The Story of Childhood

by Libby Brooks

  Ingrid the au pair is going home to Germany today. She’s coming back again one day before school starts. He’ll miss her a bit, but not as much as when his mum or his dad or his sister go somewhere. He catches himself out. ‘Well – my sister never goes anywhere without me!’

  His dad sometimes goes away on business. He had to go to Libya once. He brought back this gigantic plate with pictures of camels on it. Libya is next to Egypt. Nicholas does not consider himself widely travelled: ‘I’ve not been far, only to Scotland, and quite a few different places in France, and Crete, and Venice.’

  His father’s job means that he doesn’t have much holiday. He only has three days at Christmas: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. He brings work home with him. Nicholas wouldn’t really like to be a lawyer. He doesn’t know what sort of job would be interesting.

  You have to choose what job you want to do when you’re about seventeen, he explains, so you can decide what subjects you’re going to do at university. ‘I’m going to go to university. My mum wants me to so I will probably.’ His parents don’t know where he should go to university, because his mum went to Cambridge, his dad went to Oxford and his grandad went to London, so they can’t decide which one’s best for him.

  Nicholas can barely imagine a time when he will not be being educated. The number of years children spend in teaching institutions has soared since the introduction of free and compulsory primary education in Britain in 1880. Then, opposition to child labour was a consequence of a shift in how childhood was perceived. The factory and education acts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked the first instance of the government intervening in children’s upbringing. But it was not done purely out of charity, as politicians alighted on a new imperative of better preparing the workforce of the future.

  Concern about child labour is a relatively recent phenomenon. Reformers like Robert Owen and Lord Shaftesbury were considered radical when they challenged what was seen as children’s necessary contribution to the family wage. In pre-industrial times, it would appear that children in poor households were expected to participate in the family workforce from early on, taking on minor tasks to suit their age and ability, helping around the home and in the fields. Formal training and wages came later, when older children and teenagers left their families to work as apprentices.

  Viviana Zelizer notes that in nineteenth-century America, to include children in the household economy of the working class was considered ‘not only economically indispensible but also a legitimate social practice’. She refers to children’s books of the time, which praised the virtues of hard work, and where the standard villain was the idle child. ‘Work was a socializer; it kept children busy and out of mischief.’

  There is some dispute about whether industrialisation significantly increased the number of child labourers, or merely extended children’s employment opportunities beyond the domestic sphere. In factories, cotton mills and coal mines, mechanical advances allowed children to undertake jobs that had previously required the strength of an adult.

  Campaigners against child labour did not have to look far for evidence that interminable hours and desperate conditions were gravely affecting children’s health. Miners as young as six risked death in tunnels too small for grown men. Children with nimble fingers who were assigned to clean fast-moving power looms often lost digits. Breathing in dust and cotton fibres led to outbreaks of ‘spinners’ phthisis’ and other forms of tuberculosis. Young girls ruined their sight with the close work of lace-making and embroidery, or developed ‘phossy jaw’ – gangrene of the jawbone caused by phosphorous poisoning – in matchstick factories.

  The plight of child labourers was popularised by Charles Kingsley in his novel The Water Babies, published in 1862. The book followed the adventures of Tom the chimney sweep, who fell into a river after escaping his cruel master Grimes, where he was transformed into one of the adventurous underwater infants. Within a year, Parliament had banned the use of small boys as sweeps.

  Ultimately, the reformers were successful because they were campaigning with the economic and social grain. As the real value of incomes rose, the need for children to supplement family earnings declined. In particular, calls for a ‘family wage’ gained momentum – the idea that the male breadwinner should be able to earn enough to keep his wife and children at home. The desire of educational reformers to remove schooling from the purview of the Church further accelerated children’s ejection from the workplace.

  The nature of childhood was changing. As Stephen Kline argues: ‘The factory acts in Britain … confirm that throughout the early industrial era childhood was increasingly seen as a stage of growth that in the long-term interests of civilized society had to be isolated and guarded from an abusive world.’ This legislation, alongside the introduction of compulsory schooling, did just that.

  But Kline is also quick to point out that Victorian state schooling did not provide a children’s paradise. ‘Brutality was accepted and justified on the grounds that it was necessary to discipline the recalcitrant learner. Learning itself was defined and viewed as a very unliberating process of knowledge assimilation and repetition. Nor was the school completely without an industrial social purpose.’

  He also identifies how progressives then turned their attention to children’s play. The early twentieth century saw a dramatic expansion of children’s organisations – Sunday schools, scouting movements, camps – mostly aimed at the working classes. ‘Play, it was argued, was not simple idleness but the “work of childhood” – the moral equivalent of labour … Structured game-play and sport were also highly recommended as ways of preparing children for a competitive society and of creating a location for class mingling and negotiation.’

  Of course, children of the twenty-first century are not entirely economically inactive, though there is no minimum wage for children, nor are they covered by statutory employment rights. A study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation at the turn of the millennium found that two in five children aged between eleven and sixteen did some form of paid work outside the home, working for an average of just under five hours a week. One in twenty had three jobs or more, with paper rounds and babysitting the most common occupations. Children today tend not to be working to contribute to family income so much as to gain independence from their parents or to satisfy their burgeoning consumer needs.

