The Story of Childhood

by Libby Brooks

  She still gets teased about her scar at school, but she doesn’t mind. ‘They call me Frankenstein’s monster. They actually call me Frankenstein, which isn’t so bad because he was a scientist. They just laugh at me because I bang my head all the time.’ Is she clumsy? ‘No,’ says Lois wearily, ‘I’m just wild.’

  Allana

  ‘Go in the bushes! There aren’t monsters. My mum gone in there.’

  Allana says her doll has ticklish eyes. She is playing in the turquoise hall of her mother’s second-floor council maisonette, stuffing the raggedy girl with exaggerated irises behind the radiator. Allana is four years old, and she’s not a big talker.

  Her half-sister Sienna, who is two, is the chatterbox. They live with their mother, Gloria, on the Blackbird Leys estate, south-east of Oxford. It’s not as bad as people say, not if you’ve lived here all your life. Gloria moved away once, to a place by the river, but that didn’t last for long. Her own mum still lives just up the street, and helps with the girls whenever she can.

  Gloria’s colour is almost ebony, but Allana’s skin is lighter. She has her mother’s strong nose and a rosy cupid’s bow. She wears shiny gold hoops in her ears. When she smiles, her two front teeth arrive first. She gets frightened of monsters, especially in the night-time. She knows how to be naughty, and likes to test how naughty she can be before consequences accrue. But mainly, Allana likes to watch. And, because she won’t tell, it is hard to know what she makes of what she sees.

  Sitting on the top stair, she manages a considerable cacophony for someone who finds words surplus to requirements. This doll is a talking one. She feeds her some carpet fluff. Dora says, ‘Will you help me find my friend?’ in a cherry pie accent. Allana tries to copy the voice but blurs it into ‘da-da-da’.

  ‘Sit here now,’ she orders. When she speaks the sounds are brisk but unconfident, the phrases collected without relish. ‘I turning off now.’ Dora’s freckled head bangs on the landing floor.

  At nursery, Allana has a best friend called Kayleigh. Kayleigh is a chatterbox too. The teachers have explained to Gloria that her daughter lets Kayleigh do the talking for both of them. That’s one of the reasons why Allana won’t be starting Reception for another term. They say her behaviour can be aggressive too – a bit of pushing, a bit of kicking.

  The teachers are hoping that, apart from Kayleigh, Allana’s own verbal skills will improve. Gloria isn’t sure why her daughter is so quiet. At home, she and Sienna talk plenty to her, but she knows from her own mum that she wasn’t talkative at that age, and she thinks that Allana takes after her in a lot of ways. She just doesn’t seem to like it. But kids develop in their own way, in their own time, don’t they?

  What the nursery teachers don’t know is that the friends’ separation may soon be more permanent. Kayleigh’s mum is being evicted because she owes nearly three thousand pounds in rent arrears. Gloria is struggling too. She reckons she has fifty pence left over at the end of each week, if that. She’s always borrowing money off her mother, who works for a local supermarket. The benefits she gets just aren’t enough, she says. Her friends who have their kids’ dads around find it easier, but she’s never gone to the Child Support Agency herself because she doesn’t think it’s worth it. She knows that many people who’ve given up on it because they never got any money and it just caused lots of stress.

  This is the hard stretch of afternoon between the end of nursery and the serving of tea. Gloria is downstairs in the living-room, watching a Supernanny episode which she videoed last night. The eponymous TV child care expert is marshalling twins who won’t sleep through the night. Sienna is journeying between her mother and her sister, a large pink rucksack strapped tightly on her narrow back.

  Allana narrates her activities on the top stair: ‘That goes down.’ She is throwing coloured plastic balls from behind the low bannister. ‘I can climb up here. I won’t fall ’cos I’ll hang on.’ She climbs up one, two wooden bars then jumps down heavily with a piercing shriek: ‘I fall down!’ She does this again, and again, and again. She finds more balls to dispatch. ‘They all gone down now. Look, it’s all.’ Gloria calls up not to play on the stairs in case Sienna falls.

