The Story of Childhood (3 page)

In June 2005, a report by the Council of Europe's Human Rights Commissioner Alvaro Gils Robles condemned the British government for its record on supporting children, expressing particular concerns about the UK's low age of criminal responsibility, the high numbers of children in custody, and the detention of asylum-seeking children. He reserved his most strident criticism for what he dubbed ‘ASBO-mania', stating that ‘it is difficult to avoid the
impression that the ASBO is being touted as a miracle cure for urban nuisance'. At the time, almost half of all antisocial behaviour orders were being served on juveniles.

As Ruth Lister, former director of the Child Poverty Action Group, has noted, authoritarian policies like ASBOs and curfews do not only circumscribe children's rights. They also expose an agenda that demands a pay-off for investment in children, particularly poor ones: ‘social order today and responsible citizens tomorrow'. ‘Children count not as child-citizens in the here and now but as citizen-workers of the future,' she argues. ‘In a “social-investment state”, the child has taken on an iconic status as the prime unit of investment in human capital.' This offers minimal scope for addressing what the building blocks of a happy childhood might be.

Al Aynsley-Green marked his appointment Children's Commissioner for England by querying whether, as a nation, we cared about childhood at all. He warned of a ‘deep ambivalence' towards children, with adults investing enormously in the young people with whom they were intimately involved, while remaining equivocal about other people's children – especially those growing up on the margins – and disconnected from any broader discussion of the condition of contemporary childhood.

Over the past three decades, worries about children's well-being have been amplified to an excruciating pitch. Concern about the vulnerability of some children has been traduced by an all-pervading child-panic. Childhood has become the crucible into which is ground each and every adult anxiety – about sex, consumerism, technology, safety, achievement, respect, the proper shape of a life. This is a time of child-panic. Our children are in danger, preyed upon by paedophiles, corrupted by commerce, traumatised by testing. Our children
are dangerous: malevolent beneath hooded tops, chaotic in the classroom, bestial in the bedroom.

All of these fears are real, but not all of them reflect reality. It is axiomatic that adults worry about children. But in an era defined by child-panic, to be anxious about childhood has become a definition of adulthood. That the process of becoming an adult is changing fundamentally is both a symptom and a cause of this. Childhood is seen to be corruptible or corrupted, and between these poles there lies a shrinking habitat for young people of average virture.

Of course, granting them a central role in society is not a universal panacea for the multitude of challenges that attend contemporary childhood. Children still need limits to learn from, but that is not the same as limiting them purely by virtue of how old they are. Necessary adult authority should not be confused with adult power that is abused. And nor should contemplation of children's rights be seen as an inevitable erosion of those of adults. If anything, offering power to a child augments the adult's role in teaching them how to wield that power humanely.

This is not a book against adulthood. To assume that the majority of children are neither angels nor demons but beings of ordinary integrity is not to discredit adults who face incivility or aggression in the classroom or on the streets. Freedom is much more than the absence of restraint. To call for greater understanding, rights and respect for children is not to undermine parents, or to diminish the strenuous moral, emotional and practical project that raising children has become.

As the philosopher Thomas H. Murray observes in his book,
The Worth of a Child
: ‘In the context of parent-child relationships we learn many vitally important things. We learn most of the content of whatever morality we will embrace
as adults. We learn some rules, but also the images that guide us and the ends we should pursue. Within families, we also come to adopt our attitude to morality. We learn, that is, whether it is worth trying to be moral … Last, in a family where love survives, we come to understand the centrality of relationships in human flourishing.'

I have a confession to make here. I am not yet a parent myself. I do not believe that this disqualifies me from writing about childhood, though others may disagree. Parents are best placed to discuss the welfare of their own children, but not necessarily the welfare of all children. To conclude that parents have the franchise on debates about young people is fundamentally to misconceive the nature of childhood. It is to treat children as chattels, rather than recognising that children are everybody, and that everyone has a stake in their upbringing.

