An essay by Raffi Cavoukian
—Dr. Philip Landrigan, Center for Children's Health and the Environment"We are conducting a vast toxicological experiment in which the research animals are our children."
—Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept"The feeling appropriate to an infant in arms is his feeling of rightness, or essential goodness… that he is right, good and welcome in the world."
Early Childhood – Seeing Our Essential Humanity
Across all cultures, we find an essential humanity that is most visible in early childhood—a playful, intelligent and creative way of being. Early experience lasts a lifetime. It shapes our sense of self and how we see others; it also shapes our sense of what’s possible, our view of the world. The impressionable early years are the most vulnerable to family dynamics, cultural values, and planetary conditions. At this critical point in the history of humankind, the irreducible needs of all children (no matter where they live) can offer a unifying ethic by which the cultures of our interdependent world might reorder their priorities.
Child Honouring is a vision, an organizing principle, and a way of life—a revolution in values that calls for a profound redesign of every sphere of society.
It starts with three givens. First, the primacy of the early years—early childhood is the gateway to humane being. Second, we face planetary degradation unprecedented in scope and scale, a state of emergency that most endangers the very young, and that requires a remedy of equal scale. And third, the crisis calls for a systemic response in detoxifying the environments that make up the ecology of the child.
In this way, Child Honouring is a "children first" approach to healing communities and restoring ecosystems; it views how we regard and treat our young as the key to building humane and sustainable world. (It’s not about a child-centered society where children rule, nor a facile notion of children being all things nice; and it has nothing to do with permissive parenting.) It is a global credo for maximizing joy and reducing suffering by respecting the goodness of every human being at the beginning of life, with benefits rippling in all directions.
It’s a novel idea—organizing society around the needs of its youngest members. Just as startling is the finding of neuroscience that a lifetime of behaviors is largely shaped by the age of four, and that, developmentally speaking, the pre-school years are more important than the school years. In the words of the Council on Human Development (Greenspan, Shanker), " Early childhood is the most important time in a human being's development."