  The demands of industrial capitalism have not abated since the introduction of compulsory education. Just as adults’ time is money, so children’s time is valued as an investment in their potential earning and spending power. And – as Nicholas might testify – childhood, like chess, is these days a very competitive game.

  In his book Britain on the Couch, the psychologist Oliver James investigates the effects of increased, and more competitive, schooling on the self-confidence and optimism of children. He draws on the work of Diane Ruble, professor of psychology at New York University and the most active researcher in this field. Ruble has found that, until around the age of seven, children are indiscriminate in who they choose to compare themselves with, as happy to pick an adult as a peer. But beyond seven, they increasingly use comparison with their peers as the means of self-evaluation, becoming preoccupied with competition. Ruble argues that many teaching methods exploit this, using techniques that encourage public victories and defeats.

  She discovered that, perhaps because they do not compare themselves with their peers and are largely ignorant of their performance relative to them, preschool and primary-grade children showed impressive resilience in the face of failure. ‘They maintain persistence, self-confidence and expectations of future success. By mid-elementary school, however, such optimism and positive responses to failure largely disappear … with increasing disinterest in school-related activities appearing as children progress through elementary school.’ Ruble suggests that, ‘Because there are only a limited number of “winners” in any competitive system, children may experience a dissatisfa
ction with themselves … Comparison can promote a sense of relative deprivation and inadequacy, affecting interpersonal relationships and self-esteem.’

  James notes that Ruble particularly emphasises that children have no escape from this comparative system of schooling. Although she suggests some mechanisms by which they might avoid it – such as disengagement from school activities or the development of anti-academic cliques – she believes that the most common result is lowered self-esteem.

  ‘The drop in self-confidence and achievement expectancies found during the early school years may be due to the incorporation of comparative standards into the self-concept,’ she concludes. Indeed, she believes that children who do badly do more social comparing than those who are succeeding.

  ‘Children may develop a poor opinion of themselves because they compare frequently, or they may socially compare more because they have a poor opinion of themselves … They may begin to look for additional information but along the way the perception of the self as poor comes, in part, from negative conclusions they draw from social-comparison information. Taken all together, the data suggest that the period from seven to nine years is a very important one for self-definition and self evaluation.’

  It is difficult not to conclude that our own education system perpetuates just such damaging social comparison, seeming to pit student against student in an endless quest for ‘standards’. Schools themselves are in competition with each other for scarce resources.

  This quest makes a sham of inclusive schooling, as professor of education at Goldsmiths College Sally Tomlinson argues: ‘As long as teachers are pressed to deliver higher standards in the form of more children passing examinations and reaching targets, they will understandably be more reluctant to take on the education of all children. There is little time or incentive for teachers to introduce new curriculum practices within mainstream schools, when the emphasis is on achieving at key stages and acquiring the magic five A*–C grades at GCSE.’

  The system is destined to create more losers than winners. And it robs children of the chance to learn collaboratively when they are simply delivered a script to be regurgitated at a later date under stressful conditions. As Oliver James observes, it’s good news for future employers, guaranteed a wildly competitive workforce, and for the corporations who will exploit these insecurities in order to sell their status-affirming products.

  For now, though, Nicholas can forget about homework. He’s feeling excited about Christmas because he’ll get new toys. ‘I asked for a new Gameboy because my last one got lost. I was playing with it and I put it back in my top drawer, and then I think my sister took it out to play with and she can’t remember what she did with it afterwards.’ He’s looked hard for it, but especially since the new carpet all his things have got new places.

  His dad has bought presents for Nicholas and Emma to give their mum, and his mum has bought things for him to give her mum, but he has no idea about what to get his dad. His parents won’t have stockings, because there’d be no point in them buying tiny presents for themselves. They’d know exactly what was in there and take it out the next morning!

  Christmas is a happy time of year for most people, thinks Nicholas. But not all people. It is the year following the second Gulf War. ‘If you’re in Iraq quite a few of their houses have been destroyed so they won’t be having a Christmas tree and lots and lots of presents.’

  When I next visit Nicholas, it’s the day after the day after the day after Boxing Day, in that peculiar stretch before the New Year that can feel dilatory after the accelerated preparations of Advent. Nicholas’s Christmas Day began with him taking things out of his stocking, playing with the things in his stocking and eating some of the chocolates. Then he got dressed, and ate breakfast, which is always bacon sandwiches and eggs. Then he opened his presents.

  ‘I got one or two presents – quite a few actually. I got a snooker table.’ He pauses, still impressed. ‘It’s in the conservatory downstairs. I knew that it began with an “s” but I didn’t know that I was getting it. I was told that it was a board to do my homework on but of course I knew it wasn’t. It was in this gigantic package and you had to put it together. It took about half an hour, and then my mum taught me how to play.’