There are as many ways to understand childhood as there are children. But despite numerous attempts, the story of childhood has rarely been well told. It has always been embroidered with myth, steeped in nostalgia. And it has always reflected the prevailing anxieties of the age.

Throughout history, childhood has provided an effective prism through which to reveal social mores. In a secular, pluralistic era, with a widening gulf between rich and poor and a greedy, coarsening popular culture, that revelation is more welcome than ever. It takes us to the heart of what kinds of children we hope to raise, and what kinds of adults we strive to be.

The following chapters explore how child-panic and, more broadly, the way that childhood is constructed in contemporary British society, might affect human flourishing.

‘Without children, this world would be boring; this world would be empty.'

Rosie writes stories in coloured felt-tip on plain paper. The sheets are bound in clear plastic folders, each with a cover illustration. On the back page she provides a brief summary of the contents. This is headed ‘The Blurb'.

In a big green box in the back extension, which she called ‘Rosie's Garden' when it was first built, are files containing all the stories and all the drawings that she and her little sister Olivia have ever made. There are pictures there from when Rosie was younger, when she wrote some of the letters in her name backwards. There's a sketch of a baby in a cart, which she can definitely remember doing, a Peter Pan, and a lady with two cats going to a wedding. Now Rosie is six, and she can draw a better Peter Pan.

This afternoon her sister is at nursery. Rosie is a cheeky monkey, oop-oop-ing across the lounge carpet, tail high in the air, half a banana balanced between her lips. She has no front teeth at all. Her cleanly bobbed blonde hair curtains her cheeks. All of Rosie's facial expressions generate from her nose, which is pert like that of a fairy tale heroine. The rest of her features are involved in an ongoing dialogue about whether to be pretty or bold.

Rosie writes about a confused bear called Winnie the
Pooh, aliens in space, some of whom like eating stars, and a girl called Jenny. This story is titled ‘Jenny and her Wonderful Family'. The blurb says: ‘Will Jenny find her family?'

‘Once upon a time there was a little girl called Jenny. One day Jenny decided to start karate lessons. When she asked her mum, her mum said, “No you can't.” Jenny looked sad and walked sadly up the stairs to her room. When she came downstairs her mum was gone. Jenny said, “Well that's strange.” Then in the middle of night Jenny crept downstairs. Then in the corner she saw something dull and black it was … it was the cat. The cat crept out of the corner and purred at Jenny's leg. “Now stop it,” said Jenny. “We need to find Mum and Dad.” So they left the house to find Mum and Dad.'

‘Morning and night they looked and looked, but they couldn't find Mum and Dad but then the cat saw something moving in the bushes. It was something they had never seen before, well that's because it was in the dark of course. But then it started to move towards the cat and it was … it was Mum and Dad. “Oh I'm so glad to see you,” cried Jenny. “Oh I'm so glad to see you,” cried Mum. The family was finally together again. “I'm so glad we're a happy family again,” said Jenny and a happy time was had by all. But there was one thing. Jenny was quite happy that she hadn't gone to karate lessons in the first place. She was just glad that they were a happy family again.'

Growing up has always charted dangerous territory. Even Rosie's story of Jenny and her wonderful family takes the safest of psychic risks, drawing on a classic theme of children's literature: the lone child on a quest, abandoned by her parents, with an other-than-human helper. Kept between the covers, a different order of things can be tested.

Children construct their identities at play, through exploration and risk-taking, but their culture has become subject to containment and surveillance. Western young are safer today than at any other point in human history; they are less likely to be killed, to suffer neglect or to succumb to disease. In an era defined by child-panic, however, to be anxious about children has become a definition of adulthood.

Children's independence and mobility is limited in a variety of ways – through fear, exclusion from public spaces, more time spent at school – leading to the norm of the indoor child. But risk-taking is essential to learning how to be safe. And private time, away from adult eyes, is necessary for emotional and creative development. What is the impact of increasing surveillance on the child's internal world? What are the consequences for a generation reared in captivity?

