Translator: Claudia Sander Reviewer: Maricene Crus I will start by quoting Nelson Mandela, one of the greatest heroes of our time, who said, "The true character of a society is revealed by how it treats its children. " But, in Brazil, we live a paradox. Our children are the most valuable thing we have, we want their well-being at any cost, we would give our life for them, however, our children have been very badly treated by our society.
In fact, this demands a reflection, so we can come up with changes. I hope we can do some of this today. If we think about Brazilian poor children, which are the majority of them, according to Mandela's criteria, we have an awful character, because we deny them basic rights, such as health, housing, education and feeding.
We treat them with violence, and if they rebel, we offer them imprisionment. But even to children who are privileged by their social class, well-cared children, sons and daughters of those who are here, things also aren't going well either. We don't commit crimes, but sins.
Let's take a short trip through the seven deadly sins our society is committing against childhood. We'll join Gabriela, a typical middle-class child, starting with her mom's pregnancy, to better understand these afflictions. Gabriela's mom wants a natural birth, to start an affection bond with her daughter, to welcome with her husband this baby who will be born.
She starts the prenatal care, and soon the medical-hospital industry convinces her that the best thing for her is the C-section delivery. A highly deceiving, but very convincing argument, so much so that it produces the C-section culture, a culture that makes women believe that the "natural" birth should be the C-section, that the actual natural birth is harmful, dangerous, and painful. This generates shameful statistics in our country: ninety-three percent of births in private hospitals, for instance, in Rio de Janeiro, ninety-three percent are C-sections against 15-20 percent in developed countries.
This causes great harm to the kids, and makes us miss out on this moment of love, substituting it by a medical surgical act in which the woman is doped and immobilized. Of course [C-section] can be humanized and well-performed, but certainly it won't have the same benefits of a natural birth. Of course there are necessary C-sections.
For each one of the listed sins, we criticize the overdoing, what is unnecessary, what is a lie. The same thing happens with breast milk. This woman wants to breastfeed her daughter, but as she leaves the hospital, one of many pediatricians working there will say to her, "Look, you can use a bottle, a formula, in case the baby needs it or gets hungry.
" The woman goes home more insecure; at home, her grandmother or mother says, "You grew up drinking from the bottle, and you're alive and strong. The child is crying, your milk is weak. " In two months this child is weaned, and she misses out on the wonders that breast milk can provide.
This happens largely because of the industry. The industry is prohibited from advertising the formula to consumers, but it advertises it through the names given to the formulas: Premium, Expert Pro, Supreme. And the breast milk, poor thing, is not "pro", it i’s an amateur.
But it comes full of love, and it is infinitely superior to any of these formulas. But industries are advertising directly to the doctor, they turn the doctor into their marketer, convincing them of the nutritional qualities of the formula, saying that it is responsible for the baby's development, and sponsoring, offering awards, dinners, and conferences to them, sponsoring full medical societies, getting the pediatrician's attention, who, unconsciously, ends up being the major cause of weaning in Brazil. This way, we miss out on the benefits of breastfeeding and cause, through that first sin, which is the deprivation of natural birth and breastfeeding, serious health problems to children and moms, that will even reflect in adulthood, as science is now discovering that.
Gabriela grows up, her mom's maternity leave ends, she'll go to daycare, because Grandma cannot take care of her, and she will spend sometimes 6, 8, 10, 12 hours in an institution. When she gets home, her parents will be worn out from a long working day, traffic jams, and they'll spend little time with their daughter. And they still have work to do at home.
On weekends they go for a walk, and take the nanny, those who can afford one, after all no one has superpowers. And what happens? We missed out on what is most precious: spending time with our children.
We regret this so much when they reach adolescence. The child misses the contact with the most important people in their life. Interaction is what gives us intimacy, the ability to be together, love, the feeling of caring for someone, the feeling of knowing someone deeply, to feel at home with that person.
