The Story of Childhood

by Libby Brooks

  It is not in doubt that children’s access to media, and the prevalence and extremity of violence in such media, has vastly increased over the last fifty years. But the question of correlation versus causality in the research linking media violence with unhappy outcomes remains vexed. Many in the field believe that a critical mass of evidence has been reached, that it is incumbent on governments to legislate for more effective controls, and on parents to survey their offsprings’ media diet more strictly.

  But others argue that many of these studies are necessarily flawed because they view violence as an objective category and fail to investigate what audiences themselves define as violent. In After the Death of Childhood, David Buckingham notes that cartoons – which regularly top researchers’ lists of most violent programmes – are not generally perceived as violent by children.

  The concept of ‘desensitisation’ has become loaded, implying a dangerous lack of empathy rather than a healthy coping response. But Buckingham refers to accounts of early film that describe how people would scream and rush from the cinema when confronted with sequences of train crashes or falling buildings. ‘Rather than being taken as evidence of “desensitisation”,’ he writes, ‘this apparently distanced attitude to violence could well be seen as a reflection of the sophistication of contemporary audiences.’

  And, more than thirty years on, a review in the Lancet in 2005 reinforces Anthony Storr’s contention that ‘it is only when parents or other adults have actually seemed terrifying’ that violent stories or images will disturb a child. It found that violent imagery on television and in computer games was more likely to increase aggressive behaviour in children who came from violent families.

  The beneficial potential of new media is seldom given as much publicity as its negative aspect. Researchers from the Institute of Education’s Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media have argued that video games, for example, can assist children’s social and educational development, and that the medium deserves to be treated by schools with the same seriousness as books and films. In particular, they noted that the perception of video games as unremmitingly violent is wholly inaccurate. Indeed, the majority of those aimed at children involve imaginative role play. The biggest selling video game of all time is The Sims, where players assume the role of city mayor, constructing virtual families and communities.

  It is also worth considering some research conducted by the BBC, BBFC and others in 2003, which found that children were far more disturbed by violence or its implied threat when seen on the news or in documentaries than in cartoons or fantasy. They were especially scared by events which they could imagine happening to themselves or their immediate family, like abduction or terrorist attack. David Buckingham suggests: ‘As they gain experience of watching fictional violence, children may indeed become “desensitised” to fictional violence or at least develop strategies for coping with it; although the notion that they are thereby “desensitised” to real-life violence has yet to be substantiated. By contrast, however, there may be very little that children can do in order to come to terms with their “negative” responses to non-fictional material, precisely because they are so powerless to intervene in issues that concern them.’

  Neil Postman, nevertheless, would have applauded Adam’s mother and father. He believed that ‘those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition.’ And so, instead of watching endless hours of potentially denaturing television, Adam likes to make things that are kind of messy. He likes cutting-out and sticking, clay and wool. ‘There was art that we did at Beavers,’ he says. ‘Beavers is this club that you go to on a Wednesday, and you have to wear a uniform and a neckerchief and a scarf, and you get to do fun things and play games.’

  He has only one week left before he goes off on holiday with his Spanish cousins. ‘They speak Spanish but they speak English as well. They’re both older, and Sarah does karate and I don’t know what Luke does. Together we play football and other things.’

  Next week is the class trip to Chester. There’s a limit of five pounds’ spending money, because it wouldn’t be fair if someone brought ten pounds and another person brought less. Adam would like to bring four pounds. He gets one pound of pocket money every Saturday. He’ll probably spend it on a little figure, or a Roman helmet.

  It will be a whole day trip to Chester. ‘We get one hour at school and the rest we get at Chester. So we get twenty-three hours there. Or maybe twenty or ninteen.’ He thinks it’s in a bus. ‘It’s exciting really. It gets noisy, especially when we go swimming. Some people sing songs, but I don’t. It increases the noise.’ Sometimes noise bothers him. ‘And sometimes when I’m in bed it can actually be the silence that disturbs me. Because when I was little, I still believe, I know it isn’t true, but I think that there’s ghosts, but there isn’t really.’

  When I next visit, it’s a dour, misty day, and when Stephen came round earlier they mostly played indoors. There is one more week of holidays left. When Adam’s alone, he likes to do archery. He’s going to go to an archery club in the summer. He already has his own arrows, which he’s got twelve of, and a target.

  In the end, Adam took three pounds fifty to Chester. They went round the walls with a man dressed up as a Roman soldier, then they went into the museum, and there was a games area, an excavation area and a gift shop. He bought one little Roman soldier and a plastic sword. You had to bring your own packed lunch. He had some tuna butties, an apple, some juice, some raisins, and some raw pepper.

  After Chester they went to Herefordshire, to a cottage. There were nine people staying there in all. They played outside, went up hills and went on midnight walks – which usually take place around half past seven in the evening. ‘We take a torch, and some walkie-talkies, and just walk in the dark. We saw foxes, badgers, rabbits, hedgehogs sometimes.’ Adam played football, rounders, swingball, and Frisbee with his Spanish cousins. They didn’t bring Monkey back because nobody knows where he is. Probably somebody Spanish is looking after him now.

