Society Says About the Value We Place on the Future

We entrust childhood professionals with what is most precious to us, we ask them to prepare future generations, yet we often continue to treat their work as a secondary function. What if this contradiction stemmed from a deeper problem: the place we have collectively chosen to give to children themselves?

A society can say many things about the importance it gives to children. Yet all we need to do is look at where it actually allows them to be.

There is a fairly simple way to observe a society’s deepest priorities: look at the place it gives to its children.

Not just in its rhetoric.

Almost all contemporary societies state that childhood must be protected, that education is essential and that younger generations represent the future.

The question becomes much more interesting when we look at the concrete organization of collective life.

Where are children allowed to be present?

Which activities can they participate in?

Which responsibilities can they progressively take on?

In which ordinary places within society are they considered legitimate participants, and in which others does their absence seem self-evident?

And above all: when we keep them away, is it really because they are incapable of participating, or because we have organized these spaces without making provision for their participation?

This distinction might seem secondary.

On the contrary, it lies at the heart of the problem.

Childhood is not a waiting room

We have become accustomed to thinking of childhood as a period of preparation.

Children learn today what they will need tomorrow. They go to school for their future life. They are educated in order to become citizens, professionals, parents, voters, taxpayers or active members of society.

This view obviously contains some truth.

But it can also produce a strange effect: implicitly considering that genuine participation in society begins later.

The “serious” world would be the world of adults.

Childhood would have its own places: school, leisure centers, playgrounds, sports clubs, after-school facilities, specialized activities.

This specialization has immense advantages. In particular, it makes it possible to create environments suited to children’s development and to ensure their protection.

But when it becomes systematic separation, it raises another question:

Have we adapted society to children, or have we progressively built a society from which we have removed children?

Because a child is not merely a future adult.

A child is already a member of society.

The political question then becomes that of the conditions under which children can progressively take part in it.

Protecting does not necessarily mean separating

We must avoid caricature here.

Children need particular protection.

Their physical, cognitive and emotional development imposes real limits. Certain responsibilities obviously cannot be entrusted to them. Some environments are dangerous. Certain decisions require a maturity or legal capacity that they do not yet possess.

No one seriously proposes denying these realities.

But not all restrictions imposed on children arise from such impossibilities.

Some of them result from social choices.

A regulation.

An organization of work.

A convention.

An insurance policy.

A lack of staff.

Architecture designed exclusively for adults.

A time constraint.

Fear of an incident.

Adult convenience.

Or simply habit.

We should therefore learn to distinguish between two sentences that sound similar but mean completely different things:

“A child cannot participate in this activity.”

“We have not organized this activity in a way that allows a child to participate.”

In the first case, the limitation belongs to the child.

In the second, it belongs to our organization.

And that difference changes everything.

When a societal choice ends up being seen as a natural law

One of the difficulties lies precisely in the fact that social choices quickly become invisible.

When a particular form of organization has existed for several decades, it eventually begins to seem natural.

Children are at school while adults work.

Teenagers have activities designed for teenagers.

Adults attend adult meetings.

Older people, in turn, have specialized institutions and activities.

Each arrangement has its own logic.

But the sum of all these logics can produce something that no one explicitly decided: a society strongly segmented by age.

Generations do cross paths, of course.

But they do things together less often.

Yet there is a considerable difference between meeting someone and participating with them in a real activity.

Watching an adult work.

Helping them.

Being entrusted with a small task.

Then a more complex task.

Failing without disaster.

Trying again.

Receiving advice.

Becoming competent enough to act independently.

Then, in turn, teaching someone less experienced.

All of this constitutes an extraordinarily ancient form of learning.

And we may sometimes be at risk of losing it.

The continuum we have forgotten

We could call this mechanism the continuum of participation.

It is based on a very simple idea: we do not suddenly move from incapacity to competence.

We progress.

A child begins by watching.

Then participates.

Then helps.

Then is entrusted with part of a task.

Then the whole task.

Then becomes capable of carrying it out without assistance.

Finally, they can support someone else.

This continuum still exists wherever several levels of experience can genuinely coexist: in some families, in crafts, in sports, in the arts, in associations, in youth movements, on some farms, in scientific field activities, in popular education or in collective projects.

It produces something very different from the simple transmission of knowledge.

It transmits a capacity to act.

The child does not merely know how something works.

They progressively discover that they are capable of doing it.

You do not become autonomous by being kept apart

This is where one of the most important paradoxes in our contemporary relationship with childhood appears.

We want young people to become autonomous.

But autonomy has an inconvenient property: it cannot truly be learned without being exercised.

Choosing.

Deciding.

Carrying.

Building.

Organizing.

Caring.

Negotiating.

Using a tool.

Getting around.

Managing a budget.

Preparing something for other people.

Participating in a collective decision.

Resolving a conflict.

