From Mad in Portugal: A pathologized childhood is ultimately the uncomfortable mirror of a culture that has lost the meaning of the human. Contemporary children run the risk of becoming protagonists of the strangest anthropological experience of late modernity: children deprived of childhood who are then required to have emotional balance, sustained attention and tolerance of frustration as if they had grown up among meadows, rusty bicycles, endless afternoons and improvised gangs. Then, when anxiety, irritability, impulsivity or emptiness inevitably arise, the contemporary adult – this sophisticated animal that managed to transform even rest into a productive task – looks at the child with a clinical gesture and asks: “What disturbance will you have?”. You rarely ask yourself: “What kind of life are we imposing on you?”
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