The Story of Childhood (19 page)

This quest makes a sham of inclusive schooling, as professor of education at Goldsmiths College Sally Tomlinson argues: ‘As long as teachers are pressed to deliver higher standards in the form of more children passing examinations and reaching targets, they will understandably be more reluctant to take on the education of all children. There is little time or incentive for teachers to introduce new curriculum practices within mainstream schools, when the emphasis is on achieving at key stages and acquiring the magic five A*–C grades at GCSE.'

The system is destined to create more losers than winners. And it robs children of the chance to learn collaboratively when they are simply delivered a script to be regurgitated at a later date under stressful conditions. As Oliver James observes, it's good news for future employers, guaranteed a wildly competitive workforce, and for the corporations who will exploit these insecurities in order to sell their status-affirming products.

For now, though, Nicholas can forget about homework. He's feeling excited about Christmas because he'll get new toys. ‘I asked for a new Gameboy because my last one got lost. I was playing with it and I put it back in my top drawer, and then I think my sister took it out to play with and she can't remember what she did with it afterwards.' He's looked hard for it, but especially since the new carpet all his things have got new places.

His dad has bought presents for Nicholas and Emma to give their mum, and his mum has bought things for him to give her mum, but he has no idea about what to get his dad. His parents won't have stockings, because there'd be no point in them buying tiny presents for themselves. They'd know exactly what was in there and take it out the next morning!

Christmas is a happy time of year for most people, thinks Nicholas. But not all people. It is the year following the second Gulf War. ‘If you're in Iraq quite a few of their houses have been destroyed so they won't be having a Christmas tree and lots and lots of presents.'

When I next visit Nicholas, it's the day after the day after the day after Boxing Day, in that peculiar stretch before the New Year that can feel dilatory after the accelerated preparations of Advent. Nicholas's Christmas Day began with him taking things out of his stocking, playing with the things
in his stocking and eating some of the chocolates. Then he got dressed, and ate breakfast, which is always bacon sandwiches and eggs. Then he opened his presents.

‘I got one or two presents – quite a few actually. I got a snooker table.' He pauses, still impressed. ‘It's in the conservatory downstairs. I knew that it began with an “s” but I didn't know that I was getting it. I was told that it was a board to do my homework on but of course I knew it wasn't. It was in this gigantic package and you had to put it together. It took about half an hour, and then my mum taught me how to play.'

He got a new Gameboy and two new games as well. But then when they went to Oxford to visit his grandparents they found the one he'd lost. ‘It was in the car under the middle seat, so now I've got two Gameboys. My sister got one for Christmas too so altogether we've got three Gameboys and five games.'

His grandparents gave him a Spirograph that makes patterns, and he got a CD and one or two tapes and of course lots of books. He reaches across the bedroom floor to the pile of most-favoured presents. ‘I got the encyclopaedia of everything yucky and it says down the side “including bogies, farts, bottoms, toilets and vomit”!' His high ‘hee-hee' strains his neck muscles. ‘In here there's probably the biggest fart in the world!'

He reads on, clear and precise, revelling in rudeness sanctioned between hard covers. ‘“This consists of ants, bats, blood, body odour, burping, eye gunk, farts, fleas, fungi, lice, maggots, pee, poop, leeches, pus, rats, scabs, slugs, snakes, snots, spiders, tics, toilets, vomit.” That's what my aunt gave me. It's absolutely disgusting.' He opens it to display a lurid close-up of worms. ‘Where's snot?' he muses, leafing through the pages. ‘Here's vomit.' His mum told him about the most
disgusting thing that's he's ever done. ‘When I was a baby, when she was changing my nappy I once accidentally did a wee in her face,' he confesses, merrily aghast.

After he had finished opening his presents on Christmas Day, his dad was really mean and said that everyone had to go out for a walk, at about eleven o'clock in the morning. ‘My granny got to stay behind, unfairly. Then we waited for three hours for the turkey to cook, and then we had lunch and I didn't have any pudding, I was so full up with turkey, bacon, stuffing, carrots, potatoes, peas, etc.' Nicholas has a delicious way of saying ‘potatoes', as though he's still tasting them.

