Desolate Childhoods: The Surrender of the Adult World – Notes from the Pandemic of SARS-CoV-2

Abstract

The weakening of the authority of the adult world is a phenomenon studied for decades. State intervention, whether in its political or technical facet, is no stranger to it. Individualization processes and the predominance of projects from the adult world over the child world also have a fundamental influence. We can point out that most children today live in solitude, without a principle of clear democratic authority on the part of their parents, who also do not feel comfortable placing limits on a technical childhood that they do not recognize. The chapter will basically deal with these topics as an essay, based on our research and university extension activities regarding the impacts of the pandemic in the family environment.

1. Introduction

The bibliographic review at the European and Latin American level places emphasis on the consequences of the pandemic on families and the isolation measures taken by various governments. We briefly mention increase in situations of intergenerational and gender violence; increase in psychiatric medicalization in children and adolescents; the dramatic situations experienced by the elderly population; difficulties in schooling and access to networks to monitor educational tasks, rigor of teleworking in the domestic space, lag in health care for various pathologies and medical problems not associated with COVID, etc. [1]. However, it is worth asking about the situation prior to the pandemic, the social base in which it has been installed and that forms both the starting point and the social potential to mitigate such impacts. This is what this chapter is about, and it does so in a specific way.

The authors are investigating the impacts of the pandemic at the family level, in the Childhood and Families Academic Area, of the Department of Social Work of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of the Republic—Montevideo. The project obtained funding from the Scientific Research Sector Commission and the University Extension Commission of the Faculty of Social Sciences. The research lasts from May 2022 to May 2024, while the Extension Internship Space, from November 2022 to March 2023. The activities of the latter have been developed between the months of November and December 2022, and they will end in March 2023. The reflections that ordered this chapter were provoked by the result of these last activities.

The purpose of the Extension Internship Space was to support, through extension actions, the lines of research linked to the impacts of the pandemic, in the daily life and the psycho-social experiences of children and adolescents in popular sectors of Montevideo.

Table 1 that follows briefly summarizes: 1—the instances of work with children and adolescents and their participants; 2—the institutions for the protection of children and adolescents in which they were developed.

Information on the activities carried out with Children and Adolescents (NNA)
Date	Applied techniques	Institutions and programs	Participants
24/11/2022	Plastic expression through drawings	Gurí Children’s Club of the NGO Vida y Educación	Thirteen children and one educator participated in the first instance
24/11/2022	Plastic expression through drawings	Gurí Children’s Club of the NGO Vida y Educación	Fourteen children and two educators participated in the second instance
7/12/2022	Plastic expression through drawings	Papryka Project of the Youth Center of NGO Pablo de Tarso.	Eight pre-adolescents, and adolescents participated together with the project coordinator.
7/12/2022	Plastic expression through drawings	Children’s Club and educators of the NGO Pablo de Tarso.	Thirteen children and two educators participated

Table 1.

Summary of the information on the extension internship space.

Source: Self-made.

Before beginning with a brief description of the information collected in the instances with children and adolescents, it is convenient to distinguish the organizations where work was done. The activities were carried out in two civil associations in Montevideo. First, the Gurí Children’s Club, which belongs to Vida y Educación and is located in the Manga neighborhood. Vida y Educación has among its objectives the development of educational activities that promote the defense of the rights of children and adolescents. On the other hand, the Youth Center and the Papryka projects of the NGO Pablo de Tarso are located in the Borro neighborhood. The NGO Pablo de Tarso is a civil association managed by the Pablo de Tarso Foundation that works with children, adolescents and families of Borough D seeking to promote social inclusion and the construction of full citizenship.

It should be noted that such institutions are located and address the problems of popular neighborhoods in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. These neighborhoods are inhabited by unskilled wage workers, with unstable occupations, without legal protection. The houses are built by low quality or light materials. In general, they are neighborhoods that bring together the working class with lower incomes and the so-called precarious settlements (a group of light material constructions, without access to basic services). The most pressing social problems are unemployment, low income, access to housing and public services, difficulties to continue educational trajectories, etc.

This does not mean that the difficulties that we will talk about throughout the chapter are proper or ontologically attributable to the popular sectors. We reiterate, the results obtained were the ones that instigated our reflections on the plots of civilizing processes that allow us to speak today of the defenselessness of childhood and adolescence at a general level, in the various social classes. The cited bibliography also points this out.

