The Story of Childhood

by Libby Brooks

  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 st
arted 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.’

  If everyone starts off as children, and those children are increasingly confined to school and home, what sort of adults will they grow up to be? The psychiatrist John Bowlby, who studied the mental health of child evacuees after the Second World War, famously described an infant’s ‘failure of attachment’ to a primary care-giver, and the impact that has on the quality of its future relationships. I wonder if annexing children’s territory and fencing its borders with fear will result in an extended failure to attach: to other adults, to the environment, to the capacity to be alone.

  In examining how children balance risk-taking with self-preservation, psychologists have found that the capacity to take care of oneself is closely associated with self-esteem. The developing child must internalise the conviction that she is a being of value, and that she is worth protecting. But when that development also takes place in an atmosphere of anxiety, containment and surveillance, what else do children internalise?

  If a consequence of child-panic is confinement, then a consequence of confinement would seem to be anxious children who are making unrealistic assessments about the dangers posed to them by the outside world. Most to be feared are the constrained and cautious adults that this generation could become.

  One thing is certain: watching a wedding without children is not much fun. ‘Let’s go and have an adventure in my secret tunnel!’ Rosie springs from the arms of her tree and scythes through the undergrowth beyond the maintained parkland. A stream runs behind, and the trees along the broken pathway bend to touch fingertips. It smells of growing and decay. She is hidden, while the world is visible. ‘I can hear cars and I can see more wedding people. There are lots of ladies in red dresses. There’s a dog in that bush.’

  After a time, Rosie returns to her arboreal vantage point. ‘Livvy thinks you get married when you kiss so she thinks Mummy and Daddy are married again and again every time they kiss. Mummy and Daddy love each other.’ She beads the thoughts together relentlessly: ‘And I love my ex-boyfriend, James. But he dumped me. So I found a new boyfriend. Sam – he’s ten years old. He’s at the school Daddy’s going to teach at, and his parents are friends with my parents.’ Rosie was dumped because she was nagging James about going on a date and he didn’t want to. ‘But we’re still friends. So that doesn’t matter. I’m just planning who I’m going to marry.’

  She kicks against the trunk. ‘Look no hands! I’m going to get married in fifteen years. It’s in April, because one of my best friends is called April, and I was going to have it in January because that’s my birthday but then I thought it’s going to be very cold.’

  There are other places to visit in the park. Rosie wants to sit in the cage – a bench in a brick shelter with high iron bars around it – but it is padlocked. Instead, she poses still like a statue on an empty pedestal by the Hall. There are gaggles of teenagers arranged across the park, and Rosie observes them surreptitiously. Sometimes they call from one group to another on their mobile phones, and sometimes they shout.

  Now she has a stitch. It might be telling her to sit down. It has been a golden afternoon, with late light, She chooses to rest on the bench that can be reached by walking round one flowerbed in a particular way. Perhaps the stitch is telling her it’s time to go home. Rosie prefers the long way home.

  But on the short way she discovers a huge tree branch, as long as two of her, which she drags along with all her strength until she’s exhausted. In the midst of this effort she backs into some nettles and stings her calves. She can’t find any dock leaves. Rubbing her ankle, she picks off a smaller twig from the branch. She will take that home instead and label it to remember this day for ever.

  Lois

  ‘A snap is what families take, when things are just happening. A photograph makes people think.’

  It’s Saturday lunch-time, after swimming, at the kitchen table. ‘By the way,’ says Lois, working her jaw, ‘if you want to know why I’m eating strangely, I’m pretending to be a giraffe.’ Lois is having pasta. Pasta makes you faster. Her brother Kester is banging round his mother’s legs as she stands by the stove. Today is one of those days when it’s hard to make a decision. Does he want cheese? ‘Uh, 50-50, I want to phone a friend, I don’t really know!’ Lois and Kester used to fight a lot more than they do now, though they still support different football teams.

  Lois is almost into double figures. She lives in a long, slim house in London, with Kester, her father Damian, and her mother Sue. She loves Manchester United, and still misses her grandmother, who died a long time ago. Lois doesn’t approve of skirts. She likes to wear T-shirts and jeans and she ties her long hair back at the nape of her neck.

  She is medium height in her class and lean, her body braced for the stretch into adolescence, with nothing to spare. Her voice is lower than you expect it to be. When Lois grows up she might be an artist, or a runner, or a footballer, or a detective. Or a photographer, because both her parents are photographers and, basically, so are all their friends.

  She is looking through a selection of her mother’s prints, and comes across a photograph of a child’s face in close-up. Lois’s own face, at the age of two and a half. This, says her mother, is the record of when Lois first said, ‘Take a picture of me now.’

  Her features must have still been setting in the clay softness of her toddler skin. But in the shutter instant they have been fired firm. As she comes towards the lens her gaze is steadfast and searching, thrown out beyond the frame and into the world. She seems to be moving most sure-footedly towards life.

  ‘I was two and a half!’ Lois shrieks. ‘I look about a million! Some of these pictures I think, “That was me?” It’s really weird. It feels like another person.’ Her mum has been doing proper photos since she was two or three. She can remember what was happening when she took them, but can’t always remember what age she was. ‘Sometimes I’ll say to her, “this is quite interesting,” or, “this is interesting light, take a photo,” like there’s one of me feeding my leg, and stuff like that. But she decides how, because she is a photographer so she does know best.’

  Most of the pictures Lois likes are half in darkness, half in light. ‘Like the picture of me hugging my dad. It’s like heaven and hell.’ She likes the ones that remind her of some happy time. ‘I don’t know if they remind older people of being little. Say there was a picture of Tintin it might remind them of watching Tintin and that might make them think.’ And when she has grown up? ‘I think they’ll remind me of all the things I liked and all the things I didn’t like, and what happened. It’s probably hard to remember as you get older.’

  Lois knows that strangers see her photographs in exhibitions, and she doesn’t mind it. There’s a difference between a photograph and a snap and, it would seem, the potential for exposure in each. ‘A snap is what f
amilies take, when things are just happening. A photograph makes people think. Like there was this one with a clock and a face, and the message was “Don’t waste your life”.’

  Sue uses other models too. But much of her work concerns her daughter. She says she wants her art to ask questions about childhood. As a mother she asks questions of herself. Theirs is a working relationship that is continually evolving, she adds. She is Lois’s mother first, her chronicler second. The photographs happen in the gaps between the scheduled significances and unexpected dramas of growing up, between the birthday party and the bloody nose. They show still moments – once tears are dried, comfort administered, explanation offered. So in pictures, Lois clutches a cup of tea, a bruise blooming under one eye, having caught her face on the side of a table. Lois folds her arms fiercely in a blue bikini, after an annoying swimming lesson. Lois stares past the crusts she hasn’t eaten (nobody wants curly hair). She is also a girl with a mighty ability for pitching herself into her own thoughts. A number of the images have been taken while she is elsewhere, looking out of the window, or into water, her back curved in concentration.

  In fashioning this portfolio of progress, Sue insists that the act of photographing does not intrude on their relationship: ‘I started taking the pictures when she was little because I thought she was wonderful and I really enjoyed her and the way she was with herself. But it is a very small part of what goes on between us. We spend most of our time doing other things.’

  ‘The question of privacy doesn’t come at the time I take them,’ she explains. ‘It comes when I start to select them. She reached a certain age where she would say, “I don’t want that to be shown.” But it’s fine between us [that I’ve witnessed and documented the moment]. It’s not a question of whether the photograph should have been taken, it’s a question of whether it should be made public.’