The Story of Childhood (6 page)

And if she had three wishes? ‘To live in a big chocolate house with a nice big garden and a marzipan path. The second is that Livvy would never hurt me again and Daddy would never boss me around and I could go anywhere I liked and my last wish would be that I had lots and lots of art things and lots and lots of money.'

She repairs to the bathroom, and comes back with a white hand-towel which she lays down and climbs aboard. It's a magic carpet. ‘I can go anywhere I want to because it's my fantasy world and everyone would live in little flower houses and there would be a really nice queen and princess and they would play croquet a lot and the queen would always win because she was very clever and beautiful and the princess wasn't.'

Rosie weaves the stories she's been told into a story to tell: ‘And there would be lots of butterflies and they would be called bread-and-butterflies because they would be made out of bread and butter. And there was a children's play area in this world with little tunnels for the children to go through and sometimes there would be little doors and if you went through them there would be a really big room with lots children sitting on steps and they were watching television. And that's where I go on my magic carpet whenever I feel sad.'

Many of the stories that Rosie tells and writes contain a strong element of fantasy. But others, like ‘Jenny and her Wonderful Family', explore more everyday relationships. The Swedish sociologist Gunilla Halldén argues that all children's stories are in different ways dealing with the issue of power. In the early 1990s, she collected drawings and stories written on the subject of ‘my future family' from children in three towns in Sweden over a two-month period. The resulting narratives showed how children explored positions within the family, and how they made meaning of adulthood and parenthood.

Halldén discovered that the girls created the fictitious family as an arena for female power. The theme of relationships was central, and conflict occurred frequently, usually to be resolved by a girl protagonist. Their main characters were adults in whose hands responsibility for the care of the family rested.
In contrast, boys often failed to identify any adult, or to give them power. They used the family theme to write stories about a life without constraints, and if conflicts did occur they never explained their resolution, although in most cases everyone got what they wanted.

‘In omitting the controlling position,' she concluded, ‘the boys' stories gave a lot of power to the children. In girls' stories, on the other hand, the mother was the one who kept order and who negotiated and tried to deal with conflicting opinions. In the girls' stories, the children were cared for, but also controlled, by the mother.' So boys and girls explored different gender positions, as well as their own dependency.

The holidays are nearly over, and this autumn Rosie will enter Year 2. ‘I have my teacher and she's really, really nice. And we have this really big classroom and Livvy is going into Reception and when we go out into the playground we have to go past Reception.' Year 2 is a bigger year and the work will be harder. They're going to learn about the Great Fire of London.

‘Sometimes it's nice to have Livvy around the house, so I think sometimes it's nice to have her around the school and it's just going to be really, really good now that's she's with me all the time.' Sometimes Rosie talks as though her mind is elsewhere. She's not exactly distracted, but keeping a foot in Rosie-world. She's been tying her purple wings round her knees fretfully.

‘Sometimes I wonder if Livvy's as stressed as me when I'm doing my work because its already really hard and I think it's going to be even harder in Year 2.' Rosie finds maths hardest. ‘Some of the sums have really big numbers and it's really hard because some of the people in my class kept interrupting even though I was trying.' Rosie has
strict views about behaviour, and has been unpleasantly surprised by the antics of some of her peers. She adds further detail lest it be thought that she is feigning the difficulty. ‘Really, really big numbers, like 103 and 105, and I just didn't find it easy.'

Rosie will be tested nationally for the first time next March. Her father says he's not particularly troubled at the prospect because, as a teacher, he considers the exams valueless. But Rosie senses something coming. As children are denied the opportunity to learn from their own experiences in the outside world, indoors their education has become further regimented.

Priscilla Alderson, professor of childhood studies, told her audience at an Institute of Education centenery lecture: ‘Childhood is controlled and confined into child care and education institutions, and surveyed, regulated and tested at unprecedented levels.' Certainly, children in the UK are the most frequently tested in Europe. And, with the government's ‘wraparound' breakfast and after-school clubs, some children are at school for longer than the adult limit set down in the EU working-time directive.

Alderson believes that schools reinforce a child-rearing culture of rigid control by following the ethics of the marketplace: ‘Today's obsession with outcomes is especially oppressive for children when childhood is valued so much for its effects on future adult earning-power, and not for itself.'

Some commentators have greeted the government's five-year plan to extend school hours from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. gladly, arguing that it will provide poor children with the care and recreational opportunities that the middle classes take for granted. But is a daily ten-hour warehousing of children – while parents' employers are excused from introducing family-friendly working practices – really an advance? Teaching unions have expressed scepticism that
sufficient money is earmarked to do more than offer Coke and board-games. And concerns have been raised about privatisation through the back door, as schools have to buy in extra-curricular activities.

It is notable that Rosie preferred to complete at home the tropical island book she designed at school. Her father says that she now prefers to write here, where she colours in her library carefully. Writing at school has become boring to her, he suspects because the teaching has lately been focused towards SATS outcomes.

One Saturday, Rosie is alone in the house with her mother, because Livvy has gone to a birthday party. She's eating a snack of ham and baguette, grapes and half a banana. Simon and Linda have been painting. The house is beginning to feel more like home. Rosie sits on the couch, channel-hopping. Television is compelling. She has written down on a tiny purple clipboard what she likes to watch so she won't forget. She likes
Lilo and Stitch, Teen Angel, Lizzie MacGuire, Big Bang
, and
Sabrina
. TV offers another world of stories, which often happen in American accents.

Livvy has gone to the Wacky Warehouse: ‘It's this big house with two really big slides and a ladder and a really big tube and a play area for little children.' Although Rosie has been there on occasion herself, there is still a sense of inequity about this afternoon.

