Global Content of Mental Culture of Childhood

All-Planetary Expanses of Childhood

The question of the global content of the mental culture of childhood is unusual for most researchers of the mental health of children, adolescents and young people, although psychiatric and psychological diagnostics and clinical practice in this area are totally oriented towards unification, the development of unified approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders, correction of psychological complications age development. A general view of the problem of global and ethnic culture simplifies it to the ratio of whole and part. Moreover, the medical consciousness tends to consider children’s mental manifestations of ethnic culture, similar to anatomical atavisms, as evidence of developmental anomalies rather than productive resources of resilience. In our opinion, clinical diagnosis should be based on understanding the ethnic diversity of individual cultures of child development.

In particular, for example, the problem of children’s cultural spaces was highlighted by Jirata Tadesse Jaleta in the study “Cultural spaces of young children: care, play and early childhood learning models among the Guji people of Ethiopia” [1], the relevance of which lies in the globalized approach to the individual uniqueness of the cultural context childhood The author of the study proves the importance of “applying to the knowledge of African indigenous peoples about the development of young children by discussing the cultural spaces of care, play and learning of young children among the Gujzi people of Ethiopia” [1].

The individualized rules of behavior and collective interaction highlighted in this study are fully correlated with the idea of J. Wall, which expresses the idea of global citizenship of children, although he himself calls such a term controversial in the article “Theorizing children’s global citizenship: reconstructionism and the politics of deep interdependence” [2]. According to J. Wall, global citizenship is a highly contested term that includes many competing neoliberal, cosmopolitan, and postcolonial frameworks. Much of this debate, however, assumes a hidden normative adultism, much like the traditional understanding of citizenship in nation-states.

J. Wall argues that examining children’s experiences through the lens of childhood or childhood studies opens up the possibility for more complex and profound theorizations of global citizenship involving everyone, both children and adults. In particular, it is argued that global citizenship is best understood as a politics of reconstruction based on the aesthetic practice of interdependent political creativity. The key lies in a deep, rather than superficial, understanding of global political interdependence as a response to the triple bind of children’s desired future: their struggle for self- development, overcoming normative exclusions, and the responsiveness of others” [2].

The general cultural and psychological context of the implementation of the rights of children and youth is revealed by J. Josefsson, J. Wall in the research work “Extended inclusion: theorizing global justice for children and youth” [3], where the authors justify the opinion that the modern experience of children and youth require rethinking global justice around a new concept of enhanced inclusion. The researchers present three case studies of globalization – child labor movements, child and youth migration, and youth organizations rallying around climate change. In each case, youth are simultaneously disempowered through their struggle with injustice, which gives them deep global interdependence.

J. Josefsson, J. Wallu also cite “new theoretical advances in global justice that better respond to the experiences of children and youth through the children’s concept of empowered inclusion of both children and other marginalized groups” [3]. At the same time, the implementation of the proposed ideas is possible not only thanks to the global power provided by the international association of children and youth. The most important indicator of the possibility of such a union is the mental health of the younger generation, the preservation of which is devoted to the special issue of the journal “Global Childhood Studies”, which opens with the article Coppock V. “Psychiatric Childhood” [4]. It made an important conclusion that “...diagnostic classification systems are unstable, constantly debated, reflecting the prevailing ideological, sociocultural and political conditions” [4]. We agree with this conclusion, based on our many years of clinical practice, which includes such diverse manifestations of ethnic culture of children of different nations that it gives us reason to doubt the idea of multiculturalism and multicultural environment as one of the myths of modern civilization.

Cultural Identity of Children and Youth

The projection of resistance of the future mental culture of a citizen of any country is the educational environment and the ethics of relationships in the process of obtaining an education in educational institutions. A special issue of the journal “Global Childhood Studies” is devoted to this problem, which opens with a special introductory comment “Contemporary ethical tension: a situational case of ethical tension when working with children and youth in an educational context” by A. McPherson, D. Forster and R. Buchanan [5]. In this context, the mentioned authors use the term “educational ethics” as a term to refer to a special field of applied ethics that covers the study of the ethical complexity of working with children and young people in various educational settings, such as schools, early childcare, digital spaces, universities, public places and research environments” [5]. The purpose of this special issue is to develop approaches that highlight contemporary sociocultural dimensions of ethical tension in school and educational contexts. These approaches are designed to form social skills and conditions for mastering the mental culture of relationships in children and youth, which in the social context is realized as the legal culture of a citizen. According to the authors, “this approach views ethical dilemmas as social processes that shape and are shaped by broader historical, political, economic, institutional, and cultural forces” [5]. We share this approach because it considers ethical dilemmas as socio-psychological processes that shape the ethical culture of a child and a young person, which in the wider historical, political, economic, institutional and cultural contexts of the future acquires the properties and meaning of individual self-preservation of one’s own cultural identity in the global the world.

A separate important problem that remains almost invisible in practice and insufficiently researched in theory is the psychology of perception and transformation of linguistic meanings for oneself in order to find and define one’s own individual identity. The article by K. S. Lindholm and A. Wickström “Cycle effects” related to the mental health of young people: how young people change the meaning of psychiatric concepts” is devoted to one of the traumatic dimensions of this problem [6]. The authors of this research article note: “We demonstrate how participants re-valued, devalued, and nuanced these psychiatric labels and thus turned them into cultural categories rather than diagnostic categories” [6].

In the same way, in the continuum “ethics of education - legal culture”, children and young people learn their own reflections in the linguistic marking of themselves. The terms of laws and legislative documents are perceived accordingly: they mean nothing to a child or teenager until they acquire an individually important emotional meaning related to self-identification. The authors indicate: “… an important difference to note here is that while the DSM expands anxiety and depression as psychiatric definitions of illness, young people separate these labels from pathology and apply them as cultural categories. In this sense, psychiatric labels cease to be categories of suffering and become cultural categories applicable to the ups and downs of life” [6].

The cultural and psychological context is also determined by young children’s reflections on their transnational childhood and migration experience, which were investigated by N. N. David and A. Kilderry, and the results of this work are presented in the work “History of family migration between generations” [7]. As the authors note, “the catalyst for the study was N.D.’s (at the time) 6-year- old daughter, who asked, ‘Mum, am I Australian?’ and “Am I more Australian than you?” [7]. The individual resistance of the child who asks such questions develops on the basis of belonging to a certain nationality and within the nationality to those definitions “when “alien” is “other” and there are clear discourses of non/belonging” [7].

Conclusions Embodied in Questions for Future Answers

Instead of the provisions that traditionally end scientific research, we present questions that need a prospective solution in the globalized world of the development of the mental culture of modern and future childhood. These issues, in our opinion, primarily include the following:

• What is the child’s conflict with the world? What is the world like in a child’s mind? Is conflict-free possible? What is the numerical expression of different age categories of childhood to the total number of people? What are the rights of the child: innate and acquired? What opportunities does the child have for obtaining his rights?
• What tools can be used to measure the cultural and psychological context of the child’s age-related rights? What are the prospects for their development? How reliable can measurements be on the Internet? Childhood on the Internet: representation of the child’s interests by adult legal entities or children’s participation? The world of the child on the Internet: what is predicted in the future?
• What are the dynamics of the growth of children’s rights and childhood as a period of human life recognized by world civilization? Are the rights of a child equal to the rights of an adult?
• What will be the answers of the future to the current generations of children and youth’s thirsty search for humanity, benevolence, patience, and mercy?