by Abrams, Fran
Feeling the strain
Stanley Kasumba had lots to say about his life that was positive – he got on very well with his parents, for example. And he had a strong sense that each generation had to be better, to achieve more than the one that went before. Born in 1990 and growing up in north London, he felt he had seen quite a bit of life. But at the same time, things seemed to have been well mapped out for him.
‘When I was younger I was in football clubs, small teams within the area. And there would be reading workshops from the library. Everything was really set. It wasn’t really your freedom. It would be like your mother telling you, there’s this thing you should do,’ he said.39 ‘My parents are very ambitious for me. I think now that’s what parenting is about – they put everything they have into their children. They want them to do the best. Maybe that wasn’t really the case in the past. In the past parents would be preoccupied with so many things that they wouldn’t channel everything into their children.’
Stanley was doing A-levels and hoping to go on to university, and he was aware of competing pressures upon him. Parents, wanting him to do as well as he possibly could. Friends, whispering in his ear suggestions on this or that way to break the rules – at thirteen or fourteen, a spot of vandalism; at fifteen or sixteen, some illegal drugs. In many ways, Stanley’s teenage years could be characterized as a delicate juggling act – which, it had to be said, he appeared to have carried off with aplomb. And yet at seventeen he looked back with a kind of envy on his younger self: ‘As I grow older, I think back and I think: “Oh, man! Look how old I am.” I’m not that old, but I remember when I was eleven and we used to play in the park, and when I was twelve, and the first day I walked to school. I don’t feel as joyful. There’s always that thought – what am I going to do, why am I feeling this way? I’m so much in control of my life. Then, I didn’t have to think about anything. I could just be free and happy.’
One of the striking things about Stanley was his tendency to reflect in this way about his circumstances, his past, his future, his state of emotional equilibrium, or otherwise. The 1990s child, it seemed, was a child in touch with his own feelings and able to express them, perhaps in a way which few earlier-born children would have been. Perhaps it was not so surprising, then, that when the United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, published a report on child ‘wellbeing’ in a range of rich countries based on statistics from just before and just after the millennium, it found the United Kingdom and the United States in the bottom third of the table on five of the six measures they used. The United Kingdom’s children were found to be the worst behaved; the least content in their family lives. Overall, their levels of personal happiness and wellbeing were found to be the worst of any of the twenty-one developed countries included in the study. The only measure on which the UK’s youth scored well – in the middle of the table – was health and safety. These findings quickly became the subject of controversy, with academics disputing the comparability of the data. But they did provide an interesting picture of how British children were feeling – not so much, perhaps, of whether they were actually safe, healthy and getting a reasonable education, but of whether they and their parents thought they were. So, for instance, British children tended to rate their health as being quite poor, while in fact their chances of dying young were low – in case of accidents – or average – in the case of disease. Similarly, the British fifteen-year-old achieved above-average scores in English, maths and science, and at the same time were more likely than the average to expect only low-skilled work on leaving school.
Was the British child now just better at expressing his or her feelings than his Czech or Dutch counterpart? If so, why would he or she choose to express negative emotions, while the Dutch child – who was judged the most well-appointed of all – expressed positive ones? Certainly, the British child was more likely to live in a single-parent or a step-family than any other apart from the American child, and less likely to sit down to eat a family meal on a regular basis. He was, though, likely to say that his parents spent a good deal of time talking to him. Whatever the reasons, it certainly seemed the British child, around the time of the millennium, was not a particularly happy child. Which was, in historical terms, surprising. After all, the British child was more likely than ever to live to adulthood; more likely than ever to receive a university or a college education, more likely to have plentiful food, a warm home, a family car.
