The Story of Childhood (18 page)

Now it is the day before the day before Christmas Eve. The kitchen table is bright with coloured beads that pop into plastic frames to make pictures. Emma is working on a ladybird. Nicholas has constructed an elaborate geometric pattern. At the piano end of the long sitting-room stands a laden Christmas tree. His favourite decoration is the star, or maybe this shiny green bauble. To the side are the children's advent calendars, the cardboard windows hanging open like broken promises. This is a scene best viewed on a snowy night through a frosted window. It feels rich and snug, as though the whole home has been insulated with red velvet.

Nicholas has been to the cinema with his dad. He might like to be an actor, but he doesn't think being famous would be very good. ‘Everyone would know you and everything and you'd have loads and loads and loads of money, too much really.' It is possible to have too much money. A google or millions of pounds would be too much. A sensible amount would be a few thousand pounds, something like three thousand. He calculates. ‘Well, more than that really, maybe
£300,000.' Everyone should be able to afford a house and a car.

He retires to his bedroom. It's cold outside, and Nicholas is wearing a smart navy fleece. His thick hair looks warm like a hat. It's a Tuesday morning, but he's here at home because the holidays have arrived. He had a friend round yesterday. They played draughts and watched television together:
Tom and Jerry, Scooby-Doo, Blue Peter
and
Newsround
. Nicholas doesn't think that people his age know what's happening in the news: ‘I don't know anyone who watches it apart from me.' In the news this week, someone has made a robotic dolphin that goes a metre under water and it can do all sorts of tricks.

Outside his bedroom door, Emma is getting in a muddle with her carolling, and a chorus of sweet hallelujahs vowel-slips into ‘hallelooloo'. Nicholas laughs hard, twisting on the sofa, aware of how he is laughing and aiming for a note of grown-up derision. ‘Emm-aaa,' he calls, ‘can you stop that please?'

A tooth is wobbly. He doesn't know how many baby teeth he has left, but he does know that he's got eight big teeth. Two of them are his top front teeth and they look a little large for the rest of his mouth. When a tooth is ready, it gets extremely wobbly and then it comes out. ‘I've swallowed nearly all of them. I've swallowed six out of eight. I only realise it when I've brushed my teeth!' He doesn't like going to the dentist, but he's not scared of it.

There is a troop of monkeys at the feet end of Nicholas's bed. He's had George, the biggest one, since he was two. He got nearly all of them for Christmas, except for the smallest one. He definitely used to like them, but not so much now. He would play at throwing them in the air and catching them, and would imagine that they could talk when he was very, very young.

His earliest memory may be that, or it may be this one. ‘It was when my sister was born and my mum left me at home with my nanny and I watched videos all night!' It's not every day your sister is born. ‘She went at about one o'clock in the morning, and she came back at about eight o'clock the next night, and Emma was born at about one o'clock. I was two and a half, and you get excited about things like that when you're young.'

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 dissatisfaction 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.