For a hundred years, it belongs to 1 June to the children

The author is a director

« What he was, he was, but he was a father, and now he is underground and a Turjanka with children in misery … The children in the evening put more often with promises, singing as bread and even night has to earn earnings. » Tajovský’s story bitter bread from 1912 describes the hopelessness that we may not even imagine.

The mortality of children at that time was terrible compared to today’s standards. Each fifth child died before reaching one year. The mortality of children under 5 years of age was even higher, estimated at 300-400 to a thousand lives.

It was baptized no later than the next day, and the wounded newborn was taken to the church of the baptismal church. If the mother survived, she was recovering on a straw hidden behind a corner.

A century ago, families considered child mortality as a normal part of life. God gave and took. The child was not a subject of care, but part of the economic unit from which the performance was expected.

Three -year -olds have been assigned obligations. They played where they worked – in grazing, in dust with clay balls or dough for bread, cats and hatched chickens.

The battle was the most functional form of upbringing, the emotions were not nested, but choked.

In the cities, children had a little better prospects, if the family had money for school, shoes and workbook. The toys were unprecedented luxury, the children’s room did not exist. If they lived to adulthood, they represented an investment in old age.

In 1925, a world conference on the well -being of children took place in Geneva, which was, among other things, a response to the devastation of children’s lives during the Great War. For the first time in history, children have become a subject of global interest and defined as a group with the right to protect, education and healthy environment.

Young Czechoslovakia was also awakened in this respect. An orphanages were created, the first modern schools. Teachers began to treat pupils as individuality, doctors emphasized hygiene, and psychologists pushed to parents. Mandatory school was really mandatory.

Today most children in Slovakia have their bed, tabletshoes and opinions. True, not all. Roma childrenchildren from broken families, with mental or physical disadvantage, children of migrants. Their reality is only a little different from Tajov prose.

For a hundred years, it has been 1 June for children. It is not a celebration, but the anniversary of the match and a reminder that childhood is an achievement. One hundred years after the Geneva conference we have a chance to understand childhood as Alice’s country behind a mirror, a space in which a child may doubt, seek meaning, develop language and identity and ask the most important question of all. Who am I?

You are a citizen of this world, we should reply. You don’t vote, but you perceive. You do not pay taxes, but you pay the price for our indifference. Instead of sugar cotton and colored slime, we should allow them to fall into the rabbit burrow.