The Story of Childhood

by Libby Brooks

  It would seem that food advertising has contributed to major changes in children’s eating habits. In the UK, the Office of National Statistics estimates that children spend more than a third of their pocket money on sweets, snacks and take-aways. In 2004, the food company Organix found that children as young as four were eating up to eighty additives a day.

  The food industry would have it that it is parents’ rather than manufacturers’ responsibility to feed children well. Yet they have historically fought legislation on food labelling, while exploiting parents’ desire for healthy products for their children. In 2004, for example, Friends of the Earth discovered that the ‘Kids’ Snack Pack Carrots’ on sale at Tesco were thirteen times the price of the chain’s ‘Value’ carrots.

  But the industry is always quick to enumerate other possible causes for the rise in childhood obesity: fewer children walking to school, lack of outdoor play time, the increase in working mothers who have less time to prepare meals from scratch.

  It is not only the amount of junk, but the manner in which that junk is promoted, that may prove harmful to children. Many companies now use story books, interactive websites, toys and games to sell their products. It’s a strategy known as ‘trans-toying’: turning everyday items into playthings either by altering their nature – in the case of Heinz green ketchup – or by associating them with other toys, like Primula’s Scooby-Doo lunch-boxes or the free gifts that proliferate in cereal cartons.

  A report by the Food Commission in 2005 criticised a number of manufacturers employing this practice. Culprits included a Mars-branded arithmetic book promoting M&M sweets, and McDonald’s-licensed fast-food toys like play cash registers, plastic burgers and chicken nuggets. At the Frosties Tigercathlon website, children earn points by taking part in races in a virtual stadium, but only if their cartoon characters pick up packets of Frosties to give them power. (Kellogg’s, the manufacturer of Frosties, was criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority in 2004 for implying that Frosties cereal was a healthy product when at the time it contained 40 per cent sugar.)

  This trend may be impacting on children’s psychological as well as physical development. Boston economist Juliet Schor wonders: ‘If all children’s experiences are geared towards excitement, surprise, and thrills, they may not discover that happiness and well-being are mainly gained through an appreciation of the quotidian. They may never learn to appreciate the taste of good, wholesome food if they are taught that eating is equivalent to playing.’ She quotes the Harvard psychologist Susan Linn, one of America’s leading critics of marketing to children: ‘Marketers would have us believe that the purpose of food is to play with it. Isn’t that an obscene value, when there are people in the world who are starving?’

  Some consumer activists have called for a ban on television advertising of junk foods during children’s programmes. But, like bans of violent media content, blanket gestures like this only move the problem elsewhere, creating enticing taboos where none existed before. It is impossible to insulate children entirely, nor is it worthwhile.

  In a comprehensive review of children’s ‘media literacy’, the Institute of Education’s Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media found that educational efforts designed as ‘counter-propaganda’ were less successful than approaches that start from an engagement with the capacity and interests of children in their use of commercial media. It is better, surely, to encourage the skills necessary for navigating the changing advertising landscape, whilst moderating children’s exposure to messages they are still learning to interpret. Adults may not be able to change commercial culture, but they can change children’s position within it, by treating childhood not only as a time of vulnerability.

  A week later, Adam is still on holiday, and toasting his back at the kitchen stove. The scratch on his nose has scabbed itchily. He arranges a selection of animals on the hearth beside him while his father makes lunch. He has Beaky the eagle, a spider monkey, who has much longer arms than Monkey, and a small badger.

  Bramble the badger is the school mascot, and each holiday a different child is allowed to take her home. They voted on the name, and ‘Bramble’ got the most votes, though Adam voted for ‘Woody’.

  It’s quiet while his dad chops up vegetables for lunch. The clock is ticking, the stove is throbbing, and Adam reads his comics. He’s had four: two Beanos, one Dandy and one Bananaman. He got a free hairy Gnasher badge with this one. At Oswestry Baths this morning he swam fifteen lengths. Each length is fifty metres. He did breast-stroke, underwater with no arms, and floating on his back but not backstroke. There are twelve levels in swimming and he’s on level six.

  In Durham at the golden wedding he saw a few of his uncles and some aunts. There were about thirty people altogether. ‘We had some tea and spoke to a few friends. I played on my own while the others were saying goodbye to people and then we went.’ Adam often refers to his parents as ‘the others’. They are a gang of three, not divided by generation. Sometimes he thinks it would good to have brothers and sisters, like when he’s playing outside and he wants to play a game but the others are busy. Brothers and sisters can annoy you, though.

  On the way back from Durham, they went to the pub and to Beamish. At Beamish there was a high street with old-fashioned shops and at the confectioner’s he got a yellow sugar mouse and some chocolate raisins. They also stayed at a hotel, which wasn’t bad. You got a TV there that wasn’t just a video.

