The Story of Childhood

by Libby Brooks

Lauren gets out once a week, usually on Friday nights. It’s just nice to go and sit in someone else’s house and not have to be a mum and changing nappies. She knows she’s a mother but she’s doesn’t always think of herself as one. ‘And then I have one of my friends sat next to me, and she’s so young!’ She gives it a Mancunian plosive ‘g’. ‘She’s the same age as me and she hasn’t one responsibility, and the difference from her to me, it’s hard to believe. But you get used to it.’

  Perhaps it’s a redundant question to ask, why parents have children. Relationships happen, conception happens: the template of partners and progeny is what we have always built societies around. For any culture to survive, it must promote the act of replenishing its members, and teaching them the social and economic skills necessary to progress as a community. For most people, the grouping we call family is the best way to carry out this task.

  It is not just the community as a whole that needs children, writes the philosopher Thomas H. Murray in The Worth of a Child. Individual adults need children for their own flourishing. ‘Children have helped to meet a variety of adult needs: economic needs, as household workers or as support in old age; emotional needs for intimacy and affection; and developmental needs, for maturation, for ripening of the virtues appropriate to adult life.’

  Do adults have children solely in pursuit of their own fulfilment, or can it be a selfless act? ‘The old, familiar moral categories of altruism and selfishness seem to be jumbled up in well-functioning parent–child relationships,’ says Murray. And whatever framework we choose to assess the worth of children will have to encompass an assortment of paradoxes.

  ‘[W]e celebrate individualism, yet we find meaning in family relationships; we cherish freedom, yet we have children whose needs constrain us profoundly; we want the liberty to get up and go whenever it suits us, yet our flourishing depends on lifelong commitments and enduring, steadfast relationships; we exalt choice and control, yet families are built largely on acceptance of people as they are, with all their imperfections; we participate in a vigorous commercial culture, yet we cherish and protect a sphere in which interactions are regulated by values alien to the world of commerce and markets.’

  British adults are having fewer children than ever before. Indeed, nowhere in the European Union does the current birth rate approach the level needed to keep the population stable. In this country, it is predicted that by 2014 the over-sixty-fives will outnumber the under-sixteens for the first time. Demographers warn of a fertility crisis that threatens economic growth and social welfare. In France and Italy, governments have offered financial incentives to procreate.

  The trend towards having fewer children later, if at all, is largely a middle-class phenomenon. With success in the workplace – and the material benefits that brings – increasingly considered the measure of bourgeois fulfilment, it is unsurprising that some are unwilling to contemplate lowering their professional and consumerist horizons in order to raise children. Where once we debated how to make our children happy, we now discuss as much whether they can make us happy.

  As Laurie and Matthew Taylor point out in their book What Are Children For?, ‘What explains the gap between the reality of declining real costs and increasing opportunities for parents and the perception of growing burdens and choices denied, lies in a very different, less tangible and less easily articulated sense of sacrifice – the loss of those modern absolute values: autonomy and freedom and individualism.’

  But there are other reasons why middle-class women are pursuing their careers into their thirties, enjoying economic independence and professional fulfilment while controlling their fertility. They are unwilling to sacrifice their hard-won status in the public sphere because they are all too aware that having children will penalise them far more than it does their male colleagues.

  Feminism has often been described as a movement against nature. In her tome Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia wrote: ‘The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy … the fiercer will be her struggle with nature – that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: “Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.” ’

  It is not only nature that punishes women who hold back from childbearing. The only group as embattled as working mothers are childless women in their thirties, who are continually bombarded with doomy predictions about diminishing fertility and wasted ova. Yet little is done to shape the workplace to fit any life other than that of a male without child-care responsibilities.

  Meanwhile, an expanding range of birth technologies that promise to ease later conception suggest that having children is an alienable right, provided one has sufficient resources. Despite the 75 per cent failure rate of IVF treatments, or the profound emotional consequences for child as well as parent of using donated eggs or sperm, there is a subtle implication that any woman can be a mother if only she tries hard enough.