The Christmas concert didn't go very well because he got every single piece wrong and had to start again. After that he played more snooker. A family friend called Ann was there too. Nicholas went to bed about half an hour later than usual.

The day after Boxing Day, Nicholas and his family went to Oxford to see his dad's parents and his dad's sister and her husband and their children. ‘When we arrived my cousin Simon was there and the first thing he did was start punching my bottom. And the twins [who were born earlier this year] were always crying. But Emma played more with Simon, because they're nearly the same age.'

His grandparents like cycling a lot, and they don't like cars, he notes with surprise. They're probably the only ones in the whole street who don't have a car. They're not too old – something like sixty-six and seventy. When he visits, he does a lot of cycling because they live near two cycle paths. Otherwise, he doesn't really like sports. ‘I don't like boxing and I don't like rugby that much.' He has a double session on Fridays at school. ‘You don't actually tackle each other, you tag each other, but quite often if I
have got the ball they pull me down by the thing that holds the tag on and say it was an accident.' ‘They' are the mean people from the other classes. Nicholas's worst teacher is his PE teacher. He's
really
mean.

School doesn't start again until 11 January. He has days and stretching days left of what Dylan Thomas called ‘that wool white bell-tongued ball of holidays'. His friend George is coming tomorrow, but he doesn't know if it's for a sleep-over. Every single holiday George goes to Canada, even if it's only for one week. ‘His father used to live in Canada, so he's half English, half Canadonian, whatever you say.' He's got nothing much else to do apart from boring things like thank-you letters and music practice. He wouldn't really like to be a musician when he grows up, but it's important to do music practice because his mum wants him to and she tells him off otherwise!

He's not sure what he'll be eating with George, but it won't be pizza. ‘I don't like pizza. I can make George fall off a chair anytime when I say I don't like Coke, chocolate or pizza. Everyone in my class thinks I'm incredibly unusual not liking Coke, chocolate or pizza and always drinking water.'

Nicholas has a more cosmopolitan palate. He likes mussels, which he normally has with garlic sauce, and omelette. Once, when he was in Italy, he tasted kiwi, and peach and passion-fruit ice cream. He thinks there was even a tomato-flavoured one.

Nicholas isn't sure about whether he needs to make any New Year's resolutions. He hasn't got any bad habits, apart from picking his nose, but everyone does that. It says here in the Yuck Book that there's been a record taken and everyone has once picked their nose. Everyone in the world.

He doesn't really do anything for New Year. His mum will give him a small present like a pencil, but it seems really
titchy compared to a Gameboy or a snooker table. He prefers Christmas.

How would he feel like if he didn't get any presents? ‘That would depend on whether everyone else did or not. If no one got any then I'd be annoyed. If I was the only one then I'd be really, really cross with my mum and dad.'

Is giving presents a way of showing people that you like them?

‘Well, yes,' says Nicholas.

Are there other ways?

‘Well, saying it, obviously. Playing with them.'

A major engine in the juggernaut of child-panic is the fear that childhood has been co-opted by commerce, and children integrated into the sphere of avarice. Growing-up has always meant learning the rhythms of wanting, getting and not getting – attention, a biscuit, that toy, now, later. What is new, and profoundly alarming, is the scale and sophistication of inducements to want.

For richer and poorer, shopping has become a leisure activity. The unprecedented increase in consumption over the past fifty years has driven the search for fresh niche markets. Childhood is spliced into numerous needful stages, each requiring appropriate toys, clothes and entertainments. In addition to the teenage market, first targeted during the postwar economic boom, there are now pre-teens, tweens and tinies.