These are our precious children and we are missing out on this because of this terrible sin of outsourcing our children. Gabriela's parents have no time to cook, and have no money to pay for a maid, so they feed her with what media tells them to: frozen food, junk food, everything the supermarkets show in their bright shelves, and all of us end up substituting the traditional Brazilian food, which is wonderfully healthy, by food full of saturated fat, with huge amounts of salt and sugar, crispy on the outside, soft inside; all the weapons that industry, through highly developed food engineering, uses so children can be fully addicted to junk food, and thus, unable to eat healthy food. They can't do that.
It is not because they are fussy eaters. This leads to serious problems like obesity, diabetes, so common in childhood. And even if we want to and can give healthy food to our children, it is not so healthy, because it is full of pesticides.
We are world champion of pesticide consumption. This is the childhood poisoning sin, which also leads to serious problems. Gabriela goes to a fancy daycare, which has tablets for children as young as 4 months old.
We know this is highly negative for the development of a child. These kids have an absolutely explosive energy, they need to run, play, jump, be outdoors, and yet our urban life does not allow them to do so. People are afraid to let children go outside, so they stay at home, and then we need to offer permanent distraction, otherwise children get crazy, and make everyone around them crazy, too.
So these children spend nowadays, and this is statistics, 8 to 10 hours connected to their devices. Again, connecting and playing with a device is great, but not for 8 hours straight. Children no longer have the right to one moment of consciousness.
They are permanently distracted, and this is getting worse and worse. I remember when I used to travel by car with my kids and we played, we had an amazing time. Traveling by car with children is wonderful.
We used to play "Stop". Has anyone here played "Stop"? Countries with the letter B.
. . We played the character game; it was our family time, of laughter, things that stay in our memory, from our childhood.
We would look out the window and see the landscape, as a form of meditation. Yet, today, there's a DVD player and a tablet for each kid, otherwise there will be trouble in the car, right? There is such a thing, guys.
(Laughter) Even at times when the child needs awareness. . .
This is sold on Amazon, you can check it out: iPotty. (Laughter) That's the name of it, iPotty! And it comes with a cover to protect the tablet from getting dirty.
Even at times when the child most needs accurate awareness, this is what we offer: the lack of consciousness, absurd and compulsive distraction. And by confining our kids and preventing them from having moments of consciousness, moments of emptiness, boredom, that are essential in childhood. .
. because boredom and emptiness are the cradle of what's most important to us, creativity and imagination, so we are amputating them from our children with this confinement and permanent distraction sin. Gabriela watches four hours of TV a day.
She is massacred by advertising. She's taught more by advertisers than teachers, because she spends up to four hours in school, and more time watching TV. Americans were the record holders of this, but we have surpassed them because of our shorter school schedule.
On weekends, of course, she doesn't go to the playground. Her family goes for the classic program of Brazilian families, which is: Audience: Shopping Mall. Daniel Becker: Very well.
Where she will be even more massacred by advertising and by consumerism values. And that is coward advertising, an advertising which explores the child's inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, which explores her love for characters, causing her to fall in love with toxic products, expensive toys and brands brought about by this love, that infuse her with values such as obsessive consumerism, the overestimation of appearance, futility and much worse. This will end up in obesity, or even consumption of alcohol.
We know that beer in Brazil is a non-alcoholic drink, right? Advertising is totally allowed, always showing friendship as the background, and obviously, those in need of friendships are the teens. They are deeply affected by beer commercials and teenage alcoholism is growing alarmingly.
This is the childhood commodification and infantile consumerism sin. Gabriela's day is full of commitments. Her parents want her to be competitive, a very successful adult, and her schedule is full of commitments.
To relax from all this stress, they add a meditation class. (Laughter) But she could meditate in the playground, on a swing. What a wonderful thing!
Who has never meditated on a swing? We look at the sky, look at the ground, look at the sky. .
. (Laughter) There's no more beautiful meditation than this! But still, they'll spend money with another class.
