What should love be between two pre-teens? The desire for the first kiss, the heart beating in anticipation of being able to see each other on Saturday for a few hours. The desire to go out on Sundays to eat ice cream together. Instead, these days we read stories of very young people who have seen a love story transformed into a crime storyextremely painful, in which there is a dead person whose investigators are trying to understand whether it was suicide or murder. In the meantime, we read news which, in relation to what had been happening for weeks between those two very young people, tells us about mistreatment, violent and manipulative dynamics. How could it happen that the first love of two kids turned into a criminal affair?
In this sad and terrible story, inhabited by the pain of an entire community, as well as the families involved, we adults are left with the need to reflect on what is happening to our children, so accelerated, so adultized, so small and yet already so involved in the worst dynamics that characterize the love affairs of dysfunctional adults.
There is a time when you dream of love, desire it, fantasize about it. And that time is preadolescence. The heart beats wildly for a him and a she who you must first look at from a distance, who you must find an anonymous note in a jacket pocket or in a diary page, thanks to a mutual friend. You should be dreaming about your first kiss, wondering if you will be able to give it and if in giving it, that kiss will be as beautiful and special as they say.
The problem, however, is that nothing is said about all this anymore. The first kiss today seems like something for kindergarten children, because the romantic imagination, already in elementary school, is nourished by the dynamics that saturate the dysfunctional loves of TV series. Years ago, Rai was forced to cancel the broadcast of Albero Azzurro, because Auditel data revealed that at that time the screens turned on in the family were all tuned to programs in which men and women took each other and left each otherbecoming tronisti for a day. Boys and girls gave up knowing what the Dodo puppet had to say to them, curious to scrutinize the dynamics of adults ready to transform love into a freak show, hungry for fame, at least for one day of their lives. It was the beginning of a decline in which the world, day after day, gave up one of the most important educational dimensions to protect the growth of a minor: the specific phase. Being phase-specific means being adults capable of nourishing the minds of those growing up with the right things at the right time.
Today there are children in primary school who have never listened to Zecchino d’Oro’s songs, but who know the violent and sexist lyrics of the famous trapper by heart. And the screens of our children’s smartphones, turned on at all hours of the day and night, pour into their lives stories, images and suggestions that cause frightening accelerations towards an adulthood, which becomes as attractive as it is chaotic, in which things are done that adults do, even if they are still incredibly small. You don’t die at 13 for love. You die at 13 because you know nothing about love. And all of us adults should have the care and patience to educate our children to love love, but to do so in preadolescence and early adolescence with slowness and desire, which live on waiting and naivety.
Above all, we should teach our sons that Love is a word that is written with a capital A. Who needs respect, responsibility, empathy and who, as our grandparents said: “a woman doesn’t even touch herself with a finger” if she doesn’t have full consent. But these are things that no one tells men. Because pornography and a culture that has remained sexist and promotes a model in which “being real men” is more desirable than being “real men” speaks to them. As we mourn the terrible and unjust death of a thirteen-year-old, we reiterate that today more than ever there is a desperate need to let children remain children.
