Protect your children from the vampires

Using social infrastructure to preserve their innocence

Earlier this month,

Freya India

begged her zoomer readers to keep believing in love - loyal, selfless, lasting love - despite the desperate state of their generation’s romantic dynamics. She’s right: they must - and we must help them.

One of the strange, under-examined facets of modern social arrangements is that our young spend almost all their time locked in age-segregated environments like the classroom. They don’t grow up, as all children did prior to the relatively recent rise of the state education system, in mixed-age communities.

The children of times gone by interacted with elders of all ages, most of whom lived in stable, loving relationships. The viability and value of these relationships was obvious, their normality unquestioned.

Now, instead of learning from their married elders, our children are primarily taught about love and relationships from shows and films. By their very nature, these mediums must show drama - twists and turns, cheating and betrayal, numerous partners, and then somehow picture-perfect romance emerging at the end (or maybe not - as with dismal shows like Euphoria).

But the young are never presented a simple, wholesome journey of love as two individuals grow older together in a stable and deepening romance. Only real life can do that.

This lack is disorienting, and causes the young to constantly self-sabotage. It’s one of the reasons that young people end up in an endless dating phase, as opposed to getting married.

There is something that we can do to protect them.