In a major research study released in 2005, the National Consumer Council (NCC) identified a generation of young people aged between ten and nineteen who were avid shoppers. Perhaps surprisingly, it noted that British children were more consumer-oriented than their peers in the United States, usually considered the progenitor of materialism.

Even the youngest in the sample were already keen consumers: the average ten-year-old had internalised between 300 and 400 brands. Brand recognition even amongst infants is astonishing. An earlier study by the
International Journal of Advertising and Marketing to Children
found that over two thirds of three-year-olds recognised the McDonald's golden arches.

A combination of babies born fewer and later, working parents, and the by no means universal increase in disposable income has given children far greater influence over household purchasing decisions. With the advent of ‘pester-power', advertisers have learnt to sell to them directly. Around six out of ten children in the NCC study said that they pestered parents for what they wanted, getting annoyed or slamming doors if the answer was ‘no'. But children's own disposable income is also rising. According to a study by the Halifax, pocket money increased at more than four times the rate of inflation in 2005.

Staggering resources are mined into reaching this lucrative market, with companies drafting in child psychologists and extending their promotional activities ever more subtly, particularly through sponsorship in schools. Specialised marketing agencies sell advertising space in secondary schools and play areas. Other companies parade altruism in exchange for guaranteed brand recognition, like Cadbury's offering free sports equipment to schools in exchange for vouchers from chocolate bars, or Walkers Crisps giving away free books.

Beyond the playground, as children's leisure time becomes more contained, they spend many thousand of hours each year hopping between commercials on their multi-channel televisions, flipping through pop-ups as they surf the Internet, or clocking the product placements embedded in video games.

And children are now actively involved in the marketing
process itself. Levi Strauss was the first company to recruit ‘cool' kids to advise them. Brainstorming amongst young consumers is supposed to have led Heinz to produce its ‘E-Z squeeze' bottles. Children can become co-creators of new computer games, testing pre-release versions in online communities. Others are recruited to ‘street teams' – armies of underage PRs who are offered freebies and other inducements to promote new bands to their peers.

Stephen Kline argues that it was Victorian concern with the distinct nature of childhood, together with the increasing availability of manufactured goods, that fed the fledgling children's market. A new interest in child development and welfare encouraged manufacturers to diversify into educational and medical products. Soon clothing and furniture – like smocks, pinafores and high chairs – were being designed exclusively for children.

The production of toys followed suit, chiming with a new ideal of modern consumer domesticity that can be seen in the advertising of the early 1900s. Kline writes: ‘The child with toys is a symbol of the pleasures of consumerism, of the new objects primarily designed for leisure and fantasy … Toys are fitting symbols of economic progress because they direct consumers to the rewards of leisure and relaxation. The recreated atmosphere of domestic consumption takes its emotional cues and mood from the absence of labour implied by a playful child.'

So the children's market had as much resonance for adults. Professor Ellen Seiter, author of
Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Cultures
, observes how cultural changes throughout the twentieth century – in particular women's involvement in the labour market – have increased the demand for toys: ‘In order for the volume of toy sales to have increased, families had to move to houses with space
to keep the toys, and children had to have mothers who were so busy that they needed new ways to keep children entertained.' The increase in children's consumption, she argues, has been caused in part by the increasing difficulty in the job of caring for children.

Nowadays, however, that consumption is rising exponentially, and one extremity is swiftly superceded by the next: the toy of the film, the yoghurt of the cartoon, the padded bra of the doll. In the worst light, the industry looks like a monstrous behemoth, pushing sex and saturated fats, creating a generation of obese, promiscuous, celebrity-obsessed automatons, dependent on brands for identity, bullying the poor few who cannot afford the right trainers, unable to appreciate gratification that is anything other than instant.

But this presumes that children are innately free of cynicism, lacking any ability to discriminate. Are younger people especially at risk from the magical materialism that creates unnecessary needs and promises a fantasy world in which they are all fulfilled? Are children essentially more persuadable because they are less competent than adults? Or does some of this panic reflect certain assumptions about what it is to be a child?