by Libby Brooks
They argue: ‘When we look at the social construction of childhood we cannot fully grasp this process without looking at changes to the totality of social relations within society – the creation of the modern family form, changes to productive relations, the role of the state – and how these affect the perceptions of and attitudes to children, and the children’s responses to all this. Finally, while childhood is not static, it is not the case that there are an infinite range of ‘reconstructions’ of childhood – indeed, today’s childhood in Britain is recognisable as the childhood established for working-class children at the turn of the twentieth century.’ The psychology camp has countered that their endeavours have been misrepresented, that development is crucial and that sociologists risk lumping children together as a homogenous group. This is not the place for a conscientious examination of interdisciplinary wrangling. But what was novel about the sociology of childhood, and the broader childhood studies movement that developed out of it, was a fresh emphasis on rights. The broad consensus was that children should be treated as a minority, and defined as a disadvantaged, excluded group who deserve greater social, political and economic rights. It should also be noted that both psychologists and sociologists are now calling for a more integrated and less discipline-oriented approach to the study of childhood.
Most advocates of children’s rights take the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, finalised in 1989, as their guide. It provides for rights to provision, protection and participation for children in all parts of the world, and is designed to take into account their vulnerability, particular needs and ‘evolving capacity’. It is also the most widely ratified treaty ever – only Somalia and the United States have not signed up.
Although the UK voluntarily ratified the convention in 1991, it took this country another decade to concede that an independent body was needed to monitor its application. Following appointments in Wales and Scotland, Professor Al Aynsley-Green, the first Children’s Commissioner for England, only came into post in July 2005, to widespread disappointment that he was not actually charged with promoting children’s rights.
The convention has not been without its critics. It does, after all, present children’s needs as defined by adults because, ironically, it was drafted without any consultation with children. Some believe that it presumes that all children experience a Western indoor childhood, and so fails to acknowledge that the capacities invested in children and the transition to adulthood vary widely across different societies. But it remains an essential template, given that children throughout the world continue to be denied fundamental rights that adults take for granted.
In Britain, perhaps the most basic inequality is that children cannot make decisions about their own circumstances – their care, their education, their health. Indeed, it can be argued that to be young is to meet the definition of social exclusion without trying – existing outside the political process, unable to contribute directly to the economy, criminalised for offences determined by your status rather than your actions, vilified by the media.
The body of research which already exists on children’s participation indicates that when young people are included in decision-making they don’t just demand free Smarties, but respond with often astonishing maturity according to the circumstances in which they find themselves. Studies of children’s ability to consent to medical treatment, for example, have shown that young people with chronic illnesses can reason in ways that far outstrip the developmental standard for their age.
But to suggest that there exists such a thing as ‘childism’ is to risk ridicule. The notion of children’s rights is inevitably greeted with hostility in a political climate where young people are most often maligned for their lack of respect for the rights of others or adult authority. There is a common assumption that children will run wild given the chance, and that parents must keep control at all costs.
Many adults nowadays believe that children already have too many rights, perhaps because they confuse rights with consumerism and pester-power. But acquiring expensive designer clothes or state-of-the-art technology is not the same as having rights. Adults fear that children’s rights mean refusing to go to bed at a reasonable hour, demanding extortionate pocket money, and divorcing their parents if they don’t give them what they want. It is assumed that children will not make rational choices if they are allowed to make decisions.
But this is to misunderstand how children’s rights might operate in practice. Children’s citizenship looks different from that of adults. The fact that ten-year-olds head households in Rwanda is beside the point – because children can doesn’t necessarily mean children should.
Of course parents and the State are often best-placed to make decisions for children. But the fear that giving children rights will deprive them of their childhoods, or create a generation of mini-militants grabbing what they can from the diminishing pot of adult power, is based on a fundamental misconception about what growing up is really like.
It suggests that childhood is a time free of challenge or difficulty, when rights are unnecessary and would only be used for petty personal gain. As Mary John, a developmental psychologist renowned for her work on children’s rights, argues: ‘One of the persisting myths is that childhood is somehow stress-free – that children are learning and growing rather than enduring and surviving … Maybe such myths serve to order and control in our minds what is mysterious and possibly threatening about the presence among us not of “unpeople”, as some might wish them to be, but of sentient beings – witnesses to much of the futility and anarchy of adult lives.’
John believes that for the child to be considered a powerful member of society, she must first be recognised as a person rather than a person in the making. But if children are no longer to be seen as raw material, shaped by adults into social conformity and obedience, then ‘the question arises as to what sort of person and what role does that little person occupy relative to us.’ The place of both adults and children in society must be re-imagined.
It is not difficult to make the case that children’s rights are poorly served in the UK. Children are the only members of British society who can, by law, be hit – perhaps the most vivid exemplar of this country’s failure to treat all children with the respect they are due. A defendant not old enough to buy a hamster legally can be tried in an adult court and named and shamed in newspapers, in direct contravention of their internationally recognised human rights.
In the school summer holidays of 2005, for example, over 70 per cent of children in England and Wales were subject to curfew orders that allow the police to send people under sixteen home if they are on the streets after 9 p.m. without a supervising adult. Although the government has committed itself to the elimination of child poverty, the numbers of children growing up without warm beds or hot meals remains utterly unacceptable. And, less immediately, adults could be argued to be depriving children, and their children’s children, of the right to a future, as they bequeath them a planet on the brink of environmental collapse.
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.
Rosie
‘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 wa
ys – 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.