Rosie's mum and dad have never gone missing. But the stories that she tells about them end just as happily. Mummy and Daddy kiss each other a lot. Rosie likes to declare her affection too. Sometimes with a different word for each: ‘I wove, wove, wove Daddy, and I love, love, love Mummy.' And sometimes formally, in the letters she addresses to ‘Simon, Linda and Olivia'.

Rosie was born on the second day of January. She lives in a small, green, in-between town in Northamptonshire. Her parents landed here by accident over a decade ago when her father was pursuing his career as a secondary school teacher and her mother was working in London. They've been married for fifteen years, which Rosie says is a very long time.

Rosie can walk to school, to the park and to Simon's parents' house, though not by herself. Tomorrow is Friday so it's cake day. Every Friday she and Livvy eat a cake with their nanny. Linda says that when Rosie is ten she can go to
the shops on her own. Other destinations are reached mainly by car, and sometimes by train. These are arranged according to memory rather than geography: the pub where Livvy got stung by a bee, or Milton Keynes, where Rosie saw palm trees that were much bigger in real life.

After Livvy was born, Simon and Linda radically reassessed their child care arrangements. Previously, both had worked full-time, with Linda daily commuting the seventy-five miles to London and Rosie attending a local private nursery from the age of six months. ‘It just wasn't a life,' says Linda. She now works full-time as a database marketing manager for a local firm while Simon does part-time supply work, caring for both children in the afternoons at first and now only Livvy. Next year, once she has also started school, he will pick up teaching full-time.

Under Rosie's bed there are two boxes, one for fences and another for animals. At the farm she visits, there's a shop where you can buy things, like key-rings and toys. ‘And there's a place where you can get the animals food, and you tell the man what animal you want to feed and he gives you the food for it.' The horses eat carrots. ‘I like feeding the rabbits too but there's a fence around them so you have to toss it into their garden and they come out and eat it.'

Rosie would like an animal of her own, but the type of pet and what it might be called varies according to her assessment of the project's feasibility. Yesterday her nanny's dog Judy died. Nanny was sad, and though she used to have a rabbit and a guinea pig and gerbils and three pussy cats she said that she didn't think she'd have another pet in her whole life. Today, modestly, Rosie suggests she would like a goldfish called Goldie.

But it's hard not to think strategically. ‘The people that's house we're moving to, they have a rabbit and a guinea pig.
I would call the rabbit Nibbles and the guinea pig would be called Jessie or Megan.' Rosie's family are planning to move to a new house down the road. ‘I'll be a lot closer to school. I walk to school every day. We've had a very good look around and the solicitor says it's going really, really well. He works on our new house and this house and he tells us if its going well and when people don't want to buy our house.'

She is sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor, working efficiently through a pile of books. ‘I like pretending to stamp my books, especially my poetry and rhymes book.' She thinks she will be a library keeper when she grows up because she like books a lot. When they next go to the library Daddy says she can get more Tracy Beaker books. ‘She has very big behaviour problems. She made someone eat a worm. She's ten years old and she was at a care home. And she wants some foster parents. Her real parents just left her at the care home because they couldn't feed her properly. At the care home they look after you and you have your own room. She has a lot of friends.'

In contrast, Ark-like, Rosie's family goes two by two: two children, two parents, two grannies and two grandpas, two cousins. There are occasional wrinkles, different ways of telling the same story. Cousin Joseph is bigger than Rosie. He's seven. Joseph's parents are divorced and remarried, and it's hard to live with someone who hasn't spent your whole life with you. It's very strange living in two families, she notes jauntily.

Rosie is coming to the end of her second year of primary education. This session, her father Simon has been chair of governors. A few weeks later, I visit her at school. Today the top ability numeracy group is sitting on the floor, having a sums competition with Mrs Round. They wear yellow shirts with green jumpers, and grey skirts or trousers.
Numeracy is taught in another classroom, by a different teacher, with the top group from another Year 1 set, and everyone is feeling a little discombobulated.