A work proposal was recommended to each group that sought to promote the opinions and expressions of the participants, mainly on three fundamental axes: impacts of the pandemic on the link between the adult world and the child/adolescent world, and links between peers and educational trajectories during the pandemic. The activities were based on projective techniques. Operationally, we opted for techniques supported by the graphic production of the participants, which reflect, by definition and nature, as we will explain later, their perceptions and personality.

From this epistemic position, a construction of meanings and constructed significations [2] was elaborated together with the children who are the agonists and protagonists of the problem we are addressing. For this, the technique used was oriented to return the word to children and adolescents who, in general, do not have it. An attempt was made to reveal what they tell us, with their representations, their circuits, their transits through public and domestic physical spaces.

This technique is associated with the Freudian concept of projection. At first, Freud defines projection as a defense mechanism underlying paranoid problems. That is, the concept of projection was associated with the clinic of psychological pathologies [3, 4]. Subsequently, Freud himself expanded this concept, making it independent of its pathological character and approaching it as a “placing” outside unconscious elements associated with the various behaviors of the subject even in “normal” situations. In tune with this, this projective technique can be understood, in a very broad way, as tools sensitive to unconscious aspects of all human behavior [5].

When applying this technique, the playful aspects associated with her have also been assessed. This instrument makes it possible to analyze painful aspects through a necessary mediation, such as graphic products. We obviously recognize that distances must be saved with the elaborations of Freud [4] and Winnicott [5] regarding play in clinical settings. That is to say, this technique is not understood as transitional objects, and it is only indicated that in a certain way they are based on a “game”—drawing—that allows a more “mild” handling of what is painful. The technique made available would play the role of signifiers from which the children and adolescent, in this case, allude to meanings associated with the problem in question [2, 3, 4, 5].

To this way of understanding projective techniques was added the consideration of the group space as a sort of mediating zone between subjectivity and objectivity, between a painful reality and the capacity to symbolize it. We are not talking about a space of transition between the original experiences of the mother or father and what is real. We speak of the group as a zone between the conscious and the unconscious, between the material and symbolic and between the individual and the collective.

Perhaps Winnicott [6] is the author who allows these last two aspects to be brought together. If for the author the game is always a creative, liberating and essentially symbolic activity, it is also a space different from the external world and the internal world. The author defines a line of accumulation or growth: “there is a development that goes from the transitional phenomena to the game, from it to the shared game and from it to cultural experiences” (p. 76). In this sense, an attempt was made to reconcile the individual “game” with the group spaces for reflection, trying to feed children and young people other ways of positioning themselves before their situation.

Let us see below in a synthetic way, the results obtained and the theoretical elaborations that they have generated for us. Our reflections have as a central concern to indicate that, more than talking about the pandemic and its impacts, it developed at a certain historical moment, previously installed. We should not only talk about the effects of the pandemic. Instead, we should talk about what still needed to be done at the moment it abruptly interrupted our lives. Not everything is a pandemic, but it is the dialectical tension between the pandemic and the societal context in which it was installed.

Thinking ex nihilo about a phenomenon like the pandemic, out of nowhere and with nothing to generate it, is making a big mistake in perspective. That is why we will not place the emphasis on data on the pandemic, which is extremely widespread today, but rather on previous family processes that caused children and adolescents to assume the impact of the pandemic alone, in most cases. In Foucault’s words, we try to make “a history of the present,” genealogically speaking, “an unspeakable search for the beginnings,” in this case, for the desolation of childhood [7].

2. Desolate childhoods and adolescences

2.1 About the results achieved

In a synthetic way, we will gather in three items the results produced by a primary interpretation of the empirical material collected.

The results deserve a first observation. The space of these children and adolescents is a strictly domestic, endogamous space, associated with its natural course within the framework of the house. Beyond the differences between the genders, we could indicate a very marked tendency toward domesticity in children and adolescents of both sexes, without any extension to the already known or daily community or neighborhood. It should be noted that in Uruguay the government did not take measures to confine the population, but only a call for responsible freedom, regarding the care of oneself and others. The only more extreme measure was the suspension of classes throughout the educational system, going on to teach them under a virtual regime. The drawings or narrations do not incorporate activities with friends (except through phone calls in some cases).