  Allana and Sienna’s bedroom has two bunks, two chests of drawers, two boxes of toys and a Winnie the Pooh frieze that stretches almost all the way round the walls. There are a handful of books – mainly illustrated Disney fairy tales – but Allana isn’t interested in them. Gloria thinks she’s a bit lazy. She doesn’t have the patience to sit down and read, or to write her name.

  The more that childhood has been examined, the more it has been debated how the quality of care people receive when they are young, especially in the earliest years of life, influences their capacity to cope in the world. For previous generations, most of this care was the unremarked though utterly remarkable work of mothering. But a historically private occupation is now of huge public concern.

  Inquiries into the existence of innate character, and the influence of upbringing, stretch back to Plato. In his History of Childhood, Colin Heywood suggests that one of the reasons why medieval writers did not dwell on childhood was that they did not share the contemporary conviction that care is critical to development: ‘To the medieval mind … the nature one is born with is the most important influence on life, the raw material without which the finest nurturing will be wasted. It suited the hereditary aristocracy all too well to promote this line on lineage.’

  But with the Enlightenment came a growing interest in the impact of nurture, and in particular the benefits of education. John Locke confidently pronounced that, ‘of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. ’Tis that which makes the great difference in mankind. The little, and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies, have very important and lasting consequences.’

  Locke believed that because education was responsible for these differences between individuals, ‘great care is to be had of the forming of children’s minds, and giving them seasoning early, which shall influence their lives always hereafter’.

  Rousseau’s rejoinder, that ‘nature provides for the child’s growth in her own fashion’, was not the return to ancient notions of nativism that it might seem. Rousseau firmly believed that a child’s morals and thinking could be shaped through nurture, but was concerned with the way that educators interacted with their charges. He believed that a child was born with the capacity to learn at her own pace, and wanted teachers to be directed by this, rather than imposing adult ‘reason’ on children before they were ready.

  Rousseau was one of the first thinkers to divide childhood into discrete stages: the Age of Instinct, in the first three years of life; the Age of Sensations, up to twelve; and the Age of Ideas, at puberty. He believed that children only developed their ability to reason during the third stage, rejecting Locke’s imperative to reason with children from infancy. ‘Those children who have been constantly reasoned with strike me as exceedingly silly,’ he observed. He suggested that, rather than training the child out of its natural state, educators should ‘leave nature to act for a long time before you get involved with acting in its place’.

  Rousseau thus provided a foundation for the ideal of childhood innocence. The opposition of innocence and corruption continues to inform the adult-inflected version of childhood today. But the development of sciences of the mind and body at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century embedded another opposition which would go on to influence contemporary thinking about children: that of nature versus nurture.

  As the children’s culture theorist Stephen Kline points out, the position of families and schools as the locus for nurture gained currency during the intense social and economic upheavals of the nineteenth century: ‘It was the industrialising Victorians who took this new attitude [tracing back to Locke and Rousseau] seriously, who worked at undoing the feudal matrix of socialisation with its strict definition of c
hildren based on the family’s property rights.’

  But the belief that character could be moulded through learning was challenged by advances in the biological sciences. When Charles Darwin posited his theory of natural selection in 1858, the science of genetics was in its infancy. Darwin abolished the Cartesian distinction between people and animals, arguing that both humans and apes shared a common ancestor. He described the process whereby organisms which inherit traits that make them better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring.

  According to the concept of natural selection, evolution results over time from the selecting out of traits that do not assist environmental adaptation. Darwin theorised that these inherited characteristics were passed on by minute entities he called ‘gemmules’.

  Though radical in the way that it challenged the teachings of the Church, not everyone welcomed Darwin’s theory. The German socialist Friedrich Engels dismissed it as a conjuring trick: ‘The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes’s doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes and of the bourgeois doctrine of competition together with Malthus’ theory of population.’