  That many more women say they are choosing not to have children confronts the notion of a ‘natural’ maternal drive. It is certainly arguable that childbearing is as much of a social imperative as a biological one. But ‘choice’ here is a tricksy concept. Life is not all about choices – when to work, when to fall in love, when to procreate. In fact, much of our time is spent on these things that won’t – or can’t – be facilitated alone. Women do not remain childless for longer just because they’re holding out for a fatter pay cheque.

  Former tabloid editor and media commentator Amanda Platell has written movingly about her own childlessness. ‘I’ve spent my life with people assuming that I placed ambition above motherhood,’ she wrote in a column for the New Statesman magazine. ‘Well, call me selfish, but I only ever wanted to be a mother one way, with my own child born into a loving relationship with its father. I never thought that being a mother was just about my fulfilment.’ She concludes: ‘Not being able to have kids has not defined me, but it has defined my life.’

  Lauren thinks people have children for different reasons, some because they’re lonely, some because they want to make a family. It does change you. If you’re young, you have to grow up fast, because you’re not just looking after yourself any more. She thinks it’s made her a better person, though it might not look like it when she’s tired and stressed. It’s made her more understanding.

  From this time last year to now, everything and nothing has changed. Her plans are the same really. She was hoping to go to Bristol Uni to see another city, but now she’s going to one in Manchester. And obviously she’d thought she’d settle down with her boyfriend, but now she thinks it’s better this way.

  Ollie, who has been dozing in his buggy, wakens. Lauren picks him up again and sits him on her knees. He beams her a look of absolute adoration. She’s wearing a baseball cap. ‘Lookin’ at me ’at,’ she says, but it sounds like ‘heart’ and that seems appropriate too. Lauren thinks babies have dreams because sometimes you see them jump in their sleep. She was going to name him Oliver, but she thought that everyone was going to call him Ollie for short so she’d just use that in the first place. It’s the same sturdy pragmatism that runs through all her choices.

  A few weeks further into January, Ollie has caught a cold. He snuffles while Lauren feeds him his bottle. She’s only just back from school, and still in her uniform of black blazer and trousers, white shirt and tie. Her hair is tied back in a ponytail, and she is wearing a lick of mascara. MTV is on in the corner. Danielle is upstairs in bed. Everybody’s tired this afternoon.

  It’s good being back at school, says Lauren. She’s leaving in five months, so there’s a lot to do now – finishing coursework, getting ready for her exams in May. She’s taking maths, English, science, RE, PE, art, textiles, music, geography and graphic design. She’s most worried about maths. ‘I’m really good at it but as soon as I get into an exam my head just goes blank. Because you have to remember all the methods. I’m all right at it though. I’m expected a B.’ Ollie chews on her blaze
r shoulder, soaking it.

  He sneezes. Lauren’s mum took him to the doctor’s today but they weren’t much help, she says. What’s the point of sitting for hours on end if they’re just going to tell you to give him Calpol? Ollie is experimenting with a new noise at a higher register. ‘Aweh, aweh,’ he calls to Lauren. He gets so excited when she comes home from school. Even though he’s ill he’s got a big smile on his face.

  Ollie dribbles on to his chest. Lauren takes his top off in case he’s too hot, then wipes his mouth with it. ‘Mum, he’s got warmer.’ She comes in from the kitchen and checks his forehead. She was there at his birth, along with his father.

  Labour was horrible. Lauren had gas and air and then the epidural. It took eighteen hours. The first time she saw him she was just shocked. ‘I said, “Isn’t he small?” I didn’t know what to do. He was just there in me arms. He wasn’t crying at first, that scared me, then he started crying and I knew it was going to be all right.’ Someone brought her tea and toast but she took one bite and she was sick all over him. She laughs. Lauren laughs a lot.

