The Story of Childhood (2 page)

In his hugely popular account of how he would educate an imaginary child, Rousseau emphasised instead the primitive goodness of children, who should be left free to respond
to the world around them and only later be nurtured by a responsive teacher. ‘First leave the germ of his character free to show itself,' he wrote. ‘Do not constrain him in anything, the better to see him as he really is.'

As philosophical inquiry turned from strict reason towards a more emotional and organic description of the world, the Romantic writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteeth centuries embellished the ideal of childhood innocence and joy. William Blake followed Rousseau's notion of the primitive purity of the child. For Wordsworth – who pronounced, ‘The Child is father of the Man' – childhood was a ‘lost realm', a time of mystical communion between the natural and the divine, to be viewed with often cloying nostalgia from the ‘prison-house' of adulthood.

Such Romantic enchantments were far removed from the reality of childhood. As Charles Dickens chronicled, for the most part Victorian society brutalised its children, manifestly in its treatment of child labourers but also through the more subtle neglects inherent in the social conventions of the upper classes. Throughout the nineteenth century, reformers campaigned to regulate poor children's employment and introduce a degree of compulsory schooling through a number of factory and education acts. This was a crucial step towards the creation of a universal childhood experience in Britain which extended beyond the wealthy.

Many working-class children – and their parents – resented the curtailment of their economic independence. But as Viviana Zelizer, an expert in the social value of childhood, notes of the debate about child labour in the United States: ‘For reformers, true parental love could only exist if the child was defined exclusively as an object of sentiment and not as an agent of production.'

Zelizer documented this shift in the status of the child,
from economically useful to useless but emotionally ‘priceless'. And with the advancement of sciences of the mind in the early twentieth century, social focus turned towards children's psychological development, and how that might be influenced by their emotional relationships with adults.

In her fine historical survey of trends in childcare,
Dream Babies
, Christina Hardyment notes how the two world wars affected popular views of children in this country. In the 1920s and 1930s, parents were encouraged to apply a strictly behaviourist approach to their children by the ascendant child-care advocates of the time, Frederick Truby King and John B. Watson. Conditioning was all: feeding and sleeping were strictly regimented, indulgence kept to a minimum, and good habits introduced early and constantly reinforced.

‘[The behaviourist approach was] well-suited to a world recovering from but still apprehensive of war, which saw its children as a generation with a military purpose,' writes Hardyment. The Second World War changed all this: ‘Once the child-rearing principles of the Third Reich and Stalin's Russia became threats to freedom rather than models of egalitarianism, a reaction set in, a determination grew to allow the children of the free world to be more free than children had ever been.' Child-centric care became the norm, exemplified by the likes of Dr Benjamin Spock and, more recently, Penelope Leach, who advised that parents trust their own instincts and have fun with their offspring.

But the popularisation of clinical theories of emotional and educational development also proved influential. Just as Rousseau had done in an earlier era, practitioners adopted the concept of successive stages. One such theory was offered by Sigmund Freud, in his classic work on psychosexual development,
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
, first published in 1905. He conceived adult sexuality as the outcome
of libidinal drives present from birth, with pleasure being derived from different erotic zones at each developmental phase.

As Hardyment notes, although the theory was too overtly sexual to be universally adopted by parents, a diluted version did influence popular thinking about the avoidance of psychological distress. ‘[Parents] moved from the offensive to the defensive. Rather than directing the infant, drawing upon the blank tablet, they became its guardian against a host of fears and anxieties which could, it was believed, produce deviant emotional growth and neurotic disorder.'

By the late 1940s, uncertainties about applying a strictly psychoanalytical approach to child-rearing led to a renewed interest in behaviourism. In 1953, Jean Piaget offered another theory of successive development, this time concentrating on cognitive and intellectual rather than emotional development.

Piaget identified four different stages and, in order to explain the inevitable exceptions to them, coined the term ‘mental age', so a child who exhibited competence beyond her prescribed stage had a higher mental age than her peers.

As Piaget's concepts filtered into the public psyche, Hardyment observes, parents began to take the concept of an elastic mental age as a challenge. While they may now have worried less about their children's secret sexual yearnings, Piaget did not offer them an opportunity to relax. Instead, the focus turned to how parents could stimulate their children in order that they grow up as intelligent as possible. ‘They are now handmaids to intellect instead of emotion,' she writes.

Within academic circles, the new discipline of sociology came to challenge what it saw as a deterministic view of childhood. Sociologists have argued that psychologists treat children as incompetent, judging them solely in terms of what
they have yet to achieve. They maintain that this standardises childhood, distracting attention from the diversity of ways in which children can develop, often pathologising deviations. Children should be seen as social beings, they argue, rather than as individual developing minds.

In their essay on the sociology of childhood, Michael Lavalette and Stephen Cunningham, both lecturers in social policy, note the growing interest in children and childhood as social categories within their discipline since the late 1970s. They go on to identify the dominant theoretical approach which has emerged in this country as the ‘new sociology of childhood'. They argue that this approach makes four central claims: that childhood is a ‘social construction'; that children occupy and conduct themselves in worlds that are full of meaning for them, but about which adults understand little; that children are a ‘minority group'; and that children are an identifiable social group. However, Lavalette and Cunningham balk at what they consider the central message of the new sociology of childhood: the postmodernist view that ‘we have to abandon any attempt to arrive at a full understanding of the world, or to assert that there is any broad directionality to human history.'

