The Story of Childhood

by Libby Brooks

  After break-time, one of the older boys rings a shiny brass bell to signal for everyone to line up in front of their teacher, and three chaotic snakes of children form. Back in the classroom, it’s Golden Time for the last half-hour of this Friday afternoon. Adam and three friends share a game of Four in a Row. He sucks the counters in contemplation before dropping them into the frame. At one point he puts his face up close to the frame, screwing up one eye to view his opponent through the holes.

  With the other boys you can imagine how they will look as men. But with Adam, his bone structure seems so much more ephemeral, as though he might age into someone altogether different or never age at all. ‘We won! We won! We won!’ He waves his hands side to side, and bobs, like an American cheerleader. ‘Fair and square!’ he adds emphatically. A huge dimply smile swamps his delicate face.

  Perhaps it is because his interior world is so singly imagined that his social contact is this free and confident. At home, he relishes the silence and the gentle community of his others, Mum and Dad. In the classroom, he is jaunty and performative, experimenting with different persona, unafraid of social sanction.

  In accordance with the general trend for smaller families in the UK, almost a quarter of British children now are only children. But Adam’s self-possession is far removed from the traditional notion of the only child as lonely, maladjusted and spoilt. In fact, there is nothing to suggest that only children are much different from other children brought up with few siblings.

  Since instituting its one-child policy in 1975, which restricted birth rates in cities in order to counter an escalating population crisis, China has created a whole generation growing up without siblings. Much has been made of these ‘Little Emperors’, overfed, overindulged and unable to share. Longitudinal studies on this only-child generation are incomplete, but anecdotally it would seem that Chinese children are struggling with fierce pressure to excel as the expectations of an entire family burn into one solitary child.

  Only children do tend to be higher achievers, but this is the same for all children from small families compared with those from larger ones. Contrary to popular belief, only children are not prone to exaggerated feelings of superiority; nor do they have especial trouble forming close relationships. While they do seem positively to enjoy time on their own, and are less likely to be bored easily, there is no evidence that they are lonelier as children or as adults.

  Adam stands up now, one hand in his pocket, surveying the room like a junior cad, then moves off to investigate what some of the other children are doing. He sits down to play Snakes and Ladders with a girl who laughs into his neck flirtatiously whenever he puts on his special voice. He counts the moves out in an American accent. She flutters appreciatively, then loses the dice in the folds of her jumper. Adam begins to tug at the fabric before realising that he is closer to her chest than he ought to be. She coyly dislodges the dice from her armpit. He makes even sillier voices and faces. She deliberately falls across him as she dissolves into giggles.

  There’s five minutes left, announces Mr Bruce. Adam tries to win with the wrong number of moves. She says it doesn’t count but they start again anyway. Now they’ve got three minutes to put everything away, then get book bags, lunch-boxes and water bottles ready for home-time. At the end of the school day they say a prayer together.

  The following weekend, Adam is playing in the garden. The sky is clear and wide and does not look like the same sky that hunches over motorways or shopping centres. He lays out his bows on the path. He’s got five. One is professionally manufactured, with a nook for the arrow shaft and a proper sight. Three are hand-made, with string and larch or Scots pine, and one is a crossbow. His dad is still building the goats’ fence, and his mum is planting the beds along the driveway. Adam is standing on the seat of his swing, calling above the drone of his father’s saw for a brief acknowledgement: ‘Mum? Mum! I can swi-iii-ng!’

  It’s better to live in the countryside, he explains, because you get more space. It’s quiet. Quiet makes Adam feel snug. In a city it’s quite noisy, and not very green. He thinks that Oswestry is the biggest city close to him, but Oswestry is not really like a city, it’s like a village. Most cities have skyscrapers, and villages don’t. And cities have more car parks. Posh people, like the Queen, live in cities. Does the Prime Minister live in a city? Some poor people live in cities too. He’s not really poor, and he’s not really rich. Cities are more dangerous because there’s more cars.

  When Adam grows up he’d like to be an archaeologist. They find things, like the things in his pail. In his spare time he’d like to do historical re-enactments, like they do at Chirk Castle. He’d like to keep animals too. His mum’s a sort of farmer, because they might get some pigs. When you’re a grown-up you have to go to work every day.

  His mother comes by for some compost, and he asks her for a ham butty. He swings on. Tomorrow he’s going to the St George’s Day parade in Oswestry with Beavers. ‘We’re going to march in threes, and one of us is going to be carrying a flag.’ St George was a patron saint. ‘Most people think he killed a dragon, but I don’t think he really did. Because he was in Rome and people wanted people to stop being Christians, and he didn’t want this to happen, and he was taken and tortured and whipped and then died. I think he stood up for himself.’

  His butty is in the porch. His mum says he should have eaten more of his dinner. He mmm-hmm-hmms a reply through the first overeager-sized mouthful. As he chews, he picks through the items on the porch shelf: some glass bottles he dug up, his mother’s sheep shears. Two of the roosters are clucking by the trough of tulips beneath the kitchen window.

