The Story of Childhood (39 page)

He doesn't know how much his mum's got saved. ‘She ain't even looked at the flights. I think she's going to do it when my passport comes through, and then she's gonna find it on Easyjet.' Ashley says he likes the sunshine.

‘They get it all wrong. They think that if you're fifteen you can't look after yourself let alone a child.'

Lauren's hands are blue. She's designing a shoe for her textiles course and the dye gets everywhere. It's going to be work, work, work for the ten GCSEs she's taking this summer. The school told her she could drop some, but she didn't want to. Lauren's favourite subject is English. She loves literature – Dickens, Steinbeck – and that's what she's going to do at university. She's been making this blue shoe as one of her final pieces for submission. She says she needs three sketch books too. Ollie, her baby son, who has been fidgeting amiably on her lap, is suddenly sick, and Lauren shouts to her mum in the kitchen to bring through the wet wipes please.

It's January now, at the long dark end of a short wet day. Lauren sits back on the living-room sofa in jeans and a jumper, her long blonde hair loose around her broad shoulders. She gave birth to Ollie on 5 August last year, three months before her sixteenth birthday. In the womb, he had been an unobtrusive passenger: ‘I wasn't being sick, I'd only put a little bit of weight on, physically I felt fine. That was why I only found out when it was that late. Five months!' She says it quietly now, disbelieving.

‘It was dead weird. I went after school to one of those clinics for young people in Manchester. I went for a test, when I would have been six weeks pregnant, but it said I wasn't, so I just went with that. And then I kept going to the toilet all the time, and my friend said to me, “You'd better go for another test.” The doctor felt my belly and said, “I think you're about four months,” and I was like' – she makes a wide open mouth – ‘God!!!' A surge of noise pounds through the ceiling. Her thirteen-year-old sister Danielle is up in her bedroom and she's got her moshing music on. The four of them – three women and a baby – live together in this new-build council house in Gorton, Manchester. Down here the lights are low, and Lauren lays Ollie prostrate in his buggy for a nap.

Lauren is a child who is also a parent, a totem for liberal despair and conservative vitriol. There is no more resonant a position in the current climate of child-panic. It is the ultimate adult encroachment, as well as a profound statement about what a young person is capable of. Her dual status attacks not only the idea of what it is to be a child, but also what it is to be a parent.

The UK currently heads the European league table for teenage pregnancies. Should we blame poor sex education, a decline in moral values or a grossly sexualised culture for Lauren's pregnancy? Is it worthy of blame in the first place?

Lauren's mum found out that she was pregnant two weeks after she did. She guessed of course. ‘I felt like I'd disappointed her – 'cos I'm the one in the family, “Oh Lauren this, Lauren that.” I'm good at school, I'm good at sport, I sing and that – and I cared what she thought. I didn't care what other people thought, just my immediate family, but they was all right.'

Lauren doesn't know whether she'd have had an abortion
if she'd found out earlier. You can't really say, can you, unless it actually happens to you. By the time she knew she had three weeks left, because the limit is twenty-four weeks isn't it? And her mum said, ‘You can still go back to school,' so it didn't bother her. Now her mother looks after Ollie during the day, and on Saturdays her nan takes him until about six o'clock, so she can catch up on her homework. ‘I do make sure I go to school,' she says seriously. ‘I don't like to have a day off.'

At school, everyone was all right to her face. ‘I don't know if anyone slagged me off behind my back, but most of my friends said they knew already. They were like, “Oh can I feel your belly?” And the teachers were really good. I think if I'd been someone who was really naughty it would have been different, but I get on with them. They all love me. I love them too. They always stay behind to help me. When the baby was born they bought him lots of stuff.'

