Children are watching us

Andrea Monda

How “important it is to listen, for we need to realize that young children understand, remember and speak to us. And with their looks and their silences, too, they speak to us. So let us listen to them!”, Pope Francis urged during the International Summit on Children’s Rights, an appeal he repeated in his final greeting in the afternoon, when he said, “Father Faltas used a word, a phrase that I like very much: ‘The children are watching us’. It was also the title of a famous film. Children are watching us: they are watching us to see how we move forward in life”.

Pope Francis was referring to a 1943 film by Vittorio De Sica, titled “The Children Are Watching Us”, which reveals a simple and great truth: they watch us, they observe us. And since what Flannery O’Connor said is true — that people become what they see — the life performance that adults are capable of setting up before the eyes of their children plays a fundamental role in their lives. Hence the theme of the great responsibility that rests on parents’ shoulders.

It is worth adding that gradually, as people grow up, they find that surprises are always around the corner in life and that what one believed a short time before must continuously be challenged and often overturned. This “overturning” indicates that life’s paradoxical nature is a characteristic of life itself. All of humanity as it grows in its journey in this strange place we call world, has understood the paradox that is hidden within childhood: that those who seem to be “minors” are in fact the true grown-ups, that children are not the “little” ones but rather the true “great ones”, not the weakest but the strongest, not the least important but the most precious — in a nutshell that the “last shall be the first”. Moreover — and this sounds even more scandalous — children are more intelligent. At least this is what Alexandre Dumas believed when he firmly stated, “How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it”.

There is no doubt that the great turning point in human history, the one that grasped the paradox of the condition of children, came about with the start of Christianity and with the God-made-child, who cried in a cold grotto, tended by his young mother. That child, who became an adult and a teacher, proposed to the world of adults that children are the example to follow in order to enter into full life, into the Kingdom of Heaven, to the point of exclaiming all his joy in the famous “Cry of Exaltation”, because the Father “hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes” (Matthew 11:25). This further increases the world of adults’ level of responsibility towards children, who are watching us and are our concern.