Dzieciństwo: projekt w kryzysie
Childhood: A Project in Crisis

Summary/Abstract: This article considers the idea of crisis as one of the key tools for conceptualizing the ambivalent nature of childhood. Although crisis narratives have been an inseparable part of describing childhood, the concept of a crisis (an end, a death) of childhood itself may refer to such different phenomena as slave labor or lack of access to education on the one hand, and the consumerist lifestyle and media addiction on the other. The author focuses mainly on the idea of the disappearance of modern childhood derived from Postman’s concept. Childhood is viewed in connection with the concept of childhood’s toxicity, the dichotomy between over-controlling and ignoring childhood, and the idea of childhood being inappropriate. The article concludes that although some of the problems signaled as part of the crisis diagnosis have a negative impact on the development of young people and require solutions, the idea that childhood en bloc is in crisis is rather an expression of the collapse of the classic vision of childhood, and thus of the hierarchical, dichotomous relationship between childhood and adulthood that it is based upon. The relationship thus defined does not leave much conceptual space for recognizing the complex and ambivalent nature of childhood, or for describing the changes in childhood and adulthood and their mutual determinants.

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