CAMBRIDGE LETTER
Childhood then and now
BY BILL KIRKMAN
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Are children in the U.K. facing a "crisis of childhood"?
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PHOTO: REUTERS
No time for idleness: Is childhood getting too organised?
ARE British children facing a "crisis of childhood"? The question arises from an open letter published this week by a group of more than 100 experts. Their view is that the innocence of childhood is being poisoned by junk food, competitive schooling and excessive dependence on electronic entertainment. Their concerns were echoed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who expressed disquiet about advertising aimed at young people.
Predictably, reactions were mixed. On the one hand, a number of people made the point that it is unrealistic to believe that in this connection (and indeed in many others) the past was some sort of golden age. Certainly, for much of the 20th century the conditions in which people lived in the United Kingdom (and in many other countries too) were difficult. Family incomes were low. There was high unemployment. Children were often poorly nourished. Photographs of school children taken in the 1930s demonstrate this quite dramatically.
During the Second World War many children were evacuated, and some of them found themselves living far from home, billeted on unsympathetic families. For many more, family life was disrupted by the absence of fathers serving in the armed forces.
Real problems
On the other hand, the fact that in the past things were far from perfect does not negate the reality of some of today's problems. Many children, for example, are manifestly obese (as are many parents). The malnutrition of pre-war Britain has been superseded by another type of malnutrition — the eating of unhealthy food. Greater affluence has led to greater car ownership, and that has resulted in more children being taken to school by car, rather than walking. Lack of exercise, combined with unhealthy eating, exacerbates the tendency to obesity.
Add to this an attitude to risk, not just in the U.K., which is often tantamount to paranoia, and it is easy to become convinced that children lead lives that are far more constrained than "in our day".
It is easy to get things out of perspective, easy to exaggerate today's problems just as it is easy to view the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Nevertheless, we are faced with evidence, not just opinion. Rates of depression among those under the age of 17, for example, have greatly increased in the past twenty years.
Lifestyle changes
Some of the causes are to be found in major changes in family life, such as an increase in the number of single parents, and the pressure on many parents of longer working hours. This was brought home to me a few days ago when visiting very old family friends. They were regretting the fact that their sons — both aged around 40 — are under such pressure that they leave home for work early and get back late, seeing far less of their children than their father did. It is one of the paradoxes of modern life (as I have observed before in a Cambridge Letter) that modern technology, which should have reduced drudgery, has only too often simply given it a high-tech gloss.
At risk of falling into the "past is a golden age" trap, I see as one likely cause of the problem our obsessive insistence on measuring everything. Children start attending school young — often below the age of five — and their activities are tested and assessed. Schools are expected to meet targets, and the children in them therefore become a kind of subject for target practice.
Leisure activities, too, are often highly organised. There are clearly many good things about this, not least the fact that children can benefit from a much wider range of leisure experiences than their parents and grandparents enjoyed. And yet... the opportunities for unorganised idleness seem to be fewer than in the past.
Writing in The Independent, Thomas Sutcliffe commented that every aspect of children's lives is "micro-managed in ways that would have been unthinkable thirty years ago — when one of the prime tasks of childhood was not to bother the grown-ups".
As we contemplate the suggestion that our society may be facing a "crisis of childhood" we should perhaps explore the possibility that the problem is deeper than that. We might consider whether it is really necessary to live life always at top speed. We might sometimes try to take a less puritanical view of idleness. We might even look at the possibility of raising the school joining age. Yes, it would have huge practical complications, but we might learn something from those Scandinavian countries where compulsory education starts at age seven, rather than five.
Bill Kirkman is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, U.K. Email him at: bill.kirkman@gmail.com
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