What children need, we all need - Condensed from the book: Escape from childhood
"A Child's world." "To experience childhood." "To be allowed to be a child." Such words seem to say that childhood is a time and an experience very different from the rest of life and that it is the best part of our lives. It is not, and no one know it better than children. Children want to grow up. They want, part of the time, to be around the kind of adults who like being grownup and who think growing up as an exploration and adventure, not the process of being chased out of some garden of Eden. They do not want to hear older people say, as many often do, "These are the best years of your life." What could be more discouraging? For they are going to grow up, whether they want to or not. What they want to hear from older people is the kind of message my best friend sent me on my thirteenth birthday: "The best is yet to come." He was right, it was, and I still feel that way.
"To be allowed to experience childhood," means being allowed to do some things and being spared - or forbidden - having to do others. It means adults will decide, without often or even asking children what they think, that some experiences are good for children while others are not. It means for a child that adults are all the time deciding what is best for you and then letting or making you do it. But instead of trying to make sure that all children get only those experience we think are good for them I would rather make available to children, as to everyone else, the widest possible range of experiences (except those that hurt others) and let them choose those they like best.
If we want children to grow not just in age, seize and strength, but in understanding, awareness, kindness, confidence, competence and joy, then they need access to experiences that will build these qualities. And they need the right to shun and flee experiences that do the opposite, experiences all too common in the lives of most children - the experience of terror, of humiliation, of contempt, of endless anxiety, of deception, of lack of thrust, of being denied choice, of being pushed around, of having their lives filled with dull and pointless and repeated drudgery. But we all need this, so much that the lack of it is making us sick.
We all have a right to feel that we are not just what other people, even experts, say we are - not just this race, or color, or occupation, or income level, or personality profile - but that there is an essence that is much larger, more unknowable, and more important. And it is a delusion to believe that even if this right is denied to adults it may somehow be given to children, that they have a right to a dignity and identity where no one else has.
source: Article 'What children need, we all need'; Condensed from Escape From Childhood, by John Holt; NAMBLA Bulletin, Vol. 6, N. 3; April 1985