Sad, bad and endangered? Hardly, but not all is well 


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Sad, bad and endangered? Hardly, but not all is well



MISERABILISTS’ fear of change; idealists’ hope for a better world; an all-purpose adult nostalgia for lost youth: all these things ensure a ready hearing for claims that childhood is in crisis. Britons are especially worried. They fear that the young today are sadder than previous generations—stressed, and turned off learning by too much testing. Children may be nastier as well: bullying is “epidemic” in schools, according to one recent survey, and adults routinely describe young people as “feral” and “vermin”, says another. And they seem in danger as never before: the killing of Baby P, and the kidnapping of Shannon Matthews by her own mother, have been followed by a rash of tales of child abuse and a big rise in the number of children taken into care.

No wonder a report published on February 2nd by the Children’s Society, a charity, entitled “A Good Childhood” and claiming that far too few British children have one, has received widespread notice. Children suffer because adults put their own needs first, the panel concluded, and only a wholesale shift away from competitiveness and individualism can save them. Right-wing commentators agreed with its criticism of single parents and working mothers, left-wing ones with its call for more redistribution of income and less advertising to children. Both overlooked one striking finding: that most children are doing just fine.

Amid the statistics on teenage pregnancy rates (higher than elsewhere in Europe, lower than in America), mental illness (a tenth of 5-16-year-olds are sufferers) and drunkenness (a third of 13-15-year-olds have been drunk at least twice, a share three times higher than the European average), came some more heartening figures: 70% of 11-16-year-olds say they are very, or completely, happy, and only 4% that they are at all unhappy. The report rolls the latter in with the 9% of children who describe themselves as neither happy nor unhappy to claim that 13% are “less than happy”, and frets that a further 17% are “only just happy”. But clearly, very few children agree with adults that they are in deep trouble.

In “Reclaiming Childhood”, published three days earlier, Helene Guldberg, a child psychologist at the Open University, examines the same facts and draws different conclusions. Rising rates of mental illness among the young, she argues, reflect readier diagnosis, and bullying has increased because the word is now used to mean the infliction of even the slightest emotional bruise. She thinks many attempts to improve children’s lives, such as alarmist anti-bullying campaigns, and the parenting lessons proposed by the Children’s Society, are likely to be counterproductive. “Suggesting that all parents need to be taught how to do their job risks creating a self-fulfilling belief in parents’ incompetence and children’s lack of resilience,” she says. “And if adults tell children that name-calling may scar them for life, then it may.” Britain is no Utopia, of course. As in other rich countries, children find it too easy to sit indoors, staring at screens and overeating. They lack the protection afforded by the Nordic belief in the sacredness of outdoor play, or the shared family meals of Mediterranean countries. A large minority ape their elders’ drinking habits (Britons are particularly addicted to drunken benders) and a few, but still too many, become parents while still children themselves.

But overblown claims that childhood is in crisis make life even harder for the few whose lives really are wretched. Social workers are pestered with targets and demoralized by their vilification in the Baby P case. In Haringey, where he died, a quarter of posts for social workers are now unfilled—and across England, one in seven.

(The Economist Feb 5th 2009)

 

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