  Darwin’s findings were also implicated in early eugenic thinking, originally espoused by his first cousin Francis Galton. Galton believed that the proper evolution of the human race was being thwarted by misguided social philanthropy, which encouraged the ‘unfit’ to bear more children and ran counter to the mechanism of natural selection. He argued that a kind of artificial selection was necessary; he called it ‘eugenics,’ from the Greek word for ‘good birth’.

  But running alongside this academic emphasis on heredity was a growing popular obsession with how parents might influence their children’s intellectual and emotional development. From the fashionable behaviourism advocated during the 1920s and 1930s, to the affectionate indulgence that followed the Second World War, belief in the importance of nurture was ascendant in care manuals of the time.

  The absolutist positions of child as tabula rasa or child as adapted ape are no longer tenable. The more that is learnt about the human genome, the more is being discovered about how genes influence human behaviour and vice versa. The focus of investigation has shifted to the manner in which this symbiosis is played out.

  As neurobiologist Steven Rose has pointed out: ‘Simple-minded claims that there are “genes for” this or that trait … without understanding that how a gene is expressed depends both on the active cooperation of many other genes, and on the cell within which the genome is embedded, are misleading. Nor is “the environment” a simple concept, embracing as it does everything from the entirety of the cellular DNA via the organism as a whole, to the ever-changing physical and living worlds in which all life is embedded.’

  So how might ‘interactionism’ inform the way that children are brought up? In 2002, researchers presented some startling results as part of a cohort study of young men born in Dunedin, a city on the South Island of New Zealand, in 1972. A proportion of the boys in the study were maltreated during childhood, and many of that group went on to exhibit antisocial and violent behaviour themselves. Taking an interactionist approach, the researchers tested the boys for differences in one particular gene which controlled an enzyme in the brain, and then compared this with their upbringing.

  What they discovered was that those with the gene for developing high levels of the enzyme monoamine oxidise A (MAOA) were virtually immune to the effects of childhood maltreatment. But boys with a less active version of the same gene, and lower levels of MAOA, became significantly more antisocial if subject to abuse. Neither a poor upbringing nor a poor genetic inheritance were alone responsible for an unhappy adult outcome; this required a combination of the two.

  Longitudinal research projects like the one from Dunedin demand time and resources, but they reveal findings which those that only examine a specific gene and outcome fail to do. As Professor Richie Poulton, who presented the 2002 study, noted: ‘The key that unlocks genetic effects is a good life history. Looking at genes is the easy part; you then need thirty years of good, broad, detailed information about the participants.’

  As more sophisticated investigations like this one are conducted, the bitter feuding between the nature and nurture camps shows little sign of abating. While protagonists on both sides now wisely qualify their positions, they continue to berate the opposition for putting up straw men in order to caricature their stance as naive environmentalism or genetic determinism.

  The hybrid discipline of evolutionary psychology, which proposes that human behaviour may be best understood in the light of evolutionary history, has caused further entrenchment. From its popularisation in the mid-1990s, adherrants made controversial pronouncements on gender differences, in particular with regard to mating preferences and strategies. One such thesis was that rape in humans is an evolved adaptation to help males pass on their genes, which was bizarrely extrapolated from evidence of forced copulation in scorpion flies. Critics countered that such thinking discredited the notion of human nature, just as the Social Darwinist reliance on self-interest had done previously.

  In policy terms, the debate about early years tends towards nurture: are young children best looked after by parents or professionals, and how should that looking after be done? The present Labour government’s emphasis on early-years provision has earned it the moniker of ‘secular Jesuits’ (an order that declared: ‘Give me the boy at seven and I shall give you the man’). Still it remains unclear precisely what the government thinks public child care is for. To get mothers back to work? To ready toddlers for the labour market? To save children from poor or feckless parents?