Lauren's boyfriend, who is two years older than her, was living here at the time, because he was having problems at home. He was really, really good, she says fondly, and he was there when Ollie was born, but then about two months ago he went a bit weird. ‘Like, I would go out on a Friday night and he was supposed to mind the baby but then he would just go out, and I found text messages on his phone from other girls. So I said, “Don't you think you should just move home and we could spend some time apart?” and then after that I realised that it was better so I told him and then we split up.' He still sees his son, but she doesn't like to see him because he gets jealous when she goes out.

Lauren gets out once a week, usually on Friday nights. It's just nice to go and sit in someone else's house and not have to be a mum and changing nappies. She knows she's a mother but she's doesn't always think of herself as one.
‘And then I have one of my friends sat next to me, and she's so young!' She gives it a Mancunian plosive ‘g'. ‘She's the same age as me and she hasn't one responsibility, and the difference from her to me, it's hard to believe. But you get used to it.'

Perhaps it's a redundant question to ask, why parents have children. Relationships happen, conception happens: the template of partners and progeny is what we have always built societies around. For any culture to survive, it must promote the act of replenishing its members, and teaching them the social and economic skills necessary to progress as a community. For most people, the grouping we call family is the best way to carry out this task.

It is not just the community as a whole that needs children, writes the philosopher Thomas H. Murray in
The Worth of a Child
. Individual adults need children for their own flourishing. ‘Children have helped to meet a variety of adult needs: economic needs, as household workers or as support in old age; emotional needs for intimacy and affection; and developmental needs, for maturation, for ripening of the virtues appropriate to adult life.'

Do adults have children solely in pursuit of their own fulfilment, or can it be a selfless act? ‘The old, familiar moral categories of altruism and selfishness seem to be jumbled up in well-functioning parent–child relationships,' says Murray. And whatever framework we choose to assess the worth of children will have to encompass an assortment of paradoxes.

‘[W]e celebrate individualism, yet we find meaning in family relationships; we cherish freedom, yet we have children whose needs constrain us profoundly; we want the liberty to get up and go whenever it suits us, yet our flourishing depends on lifelong commitments and enduring,
steadfast relationships; we exalt choice and control, yet families are built largely on acceptance of people as they are, with all their imperfections; we participate in a vigorous commercial culture, yet we cherish and protect a sphere in which interactions are regulated by values alien to the world of commerce and markets.'

British adults are having fewer children than ever before. Indeed, nowhere in the European Union does the current birth rate approach the level needed to keep the population stable. In this country, it is predicted that by 2014 the over-sixty-fives will outnumber the under-sixteens for the first time. Demographers warn of a fertility crisis that threatens economic growth and social welfare. In France and Italy, governments have offered financial incentives to procreate.

The trend towards having fewer children later, if at all, is largely a middle-class phenomenon. With success in the workplace – and the material benefits that brings – increasingly considered the measure of bourgeois fulfilment, it is unsurprising that some are unwilling to contemplate lowering their professional and consumerist horizons in order to raise children. Where once we debated how to make our children happy, we now discuss as much whether they can make us happy.

As Laurie and Matthew Taylor point out in their book
What Are Children For?
, ‘What explains the gap between the reality of declining real costs and increasing opportunities for parents and the perception of growing burdens and choices denied, lies in a very different, less tangible and less easily articulated sense of sacrifice – the loss of those modern absolute values: autonomy and freedom and individualism.'

But there are other reasons why middle-class women are pursuing their careers into their thirties, enjoying economic independence and professional fulfilment while controlling
their fertility. They are unwilling to sacrifice their hard-won status in the public sphere because they are all too aware that having children will penalise them far more than it does their male colleagues.

Feminism has often been described as a movement against nature. In her tome
Sexual Personae
, Camille Paglia wrote: ‘The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy … the fiercer will be her struggle with nature – that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: “Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.” '

It is not only nature that punishes women who hold back from childbearing. The only group as embattled as working mothers are childless women in their thirties, who are continually bombarded with doomy predictions about diminishing fertility and wasted ova. Yet little is done to shape the workplace to fit any life other than that of a male without child-care responsibilities.

