The Story of Childhood

by Libby Brooks

  There is wide consensus amongst practitioners that a crucial policy improvement would be the provision of universal parenting skills training, ideally making it a compulsory part of the curriculum. They emphasise the need to prepare for the transition to parenthood from birth. In Canada, a classroom scheme called Roots of Empathy has had a dramatic effect in raising school children’s social and emotional competence. A local baby visits the class with her parent every three weeks over the school year. Pupils are encouraged to observe the infant’s development, interact with her and learn about her needs, while a specialised curriculum teaches them about child safety and development and responsible parenting. But the current failure to provide even basic sex education in many UK schools doesn’t bode well for this aspiration. Parenting is included in the PSHE curriculum but, if it is dealt with at all, is usually framed in terms of discouraging teenage pregnancy, not encouraging the psychological flourishing of the next generation.

  What about Anthony Clare’s injunction to be ‘a leaf on a tree’? In order to offer young people an alternative to the misery of meaningless choice and inflamed expectation we may have to reconceive childhood itself. Some of the emotional distress that many young people feel must surely be based on their experiences of marginality and exclusion. The UN Charter lays down every child’s right to protection, provision and participation, but that third right is rarely acted on. We can help adolescents to develop a more coherent social identity only by allowing children genuine involvement in the world they are growing up in.

  In an essay on fostering resilience, Sebastian Kraemer of London’s Tavistock Clinic writes, ‘In a world in which individuality is acknowledged, even celebrated, resilience is best understood as the experience of agency: that what you do or say makes a difference, that it is worthwhile making plans for your life, that you are not simply a helpless victim of forces entirely beyond your control.’ But children, he argues, are still relatively powerless, ‘at the mercy of our adult terror of helplessness’.

  ‘When we talk about children we talk about everyone, yet there is … a subtle but pervasive contempt for children, often disguised with condescending words, as if they were a different species. Quite apart from the scandalous levels of poverty in one of the richest countries in the world … there are still far too many neglected children, at all levels of society … After sexism and racism, we still have to confront “childism”.’

  Referring to the work of John Bowlby, Kraemer concludes that all those who come into contact with children and young people need ‘the reflective skills that make all the difference between power which is abused, and authority which is necessary. It is no good arguing for resilience based on secure attachment if we do not also argue for a society that welcomes it.’

  Almost a month later, on another damp day, Laura is explaining why she doesn’t want to go back to Fitzroy House. The builders are nearly finished, and her room is all but complete.

  ‘I dunno,’ she says, ‘I didn’t feel like I needed it. I didn’t like it there, and compared to some of the people there I don’t feel like I’m that ill any more. They won’t discharge me for another month, and I’ll have to go there twice a week for a meeting where they’ll basically try to persuade me to go back. But I didn’t go to my meeting this Monday, and I’ve got another one this Friday. I don’t think I’ll go back.’

  She is relentless. ‘Their routine is that you get worse before you get better. They want to break you down, and find out all your problems. They want to go into your childhood, and I don’t think I had any problems in my childhood. It’s not for me.’ Laura says she isn’t like the other people there. ‘Not like really ill, really quite disturbed. There’s one girl just always takes her top off and her bra and everything, she can’t help it, and everyone’s got to stop her. I’m not like that.’

  Her parents think that she should stay there until December. She presses her point. ‘I don’t feel high risk, like I would want to kill myself or anything. I do still feel really ugly but I think every teenager feels like that sometimes. It already takes a lot less time to do my make-up when I go out.’

  So why is she still considered high risk? She talks about the last time, just before my previous visit. ‘I felt really sad and really lonely, and I was in the house all alone and I tried to kill myself but it didn’t work. Even that was better than the first time,’ she insists, ‘because I never used to give up. When it didn’t work I just kept trying and trying. I tried to hang myself, but the cord thing broke. I tried a couple of times and then just gave up.’

  ‘That seems like quite recent, but you know when you just feel something inside yourself changing? But I can’t really say because everyone at Fitzroy House is so convinced I need their help. I can’t say I don’t feel suicidal any more because they’re like, “Well you say that now but then a month ago you tried to kill yourself, na, na, na, na.” But I just know. I feel more in control of myself and more – I don’t really know how to explain it.’

  Neither do I. Even at the worst of times, Laura has always remained supremely lucid about the agonies and absurdities of her adolescent universe. At times like now, when her voice is tough and certain, her frame not limp but upright with energy, you want to believe every word. But if psychology is silly, and therapy delves too deep, can it all be left to how Laura feels on sad afternoons?

  She is particularly resistant to her new therapist’s emphasis, as she sees it, on her early childhood experiences. ‘I think people always like to blame their problems on their parents. Everything about you pretty much is from your upbringing, but I know lots of people take any little problem they have and blame it on “when I was five my dad didn’t do something …” ’

  Laura believes her depression is all to do with what happened at school. ‘There’s some stuff. Like my brother and sister used to be really best friends, and they wouldn’t speak to me because I used to get on really well with my mum’s boyfriend and they didn’t like him. I wouldn’t say that made me depressed, but it did make me feel left out and like I was always second best. But I think that’s the only thing my family did.’