The low density of their bonding networks, internal or external to the family, shows us that we find children and adolescents alone, in situations of anguish and isolation, denoting a very elementary family life. For example, the drawings do not represent family members, only children and adolescents with their siblings. In the cases in which the adult world is drawn, it is in its condition as a patient or sick person: in bed, getting vaccinated, etc. There are no drawings in which the family is carrying out common activities or adults carrying out habitual tasks such as cooking, going to or coming from work. This absence of the adult world in the drawings made and the lack of common activities among the various members of the family indicates phenomena that, we believe, go beyond the pandemic. In a way, the limits between the adult and child world are blurred: The few adults that appear are patient, like children. Except in one case where the drawn adult appears armed and inside the house itself, which is explained by the child in the dialog held. This violent world is also observed in other drawings, where weapons and war transport appear.

Secondly, the works mark a clear logic of power, of domination, where the dominant and masculine social order is so deeply entrenched that it requires no justification, it imposes itself as self-evident and is taken as “natural.” This is expressed in the constant presence of doctors or vaccinators, all of them men, in the family space itself. This social order, where the public world that appears is of a sanitary and masculine nature, is achieved thanks to the almost perfect and immediate agreement obtained from social structures such as the social organization of space and time and the sexual division of labor, and on the other hand, of cognitive structures inscribed in bodies and minds. Field and habitus reinforce the patriarchal and adult-centric system. In the words of Bourdieu [8] “history made institution” and “history made flesh.” These stereotypes attributed to each sex crystallize in a very radical way in the identities of these children and adolescents.

Finally, we have analyzed the spatial configuration of the drawings where we can highlight figure and background, which are in relation to container and content. The sun, or clouds, or birds do not appear in these drawings. Just big viruses or lots of little ones. Neither do other living beings appear around the participants (except in some cases siblings, fathers as patients and male health personnel).

Neither do the houses rest on the ground. The houses are drawn in the air, without foundations that root them and contain them. The setting is almost empty of content: Isolated houses, very little furniture and the settings are decontextualized, there are no elements that account for the time of day, the ground is not drawn below the houses or the people, nor is the sky above, as we already said. It is practically a childish scenario, no ground, no sky, no time, no space. It would seem that these children and adolescents have a lack of support, elements that frame or contain them. They appear located in blurred spatial-temporal coordinates, a kind of “social limbo.” Their houses are like any typical house from any place, at any time, in a popular neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Montevideo or Santiago. The vital-nutritional elements that surround these childhoods and adolescences are almost imperceptible, as if they traveled through circuits of low social intensity and therefore of low vital intensity. The sun/symbol does not exist. Perhaps because of not waiting for the future to bring different events than today. Time passes and daily life is not invested with relevant and significant events, except for the outbreak of the pandemic: face masks, vaccines, doctors and nurses and many viruses. A sanitary and masculine world faced by children without clear adult references.

It should be noted that some adolescents did not resort to drawing but to sequencing the activities carried out throughout the day. This arrangement under his pandemic life reinforces what has been said: Activities shared with adults do not appear. In the case of girls, there are domestic and care activities, aspects in which the pandemic has had a strong impact in Latin America, burdening the shoulders of women of various age groups with this type of task, underlining the sexual division of labor, already mentioned above.

In this panorama of retreat from the adult world expressed by these children and adolescents, we believe that three phenomena or three civilizing processes come together that we will consider separately for the sole purpose of exposition. In this way, we avoid the stigmatization of adults by placing them as sons and daughters of their time. It should be noted that such processes are also developed in a historical context characterized by the highest historical levels of concentration of wealth, increased poverty and loss of wages according to the Picketty report [9]. All this before the pandemic context, which what it has done is catalyze these structural and cultural processes already installed for decades: the cyclical crises of capitalism and the dilution of the borders between adults and children.

