Adults need to grow up too, says Archbishop of Canterbury
-12/04/05
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has said that adults must face the full demands of being grown up if they are to meet the needs of children.
In a lecture yesterday for an event organised by the Citizen Organising Foundation, Dr Williams declared, ëWe canít shape the lives and minds of children without a sense of responsibility we have as adults.í
He continued: ëIf we want to give children a chance of experiencing childhood as they should – experiencing it as a time to learn, play, grow, in an environment of stability and security – we have to face the demands of being adults ourselves. We have to accept that growing up is about taking on the task of forming other human lives.í
The Archbishop warned that the pressures of modern life are eroding the time and space needed for the development of children as individual people and cautions that this is itself likely to lead to further problems.
Dr Williams said: ëIn a setting where relentless productivity is overvalued, we can forget what is needed to produce functioning human beings. We can become abusers of our children by default when we ignore the choices we can make that will better secure their stability and their sense of being seen and listened to. The result is that we seem to produce people who themselves cannot properly look or listen; and this is not a matter of pop psychology but a serious insight from those who have studied neurological development.í
The Citizen Organizing Foundation (COF) is a network of groups who bring together local people across the social and religious spectrum to discocer common interests and campaign for democratic change.
‘Broad-based organizing’, as it is known, owes its insights and tactics to US acctivist Saul Alinsky and his book ‘Rules for Radicals’. There are two BBOs in London, both with significant Christian involvment. The COF has also worked constructively with Muslim communities, and with civil society groups of no religious affiliation.
Broad-based organizing is not without its critics. Some allege that it marginalizes certain sections of a community in relation to others, and that it undermines existing community groups. Others argue that it maximises grassroots pressure on resistant political processes.