Assessing danger.

Taking responsibility.

All these skills require experience.

A society that sought to protect children from every situation in which they were not yet perfectly autonomous would therefore risk creating a particularly absurd circle:

We refuse them certain responsibilities because they are not yet autonomous, while removing the very situations that would enable them to build that autonomy.

This obviously does not mean allowing anything and everything.

The entire educational challenge lies precisely in the space between two extremes: abandonment and prevention.

The real educational profession: making experience possible

Supporting a child does not simply mean telling them what to do.

It often means creating an environment in which they will be able to do something themselves that they could not yet have accomplished alone.

It is a subtle operation.

It requires simultaneously ensuring safety and enabling experimentation.

Giving rules while allowing freedom.

Intervening early enough to prevent significant harm, but late enough to allow the child to look for a solution.

Taking the individual into account while maintaining the group.

Accepting some mistakes without accepting every risk.

Protecting without preventing.

Passing on knowledge without doing things in their place.

Deciding while preparing the other person to decide.

These tensions are strikingly similar to those we readily associate with prestigious professional functions: management, leadership, team management, change management, mediation, risk management, training or governance.

Yet when they are exercised with children, we tend to view them differently.

When the activity leader becomes a guard

The way we regard children directly transforms the way we regard those who work with them.

If the child is primarily perceived as someone who must be prevented from putting themselves in danger, the professional’s mission mechanically shifts toward supervision.

The educator becomes the person who prevents.

The activity leader becomes the person who keeps children occupied.

The center director becomes the person who ensures that no incident occurs.

The activity becomes a way of filling time.

The project becomes entertainment.

And an extremely complex educational skill can end up being reduced, in collective perceptions, to a childminding function.

This may be one of the most powerful mechanisms behind the devaluation of childhood professions.

Because if we think that an activity leader is essentially there to “watch the children,” their relatively low pay can almost begin to seem consistent.

If, on the other hand, we understand that they are responsible for creating situations in which people progressively learn to become capable of acting, the value of the profession appears in an entirely different light.

Considerable responsibilities for limited recognition

The contrast is then striking.

We may expect a sometimes very young professional to be simultaneously capable of:

• ensuring the physical safety of a group;
• understanding individual needs;
• detecting a concerning situation;
• preventing and managing conflicts;
• organizing a complex activity;
• making decisions quickly;
• communicating with families;
• applying regulations;
• working as part of a team;
• supporting children in difficulty;
• maintaining group dynamics;
• encouraging initiative;
• setting boundaries;
• managing unforeseen events;
• and nevertheless creating a joyful, stimulating and empowering experience.

The collective message then becomes difficult to understand:

“Your work is important enough for us to demand that you take considerable responsibility for the safety, education and development of our children; but not important enough for your profession to systematically receive the prestige, resources and remuneration corresponding to that responsibility.”

The vicious circle of devaluation

This contradiction is not merely unfair to professionals.

It ultimately damages the system itself.

A profession with little recognition has greater difficulty attracting people.

A poorly paid profession has greater difficulty retaining experienced professionals.

When teams experience rapid turnover, accumulated skills are lost.

When experienced professionals leave, the transfer of knowledge to newcomers declines.

When teams become more fragile, institutions legitimately seek to reduce risks.

They then strengthen procedures, prohibitions and control mechanisms.

Professionals have less autonomy.

They can organize fewer complex activities.

The profession becomes less interesting.

It attracts even fewer people.

And when quality eventually declines, this decline can be interpreted as proof that the sector is intrinsically unprofessional.

Underinvestment thus produces some of the difficulties that are then used to justify the low value assigned to the sector.

Expertise we no longer even know how to recognize

The loss does not stop there.

An experienced activity leader, educator, center director, teacher or trip leader may accumulate over the years an extremely refined understanding of complex human phenomena:

• motivation;
• group dynamics;
• cooperation;
• leadership;
• conflicts;
• inclusion;
• fatigue;
• engagement;
• learning;
• empowerment;
• decision-making;
• relationship with rules;
• trust;
• managing uncertainty.

In many other sectors, some of these skills have prestigious names.

They are called management.

Facilitation.

Team leadership.

Crisis management.

Collective intelligence.

Mediation.

Skills development.

When they have been acquired in youth work or education, they are far less systematically recognized as transferable expertise.

Society therefore loses twice.

It undervalues the professionals.

Then it underuses the knowledge they have produced.

Separating children also means separating generations

The issue becomes even broader when we look at the effects of specialized spaces.

A child surrounded almost exclusively by children of the same age obviously learns a great deal from their peers.

But they lose part of another kind of learning: that which arises from regular contact with people at different levels of experience.

The younger person observes the older one.

The older person learns to help the younger one.

The teenager discovers that they can become a point of reference for a child.

The young adult learns to pass things on.

The adult must adapt the way they explain.