2.2 Investigating Oedipus and his present: the withdrawal of the father state

What we want to point out, basically given the length of the article, is where the legality of paternity/maternity is anchored in the present, in a context of substantive changes such as those that can be observed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Will such paternity and maternity and their legality be up to sustaining the world of children and adolescents affected by the pandemic? Without intending to exhaust the subject, we bring to this dialog Tuber [10] who criticizes the Lacanian constructions regarding the name-of-the-father saying:

Thus, we have on the one hand the sublime father, the great man, the peacemaker and on the other, the father who demands blind obedience to his authority and an unquestionable absolute belief. Consequently, the paternal role cannot transmit only the principle of reason, without also bringing cruelty and irrationality. ([10], p.78).

This conception of the symbolic father is related to a context in which man symbolically appropriated the maternal origin of life. The Father of Oedipus [4] is the real bearer of the prohibition that prevents the union with the incestuous object [11] and that will return as a symbolic authority later in “Totem and Taboo” [12]. This father is not the third party at stake, the one that prevents the union with the incestuous object; on the contrary, it is his murder that prevents the symbolic union with the mother, as an object of desire. And that collective murder should have happened to go from the animal state to a social state, culturally integrated. While in the myth of Oedipus someone kills the father in an exceptional way, in Totem and Taboo we all did it, the Horde did it and that crime shared by all plays the role of a common cultural base: The Father becomes a symbol. This father coexists with the father jouissance, alive and sexual and the dead father and interdicting symbol [11, 12].

Later, in “Moses and the monotheistic religion” [13], both figures are synthesized in Moses, the man who, sweeping away superstitions, introduced monotheism and, if you like, the idea of ​​a world governed by a single rational system. But this Moses lives with the figure of a furious and vengeful Moses if his people betray him. This vengeful God is not the Father Jouissance, but the one who introduces the prohibition of incest, the norm, the cultural and expels all jouissance or sexualization.

The Father of “Moses and monotheistic religions” is not the father of “Totem and Taboo” who imposed the prohibition knowing jouissance, but this Father prohibits without knowing it and with fury [11, 12, 13].

The modern bourgeois family, by unifying within its bosom the two paternal functions (object of identification and, on the other hand, subject of capital authority, that is, cutting function and nurturing function), has generated not only what some call a “crisis of Oedipus,” but also a crisis of investiture of authority figures [11]. This historical process that Freud works on is historically associated with paternity and maternity in which the maternal origin of life has been expropriated by the father, from patrilineal lineage. In addition, it is clear that an affectionate, nurturing mother and a father who orders and sets limits reproduces the sexual division of industrial labor and the “spheres” of production and reproduction.

Although we do not have answers, we must think about how the nutritional and cutting functions are developed today, given the major changes observed at the family level. There will always be someone in the family context who performs or complements them. More than the presence of one or the other parent, beyond their sexual identities, it is important that the function is fulfilled, but the truth is that the conditions for the exercise of these paternity and maternity duties must be thought from another perspective. In the general historical context of the loss of investiture of adult figures, it is especially the figure of the interdicting father that is in the process of withdrawal, with its diffuse limits [11].

What we want to invoke is that various authors for decades have questioned the validity of the Oedipus complex as a structuring element of the subject and/or pathology [14]. The advancement of women’s rights, the different ways of being family, the diversity of cultural patterns to those that Freud observed, must be recognized and included in the analysis of the validity of the oedipal triad. Heritier [15] says that what is truly prohibited would be the contact of bodies and the transmission of flows from one body to another. In the tragedy, the Chorus does not tell Oedipus that he had a sexual relationship with his mother, but rather that he found his father in the womb. This is the unthinkable. If the limit disappears, we enter the terrain of the indiscriminate. And it is precisely in the field of sexuality and sexual relations and kinship, where the difference between the sexes and generations acquires greater relevance. Also in the paternal and maternal functions, due to the place they occupy in the construction of the human psyche, since when the barriers between the different and the identical are erased, there is a risk of falling into the indiscriminate, the unrepresentable.

What effects will all these changes have on future generations? We do not know yet, but perhaps it is a good indicator the greater presence of adolescents and young people with difficulties in the construction of a consolidated self or identity center. But these transformations, this return of the Father of the Horde, of a certain lack of differentiation between the adult and child world, could be speaking as much of an adulthood that denies one of its almost historical psychic conditions and demands, as of unrealized childhoods and adolescences.

Just as the Interdicted Father withdraws before the return of the Father of the Horde, the Welfare State withdraws, giving way to a light and distant state, as we will see later.