Somehow, it seemed, the nation’s children had become all mixed up. And not just ‘mixed up’, in an emotional sense. In a practical sense, their lives were becoming more mixed up, too, with the lives of adults. They spent more time with their parents – Stanley’s family would enjoy a walk in Epping Forest together on the weekend, or would take a trip to Margate. Somehow, their worlds were not so separate as they had been. They watched the same television programmes as their parents, stayed indoors more, rather than going out with friends. There was a wider sense, too, in which children’s lives had been mixed up with those of adults – a phenomenon which had been demonstrated in the reaction to the Bulger murder. Children were now a part of society. Their world was no longer seen as being some separated place, some walled garden or woodland glade where they could frolic, childlike and undisturbed. The adult world was their world, and vice versa: witness, for example, the adult tendency to read Harry Potter books, or to visit theme parks unaccompanied by children. Somehow, this left children exposed to all the pressures of the adult world. And at the same time it led to a sense of panic among adults, about where childhood had vanished to. Children were felt to be indulging in adult vices – drink, drugs, violence. And, as ever, there was conflict over who was to blame. The children themselves, for going off the rails? Their parents, for failing them by being divorced, going out to work (mothers), not going out to work (fathers)? Or society, as a whole, as an entity? Increasingly, the feeling was that society was to blame.
During the mid-1990s, then, the political focus began to turn on children. An education reform act in the late 1980s had begun the process of focusing on what children should be learning at school, and on ensuring they left with the ‘right’ knowledge, gained under a national curriculum. Now, with the advent of a new Labour government, the drive – in every area of life, it seemed, and children were certainly no exception – was to drive up ‘standards’. At school, they must achieve better results. More of them must go to university. Overall, they must be better provided for; they must do more; they must be better; they must improve. A whole range of grand schemes were conceived. By 2008,40 the targets towards which the government’s department for children and schools would be working would include breastfeeding, childhood obesity, bullying, social care assessments, preventable child deaths, exam performance, drug misuse, teenage pregnancy and youth crime, to name but a few. The state now felt the need to measure and improve every aspect of children’s lives. Parents, meanwhile, sometimes seemed to be there largely to be blamed when things went wrong. The state, naturally, would take the credit where things went right.
Even before Labour came to power in 1997, John Major’s Conservative government had begun the process with a plan to ensure every child received pre-school education. For a while, this particular programme was felt to be a possible panacea for all the perceived ills from which children were suffering. Catch them early, the theory went, and it might be possible to nip all these social ailments in the bud: low standards, delinquency, truancy, unemployment, even crime. But the revelation – hardly new – that educational under-achievement had social causes led to deeper thinking. Perhaps what was needed was not so much a programme to tackle educational under-achievement as a programme to tackle child poverty. The government set itself a target of cutting relative child poverty by a quarter before 2004 – something which, by and large, it did achieve.41 The strategy was to try to tackle long-term unemployment on the basis that children born into workless families were very likely to under-achieve themselves.
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p; ‘Poverty must not be a birthright,’ the work and pensions minister, Baroness Hollis, declared in 2000.42 ‘Our strategy is to halt the transmission of low expectations, low aspirations and low outcomes from parent to child.’ A ‘Sure Start’ programme, similar to one already running in the United States, was set up to bring mothers and babies from poor estates into the state’s ambit. Five hundred million pounds was spent on setting up centres in the hope people would arrive to ask for developmental advice, health advice, advice on how to stop smoking. Unsurprisingly, the poorest mothers, the teenage mothers and the mothers who coped least well were the least likely to want to go to a centre to be told how to be better, and so the scheme was only a partial success.
Everywhere, though, there was a sense that something big should be done. Children’s rights were once again in the ascendancy when Britain ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1991, giving children the legal ‘right’ to various things – to have special protection, to be able to pursue their talents, to participate in achieving a better future for all children. There was almost nothing, it seemed, that the state could not now promise the child. The British government, underlining an article in the UN convention, even promised its children the right to ‘grow up in an environment of happiness, love and understanding’,43 though how this was to be achieved was never made clear. The government did not choose to dwell upon these ‘rights’ when it made its periodic reports to the United Nations about its progress towards its goals.