  He came back from Herefordshire, which is hard to pronounce, on Saturday, and then it was Easter. ‘We went on an Easter-egg hunt up hills. It wasn’t really an egg hunt. There were clues and you have to try and look for the thing. We had to find things like feathers or sheep. We got forty-seven points and came second. I got a little chicken with a little Easter egg in it as a prize.’

  On Sundays, sometimes he and his dad go to church, though they didn’t go for Easter Sunday. On Easter, Jesus was crucified and rose up from the dead. When you are crucified you are killed on the cross. It probably hurt a lot. He came back to life because of God’s power. It’s something that lots of people are happy about now.

  Adam believes in God. If you do, you have to help people and be kind. ‘You have to say prayers at night-time and at teatime. The prayers are all different. Sometimes they come from The Lion Book of Prayers, which has different prayers for different times of the year, and sometimes we make them up to say thank you, and sometimes we don’t say any at all.’

  He scrambles up the back of the sofa to watch the hens that are lording around the garden. What became of the chicks in the woodshed? He ponders. ‘I think we’ve killed them all. We’ve got another set now. You just break their necks. I haven’t done it on my own but I’ve watched Mum and Dad. After that we cook them. There are loads of ways really. Sometimes we roast them, sometimes we make stew. Sometimes chicken doesn’t have any taste, and sometimes it does.’

  Adam says that his favourite things to eat are broccoli, chips, chicken and chocolate egg. ‘I eat five fruit and vegetables a day, and we grow food round where the swing is, sometimes broccoli, rhubarb, leeks, potatoes and sometimes cauliflower.’ He rubs a fresh scratch on his nose absently. He can’t remember how it got there.

  When he goes to the supermarket with his mum and dad, he asks them to buy treacle tarts. But the majority of Ada
m’s food comes from local producers. His parents buy meat, fruit and vegetables that are in season, and that come with the minimum of food miles. There’s a non-profit-making organisation that delivers boxes to a house near the school, and the families pick them up every Friday. Most of the villagers avoid big supermarkets if they possibly can.

  His mum says it’s important that he knows where food comes from, and that their lambs which he pets in spring will end up on his plate. He likes helping in the kitchen, and his favourite thing is chopping. Adam says he doesn’t really see adverts for sweeties or drinks because you see them on television. Sometimes he’s noticed that after eating jelly babies he feels excited.

  When he’s at school, the dinners are different every day. His favourite is fish, chips and peas. Again, the food is sourced locally, the sausages are home-made and the pizzas constructed from scratch with fresh ingredients.

  This evening it’s kedgeree for tea, made with newly laid eggs from the hens. His parents are in the kitchen and the radio is on. This weekend they are going to Durham. It’s a golden wedding, which he thinks is fifty years. His own mum and dad are ten years. They’ll be in their eighties when they have theirs. They’ll be wrinkly then, but they’ll still go for long walks because his grandad and grandma still do.

  He spots his father out of the window, coming round the side of the woodshed. He’s got his helmet, his chainsaw and his clippers because he’s been cutting down trees. He’s making a fence for the goats from the wood that he’s harvested from the coppice. Adam says he can use an axe, and sometimes he sharpens it too. ‘Sometimes it’s quite heavy when I’m using one hand, but not with two hands.’

  Adam returns to playing with his Playmobil figures. One is a flag-bearer, and another is a knight in armour. Where’s his shield? Now that notice of tea has been given, there’s an urgency to get everyone constructed. He snatches vital seconds, attaching swords to hands as his mum comes in to encourage him towards the table.

  The kitchen is heated by an oil stove. Strings of dried chillies and orange slices garnish the sides of the fireplace. Some of Adam’s pottery hangs on the walls: an owl with individually moulded clay feathers, a glazed mug and a loving portrait of his mother which presents her with wild, wormy hair. The family sit down to eat together every evening. Before eating, everyone holds hands and thanks God for the food: the fish that gave its life and the chicken that laid the eggs.

  They talk about the trip to Durham. Adam is wearing a red sleeveless T-shirt, and when he gesticulates his arm muscles flex vigorously beneath the skin. He describes the games they play in the car, making sentences out of letters on number-plates they see. One of them was Dad’s Windy Bottom!

  In the spring of 2005, the government pledged £280 million to improve school meals, as a result of the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s ‘Feed Me Better’ campaign. His television series Jamie’s School Dinners, which exposed the appalling state of school catering, ambushed public opinion, driving an issue that had long struggled for attention straight to the top of the political agenda. The reintroduction of minimum nutritional standards that had been abolished by the Conservative government when they privatised the service in 1980 was also announced.

  But miracles take longer. There was suspicion that the Schools Food Trust, created by the government following the Jamie Oliver series, would simply add another layer of bureaucracy to proceedings. It later emerged that some schools were locked into contracts with private catering firms that would leave them unable to implement changes for years to come.