  There is a risk here that the government will end up holding individual families responsible for structural inequalities. But, as academic factionalism continues, there is precious little clarity about how we should weigh and balance the multifarious factors that can shape a young life. When will Allana’s fate be determined, and by what?

  Allana wanders into her mother’s room with the nonchalance of a practised intruder. There’s another television there, a portable CD player, and a pile of unsorted laundry. Allana sits on top of it. She finds a screwdriver, which Sienna says belongs to her daddy. Allana likes to call Sienna’s father ‘Daddy’ too. When he moved out, Gloria admits she enjoyed the extra space in the bed.

  Allana also discovers a dummy which she sucks energetically. She didn’t have one as a baby but she loves them now. ‘Is that your dummy, Sienna?’ she asks companionably, as though she might actually relinquish her find. She quickly scotches hope: ‘You’ve already got a dummy, in’t you?’

  The dummy becomes a theme. Allana compresses herself into her Baby Annabel pram, sitting up on top of the frame, her knees tight against the handlebar. Sienna, who relishes the order of bags, begins packing toys and food into her rucksack for a walk in the park. Allana is now fully a baby, grizzling and kicking her legs. She throws a doll out of the pram. She is almost too heavy for Sienna to push.

  They swap roles. Allana counts toys for the baby up to nine, then gets lost and starts making up numbers. ‘You want milk baby?’ Sienna sucks hungrily on an empty liquid soap dispenser that has become an improvised bottle. ‘I think her wants some lunch. Let’s go home.’ She makes a nest behind the chair in the corner of the bedroom and navigates Sienna in there with her.

  After a while, Allana picks up a brush and starts attending to her sister’s hair. This is an enterprise of dubious intent. ‘That not hurt, that not hurtin’,’ Allana soothes as she rakes the bristles through Sienna’s tight curls. Both girls have difficult hair to keep, says Gloria, but Allana will never sit still long enough for her to oil it. ‘Don’t brush my eyes!’ Sienna pleads.

  Later, Allana washes her dummy in the bathroom. She is fascinated by the taps, and pretends to be brushing her teeth in order to turn them on then off again, on then off again. She needs to pee. She closes the door dis
creetly but Sienna bursts in on her. ‘No! No! No!’ They are fighting over the door-knob, Allana still with her trousers down. She starts whipping her sister away with a towel, eventually reclaiming possession of the knob.

  Gloria calls them down for tea. Allana and Sienna sit opposite each other at the small oblong table in the corner of the living-room, by the arch into the kitchen. They are deadly opponents in the contest of clearing plates. Gloria passes through chicken nuggets, chips and beans. She administers salt and ketchup judiciously. On the local television news there is an item about a sculpture which sounds like a waste of money. Allana eats all her meat. Sienna eats everything but. There are Munch Bunch yoghurts for afters.

  Whenever they go food-shopping, Allana asks for spaghetti bolognaise and Sienna wants macaroni cheese. It can be a struggle to buy them what they like, but Gloria usually asks her mum to get some things for her, since she gets a discount because of her job.

  On another day, Allana is out on the walkway, hanging off the arm of a neighbour who props her baby son on her hip. She had him when she was sixteen. Gloria didn’t have Allana until she was twenty-six – it just worked out that way. She left school at thirteen, and spent the intervening years working in a college kitchen. Now the neighbour is trying to stop Allana following Gloria down into the yard. Gloria thinks the local council is pretty awful. After Allana ran away they had to wait two years to get a gate on the top-floor landing. She was only two, but she went all the way to the shops on her own. Everyone on the estate was out looking for her. She’d found some money and wanted to spend it.

  Back in the flat, the girls roll around on the sofa while Gloria hangs out the washing on the balcony. She calls down to another neighbour below, and they exchange plans for Saturday night. Gloria doesn’t get out much, because babysitters are so expensive, but sometimes her mother takes them and Gloria will relax with whatever’s on telly and a bottle of wine.