And then she will be exposed to the kind of sexualization that our society offers, one that uses seven, eight-year-old kids to sell fashion products, sexualization based on male chauvinism, turning girls and women into sexual objects, the overvaluation of appearance, and worse, the dissociation of sexuality from love and affection. This is our way to spread eroticism, and this affects children directly, completely changing their minds when they are eight or ten years old. This is the sin of an early ending of childhood and early sexualization.
Gabriela's parents are afraid of her because they don't spend time with her. Then, instead of giving her limits, they put her up on a throne. She becomes the queen and is no longer a member of the family.
She decides their programs and menus. If things go wrong at school, they blame the school, and go talk to the teacher. She gets many presents, when what she needs is their presence.
And she realizes her parents have no authority. A three-year-old kid, who realizes that their parents have no authority, gets a little crazy and insecure. Kids need someone leading their lives.
This will generate anguish and symptoms. We know the importance of limits and of saying "no" is an essential way of showing the love that we need to give our children, and we're losing this ability. Instead, we are doing what Americans call "helicopter parenting".
We stand between our children's experience and the world, keeping them from experiencing life, and, therefore, they won't be able to develop mechanisms to deal with the frustration, pain, and difficulty the world will surely deliver to them later. This is the sin of enthronement and childhood overprotection. Well, by facing so many problems, this childhood will show symptoms.
The child will be rebellious, quarrelsome, sulky, will get sick, become overweight, do bad in school, will lack attention, be hyperactive. We need to do something about this. It’'s not possible to have children like that.
The same way we put poor children in jail, what is the solution we will find for these children who misbehave? Should we not analyze these problems and not think about this context? No.
Medicalization! We'll give them prescription drugs so they can behave well. This is called medicalization, and it is the worst of the sins.
Quino, Mafalda's creator, portrays this in a wonderful way. He tells the story of a city terribly polluted by a factory. People, feeling sick because of the soot, go to the doctor, who sees they are sick and prescribes them the medicine, people buy it at the drugstore, and then Quino shows us that, in fact, what the factory produces is precisely that medicine.
And that's what we're doing to our kids. Not only to kids, by the way; to adults too, shamefully. Medicalization is one of the most harmful phenomena today.
In the United States, 15% of children take prescription drugs. It's a competitive, individualistic society. Preschoolers are the fastest growing market for antidepressants.
We're reaching this point. And Ritalin, the drug for ADHD, sold 70,000 boxes in 1999. In 2010, it sold more than 2 million boxes.
This is not an epidemic disease, this is a massacre against childhood. We're labeling, standardizing, and preventing children from being themselves. And I'm sure that if any of these geniuses of mankind were at school today, they'd be just that: labeled, standardized, and we'd have amputated their geniality and we'd have lost all the wonderful things they gave us.
As we can see, medicalization doesn't work, we need better solutions and different paths. These problems are very complex, it's an endless cycle of sins and abundance feeding one another. But for any complex problem of humanity, as the philosopher used to say, there is always a simple, easy and invariably wrong solution.
. . It is obvious!
But I want to propose a simple solution for you. I want us to think about it. A TEDx-style solution.
I will certainly exceed my time, but that's okay, just a little. A solution that changes only two factors: time and space, nothing else. Regarding time, what can we do?
When we talk about sins, we talk about penance. Penance today means tithing in almost every church. Giving a part of the most precious thing we have to our childhood, to our children, who are our sacred.
What is the most precious today? Our most important capital? Time.
We are awake 17 hours a day, it means 1. 7 hours to devote to our children. One hundred minutes.
This means 1h40m a day, it's not too much, it's possible; we just have to prioritize. And if it can't be done on weekdays, we add it up for the weekends. We can have time to spend with our children.
Regarding space, I want to propose an exercise to you. We'll close our eyes for 15 seconds, I will not see you, but I'll ask for your trust. Close your eyes for about 15 seconds and imagine a healthy place, a healthy city or neighborhood, a place you would want your children to grow up in, because it has health, quality of life; a good place to live.