An older person can pass on experience that their professional status may no longer necessarily allow them to practice.

The continuum is therefore not only useful to children.

It transforms everyone who takes part in it.

A society excessively segmented by age risks losing part of this constant circulation of skills, responsibilities and roles.

The paradox of the suddenly responsible teenager

This break in the continuum becomes particularly visible during adolescence and early adulthood.

For years, we may tell a young person that they are too young to decide, too young to participate, too young to organize, too young to take on certain responsibilities.

Then an administrative age arrives.

And suddenly, we expect them to know how to choose an educational or career path, manage their money, work, vote, drive, live alone, understand administrative procedures, organize their time, make important decisions and answer for the consequences of their actions.

We sometimes turn autonomy into a switch.

Before: no.

After: yes.

But human maturation does not work that way.

Between dependence and autonomy there should be a succession of gradual responsibilities.

That is precisely what the continuum makes possible.

A society that repairs much of what it could have prevented

This reflection also has an economic dimension.

A considerable share of public action occurs once difficulties are already visible.

School dropout.

Isolation.

Difficulties entering the workforce.

Violence.

Loss of confidence.

Social exclusion.

Health difficulties.

Unemployment.

Relationship difficulties.

The causes of these phenomena are multiple. It would obviously be simplistic, and scientifically false, to claim that they are all caused by childhood or that better educational policy would be enough to make them disappear.

But it would be equally unreasonable to consider that experiences during the first decades of life have only a marginal effect on what follows.

The question therefore deserves to be asked differently:

what proportion of the sums devoted to repairing certain difficulties in adulthood could be avoided, or their severity reduced, through greater investment in the conditions for children’s and adolescents’ development, education, socialization and autonomy?

We should not presume the answer.

We should measure it.

But failing to ask the question is already a political choice.

The trap of the long term

Childhood faces a particular disadvantage here.

Its results appear slowly.

Creating an additional position in an educational organization immediately creates an expense.

Providing more training to an activity leader costs money today.

Reducing the number of children entrusted to one professional costs money today.

Creating spaces that allow more experimentation costs money today.

By contrast, the adult who, fifteen years later, cooperates better, takes more initiative, avoids certain difficulties, creates a company, becomes involved in an association, participates more effectively as a citizen or in turn passes on certain skills will never easily be linked back to that investment.

The cost is recorded immediately. The diffuse benefit belongs to the future.

Conversely, when a problem has already appeared, public action becomes visible.

A program is created.

Beneficiaries are identified.

A budget is mobilized.

Indicators can be produced.

A problem that has been prevented, however, has no face.

This is one of the great economic paradoxes of prevention:

it is much easier to measure the cost of a preventive policy than to show the small or considerable disasters that, thanks to it, never occurred.

What if the care and consideration given to childhood were an infrastructure?

We readily speak of investment when we build a bridge, a rail network, a university, or digital or energy infrastructure.

We then accept that present expenditure can create capacities for several decades.

Why not apply the same reasoning to childhood?

Not to reduce children to their future economic productivity.

But because human capacities are themselves a collective infrastructure.

Knowing how to cooperate.

Learning.

Taking initiative.

Listening.

Making an argument.

Trusting.

Resolving a conflict.

Creating.

Caring.

Adapting.

Taking responsibility.

All these capacities are subsequently needed by the economy, democracy, associations, companies, institutions, families and collective life.

From this perspective, youth activities, education, culture, sport, Participatory Science and other spaces that enable young people to experience collective activities are no longer simply social expenditures.

They become part of a society’s human infrastructure.

Changing the place of children would mechanically change the value of the professions

This may be where the real reversal lies.

We regularly try to raise the status of childhood professions.

We talk about salaries.

Training.

Status.

Working conditions.

Professionalization.

All these dimensions are essential.

But perhaps we sometimes try to treat the symptom without sufficiently addressing its cultural cause.

As long as childhood is implicitly regarded as a peripheral area of social life, the professions associated with it will also risk remaining peripheral.

Conversely, if we regarded the progressive support of new generations as one of society’s strategic functions, the hierarchy could change.

The activity leader would no longer be the person who keeps children occupied while adults do important things.

They would be one of the professionals who organize children’s progressive entry into the capacity to act.

The educator would no longer simply be the person who protects.

They would be the person who knows exactly how far to protect so that the other person can learn to no longer need that protection.

The director of a youth organization would no longer simply be responsible for a facility.

They would manage a complex human environment in which cooperation, autonomy, safety, trust and responsibility are built every day.

Not idealizing the past: inventing something else

Recognizing the virtues of the intergenerational continuum obviously does not mean longing nostalgically for a return to an older society.

Historically, children have endured forced labor, economic exploitation, educational violence, authoritarianism and many forms of domination from which contemporary protections have fortunately distanced us.

The aim is not to go backward.