They argue: ‘When we look at the social construction of childhood we cannot fully grasp this process without looking at changes to the totality of social relations within society – the creation of the modern family form, changes to productive relations, the role of the state – and how these affect the perceptions of and attitudes to children, and the children's responses to all this. Finally, while childhood is not static, it is not the case that there are an infinite range of ‘reconstructions' of childhood – indeed, today's childhood in Britain is recognisable as the childhood established for working-class children at the turn of the twentieth century.'
The psychology camp has countered that their endeavours have been misrepresented, that development is crucial and that sociologists risk lumping children together as a homogenous group. This is not the place for a conscientious examination of interdisciplinary wrangling. But what was novel about the sociology of childhood, and the broader childhood studies movement that developed out of it, was a fresh emphasis on rights. The broad consensus was that children should be treated as a minority, and defined as a disadvantaged, excluded group who deserve greater social, political and economic rights. It should also be noted that both psychologists and sociologists are now calling for a more integrated and less discipline-oriented approach to the study of childhood.

Most advocates of children's rights take the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, finalised in 1989, as their guide. It provides for rights to provision, protection and participation for children in all parts of the world, and is designed to take into account their vulnerability, particular needs and ‘evolving capacity'. It is also the most widely ratified treaty ever – only Somalia and the United States have not signed up.

Although the UK voluntarily ratified the convention in 1991, it took this country another decade to concede that an independent body was needed to monitor its application. Following appointments in Wales and Scotland, Professor Al Aynsley-Green, the first Children's Commissioner for England, only came into post in July 2005, to widespread disappointment that he was not actually charged with promoting children's rights.

The convention has not been without its critics. It does, after all, present children's needs as defined by adults because, ironically, it was drafted without any consultation
with children. Some believe that it presumes that all children experience a Western indoor childhood, and so fails to acknowledge that the capacities invested in children and the transition to adulthood vary widely across different societies. But it remains an essential template, given that children throughout the world continue to be denied fundamental rights that adults take for granted.

In Britain, perhaps the most basic inequality is that children cannot make decisions about their own circumstances – their care, their education, their health. Indeed, it can be argued that to be young is to meet the definition of social exclusion without trying – existing outside the political process, unable to contribute directly to the economy, criminalised for offences determined by your status rather than your actions, vilified by the media.

The body of research which already exists on children's participation indicates that when young people are included in decision-making they don't just demand free Smarties, but respond with often astonishing maturity according to the circumstances in which they find themselves. Studies of children's ability to consent to medical treatment, for example, have shown that young people with chronic illnesses can reason in ways that far outstrip the developmental standard for their age.

But to suggest that there exists such a thing as ‘childism' is to risk ridicule. The notion of children's rights is inevitably greeted with hostility in a political climate where young people are most often maligned for their lack of respect for the rights of others or adult authority. There is a common assumption that children will run wild given the chance, and that parents must keep control at all costs.

Many adults nowadays believe that children already have too many rights, perhaps because they confuse rights with
consumerism and pester-power. But acquiring expensive designer clothes or state-of-the-art technology is not the same as having rights. Adults fear that children's rights mean refusing to go to bed at a reasonable hour, demanding extortionate pocket money, and divorcing their parents if they don't give them what they want. It is assumed that children will not make rational choices if they are allowed to make decisions.

But this is to misunderstand how children's rights might operate in practice. Children's citizenship looks different from that of adults. The fact that ten-year-olds head households in Rwanda is beside the point – because children
can
doesn't necessarily mean children
should
.

Of course parents and the State are often best-placed to make decisions for children. But the fear that giving children rights will deprive them of their childhoods, or create a generation of mini-militants grabbing what they can from the diminishing pot of adult power, is based on a fundamental misconception about what growing up is really like.

It suggests that childhood is a time free of challenge or difficulty, when rights are unnecessary and would only be used for petty personal gain. As Mary John, a developmental psychologist renowned for her work on children's rights, argues: ‘One of the persisting myths is that childhood is somehow stress-free – that children are learning and growing rather than enduring and surviving … Maybe such myths serve to order and control in our minds what is mysterious and possibly threatening about the presence among us not of “unpeople”, as some might wish them to be, but of sentient beings – witnesses to much of the futility and anarchy of adult lives.'

John believes that for the child to be considered a powerful member of society, she must first be recognised as a person
rather than a person in the making. But if children are no longer to be seen as raw material, shaped by adults into social conformity and obedience, then ‘the question arises as to what sort of person and what role does that little person occupy relative to us.' The place of both adults and children in society must be re-imagined.

It is not difficult to make the case that children's rights are poorly served in the UK. Children are the only members of British society who can, by law, be hit – perhaps the most vivid exemplar of this country's failure to treat all children with the respect they are due. A defendant not old enough to buy a hamster legally can be tried in an adult court and named and shamed in newspapers, in direct contravention of their internationally recognised human rights.

In the school summer holidays of 2005, for example, over 70 per cent of children in England and Wales were subject to curfew orders that allow the police to send people under sixteen home if they are on the streets after 9 p.m. without a supervising adult. Although the government has committed itself to the elimination of child poverty, the numbers of children growing up without warm beds or hot meals remains utterly unacceptable. And, less immediately, adults could be argued to be depriving children, and their children's children, of the right to a future, as they bequeath them a planet on the brink of environmental collapse.