Visualize this place. How it would be. .
. Open your eyes and tell me if you fit into this statement. [Green, tree, park, forest, garden, tree-lined street, squares, open space.
] I'm sure most of you do. This shows a little bit of how important nature is to us. Nature is deeply associated with health and the human soul.
We know what makes us healthy. It's not doctors, hospitals, or medicine, but all of these factors, we know that. What we don't know - and I just had an interesting experience, I talked to Patricia when I handed in my presentation, she said, "Gee, but you talked about an amazing thing.
" I talked about converging health and sustainability. "I didn't know that all good I do for myself is good for nature and the environment as well. " Everything that's good for health is good for the environment and vice versa.
Riding a bike is good for the body and for the city, it reduces traffic jams and pollution. Public transportation is good for socializing time, it reduces stress and pollution. Eating organic food is good for the body, for the rivers, the land and animals.
Things always feedback positively, creating vicious circles. And the contact with nature itself, in an open space. What does it do?
Look, how wonderful! It moves us away from the screens, and gives us moments of consciousness, especially for children; it reduces consumerism and excessive materialism; it allows kids to play free, which, in turn, generates intelligence, humor, imagination, creativity; it generates loving interaction between families, it generates interaction among different children, who will get together and learn how to deal with each other, and it develops empathy; it promotes contact with air, the sun and trees, which provides physical, psychological and mental well-being; and it will reduce all childhood problems. This is scientific, it's not my saying, studies show a decrease in obesity, hyperactivity, aggressiveness, allergy, dysfunction, it improves immunity, socialization and education.
It is amazing to put kids in contact with nature. When I say to put them in contact with nature, I'm not talking about condos with a gourmet space, fitness rooms and now there will be a "green" space. No, we're talking about the "anti-condo.
" We're talking about jumping over the wall, going to the cities and embracing them, playing on the streets, occupying public spaces with games, with love, affection, and conviviality. There are many movements in Brazil promoting exactly this. And also civil society initiatives claiming public policies to facilitate the contact with public space and nature and to promote bike lanes, free events in these spaces, neighborhood afforestation, gardens in schools and in the city, public transportation to take us to these places with safety, accessible and well maintened squares.
All this, in fact, is called occupation of a city. And the word "occupy," formerly used for citizen resistance, today means occupying public spaces with joy, and mainly getting involved with the governance of cities. The governance of cities is what makes the difference between catastrophes, like that one that happened in São Paulo - this photo is from Billings' dam, a São Paulo's source of water, 30-40 years ago, and today - caused by poor governance, and cities that have quality of life, because they have participation and people require public agendas geared to the public interest, with sustainability, equity, transparency and accountability.
There are many movements starting to do this in Brazil, including Porto Alegre, and it's nice to take part in them. Finally, the same scientists announcing a terrible environmental crisis that's coming - and it'll come very soon, our children will be hit by it - they also say, with 97% of scientific consensus, that there are two ways to mitigate this crisis: reducing inequality, from the social point of view; and from the environmental perspective, doing everything we already know: acting for sustainability, reducing intake, recycling, changing the energy pattern, and taking kids outdoors, to parks, to the agora, for socializing, for empathy, we will learn to care for others and we'll reduce inequality. By putting kids in contact with nature, we will teach them to love it, because only by experiencing a freezing waterfall - and not by seeing it on YouTube - we'll learn to love this waterfall, and we'll defend it in the future, because we only defend what we love.
In a nutshell, this is our proposal: children, go outside now! Families, go outside now! Let's go to the city, let's occupy public spaces by playing, with games, with joy, participation.
And since we are talking about utopia, I'll say goodbye showing a sentence by Eduardo Galeano, who left us this year, unfortunately. He used to say that utopia is on the horizon. The closer I get to it, the farther it moves away.
I walk two steps, it takes two steps back. So, what is utopia for? Just to make us walk.
May it make us walk outside. Thank you.