We go to the park. Rosie discharges from her front door like a bullet. There is one road to cross and she jigs on the edge of the pavement, her trajectory disrupted. She runs, skips, bounces to the swings, but this apparatus is too structured for her purposes. Rosie is fortunate: Audit Commission figures suggest that the average child under twelve has a ration of 2.3 square metres of outdoor play space – about the size of a
kitchen table. This park is an extension of her domain, full of unassuming places with wild stories attached. There are dangers too. A witch lives behind that wall.

While defending play as an activity involving worthwhile risk, Peter Moss and Pat Petrie of the Institute of Education consider how children develop their own collective social lives which operate alongside the dominant adult culture. Here, play is not a means to an educational end, but ‘a central activity … what children do, often on the margins of the adult world, making use of the minutes between adult-directed activities for their own purposes.' They echo the work of the anthropologist Erik Erikson, who cautioned adults against defining play as ‘not work', arguing that this was to exclude children from an early source of identity.

Noting how children transform and subvert adult cultural forms, Moss and Petrie give the example of how children's maps of familiar areas may give prominence to features that are inconsequential to adults: ‘Children use features of school playgrounds intended for other purposes for their own; flights of steps may become jumping apparatuses, castles, alien dens, shops. In a London suburb, a grassed bank, with scrubby trees, runs for a short stretch alongside the pavement … For at least seventy years … children have scrambled on to the bank and walked behind the trees for a matter of twenty yards and then clambered down again. They have worn a clear, narrow path. This path has no place in adult culture – for adults, paths are usually taken to reach a destination; yet children endow following the path with their own meanings, it is part of their local culture.'

The creation of private spaces, away from adult eyes and sometimes away from other children, is an essential part of childhood culture. The Green Alliance/Demos report also
noted that secret or special places, whether hidden at the bottom of the garden or in overgrown parkland, were particularly important to children. They were places for quiet reflection, storytelling and secret discoveries about the natural world. While they were considered to be safe, the unofficial nature of these spaces allowed children to imbue them with their own distinct meaning.

In his book
Solitude
, Anthony Storr makes a compelling case for intimate personal relationships being but one source of health and happiness, arguing that the capacity to be alone is fundamental to creative development. Storr noted that while there has been a great deal of research into children's relationships with their parents and with other children, there is virtually no discussion of whether it is valuable for them to be alone. ‘Yet if it is considered desirable to foster the growth of the child's imaginative capacity,' he wrote, ‘we should ensure that our children, when they are old enough to enjoy it, are given time and opportunity for solitude. Many creative adults have left accounts of childhood feelings of mystical union with Nature; peculiar states of awareness, or “Intimations of Immortality”, as Wordsworth called them … We may be sure that such moments do not occur when playing football, but chiefly when the child is on its own.'

Solitude not only fosters creativity, argued Storr, but relates to an individual's capacity to connect with, and make manifest, their own true inner feelings. When the contemporary childhood experience is one of containment and surveillance, what becomes of self-discovery and self-realisation? Without privacy, both physical and psychological, how do children become aware of their deepest needs and impulses?

It may seem odd to talk of surveillance after discussing the
lack of collective oversight of children's outdoor pursuits and how that feeds a suspicion of adult strangers. Now friendly adult eyes have been replaced by webcams in nurseries and tracking devices for teenagers, while community surveillance has been superceded by centralised databases.

This intrusion is not at the behest of individual adults. Many parents would be horrified if they were aware of the extent of detailed information recorded in computer databases without any respect for the privacy of the children it relates to. The universal children's database, planned under the Children Act 2004, which was to hold basic details of all under-eighteens, now appears to have been shelved in favour of the National Pupil Database, which is to be updated by a termly school census. It also seems that a number of other databases, held by agencies like Connexions and Sure Start, will be allowed to feed into this national archive. And in January 2006, the government was forced to defend the storage of around 24,000 DNA profiles of children and young people, despite the fact that none had been cautioned, charged or convicted of an offence.

Privacy campaigners are particularly concerned that these databases will include subjective opinions about the behaviour, well-being, and potential criminality of children, as well as basic factual information. At the time of writing, there is no facility allowing pupils or parents an independent adjudication to correct this. The consequences are far-reaching. A toddler who has been identified as aggressive or bullying will carry that prognosis into adulthood. The impact of such intrusion on children's sense of privacy has yet to be investigated.

Rosie swings her legs from a branch of her special tree, rigorously inspecting a wedding party that has spilled from Rushden Hall, a grand old building set in the bosom of the
park. She started climbing this tree last year: ‘I came to the park with my grandma and I thought it was a good tree and I thought I could build a little fence around it and put a sign round it saying “Rosie's tree”. I am going to have a gate in my fence and other people would have to have a special key.'

She spots the bride. She is wearing a russet gown. ‘She looks lovely!' says Rosie approvingly. ‘I wonder who she's going to marry. But there aren't any children at the wedding, are there? I went to lots and lots of weddings – well, perhaps three weddings – and they all had children. At first I thought that wheelchair was a buggy but it wasn't. I suppose they gave the children to their nannies or grandads.'

‘I suppose they are having chicken and peas,' she adds airily, ‘because that's what they normally have at weddings. But I'm going to have jelly and cake. And for dessert we'll have biscuits – party rings! But a wedding like that is really boring. Children bring you toys. Grown-ups bring you wineglasses and bottles of beer.' Still outraged at the adult-centricity of the wedding, Rosie remarks: ‘Without children this world would be boring; this world would be empty. Because everyone starts off as children and no children means no people.'