  Ollie does a big burp. Lauren’s rested him on the sofa, and he’s trying to sit up but can’t quite. He rolls over on to his front instead. She was trying not to get pregnant. She laughs again. ‘Not as much as I should have! I was on the Pill, but I forgot to take it. I never even wanted kids. I don’t want any more. I just wanted to do normal things, travel, do my job first.’ She hasn’t travelled much, though she did go to Malta with her netball team for a competition. They won. ‘I wanted to live somewhere, anywhere that wasn’t England. My auntie lives in Oregon, Portland, but I’ve never visited because it’s too expensive. I’m still going to college though.’ She repeats it like an affirmation.

  She sent the application off to Stockport College this week. She chose it because it’s got a crèche. She’s applied for the English language course. It’s about how language evolves and how babies learn to speak. It’ll be useful because she wants to be a primary school teacher. That way, she’ll get all the same holidays as him.

  Lauren isn’t sure what advice she’d give to someone who found herself in her position. ‘I don’t really have a right or wrong on abortion. I think it’s every person’s choice. Everyone’s different. They might not have the support I’ve got. It’s hard work. But as they get older it does get better, and little things that they do make it worth it. Like when he first rolled over. But it is hard. All these girls that get pregnant on purpose. I don’t know why they do it.’

  She doesn’t know people like that personally, but there was a programme on TV about two teenage sisters who got pregnant deliberately. It was probably because they were lonely, or for attention. ‘You get some people who are just really obsessed with babies,’ she notes with derision. Lauren doesn’t like the phrase ‘teenage mothers’. ‘It’s a bit of a cliché. People have this really bad perception. I did, really, until it happened to me. I thought, they’re stupid, it’s their own fault. You get it from media. They always put it so it looks bad. Nobody agrees with it really.’

  People seem to think that teenagers can’t look after babies, she says. ‘But they don’t think that about a first-time mum who’s thirty. They get it all wrong. They think that if you’re fifteen you can’t look after yourself let alone a child. A woman of thirty could have a baby and cope worse than I have, but some people would think that she was more right than me just because of her age.’

  It is widely assumed that a young mother will be a bad mother, or at least that early motherhood is bad for teenagers. Certain newspapers delight in highlighting atypical cases of twelve-year-old pregnancies and fourteen-year-old abortions as evidence of the country’s moral unravelling. The distillation of the feckless council-estate teen is Vicky Pollard from the comedy series Little Britain, who swapped her new baby for a Westlife CD. Since the 1980s, when the Conservative government specialised in attacks on young mothers, there has been the impression that the country is facing an epidemic of teenage pregnancies.

  Certainly the rates are comparatively high, though it is worth remembering that, in 1970, teenagers were twice as likely to become mothers as nowadays. Despite the shock-horror headlines, the teenage conception rate dropped by nearly 10 per cent in the five years since the introduction of the government’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy in 1999.

  The rationale for the strategy, set out in a paper from the government’s Social Exclusion Unit, aimed to demonstrate that a woman’s life chances, and those of her children, were adversely affected by early motherhood. Teenagers in deprived areas are both more likely to become pregnant and less likely to consider abortion. The majority of teenage mothers do live in poverty. They are more likely to be unemployed, to suffer from depression and to become dependent on alcohol or drugs. But so are their childless peers. It is typically poverty, not early motherhood, that truncates life chances.

  Clearly, helping more young people out of poverty is a laudable objective. But it is worth assessing whether this altruism is at all motivated by adult distaste for teenage sexual activity, or by a conviction that children are not capable of looking after other children. Vicky Pollard is compelling precisely because she plays on fears of a rampant underclass.

  If the decision is made freely, and properly supported, there is nothing essentially wrong with having a baby before you’re twenty. Granted, not every teenage mother is as capable and undiminished as Lauren, nor do they all have her support network. But, instead of condemning the root causes – like social exclusion, poor sex education or lack of opportunities – it is the young women themselves who have been continually vilified by the press and politicians as slags or scroungers, despite there being no evidence that teenagers get pregnant to procure better housing or benefits.