  He got a new Gameboy and two new games as well. But then when they went to Oxford to visit his grandparents they found the one he’d lost. ‘It was in the car under the middle seat, so now I’ve got two Gameboys. My sister got one for Christmas too so altogether we’ve got three Gameboys and five games.’

  His grandparents gave him a Spirograph that makes patterns, and he got a CD and one or two tapes and of course lots of books. He reaches across the bedroom floor to the pile of most-favoured presents. ‘I got the encyclopaedia of everything yucky and it says down the side “including bogies, farts, bottoms, toilets and vomit”!’ His high ‘hee-hee’ strains his neck muscles. ‘In here there’s probably the biggest fart in the world!’

  He reads on, clear and precise, revelling in rudeness sanctioned between hard covers. ‘“This consists of ants, bats, blood, body odour, burping, eye gunk, farts, fleas, fungi, lice, maggots, pee, poop, leeches, pus, rats, scabs, slugs, snakes, snots, spiders, tics, toilets, vomit.” That’s what my aunt gave me. It’s absolutely disgusting.’ He opens it to display a lurid close-up of worms. ‘Where’s snot?’ he muses, leafing through the pages. ‘Here’s vomit.’ His mum told him about the most disgusting thing that’s he’s ever done. ‘When I was a baby, when she was changing my nappy I once accidentally did a wee in her face,’ he confesses, merrily aghast.

  After he had finished opening his presents on Christmas Day, his dad was really mean and said that everyone had to go out for a walk, at about eleven o’clock in the morning. ‘My granny got to stay behind, unfairly. Then we waited for three hours for the turkey to cook, and then we had lunch and I didn’t have any pudding, I was so full up with turkey, bacon, stuffing, carrots, potatoes, peas, etc.’ Nicholas has a delicious way of saying ‘potatoes’, as though he’s still tasting them.

  The Christmas concert didn’t go very well because he got every single piece wrong and had to start again. After that he played more snooker. A family friend called Ann was there too. Nicholas went to bed about half an hour later than usual.

  The day after Boxing Day, Nicholas and his family went to Oxford to see his dad’s parents and his dad’s sister and her husband and their children. ‘When we arrived my cousin Simon was there and the first thing he did was start punching my bottom. And the twins [who were born earlier this year] were always crying. But Emma played more with Simon, because they’re nearly the same age.’

  His grandparents like cycling a lot, and they don’t like cars, he notes with surprise. They’re probably the only ones in the whole street who don’t have a car. They’re not too old – something like sixty-six and seventy. When he visits, he does a lot of cycling because they live near two cycle paths. Otherwise, he doesn’t really like sports. ‘I don’t like boxing and I don’t like rugby that much.’ He has a double session on Fridays at school. ‘You don’t actually tackle each other, you tag each other, but quite often if I have got the ball they pull me down by the thing that holds the tag on and say it was an accident.’ ‘They’ are the mean people from the other classes. Nicholas’s worst teacher is his PE teacher. He’s really mean.

  School doesn’t start again until 11 January. He has days and stretching days left of what Dylan Thomas called ‘that wool white bell-tongued ball of holidays’. His friend George is coming tomorrow, but he doesn’t know if it’s for a sleep-over. Every single holiday George goes to Canada, even if it’s only for one week. ‘His father used to live in Canada, so he’s half English, half Canadonian, whatever you say.’ He’s got nothing much else to do apart from boring things like thank-you letters and music practice. He wouldn’t really like to be a musician when he grows up, but it’s important to do music practice because his mum wants him to and she tells him off otherwise!


  He’s not sure what he’ll be eating with George, but it won’t be pizza. ‘I don’t like pizza. I can make George fall off a chair anytime when I say I don’t like Coke, chocolate or pizza. Everyone in my class thinks I’m incredibly unusual not liking Coke, chocolate or pizza and always drinking water.’

  Nicholas has a more cosmopolitan palate. He likes mussels, which he normally has with garlic sauce, and omelette. Once, when he was in Italy, he tasted kiwi, and peach and passion-fruit ice cream. He thinks there was even a tomato-flavoured one.

  Nicholas isn’t sure about whether he needs to make any New Year’s resolutions. He hasn’t got any bad habits, apart from picking his nose, but everyone does that. It says here in the Yuck Book that there’s been a record taken and everyone has once picked their nose. Everyone in the world.

  He doesn’t really do anything for New Year. His mum will give him a small present like a pencil, but it seems really titchy compared to a Gameboy or a snooker table. He prefers Christmas.

  How would he feel like if he didn’t get any presents? ‘That would depend on whether everyone else did or not. If no one got any then I’d be annoyed. If I was the only one then I’d be really, really cross with my mum and dad.’

  Is giving presents a way of showing people that you like them?

  ‘Well, yes,’ says Nicholas.

  Are there other ways?

  ‘Well, saying it, obviously. Playing with them.’

  A major engine in the juggernaut of child-panic is the fear that childhood has been co-opted by commerce, and children integrated into the sphere of avarice. Growing-up has always meant learning the rhythms of wanting, getting and not getting – attention, a biscuit, that toy, now, later. What is new, and profoundly alarming, is the scale and sophistication of inducements to want.