  It’s only two days, Saturday and Sunday, until he goes back to school. ‘I don’t want to really,’ he admits. ‘I just like being with my mum and dad. I won’t see my dad until six o’clock when we have tea and I’ll see my mum when she picks me up from school.’ Adam’s father is an engineer, who makes the plastic things that you put behind windows. Although his mother works two days a week as a physiotherapist, her professional life is not understood in terms of absence, but rather as something curious that happens when his time is otherwise occupied.

  This week he’s stayed at home, playing by himself. He likes board-games and jigsaws and doing things, like making planes. Sometimes he pretends to be other people, like the people of The Lord of the Rings. ‘I like the way they move,’ he says reverently. Adam likes to move too. He is limber and precise, and one can’t imagine him ever being clumsy. He likes to experiment with facial expressions and different ways of articulating his body. Sometimes it seems unconscious, an absent-minded waggle of the head, or, like now, walking against the walls to get to his bedroom.

  He starts to sort the cuddly toys under his bed. Their names are explanatory, often influenced by the maker’s tag or place of purchase. This one looks like a person but it’s really a monkey finger-puppet. He got it in Seventh Heaven, which is a bed shop where you order beds and they deliver them to you. ‘The lady knew that I was very fond of monkeys.’

  This one’s called Cheeky and he got him in Tesco, so he’s Cheeky Tesco. This is his favourite teddy and it’s Forever Friends, Made In China. This one is called Monkey’s Brother because he does look like Monkey. There are a few without names, who go on a separate pile.

  Adam is reading the third Swallows and Amazons book. He has the CD of The Hobbit, which he listens to on his CD player. He waves the remote control airily. ‘Sometimes when I’m in bed I can be quite lazy …’ He presses the buttons. ‘You can do tapes too and I can listen to the radio. I normally listen to classic.’

  On his bedroom door is a crafted sign that reads: ‘Brave knight sleeping, wake with extreme caution’. ‘When I was very ill and had a temperature in the hundreds my dad got me this sign.’ The memory is set flush against another of significance: ‘Every year we have people from the Eisteddfod, where they have people singing and it’s a sort of judging competition. And everyone has to have guests and we had the Turkish people and I was so ill that my dad had to go out with the Turkish people and buy this for me.’

  That time when Adam was ill, he got this very bad feeling. ‘I had this weird fe
eling like I was walking twice as slow and I had weird dreams that I was having a boulder thrown at me.’

  Last night he dreamt about being stuck in a lift: ‘When I went to get my new piano we went into a lift and there was this button outside that the man had to push and he forgot and I thought we were going to be there for ever. Mum had to ring the telephone. It was very weird because last night I thought I was still in the lift.’ He was very afraid.

  Scary things, he says, that’s all he dreams about. Sometimes he even has nightmares. A nightmare is worse, probably ten times as scary as a scary dream. ‘Once I dreamt about being in a tunnel with Mum and Dad and other people and we couldn’t find our way out and if you fell down there were those skeletons that would eat you.’

  But sometimes he has good dreams, even with ghosts in, but friendly ghosts. He’s got a ghost in his bedroom called Frankenstein. ‘He helps me with my homework and sometimes I pretend to play with him. When I had Monkey I didn’t have Frankenstein around because I had Monkey to play games with and then when I lost him I got Frankenstein as my friend.’

  There is a forlorn grey image of Monkey pinned to the wall, from the time when the pair were at Grandma and Grandpa’s and Adam popped Monkey on their photocopier. The day when Monkey went missing is still vivid and he recounts it with due solemnity.

  ‘I was crying when I found out I’d lost Monkey. When we got back to the car the only hope was that he was at the house or in the café we went to but he wasn’t in either. I don’t know how I lost him. I must have dropped him.’ It is a guilty admission. ‘I’ve got two copies of the picture of him, one on the wall and one in the drawer.’

  No other monkey toy he could buy would be exactly the same, he says emptily. ‘Monkey was my favourite toy. I still sometimes cry because of him. I played with him all the time. I got him as soon as I was born so he was six years old when he disappeared.’

  Despite the panoply of readily conjured, hyper-marketed toys and characters available to them, children continue to create their own distinctive companions – whether embodied, like Monkey, or invisible, like Frankenstein. First-born and only children are more likely to have imaginary friends and children who have them watch significantly less television. But one study, conducted in America in 1997, estimated that 63 per cent of children under the age of seven had had an imaginary companion at some stage.

  Their existence has often been enmeshed with adult creativity. It was the imaginary world of A. A. Milne’s son Christopher that inspired the Winnie the Pooh books. And the Mexican painter Frida Khalo, describing the inspiration for her painting The Two Fridas, credited her invented childhood companion. ‘I must have been six years old when I had the intense experience of an imaginary friendship with a little girl … roughly my own age.’ She contacted her friend by breathing on the glass of her bedroom window and drawing a door in the mist. ‘I don’t remember her appearance or her colour,’ she recalled. ‘But I do remember her joyfulness – she laughed a lot. Soundlessly. She was agile and danced as if she was weightless. I followed her every movement and, while she danced, I told her my secret problems.’