And yet the feeling persisted – indeed, continued to grow – that all was not well in the world of the child. Save the Children summed up the situation thus: ‘From a very early age, the majority of children’s time is taken up by structured activities, leaving very little space for individual choice. Increased perception of danger in public spaces, (adult-centred) consumerism, an achievement-oriented society, child poverty and public prejudice against children on the street are factors contributing to a narrowing of the private space, and hence the liberty, of today’s children. Children’s wishes often come secondary to what adults deem necessary, safe, educative or more convenient.’44 Despite this apparent catalogue of complaints, Save the Children was able to conclude that children’s lives were getting better. Others begged to differ. Day after day, year after year, the press was full of stories expressing an increased sense of children’s vulnerability, of a perceived jeopardy and threat, if not to their present then to their wellbeing at some future, unspecified date. Parents were repeatedly injuncted to take precautions, to protect their young.
In July 2000, just to pick one example, the Daily Mail reported that the Imperial Cancer Research Fund had warned that one child in three would grow up to be a ‘cancer victim’, and had linked this risk with childhood diet. It then featured three families talking about their lifestyles, and accompanied by advice from ‘cancer experts’: ‘WATCH their weight. Obesity has a clear link with bowel and breast cancer. MAKE a point of examining your children’s skin, and see your GP about any moles that grow, weep, hurt or appear suddenly. MAKE sure your children eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. Bowel cancer is less likely to strike if you have a high-fibre diet. LOWER their intake of fats, salt and nitrates. AVOID plastic packaging and cookware. Plastics contain chemicals that may disrupt the fine hormone balance in the body.’ The list of injunctions seemed interminable – and this was just what parents were now meant to do to avoid one perceived, far-distant future risk.
The internet, too, had to be policed. ‘Popular concerns have been expressed that using a computer is a solitary and potentially addictive activity, provoking fears that some children might become so obsessed with the technology that they will socially withdraw from the off-line world of family and friends,’ a report on children’s computer use suggested.45 ‘Children, as symbols of the future themselves, are at the heart of debates . . . about the “new” dangers that these technologies might bring for the Net generation.’
The potent belief that when we look at our children we look at the future of mankind was at work, and with a new intensity, in the years around the millennium. It was as if the soul of the human race had been taken out of the dark drawer where it had been hidden during the rationalist, thrusting years of the 1980s and 1990s, examined, dusted off and found to have been damaged. Something was going wrong – and the explanations, the exhortations to do better, to do different, were myriad. By 2000, even the Incorporated Association of Preparatory Schools, an organization whose members were largely devoted to getting children into the top public schools and therefore not noted for their lax attitude to educational achievement, was concerned that children were being pushed too hard. At the association’s conference that year, the headmaster of Dulwich College Preparatory School worried aloud about the private tuition many children were forced to undergo in order to pass entrance exams: ‘They deserve a childhood. They need our protection. There is a need for children to have a life and enjoy it.’46 The problem, he suggested, was parents’, not children’s, fear of failure, of the shame they would endure if their offspring failed to win places at the most over-subscribed private schools.
Somehow, the debate was turning in on itself. Increasingly, it was not the fears themselves – delinquency, early pregnancy, abuse, abduction, internet porn – but the fear of the damage the fears were doing, that was exercising public opinion. The panic about children’s wellbeing began to give way, in short, to a panic about panic. This took specific forms – the concern that new rules demanding criminal record checks of adults working with children could close sports clubs and bar perfectly blameless people from jobs through technicalities, for example. ‘Would You Dare to Help This Child?’ the Daily Telegraph asked in 2009, its question posed next to a photo of a small boy lying on the floor by an upturned bicycle. ‘What sort of society is it where adults suspect other adults, and children are taught to suspect anyone other than their parents, who are often the people who cause them greatest harm?’ The article drew ninety-nine comments on the paper’s website, almost all of them supportive of the author.