  A dog kennel has appeared on the paving by the porch, donated by a neighbour for the chickens. Adam crawls inside on all fours; it fits him perfectly. There is something interesting hanging from the roof, the size of a tennis ball. He tugs it off gently. It’s a crumbly ball. He thinks it was a wasps’ nest. Opening it carefully, he exposes the perfect honeycomb inside, each egg compartment covered with a fine papery cap. He clambers out of the kennel and runs to show his mother.

  Later he sets up his archery target on a stand of three slim boughs. If you’re a beginner you have to go on the gravel, but he can do it from the grass. He sets his feet in a line with the target, raises the bow, scrunches shut his left eye and pulls back the arrow. Whack! He hits the board, but out of range of the target. One of the wandering roosters broadcasts a shrill doodle-doo. Normally Adam has six goes with each arrow. The next shot hits the target. That’s seven points.

  Laura

  ‘When you’re younger, you’re kept happy all the time. But when you’re a teenager it’s not so easy.’

  Laura had a crap day at school. ‘There was this one really stupid boy and he was saying that some of the other boys were saying things about the way I looked, and I had to come home, because I get upset really easily. It’s stupid.’ She talks very quietly indeed, and her right knee jiggles.

  Today was only her fourth at Maple House, a place where people who can’t get along in ordinary schools come to learn. There’s just Laura in the class, and these four boys. It made her think she’s really weak. It made her feel like she’s always failing. ‘They didn’t know about why I was there, but I told the teacher she could tell them if it meant they’d be more sensitive. I suppose to everyone else it must look like I’m a stupid cry-baby. But it just touched a nerve. It’s like the one thing they could have said to make me really upset.’

  This one boy wrote a note saying the other boys were saying she looks like a man and talks like a man, basically calling her ugly. ‘They must think I’m the sort of person who cries loads but before I went into hospital I hadn’t cried for about a year.’

  It is April, and Laura is fifteen. In January, she tried to kill herself. She was admitted to a psychiatric unit, where she spent three months. During that time, she attempted suicide again. Calling her ugly was the worst thing this boy could have done, because Laura feels v
ery unhappy about the way she looks. She has felt like this since the gang of girls she hung out with turned on her. Since they kicked her unconscious and pulled her trousers down. It takes her hours and hours to get ready to go out, and sometimes she feels so terrible about her appearance that she won’t leave the house for days. It might sound just vain, but it’s much, much more than that.

  Objectively, Laura is a continent away from ugly. She has long dark hair, dark eyes and a neat rosy mouth. Her hips are slim as a handspan. She is pretty of herself, and pretty as all young girls are, purely by way of being fifteen. She looks delicious, and can’t see it at all.

  Simply being able to word her distress is an advance peculiar to Laura’s generation. The extent to which it is considered legitimate to pay attention to feelings, and the accompanying fluency in the language of psychology, are recent phenomena. Advanced by a popular culture that puts a premium on exhibitionism and self-exposure, it it debatable how authentic this understanding actually is.

  That young people too experience mental disorder sits uneasily alongside the imperative that the young – like Sunday’s child – be ‘bonny and bright and good and gay’. Two hundred and fifty years ago, only one in four British children survived beyond their fifth birthday and, in many places, extreme physical deprivation remains a defining condition of growing up. When it’s estimated that a child dies of extreme poverty every three seconds in some part of the world, to be concerned with children’s mental health could be considered indulgent by some.

  But it is not a luxury to feel like Laura, or the estimated 10 per cent of five to fifteen-year-olds like her who use the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. The poet Francis Thompson wrote: ‘Children’s griefs are little, certainly, but so is the child … Pour a puddle into a thimble, or an Atlantic into Etna; both thimble and mountain overflow.’ Today, those griefs are not so little. Adolescent mental health has declined sharply over the past twenty-five years, and one in ten children aged between eleven and fifteen have clinically significant emotional or behavioural difficulties.

  Given the evolution of medical explanations for human behaviour, it is possible to speculate that what is now interpreted as mental disorder would previously have been attributed to moral laxity or fecklessness. If children and the people who care for them have access to a new language of emotion, are they describing something that was always there or is that language creating a different understanding of childhood? Whatever caveats we lay down, the experience of those working in the field points to a deeply troubling conclusion. At a time of increasing affluence and material provision, children are unhappier than ever, and getting more so.

  Is modern childhood affecting children’s mental health? Perhaps children’s increasing confinement is limiting the development of resilience. Does competition for grades and for consumer goods distort self-confidence and optimism? Maybe children’s lack of participation in the decisions that affect their lives is adversely informing their sense of agency. When they gain unmediated access to the adult world from a young age, but remain financially dependent on their parents for longer than ever before, how do they negotiate the transition of adolesence?

  For Laura, there is no mystery to the root of her unhappiness. ‘I had problems at school a few years ago now, and then lots of bad things happened. I guess they might happen to a lot of people, and worse things happen to a lot of people, but I never really showed how upset it made me and after about four years of holding everything in I collapsed.’ Laura speaks in a highly strung register, all Antipodean phrasing and lazy vowels. Sometimes she explains things in neutral words that are the most painless, sometimes in the technical phrasing she’s learnt from the unit. Because her voice is so gauzy, it can sound like she is spinning a fairy tale.