2.3 The disappearance of childhood

If paternity and maternity must be reread in this social context, so must childhood. Neil Postman, an Australian sociologist, who has studied the ways in which technology impacts society, has a suggested book entitled The Disappearance of Childhood [16].

The central thesis of the work brings together three elements: the appearance and dissemination of TV, the collapse of the differentiation of information (adulthood and childhood) and the relativization of the adult and childhood categories.

Inescapable this author for our reflections. What the author maintains is that the lack of differentiation of information for adults and children, which TV shows indiscriminately to the adult world as well as to the children’s world, would cause less distance between adults and children, or, in other words, the difference between them would begin to blur. We must not forget that Postman writes what he writes when TV was the quintessential mass medium in the USA.

In other of his works he tells us:

In each tool there is inscribed an ideological tendency, a predisposition to build the world in one way and not another, to value one thing more than another, to develop a sense or an ability or an attitude more than others ([17], p. 26).

Adding: This is how media technology works. A new technology does not add or take away anything. It changes everything ([17], p. 31).

But what relationship does the effect of TV have on the relationship between adults and children? For some authors, apart from Postman, TV blurs the line between adults and children. It is that TV does not require much instruction to be handled, the information it provides is simplified and does not discriminate against the audience. That is why the author indicates: “Without secrets, of course, there is nothing that can be called childhood” ([16], p. 80).

TV reveals secrets, children access issues previously reserved only for adults and TV makes public what was private [16]. This brings an unthinkable consequence in its repercussions: “The idea of ​​shame is diluted and demystified” ([16], p. 85). But this does not mean that childhood is a “without shame” childhood; on the contrary, it means that it is a childhood that has not been able to build relationships of authority with adults [16].

Television forces the entire culture to “come out of the closet.” In its desire to find new and sensational information to retain its audience, TV has to touch all the existing taboos within the culture—incest, divorce, promiscuity, corruption, adultery, sadism, masochism—one of them is now no more. Than a subject for a television show. And, of course, in this process, each of them loses their role as a secret that belongs exclusively to adults ([16], p. 93).

The author goes on to point out that, by using material from the adult world indiscriminately, TV is projecting a type of person that is completely new. We could call this person “the adult child.” TV promotes as something desirable many of the attitudes that we usually associate with childhood. For example, an excessive need for immediate gratification, a lack of concern for the consequences, an almost promiscuous concern for consumerism, the author points out. Or the idea of ​​eternal youth now facilitated by various cosmetic and surgical devices.

If you can conceive what it means to be an adult, you can conceive what it means to be a child. In any case, whatever description one wants to give this transformation that is taking place, it is quite clear that the behavior, attitudes, desires and even the physical appearance of adults and children are becoming less and less distinguishable ([16], p. 88).

If we say boy or girl, we almost immediately associate the future, an idea of ​​the future. In communication terms, the author tells us that children are messages that we send to the future, living messages. But TV does not give a sense of history, past or future, it is eminently present. The author borders on cruelty when telling us that the message that TV can convey is that children do not matter, if they are exposed to the same sexual arousal, to the same consumerism as the adult world.

This leads us hand in hand to a fourth process that has crossed Western societies in the twentieth century and that has placed individualization processes and the exaltation of adult life projects as a form of biographical construction at the center of the scene. Successful.

2.4 The fading of the structures and the staging of risk management

Since the 1980s are observed, there has been a marked sociopolitical tendency to individualize social problems and understand them in terms of individual “disabilities” and failed acts of the self, when it comes to socializing or entering the market in one way or another. Poverty, understood as individual traits or attributes, is already a characteristic assumption of social policies, not only in Uruguay but in the region. It must be noted, then, that the call to build reflexive biographies or narratives of the self has become an emblematic feature of late capitalism.

We are talking about a supposed sovereignty of the subjects, who, with more options at their disposal in the various social spheres, could choose between different “opportunities.” At the same time, they will be held accountable for the decisions they make. The lifestyle is thus understood as a “project,” based on a supposed freedom and individual conscience. The contemporary subject is understood as clearly reflective, supposedly informed and rational when making their decisions [18, 19, 20].