Even terrible crimes against children were now met by the fear that fear itself would be the outcome. After the murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne in 2000, by a man named Roy Whiting, who had already served a prison sentence for child abduction and indecent assault, a ‘but’ crept into the comment pages: ‘There is not a parent in Britain whose heart does not ache for Sarah Payne’s family,’ wrote Susan Dalgety in the Edinburgh Evening News. But the worst effect of the crime would be its effect on all youngsters: ‘Children who would otherwise have been outside in the summer sun, revelling in the glorious freedom of the school holidays, will be trapped indoors because of their parents’ fear of evil strangers. And a generation of youngsters, already swaddled in cotton wool, will be warned to treat everyone, even their next door neighbour or local shopkeeper, as a potential abductor.’
The problem went deeper than mere over-protectiveness, though. A 2007 book summed up the state of play. Its title was Toxic Childhood. The problem, it suggested, was too much technology, not enough exercise, too much fattening food, all leading to low self-esteem and a risk of developmental disorders such as dyslexia or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Too many children were failing to bond with their parents: ‘This is the “elephant” standing full square in the living room of every family in the developed world.’
The author described a sulky girl she had once seen, standing on the steps of the Ufizzi gallery in Florence, licking an ice-cream with evident adolescent angst. This poor girl, unaware of the attention she had attracted, became a symbol for all that ailed the Western child: ‘Poor child. Poor parents. Poor western civilisation . . . How did she get like that? Perhaps she’s spent ten years feeding on burgers, pizza and ice cream, washed down with sugary cola. Maybe she spends long hours in a virtual world of her own, absorbing the messages of the marketing men, playing computer games rather than real ones, staring at TV programmes
rather than going out to play in the sunshine. Does she lie awake till the early hours, watching unsuitable TV and texting her chums? Has this sedentary, screen-based lifestyle led to problems at school in concentrating, controlling her temper or relating to other people? And are her parents bewildered that their beloved little girl seems so troubled, when they’ve provided her with every luxury money could buy?’ The answer, in the author’s mind at least, was a resounding ‘yes’.
The book, alarmist as it was, was backed by an enormous number of child development experts, no fewer than 110 of whom signed a letter its author wrote to the Daily Telegraph on the subject. A rise in special educational needs, she said, was particularly worrying: ‘Today’s special educational needs turn all too often into tomorrow’s mental health problems, antisocial behaviour and crime.’ The author, along with the experts, had seen the future. And it frightened them.
Conclusion
Children, when seen from a distance by an adult world which fears for its own future, often seem to cause alarm. Look close up and the scene is usually calmer, more reassuring. As the American academic John Sommerville put it in the 1980s: ‘Babies are the enemy. Not your baby or mine, of course. Individually they are all cute. But together they are a menace.’1
A closer look at one modern childhood, then, might prove reassuring. We might meet Florence Bishop, for instance, born in 2000 into a middle-class family in the south of England, early one weekday evening. Aged seven, Florence was wearing her school uniform on this particular evening and was in the middle of her piano practice. She loved her little magnetic toys, and her hamster.2 In November, she had already written a list for Father Christmas. She was brimming with health and full of enthusiasm for life. In her no sign whatsoever could be detected of bad diet, poor parenting, incipient delinquency. Hers was the very model of a calm, happy, well-regulated childhood. If anything, Florence’s life was possibly more regulated than her parents’ would have been. She knew exactly what time she must board the school bus each day, and she had always to be sure she had the right books with her. Her mother, unlike her mother’s mother in the 1970s, had a full-time job but one or other parent was always at home to greet her when she returned from school; to ensure homework was done and the correct number of vegetables eaten at teatime. Perhaps they worried a little more than their own parents would have done. Florence always had to carry a mobile phone so they could be in touch; she was not yet considered old enough to go out alone. Yet the cadences of Florence’s early life carried only a few distant echoes from the heat and the noise and the sense of alarm that were filling up the public arena during those years. And the same, almost certainly, could be said for most children.