  ‘At my first secondary school there were these girls I hung around with, never going to school, smoking drugs, being an idiot. I used to get bullied a lot by them. But when I decided to leave that school that was when they got really angry and started to beat me up loads. I guess they felt like it was me thinking I was too good for them, but I never went into school and I’d never have succeeded if I’d stayed with them.’

  There was quite a long time after leaving her first school, and before starting at the second, when she didn’t have any friends at all. She started getting really obsessed with her appearance, really distressed about it. During those months in between, the people from her old school still wanted to beat her up so they’d come round and egg her house and stand outside, shouting stuff.

  ‘Then once I did start at the new school, because the two schools are really near each other and everyone knows everyone, they started spreading rumours about me and trying to turn everyone against me, which worked with quite a lot of people. A lot of people don’t like me,’ she says, matter-of-factly.

  The last time they beat Laura up it went too far. ‘They knocked me out because someone kicked me in the head. They robbed me and I was quite badly sexually assaulted as well. For hours I couldn’t remember a thing. The next morning I was bruised all over and had big lumps on my head. My memory still isn’t clear. I just get little flashbacks.’

  Despite anxieties about stranger danger and unsafe streets, it is children’s peers from whom they require most protection, in the relentlessly familiar environment of the playground. We ask of children what few adults would tolerate: to endure hours of enforced proximity to their tormentors, to manage themselves – and GCSEs too – in a social environment where the rules are ambiguous and constantly changing. The mother of a boy who had killed himself after being bullied about his weight once told me, ‘He just couldn’t respond in the way other kids expected him to.’

  It is impossible to know whether the problem of bullying is getting worse or whether, as with child abuse, growing public awareness has led to increased reporting of incidents. It is estimated that sixteen children in the UK take their own lives each year because of bullying. The charity Childline receives calls from tens of thousands of bullied children annually and, in a 2003 survey, found that 15 per cent of primary school children and 12 per cent of secondary pupils reported that they had been bullied in the past twelve months. Bullying is implicated in many cases of truancy, and the NSPCC believes that some 90,000 children are temporarily removed from school each year because of it.

  Certainly the methodology of harassment is changing. Use of the Internet and mobile phones in carrying out hate campaigns is a new development. In 2005, the children’s charity NCH found that 14 per cent of 11–19 year-olds had been threatened via text message. But the intricately conceived cruelties that children visit on one another – for less than half a good reason – the volatility of childhood friendships, and the power of cliques are age-old. As Margaret Atwood wrote in her novel about schoolgirl bullies, Cats Eye: ‘[Children] are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.’

  Since 1998, it has been the obligation of every school in the UK to adopt an anti-bullying strategy, though critics say this often fails to make the transition from paper to practice. The content of these strategies has also been called into question. First developed in Sweden, the ‘No Blame Approach’ to bullying has been gaining currency in British schools and, in 2004, was official policy in one third of them. The theory holds that, by encouraging children to communicate in a controlled environment, rather than reinforcing the roles of victim and perpetrator through punishment, chronic bullies will develop sympathy and alter their behaviour accordingly.

  A number of organisations – including the major children’s charity Kidscape – have criticised the approach, arguing that without punitive sanction perpetrators fail to learn that their actions have consequences. They worry that forcing victims to challenge their bully in front of a teacher may place them at further risk. The dispute would seem to centre around the kind of bullying that this strategy is applied to. Certainly, it can be of benefit for minor incidents in primary schools, but its use
is questionable for the more serious cases that Kidscape deals with.

  At a time when the criminal justice system, through curfews and ASBOs, is taking an increasingly punitive approach to young people, it is ironic that this strategy persists in some schools. Of course, the ‘no blame’ approach has worthy roots. A bully who is acting out the violence she has experienced in her own life may well respond badly to further sanction. But just as the courts may employ mitigation to reduce the sentence of a drug addict who is convicted of burglary, so schools need to find a way of making punishment fit both crime and perpetrator. We cannot throw our hands up at children’s lack of ‘respect’ or moral responsibility, while failing to provide a system of sanction and incentive for them to learn from.

  Of course, bullying behaviour is not the preserve of childhood. Even with the buffer of maturity, a variety of Acts of Parliament, and recourse to tribunals, bullying does not stop at the school gates. The quest for status, the exploitation of difference and the pack mentality never absent themselves from our social interactions. But it is in the playground, where the relationship between instinct and self-control is still being tested, that the human capacity for cruelty as well as kindness is laid bare along with the old lie: stick and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.

  It has become an easy adult observation to make, that ‘kids can be so cruel’. It is seldom remembered whether ‘I was cruel’. The development of moral responsibility seems to happen when we are looking the other way. It is hard to know whether our motivations are pure or practical – because we genuinely want to be kind, or because we are self-interested, and recognise that if we are generally pleasant then people will generally be pleasant to us.