  She flexes her fingers. Her nails are so neat. She’s got some white nail polish that glides on really easily so she can do a French manicure at home. She used to get fake nails but they cost twenty-five pounds for a set, and when she smoked they’d go all yellow so she wound up biting them off.

  Beyond Fitzroy House, Laura would like to get a job, but she’s aware that no one trusts her to turn up on time every day. She doesn’t want to leave home. ‘I’ve got my new room being done. Mmmm,’ she makes the sound of a satisfied cat. ‘I can’t imagine myself leaving. It’s a bit scary really. My brother and sister are still here.’

  Becoming an adult, Laura says, is about recognising the fleeting nature of happiness. ‘When you’re younger, you’re kept happy all the time. When you’re not happy you cry and your parents do something to make you happy. But when you’re a teenager it’s not so easy. If you’re even a bit insecure then you compare yourself to other people and think their lives are perfect, and you feel bad for it.’

  Laura read something the other day that one in three people have depression in their lives. ‘When you think of happiness you think, “Oh there’ll be a point in my life when I have everything I want and I’ll be happy and it’ll stay that way for the rest of my life,” but you forget that circumstances change. Like say you expect you’ll go to secondary school, you’ll get all your good friends, you’ll get a boyfriend and you’ll just be happy for the rest of secondary school. But you forget that your friends might turn on you, your boyfriend might dump you and you’ll stop going to school. You don’t expect that to happen so you think, “I’ll just be sad for ever now.” ’

  Laura employs her favourite disclaimer: ‘Not in a mean way, but I think that stupider people find it easier to be happy. Not like stupid and clever in an academic way. But simpler people who don’t think about stuff as much find it easier to
be happy because they don’t sit and analyse the bad stuff. If you’re simple and careless you just take life as it comes.’

  The cleaner comes in. She needs to vacuum the sitting-room. So Laura climbs the stairs to her new bedroom, past mother’s, brother’s and sister’s rooms and up a newly conjured staircase. She pads across the varnished floorboards. It smells of dry paint and young wood. The wet sunshine streams through the skylight. Up here in her tower, Princess Laura will sleep, until the enchantment is broken, until the mirror on the wall tells her a kinder story. Out of the window there’s a view right across the city.

  Majid

  ‘They can’t decide who lives here and who doesn’t. It’s their country, yeah, but it’s a free world.’

  Majid and his mother were on the bus. This woman was going to get off and she said to his mum, ‘I personally don’t think you should wear the headscarf because it doesn’t matter what your hair’s like.’ Some people think it’s just to hide the hair or not show yourself in front of men. That’s a different thing to how Majid understands it. His mum is a believer in Allah and she wears the headscarf to respect Him.

  Majid is thirteen years old. He lives with his parents and younger sister in a sprawling suburb of a large multicultural city. Their airy, bright-tiled flat is a thoroughfare, where uncles and cousins and toddlers tarry. He speaks Arabic at home and, though his English is fluent, on occasion he adds a non-native flourish, like a strictly grammatical expansion of a tense.

  He is slight of build but expansive in gesture, with a wide mouth and mobile eyebrows. Majid is a declaimer. He delights in florid description, especially when he’s detailing the playground battles that leave him exuberantly bruised.

  There’s lots of ethnic minorities in Britain, he says, that all get along. He qualifies his optimism. On the other hand you have some people that think it’s wrong [to welcome different races]. It’s not really pressure, but the war gets to you, so do politicians, drugs, the bad influences.

  Majid’s family is Iraqi, and his grandparents still live in Baghdad. His parents came here two months before he was born, to escape the Kuwait war. His father fought in the Iran–Iraq war. ‘They came out through Syria, and then they came to Britain, then they had me, then they had my sister, and a couple of months after that my dad got stabbed in the chest.’

  He was about two at the time. His father was attacked on the street, apparently at random, and the police never caught his assailant. Majid can’t remember much about what happened, but it remains an important story to tell about his early life. His dad was in a coma for two weeks. He used to be a mechanic, but now he can’t work, because he doesn’t have the stamina.

  There have been lectures about the aftermath of war [the US–British-led war in Iraq, which began in the spring of 2003 – these interviews took place in the spring of 2005 when the country was still in turmoil and occupied by foreign troops]. Majid has gone to some of them with his dad. ‘People were very angry because they said we were better off with Saddam without the bombs, at least we could go out. They said it was better with Saddam than what we have now, and everyone agreed. Then they made accusations, who is doing this and who is making all this happen? And why Bush did want to actually go to war.’ He thinks Bush is an idiot.

  Majid is staunchly male: noisy, rambunctious, crackling with energy and outrage. He is alive to injustices big and small: the treatment of asylum seekers, the teacher who tells him off for calling out when he knew the right answer! He balances rights and responsibilities: his right to play on the street with his need for protection there; his responsibility to behave in class with his desire not to be seen as sissy.