The Theory of Reflexive Modernization, led by Beck, is also built by Giddens [18] who broadly shares the following diagnosis: In the face of the crisis of traditional identity models, the constitution of the self becomes a personal reflective project. It is the individual who has to interpret his own past, justify his options, choose how to be and how to act, in order to reflexively build his own identity, in a narrative that unifies the experience and provides coherence to the self. This open nature of identity would open up new possibilities of autonomy for individuals and would democratize, according to the author, social relations.

Scott Lash [18], from the USA, for his part, completes the map of the main voices in the debate. In his proposal, in contemporary society, more than the preeminence of the actor over the structure, new structural conditions of reflexivity are noticed, which result in a complex dialectic between both instances. In this way, reflexivity is a relational concept that articulates two simultaneous meanings: On the one hand, it is the achievement of a greater independence of the subject with respect to tradition and ferreous social formations, and on the other, the constant demand for self-definition that is it presents to the subject once the classical sources that organize the social map have collapsed.

Unlike his theoretical companions, Lash [18] does believe in the validity of class polarization, although now the conflict would move from the place that the subject occupies in the work, family and political structure, to the question of the possibilities of access and the position occupied in the global structures of information and communication, given that today the capacities for the processing of the goods of reflexive production are acquired in replacement of the traditional social structures. Altered then, the canonical principle of accumulation appears a new class of excluded, who constitute what the author calls the” losers of reflexivity,” that is, “those who remain outside the limits of the informational society.”

From a critical perspective regarding these authors, Bauman [21] recalls that initially work was the main tool for building one’s own destiny. And, once chosen, the social identity accompanied the individual forever. However, the motto of the new times is flexibility. The author focuses on the term flexibility because he considers that whatever identity is sought and desired, it must have the gift of flexibility, and it is necessary that it can be changed in the short term. That is to say, the identities of late modernity are temporary and ephemeral for Bauman and their construction requires consumption. And in this sense it indicates: “the paths to reach one’s own identity, to occupy a place in human society and to live a life that is recognized as significant require daily visits to the market” ([22], p. 49).

This individualizing tendency, which advocates biographical resolutions to structural problems, impregnates the conception of poverty of the current social protection systems in our country. And it places a successful challenge on the middle and wealthy classes, with a clear emphasis on the vital projects of adults regardless of the responsibilities regarding the world of children and adolescents. At least this can be derived from reading the book Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies by A. Giddens [23].

The centrality of individual success, the understanding of the family as a network of individual adult projects, the biographization of structural social processes, place major responsibilities in the adult world, which could be interpreted as a change of course at the time. If the work, the directed and cumulative labor trajectory, the virtual absence of uncertainties, the modern, monolithic educational systems, in short, an “institutional program” of modernity that began to collapse, it is important to recognize the impacts of such transformations on the adult world. Adult world required to demonstrate its success in the construction of a healthy and rational biography. What spare time does the adult world, pressured by said demands, has to listen, care and be of emotional support for children and adolescents nowadays? [24].

3. Conclusions

Taking items 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4 as a starting point, we have tried to analyze some of the transformations experienced in the subjectivities of adults, children and adolescents. In these conclusions, we will try to close the items developed by trying to build a continuum of adult and non-adult subjectivities with the understanding that the adult’s actions influence what a child or adolescent is like, since the adult is an important figure of authority and affection.

The challenges for parenthood in the twenty-first century can be summed up in the blurring of the adult that has consequences, not unique, in the new ways of being a child or adolescent. We have seen how, in item 2.2, we have questioned the psychological concept of adult that is traditionally handled.

This traditional psychological concept would seem to lose its legality once the Welfare State withdrew (item 2.3), demonstrating the links between the psychological and the economic, political and cultural aspects of the time. This mutation of the ways of being an adult and, therefore, of being a child, are the plot that allows us to understand the difficulties and challenges that fathers and mothers assume in the exercise of their function.

Functions that must be developed in the face of the new ways of being a child: being an adult child. In the continuum that we intend to synthesize, we will see how the context becomes a text in adolescent and child manifestations and how, in turn, this text is what allows, mistakenly or not, to find a place in this highly individualized society. It will bring to mind the corner where we grew up and the memories of our parents and grandparents. In this journey, we will discover resonances, either pleasant or unpleasant, that lead us to consider how we position ourselves as adults and parents.

