We call them youth; they were children

Every June we return to the children of 1976.

- Samkelisiwe Mnguni

We picture the rows of schoolchildren walking out of their classrooms in Soweto and the boy carried lifeless through the smoke, Hector Pieterson, who was 12 years old.

We have honoured them, rightly, as the youth.

But the word ‘‘youth’’ ages them. It lets us hold them in memory as young revolutionaries rather than as what they were: schoolchildren.

Schoolchildren who should have been worrying about homework but were instead handed a brutally grown world and made to find their courage inside it because the adults around them could not keep them safe.

I think about that small slip, from child to youth, every now and then. Not because it dishonours 1976 but because we make the same slip constantly. And not only about the past. We make it about our own children now. We are in a great hurry to call them grown.

The world we are handing them is not a gentler one. It is faster, louder and more saturated with content and contact than any generation has met this young.

Much of it reaches them through a screen we never learnt to navigate ourselves, in a digital world that arrived before our rules, our schools or our conversations were ready for it.

We expect them to cross it mature and whole.

We expect them to do it with fewer and fewer of us beside them, holding their hands.

This year’s child protection figures are being read as proof that something has gone wrong with our children.

I read them differently: as proof of what happens when children are sent into a world they are not ready to navigate alone.