  Previously, I discussed Sebastian Kraemer’s belief that resilience, a quality essential to mental well-being, is best understood as the experience of agency: that what you do or say makes a difference, that you are not simply a helpless victim of forces beyond your control. He argued that only by correcting the imbalance of power between adults and children might we effectively foster resilience in childhood.

  But this imbalance runs as a seam through children’s lives. They are granted rights in principle by the UN, but refused many of them in practice. They are denied responsibility over their own education, health and welfare, then punished when they behave irresponsibly. They are excluded from the political process then berated for their apathy. At a time when adults’ perception of childhood is fraught with contradictions, young people’s own potential to balance them is seldom considered.

  Majid’s auntie works for Alfayhaa, an Arabic-speaking satellite station based in Kuwait. This weekend she reported that they had captured some bombers in Iraq, and most of them were Syrian, Saudi Arabian and Sudanese. These suicide bombers are sad low-lifes, says Majid. ‘Most of them are people from foreign Arab countries that don’t want Iraq to evolve. Some of them are Saddam’s people, and others are just people that have been threatened.’

  ‘Most of the people that are killed are the Shia not the Sunni. There’s kind of a racial thing, like a civil war. But I’m a Muslim.’ He slaps his chest. ‘I’m not Shia or Sunni. I believe in one god, Allah; I believe in the prophet, and I believe in his followers.’

  Majid doesn’t go to mosque regularly, but he attends with his family on special occasions, like Eid. He goes to the lectures and he’s been on a few marches. He prays five times every day, and he fasts.

  The prayer in the afternoon is one or two o’clock, but he prays when he comes back from school instead. ‘I don’t pray at school because you have to make wudu [washing] and the toilets are dirty.’ He knows some Muslims who pray at school, but they pray in a different way, and he gets confused. Most of Majid’s friends at school are Christians. He’s not a racist person.

  Majid says that he’s religious, but he’s not extreme. ‘It’s like McDonalds. I don’t know how they kill the chicken, but I still eat it.’ It’s certainly an arresting analogy. ‘I pray, but I’m not extreme, extreme. ’Cos some people try to make up their own rules, and I think it’s wrong. Like one of the lectures I went to, he said that listening to music is wrong. And it’s true, but then again it’s just a little beat with words that rhyme.’ That’s what he thinks.

  If Majid had a vote, he’d vote Labour, because for now they’re the safe side. ‘Greenpeace, they want to make things like flying more expensive. And Conservatives, they say every man for himself, people won’t get educated if they can’t afford it, no free dental, no free doctors, that’s not fair. If someone’s life could be saved just for money, that’s not fair.’

  He thinks that the way politicians talk about asylum seekers is disgusting. ‘They can’t decide who lives here and who doesn’t. It’s their country, yeah, but it’s a free world.’

  Majid isn’t certain whether his own parents sought asylum in Britain. He thinks they were granted British nationality because he was born here. He says it’s kind of sad. ‘It’s not their choice. People that have to run away from home, they don’t want to, but they have to leave to live. That’s not fair,’ he refrains, getting louder and more urgent. ‘And then people say we don’t want you here, go back home and die.’ He points to a dictatorship in the corner of the room. ‘That’s not fair. It’s like execution, just a longer way. The thing about this country that’s nice is that every race is accepted. It lets a lot of people in. That’s good.’

  Majid didn’t used to care about things like this. He wasn’t that much interested in politics until the war started. When Pokémon cards were out, he just used to worry about them, and his dad would say, ‘Look what’s happening in your country, and you want to buy Pokémon cards!’ He never knew what was going on.

  He last visited Iraq two years ago. It was a relief to see his family. ‘No matter how many poor people there were, everyone was helping each other out, so everyone was happy and sad at the same time. And you saw everyone unite, not like now when everyone’s against each other and they’re all trying to kidnap children to get money.’

 
; One third of the British Muslim population is under the age of sixteen, and is more likely to grow up in poverty and to leave school without qualifications than average. This is a critical cohort. Many are third generation and negotiating in their daily lives the opposition between Islam and the West that has dominated world politics in recent years. Although research into the attitudes of young British Muslims is minimal, and only beginning to distinguish by faith rather than ethnicity, those working within the community testify that, like Majid, their children have been brought directly to consciousness by events like 9/11, the bombing of Afghanistan, and the war with Iraq.

  My interviews with Majid took place before the London bombings of July 2005. Carried out by four young British Muslims, this act of terrorism placed younger members of the community under even sharper scrutiny. After the bombings, according to the Muslim Safety Forum, the total number of faith-related attacks in the capital rose by 500 per cent compared with the same period the previous year.

  Shareefa Fulat is the director of the Muslim Youth Helpline, the country’s only support service for young Muslims. Dealing on average with one hundred clients each week, it aims towards the 16–25-year-old age group, although it has taken calls from children as young as twelve.

  Fulat says that she did not notice a significant increase in calls after the July bombings. In a sense, the problems that young people bring to MYH are no different from those encountered by their non-Muslim peers – relationship worries relating to family and friends, exam stress, bullying and depression.