  And these prejudices can also inform the public service provision they receive. In a poll conducted in 2004, the YWCA found that half of education professionals thought that young mothers were not interested in education, though their research shows that having a child of their own makes them more determined to gain qualifications. Lauren didn’t need any persuading to get back to school. Indeed, she didn’t miss out on any of her education because, with her usual precision, she gave birth during the summer holidays.

  Ollie saw his dad yesterday. He’s got his own flat now, but Lauren insists he has Ollie at his mum’s. Otherwise she’d be ringing up every five minutes to check on him. He’d be sat there and spark up a cig or something. He’s dead dopey, she says, still half-indulgent. There’s nothing special between them now, just ‘Hiya’, just keeping the peace.

  Lauren first went out with him when she was about twelve. Then she didn’t see him for ages. And then, when she’d just turned fourteen, she saw his brother at a party and got his number again. The next day she dropped her phone down the toilet so she went to his house to say she couldn’t call him; he invited her in and that was it.

  ‘He was dead nice. He used to take me out every weekend. He used to buy me little things, cards. But then it was, like, I’d have school the next day and he thought it didn’t matter. We were totally different. I’d say a word and he’d be, “What are you trying to speak posh for?” and I’d be, “I’m not.” So we just drifted apart.’

  But there’s one thing she knows, no matter what their relationship is like: he will be a really good dad. Lauren still sees her own father, who moved out when she was nine, regularly. ‘Aweh,’ Ollie calls. She holds him to her and kisses his neck. She whispers: ‘Big love, big love.’

  Before having Ollie, she’d never even held a newborn baby or changed a nappy. ‘But if you don’t do it, there’s nobody else to do it for you, so you just learn. And then they start crying and you learn what different crying means and you get used to it. Because nobody knows, do they? It’s just like trial and error.’

  Her mum has let her find it out all by herself. ‘When he was born, everyone was like, “Oh, you’ll be taking over, you’ll be looking after the baby all the time,” but she’
s never had him in her room at night, not one time,’ she says. ‘She’s let me do it myself, the hard way, but it’s a better way. She was seventeen when she had me so she knows what it’s like.’

  When I next visit, it’s still raining. Lauren started Weightwatchers last night. You sign up, they weigh you and then work out how many points a day you’re allowed. You follow the points, and lose the weight. Lauren is allowed twenty-two points a day. You pay a fiver a week. And then when you get to your target weight it all changes and you start eating a bit more but not too much so you don’t put all your weight back on.

  She went with a friend who’s a year older than her. ‘She needs it more than me. I was twelve stone thirteen pounds. I was shocked! But before I was pregnant I weighed about eleven stone. I want to lose at least a stone,’ she says. Like all of Lauren’s intentions, her capability is never in doubt. ‘I ate like crazy when I was pregnant. I ate for triplets. And now he’s getting older I’m starting to think about me again. They say it takes a year for your body to get back to normal.’

  Lauren is in the living-room with Danielle. Ollie and their mum aren’t home yet. They’re watching MTV. They both like rock, but Lauren’s tastes aren’t as heavy as her sister’s. Danielle wears the moshers’ uniform of black and boots, a very teenage way of dressing that screams a statement but hides your shape. She gets called names for her outfits at school, and Lauren worries about that.

  Danielle adores her sister, and doesn’t bother to hide it. She’s always trying to get Lauren to sing. Her friend is starting a band, and she wants her sister to record something and send it to him. ‘It has to be punk,’ she challenges, ‘Green Day or something.’ All right, yeah, she’ll try it. But she’s used to singing ballads, Sinead O’Connor or Shania Twain. Before Lauren got pregnant she sang in pubs for a company called Natural Talent. She says she’s an exhibitionist. She’d love to go back to it now, but with having him and school it’s too much.