In the first link of this continuum, we find the nineteenth century model of being an adult, marked by the incipient development of capitalism and the principle of authority (political, religious, by generation and gender). Capitalist development implied the domination of impulses (including sexual ones), the subordination of women to men and the subordination of children and adolescents to family power. We cannot leave aside the medical power that, in an organic alliance with the woman-mother, allowed home control of hygiene and educational principles, which were instilled in children and adolescents. Belonging to a social class implies having ways of being and acting; religion form of thinking and the incipient democratic life the principle of meritocracy.

Children and adolescents were something different from the adult world, who, based on the principle of authority, were transformed into beings to be governed, educated under a series of adult-centric devices. The adult’s gaze was imposed, and the child’s and adolescent’s voice were not heard. The figure of the Father of the Horde (item 2.2) is timely. On today’s patriarchal societies, the feminine, the childish, the adolescents became beings to be governed. As an example, it should be noted that the concept of youth appears in this period of the beginning of capitalism, which in Latin America can be located in the nineteenth century. The expression youth was associated in the first place with the young worker, who was part of the ranks of the proletariat and for whom the world of education was foreign to him. Youth was associated with a certain social “dangerousness.”

According to what was expressed and from the various lines of subordination, affection was not frequently expressed, and when it was, it was done harshly. This nineteenth century model gives rise to other ways of being in the twentieth century. Century of life in strengthened democracies; of the rights of the individual and citizen; of humanized capitalism under the Welfare State. Century of the revolution of the rights of women and children and adolescents. Century in which they were considered subjects of rights and political subjects. Also, under the Parsonian model, the democratic school and family were the institutions that generated childhood and adolescence.

It is a new period, the three decades after the World War II, the decades of victorious capitalism and cushioned by the interclass pacts financed by the Welfare State. In this period, the school and the family were the institutions that created participating childhoods and adolescences, educated with new pedagogical forms that placed the child as the starting point and center of educational action. On the other hand, the families were democratized although the imputed gender roles still persisted.

The Father Legislator, who fulfills the court function and makes the Law enter the family nucleus, is the father of the first decades of this twentieth century. The social role of women was modified, demonstrating the advances in her rights, but within the family, the nurturing and affective function was what she sustained. With fathers and mothers with clear family locations and with an organic alliance, now between family and school, childhood and adolescence continued to be viewed from an adult-centric perspective.

These last three decades of well-being have allowed adults to plan their lives and their families based on certainties, in full-employment societies. With certainties and with institutions that give meaning (unions, companies, churches, universities, etc.), transforming the world into something known and safe guided by protective states, as we pointed out in item 2.4. Starting in 1973, from the crisis of the global accumulation pattern of capitalism, the so-called late capitalism was installed, or, from another perspective, the moment of globalization arrived.

In this Second Modernization, according to the Reflexive Modernization theorists, with the opening and mobility of the National States, with a strong weakening of traditional industrialization and with the highest indicators of poverty and concentration of wealth never seen before, fathers and mothers had to face uncertainty, that is, uncertainty in their job projections, in their salary indexes and in the access to goods and services. Its future was no longer assured, the Parent State had collapsed, and the figure of a weak and outsourced state was emerging. How to educate your children for an uncertain future? Did he reach the ideal of a university son? Was it enough now to think of sexual identity as something binary? Could they continue with the dream of a home of their own? How to take charge of his own adulthood, whose parameters were no longer those of the decades of well-being?

On the other hand, how to be a child or adolescent in a family that has changed and attending an educational system that still looks to the past? Family and School were institutions that began to present problems to generate childhoods and adolescences in an uncertain and hostile world. Beyond the progress in the rights of women, children and infancy, family and school began to be weak entities to comply with a socialization process appropriate to the new era.

The disagreement between an adult world worried about uncertainty, including that of one’s own love ties, concerned about building a biography that gives pleasure and a world of children and adolescents facing screens, is one of the biggest challenges for being parents today. The loneliness of children and adolescents, as we have seen in the empirical data that we have brought to the beginning of the chapter, the excessive medicalization for their anxiety, insecurities and loneliness and the pathologies generated by the difficulties in the construction of a consolidated self are some of the problems that childhoods and adolescences place today in the adult world.

