Glenda Simms

Each year, May is designated Child Month and it is not by coincidence that Mother's Day falls within this month. It would have been strategic for the designers of these monthly foci points to have also placed Father's Day in Child Month.

The obvious advantage would be the overt emphasis on the dual role of man and woman, not only in producing the genetic raw material to make a child, but on the centrality of the responsibility of both the mother and the father to care, nurture and protect the children that they have brought into this world.

Of course, the great designers and social engineers of the yearly calendar needed to put Mother's Day in one month, Father's Day in another, Valentine's Day in February, Christmas Day in December and so on and so forth.

All of this fixing of the social yearly calendar has more to do with the commercial benefits of these days rather than the philosophical, ideological and moral underpinnings of the human family.

Let's be real. In February, we consume a lot of stuffed white teddy bears with red ribbons around their necks, stylised, unflawed red roses, calorie-laden cakes and artificial hearts in baskets and the mystique and trappings of romantic love, if even it is with someone else's spouse, girlfriend or boyfriend.

At Easter time, we buy thousands of loaves of buns and many tins of chemically-laced, salt-filled processed cheese from across the oceans. Women also spend a lot of money on fancy hats to show off at the early morning Good Friday and Easter Sunday services. Let's face it, Easter is more about our outfits and matching hats, shoes, and hand bags

than about the painful journey that Jesus Christ tookon the way to his grave, in God's grand design to redeem us in spite of our sinful ways.

Child's Month embraces Mother's Day, a day on which we send cards and messages designed and written by others to our dear mothers. We also create a rush on the restaurants in which sumptuous Mother's Day brunches are served throughout the day into the evening. We do all of this because we are the children of these women and even enjoy splurging in order to make our mothers feel appreciated.

In Jamaica, the majority of children know who their mothers are and most have been raised and nurtured by these women, so Child's Month and Mother's Day, in spite of the commercial agenda, pose some fundamental questions about the state of the nation.

It is the contradictions within these systems that are designed to make a difference in Jamaica that prompted Melville Cooke, a freelance Gleaner writer to pose the question "just where is the line between a child and an adult drawn?"

In a real sense, Mr. Cooke's thesis is that we try to be kind to children generally, but are less concerned about the adults they will become.

While it can be argued that, in May, we pay some amount of attention to the important human development stage of childhood, we need to be reminded that human beings have not always valued children. Sometimes in our effort to grapple with the basis of contradictions that are posed by writer Cooke, we need to do an audit of the historical blueprint at the base of the so-called 'civilisation' in which we exist.

The late Dr. Loretta Haroian who was, in her time, a well-respected professor at the Institute of Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, reminds us that children were not always valued in many societies. She pointed out in an article entitled Child Sexual Development that ,prior to the Victorian idealisation of childhood innocence, "children were commonly used and abused physically and psychologically."

Interestingly, she also reminds us that the aristocrats of 18th century Europe imposed a barrier between parent and child. In those days of yore, infants were suckled by wet nurses and "infanticide was the major method of population control".

The changing of attitudes towards childhood from these early barbaric times has been revolutionary, transformative and gradual.

It is within this mode of transformation that Child's Month, which includes Mother's Day, can offer moments of linking the societal and individual responsibility to not only nurture our children but to value the adults that they will become. Some of these children of yesteryear became our mothers and we in turn must face the child that will always be within us.

Indeed, a healthy childhood is the main building block of a stable, peaceful and prosperous society. The time has come for us to emphasise the meaning of childhood in Child's Month and reduce the emphasis on the commercialisation of Mother's Day.

[Glenda P. Simms is a gender expert and consultant.]