  The ban on junk food and drink from canteens and school vending machines announced in the autumn of 2005 was encouraging. But the transformation of school dinners will require a sustained commitment when local authority control over meals is negligible following the compulsory competitive tendering of the 1980s, and when some schools don’t even have kitchens.

  As Jamie Oliver discovered, adults as well as children resist the introduction of healthy foods. A genuine revolution in school meals will need to tackle parental attitudes and marketing to children as well as the basic foodstuffs on offer.

  Although childhood obesity remains one of the clearest markers of poverty, malnutrition and bad diet are no longer the preserve of those who cannot afford to eat better. One in five adults are now classified as clinically obese in this country, and obesity in children has increased threefold in the last twenty-five years. The majority of young people eat more than the recommended amounts of salt, sugar and saturated fats, while consuming less than half the recommended amounts of fruit and vegetables.

  Inadequate diet in childhood is laying down risks of cancer, heart disease and diabetes in later life, as well as contributing to behavioural problems in youth. There is convincing evidence linking lack of nutrients – in particular omega 3 and 6 fatty acids – to ADHD and autistic spectrum disorders.

  For all the concerns that are noisily articulated about childhood today, it is curious that children’s nutrition has only latterly been considered worthy of public action. Perhaps adult ambivalence about food, combined with the stigma that still surrounds obesity, has contributed to this blindspot. Children grow up in a society riven with contradictory messages about food, parented by those who may themselves continue to harbour anxieties around eating habits. On the one hand, what we eat has become a social preoccupation, now variously imbued with messages about status, leisure, love and exoticism. On the other, thinness has never been more prized.

  Children are not born demanding burgers. Initial food preferences are biologically driven, the genetic predisposition being to prefer sweet and salty tastes and to dislike bitter and sour ones. These innate preferences are assumed to have served an evolutionary purpose, as sweetness can predict the energy value of foods, while bitter tastes often denote poisonous substances.

  Very young children also exhibit a developmental fear of new and unfamiliar tastes, which is again thought to have evolved in order to stop them eating dangerous substances. It has been estimated that approximately ten exposures to a new food are adequate to establish acceptance. Some experts believe that at this stage infants create a ‘weaning library’ of tastes that will influence their preferences for the rest of their lives.

  Researchers have found that children can effectively regulate their intake when surrounded by nutritious foods. Children’s poor food choices are dictated by what is made available to them – naturally, they will choose a cake over broccoli – but also by what tastes they have become used to. And here manufacturers have become adept at hijacking evolutionary preferences. The ingredient monosodium glutamate, for example, preys upon the disposition to like salt, but increases the level at which it is satisfied. Because children’s preferences are still in flux it is possible to subvert their tastes permanently, creating higher thresholds from which there is no retreat.

  While unhealthy, processed foods are marketed as cost-effective and quick to cook, fresh and organic produce remains prohibitively expensive for many people. It takes time, energy and nutritional intelligence to prepare meals from scratch on a daily basis. Knowledge of basic cooking techniques – even the ability to identify different varieties of fruits and vegetables – is no longer passed down through families.

  But eating is a psychological as well as a physiological process. Children are more likely to eat foods that they see teachers, parents and peers eating. But, in a generation, there has been a shift to cooking separate meals for children. It has been suggested that, with more parents working longer hours, denial or provision of food has taken on more emotional significance. Studies have shown that when children are rewarded for eating their ability to regulate disappears and their intake increases. Early experience of food being used in a system of reward or punishment has also been linked to the development of eating disorders in adolescence.

  Similarly, food is the primary site where children themselves assert control. Refusing to eat certain foodstuffs is how toddlers first differentiate their need
s. Teenaged sufferers of anorexia nervosa and bulimia are often thought to be using their condition as a way of controlling their changing physicality or of managing psychological pressures. The sociologist Alison James believes that children can use food to structure their identities in the face of adult authority.

  While conducting fieldwork at a village youth club in the north-east of England, James noticed that local adults and children both used the dialect word ‘ket’ or ‘kets’, but that adults used it to refer to something diseased or inedible, while children used it to describe penny or cheap sweets. In the essay that resulted from her observations, she suggests it is no coincidence that rubbish and sweets share the same moniker.

  James discovered that children used the term only for those sweets at the lower end of the price range. They were comically named and brightly coloured, often in luminous shades wholly absent from adult foodstuffs. They also offered what she neatly describes as ‘a unique digestive experience’: gobstoppers that fill the mouth completely; Fruit Salad chews that leave the jaw aching; Space Dust that explodes violently on the tongue. They were attractive because they stood in contrast to conventional adult sweets and adult eating-patterns, she argues, not only in their names, their colours and the sensations they induced but also in the timing and manner of their consumption. So kets were munched haphazardly between meals, and sucks on kets were shared, in flagrant disregard of the eating conventions instilled in early childhood.

  Interestingly, kets were never advertised. James’s idea of children using their food choices to assert their identity becomes muddied when those choices are thrust before them by adult marketing executives. The advertising industry has been quick to reframe its activities in terms of children’s empowerment. But how empowered is the average British child who, it has been estimated, views up to 5,000 advertisements for junk food every year?