Meanwhile, an expanding range of birth technologies that promise to ease later conception suggest that having children is an alienable right, provided one has sufficient resources. Despite the 75 per cent failure rate of IVF treatments, or the profound emotional consequences for child as well as parent of using donated eggs or sperm, there is a subtle implication that any woman can be a mother if only she tries hard enough.

That many more women say they are choosing not to have children confronts the notion of a ‘natural' maternal drive. It is certainly arguable that childbearing is as much of a social imperative as a biological one. But ‘choice' here is a tricksy concept. Life is not all about choices – when to work, when to fall in love, when to procreate. In fact, much of our time is spent on these things that won't – or can't – be facilitated
alone. Women do not remain childless for longer just because they're holding out for a fatter pay cheque.

Former tabloid editor and media commentator Amanda Platell has written movingly about her own childlessness. ‘I've spent my life with people assuming that I placed ambition above motherhood,' she wrote in a column for the
New Statesman
magazine. ‘Well, call me selfish, but I only ever wanted to be a mother one way, with my own child born into a loving relationship with its father. I never thought that being a mother was just about my fulfilment.' She concludes: ‘Not being able to have kids has not defined me, but it has defined my life.'

Lauren thinks people have children for different reasons, some because they're lonely, some because they want to make a family. It does change you. If you're young, you have to grow up fast, because you're not just looking after yourself any more. She thinks it's made her a better person, though it might not look like it when she's tired and stressed. It's made her more understanding.

From this time last year to now, everything and nothing has changed. Her plans are the same really. She was hoping to go to Bristol Uni to see another city, but now she's going to one in Manchester. And obviously she'd thought she'd settle down with her boyfriend, but now she thinks it's better this way.

Ollie, who has been dozing in his buggy, wakens. Lauren picks him up again and sits him on her knees. He beams her a look of absolute adoration. She's wearing a baseball cap. ‘Lookin' at me 'at,' she says, but it sounds like ‘heart' and that seems appropriate too. Lauren thinks babies have dreams because sometimes you see them jump in their sleep. She was going to name him Oliver, but she thought that
everyone was going to call him Ollie for short so she'd just use that in the first place. It's the same sturdy pragmatism that runs through all her choices.

A few weeks further into January, Ollie has caught a cold. He snuffles while Lauren feeds him his bottle. She's only just back from school, and still in her uniform of black blazer and trousers, white shirt and tie. Her hair is tied back in a ponytail, and she is wearing a lick of mascara. MTV is on in the corner. Danielle is upstairs in bed. Everybody's tired this afternoon.

It's good being back at school, says Lauren. She's leaving in five months, so there's a lot to do now – finishing coursework, getting ready for her exams in May. She's taking maths, English, science, RE, PE, art, textiles, music, geography and graphic design. She's most worried about maths. ‘I'm really good at it but as soon as I get into an exam my head just goes blank. Because you have to remember all the methods. I'm all right at it though. I'm expected a B.' Ollie chews on her blazer shoulder, soaking it.

He sneezes. Lauren's mum took him to the doctor's today but they weren't much help, she says. What's the point of sitting for hours on end if they're just going to tell you to give him Calpol? Ollie is experimenting with a new noise at a higher register. ‘Aweh, aweh,' he calls to Lauren. He gets so excited when she comes home from school. Even though he's ill he's got a big smile on his face.

Ollie dribbles on to his chest. Lauren takes his top off in case he's too hot, then wipes his mouth with it. ‘Mum, he's got warmer.' She comes in from the kitchen and checks his forehead. She was there at his birth, along with his father.

Labour was horrible. Lauren had gas and air and then the epidural. It took eighteen hours. The first time she saw him she was just shocked. ‘I said, “Isn't he small?” I didn't
know what to do. He was just there in me arms. He wasn't crying at first, that scared me, then he started crying and I knew it was going to be all right.' Someone brought her tea and toast but she took one bite and she was sick all over him. She laughs. Lauren laughs a lot.