It is precisely to invent something better.

To preserve the fundamental achievements of child protection while refusing to allow protection to become synonymous with exclusion.

To create real situations without reproducing exploitation.

To give responsibilities without transferring to children those that belong to adults.

To allow reasonable risk without neglecting safety.

To involve without instrumentalizing.

To include without abandoning.

In short: replace separation with progressive and organized participation.

The right question may therefore no longer be: “Is this allowed for children?”

We could begin by changing the question.

When faced with an activity, a place, an institution, a project, a collective decision or a responsibility, we should no longer ask only:

“Can children participate in it?”

But:

“What would objectively prevent their participation?”

“What genuinely relates to their age and what relates to the way we organize things?”

“What form of participation would be possible at age 6, 10, 14 or 17?”

“What support would make this participation sufficiently safe?”

“What progressive responsibility could be entrusted to them?”

These questions produce an entirely different philosophy.

They no longer assume that exclusion is the rule and participation the exception.

They require us to justify exclusion when it is genuinely necessary and to organize participation when it is reasonably possible.

Does what is most precious to us really deserve our least valued professions?

We then arrive at the central paradox.

We say that children are what is most precious to us.

We state that they represent our future.

We know that their earliest experiences profoundly influence the development of their future capacities.

We ask the people who support them to simultaneously ensure their safety, development, socialization and autonomy.

Then we accept that many of these professions experience low recognition, recruitment difficulties, high staff turnover and salaries that are sometimes out of proportion with the level of responsibility required.

This paradox should alert us.

Because ultimately, it does not concern only childhood professionals.

It reveals our collective way of thinking about value.

Reinvesting in the continuum

Revaluing childhood therefore does not simply mean increasing a budget.

It could mean rethinking much more broadly the way new generations enter society.

Creating more intergenerational spaces.

Creating more progressive responsibilities.

Involving young people in real projects.

Recognizing learning that takes place outside school.

Allowing children to observe and contribute to adults’ real activities whenever possible.

Valuing mentoring.

Developing situations in which teenagers support younger children.

Professionally recognizing skills acquired in youth work.

Training professionals not only to prevent incidents, but to organize reasonable risk and autonomy.

Evaluating public policies over much longer time horizons.

And above all, considering the capacity to act as an educational objective just as fundamental as the acquisition of knowledge.

It would no longer simply be a matter of preparing children for society.

It would be a matter of enabling them to progressively enter it as they grow.

Another definition of protection

Perhaps we ultimately need to reconsider the word itself.

Protecting a child does not necessarily mean removing from them every danger, every difficulty, every responsibility and every uncertainty.

Protection can also mean enabling them to encounter these things progressively under appropriate conditions.

A child who is effectively protected today should be able to need a little less protection tomorrow.

Then a little less again.

Until they are able to protect other people themselves.

That may be the best indicator of success.

Protection does not achieve its objective when it becomes permanent. It achieves it when it progressively builds the capacities that will make it possible to do without it.

Ultimately, the question is not about children. It is about the society we want to become.

The place given to children reveals the way a society thinks about time.

Does it invest only in what produces an immediately visible result?

Or does it know how to invest in capacities whose effects will appear ten, twenty or thirty years later?

It also reveals our conception of competence.

Do we think it appears with age, a diploma or status?

Or that it is built progressively through experience, trust and responsibility?

Finally, it reveals our conception of protection.

Does protecting mean keeping apart?

Or creating the conditions that allow participation without abandoning someone to danger?

These choices also determine the place given to childhood professionals.

Because a society that regards children mainly as people who need to be watched will need guards.

A society that regards them as people called upon to become progressively capable of acting will need highly skilled professionals to organize that progression.

And it will probably need to train, pay and recognize them accordingly.

What if we finally reversed the calculation?

For decades, one question has repeatedly arisen whenever we talk about education, youth activities, culture, sport, prevention or support:

“How much will it cost?”

It is a legitimate question.

But it is incomplete.

A second question should systematically be added:

“How much will what we choose not to do today cost us in ten, twenty or thirty years?”

And a third:

“What collective capacities are we choosing not to build when we prevent a generation from learning progressively through participation?”

We might then discover that childhood professions are not on the periphery of the economy and society.

They work on what will make both possible tomorrow.

And that the child is not a citizen in waiting, placed in a protected space until the day they are finally ready to enter the real world.

They are already part of it.

The question that should concern us now may therefore no longer be how to prepare children to enter our society one day.

It is much more ambitious:

How can we build a society in which each new generation can progressively take its place, experiment, contribute, learn from previous generations, pass things on to the next, and become autonomous without first having to be kept away from the world for their own protection—the very world for which we claim to be preparing them?

Perhaps only under this condition will we finally be able to escape the paradox: proclaiming that childhood represents our future while underinvesting in those who, every day, make that future possible.