For its part, it would seem that the adult world gives up its condition by not taking charge and sustaining the maturation process of infants and by not taking charge of the limits that it must impose. The child is treated as an adult. He is transformed into a consumer to obtain an ephemeral satisfaction for his needs. On the other hand, the advent of new communication technologies has transformed childhood and adolescence into consumers, too, of new realities. As we have said before, when the “secret” is erased and the child accesses what corresponds only to the adult world, the borders between both worlds are diluted.

Adults in crisis and uncertainty, childhoods and adolescents alone, those of whom have winded up without clear guidelines and have transformed into compulsive consumers and the object of medicalization, which raises multiple questions that go beyond the limits of this chapter. But what we are sure of is that the adult of the second half of the twentieth century and the twenty-first is an insecure adult. The process of high technification of parental functions, under the Welfare State, is not unrelated to this.

As we have already analyzed in item 2.3, the adult dependent on technical opinion to exercise her paternity is the product of the good intentions of the Welfare State, its unexpected result. The weakening of parental authority is an element to take into account when analyzing how to be parents in the twenty-first century. C. Lasch [25] comes to our aid again in a text in which he analyzes American culture after three decades of well-being, post-World War II.

The author analyzes various processes. It indicates that the last hundred years of family crisis, this is, the passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, have ended with family authority. But the author does not speak of a family crisis in conservative terms, although some believe so. Family crisis in terms of once more state interference in family affairs. In such a way that parental and maternal functions underwent a high process of technification, among other things thanks to the action of the care professions and other knowledge.

The precariousness of paternal and maternal authority has placed the adult world in a difficult situation when it comes to setting limits or transmitting values ​​or visions of the world. The adult world is somehow infantilized before the state and professional authority, in a situation of dependency and subordination [26].

The author, with some pessimism, makes a description of American society from a psychological perspective. Beyond the cultural specificity, his ideas can make us think about the national and regional reality.

When talking about narcissism in that time period, he does not put selfishness in the first place. Instead, it creates dependence on others to found and sustain our self-esteem and our judgments as a defining feature.

Narciso drowns in his own reflection, without ever understanding that this is just a reflection. The essence of the story is not that Narciso falls in love with himself, but that he does not recognize his own reflection because he lacks any notion of a difference between himself and his environment ([25], p. 289).

This narcissistic perspective allows us to understand the exposure of and to the mass media, the importance given to youth, to the present and its enjoyment, the various new age techniques that teach it, to the detriment of the intimate, the secret, the “academic education “and of history and its meanings.

Narcissism is a metaphor for the current human condition. As Erich Fromm indicated, beyond his psychoanalytic notion, one must also speak of narcissism as vanity, admiration, satisfaction, that is, as individualism asocial, oblivious to any expression of cooperation, kindness and cooperative participation.

If we unite this narcissism as a metaphor for the adult human condition and we add the figure of the adult child and child adult Postman [16], it is worth asking: Who sets limits, healthy authority, informs traditions, etc.? [24]. Considering the data we were based on, we ask ourselves, who takes care of the adult child whom has lived throughout the pandemic as best as they could?

We are thinking about something that we call, provisionally today, the surrender of the adult world. Adulthood perhaps today indicates the dose of claudication: of authority, of placing limits on the little one, of saying no and of carrying out activities that adults historically did. And do they also give up on the nutritional and cutting functions? Up to some point, yes, and it takes just for us to take a look back into our introduction to see how the children and adolescents do not draw their parents or if they do, they portray them as sick or ill. If such functions are weakened, the path could lead us to the Horde, to the undifferentiated and to a world where the incest taboo is generally abolished. The raise in cases of child sex abuse is an indicator of what we stated above. It is that the child adult may have forgotten what it means to be an adult. But the one who cannot give up is the adult child, since he has not even known childhood when he is subjected to the pressures and perversions of us, supposedly conscious adults [24].

In this panorama that we designed we have placed some of the challenges that parents face in this twenty-first century. Under this period diagnosis, sustaining in the post-pandemic picture would still be seem to be a debt owed and of life.

Acknowledgments

We express our gratitude to the Sectoral Commission for Scientific Research and the Extension Commission of the Faculty of Social Sciences, for the financing and recognition, both from the University of the Republic, Montevideo, Uruguay.