  But adults remain curiously ambivalent about these companions, worrying that their existence betrays shyness or introversion, a propensity to lie, mental disturbance, or even a connection to something malign and other-worldly. Unbounded invention, while celebrated, also brings with it an element of threat. Although research in this area has been limited, the American professor Marjorie Taylor believes such fears to be unfounded. She surveys the available data in her book, Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them, concluding that, ‘Although children with imaginary companions might be somewhat advanced in their social understanding, and at younger ages they seem a little less shy and more able to focus their attention, they are not much different from other children in most respects.’

  The variety of forms that imaginary friends can take defies categorisation. In Taylor’s own work she came across Derek, a 91-year-old man who is only two feet tall but can hit bears; Aida Paida, a girl with a magical ability to make everyone feel safe; and Station Pheta, a boy with big beady eyes and a blue head whose job it is to hunt for sea anemones and dinosaurs on the beach. ‘They are all-purpose, extraordinarily useful beings,’ she writes. ‘Not only can they provide companionship, they can bear the brunt of a child’s anger, be blamed for mishaps, provide a reference point when bargaining with parents … many have design features that appear customised to meet the idiosyncratic psychological needs of the child creators.’

  Children usually begin to pretend in the second year of life, and are inducted by adults into a world of fantasy from an early age, through storytelling and inventive play. Taylor praises children for their sophisticated negotiation of the boundaries between appearance and reality. ‘Very young children are inundated with fantasy information,’ she notes, ‘often mixed seamlessly with real-world content. Children interact with adults who talk to stuffed animals as if the toys could understand … and react to a child’s gentle push by falling violently to the ground.’

  And yet, despite their collusion, adults continue to worry that the existence of an imaginary friend indicates an inability to distinguish the real from the make-believe. It is not so far removed from concerns about media violence. Taylor argues that confusions of fantasy with reality occur most commonly when a fantasy is presented to children by other people. Thus it is not surprising that the majority of young children believe in Santa Claus, since family, community and commerce conspire together to sustain their belief.

  Perhaps this ambivalence has more to do with an adult sorrow at renouncing the imaginative freedom of childhood. Adult life can feel inimical to spontaneity and playfulness. As the writer and critic Marina Warner once observed, ‘The make-believe world of infants and young minds, when perceived retrospectively, often inverts the adult order: it becomes the haven for dreams of unruliness and freedom, for spontaneity and the unrepressed unconscious. Like Alice in Lewis Carroll’s great fables, a child instinctively dethrones social prescriptions and accepted ideas through spontaneous lucidity.’

  No wonder Peter Pan didn’t want to grow up. It’s a sense of loss evoked beautifully by J. M. Barrie in his description of Neverland: ‘On these magic shores, children at play are forever beaching their corricles. We too have been there. We can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.’

  But why should adulthood be experienced as a time beyond play? The idea of ‘adult knowledge’ is a chimera. Knowledge is never complete or conclusive. It need not be antithetical to conjecture and fantasy. It is only fearfulness, convention or complacency that render it so.

  A week later, summer term has begun. Adam’s primary school, in the nearest village but one, squats in the lea of a wooded hillside. Its limestone walls are fat and sturdy. Further up the rise is a row of newly built classroom cabins that edge a playground, and at the top of the hill are two playing fields. Adam’s teacher Mr Bruce is calmly burning off the residual adrenalin of the lunch-hour. He counts one, two, three and everyone sit up and look this way.

  The children are seated in groups, according to ability. Adam sits with three other boys at the front of the classroom, by the computers. They wear yellow shirts, with blue sweaters and black bottoms. In the centre of each desk cluster is a blue plastic tube-tidy with pencils, rubbers, rulers and glue.

  This afternoon is observational drawing. The adjective comes from the word ‘observe’, which means to look very carefully. Mr Bruce points to his two eyes. He has chopped up a selection of fruit and vegetables – which are named and numbered one to sixteen on the whiteboard – into interesting shapes and to show seeds, then arranged them on paper plates. Mr Bruce gives two plates to each table. One boy doesn’t know what a papaya is. Adam’s table gets some cucumber sliced lengthways and a large head of broccoli. The class has twenty minutes to sketch and, if they’ve drawn really well, they can sit anywhere they like to do their colouring-in
.

  ‘Which one do I want to draw?’ thinks Adam aloud. He is turning the plate to get the best angle. The boy opposite him turns it back, and Adam turns it again. It’s not antagonistic, just a tease and a test. They settle on a mutually satisfactory position. Adam kneels on his chair to give himself a better purchase on his workbook, and starts measuring the cucumber with a ruler.

  There are more girls than boys in the class, and the girls show the greatest variance in height and weight. A few are already budding breasts, but the majority remain neat and doll-like. This is the class with the largest breadth of age, from six to nine. Adam got mostly As in his last school report, and Mr Bruce thinks it’s good for him to be challenged by the older children in his group.

  Three girls are called out for their violin lesson. Mr Bruce says not to use a ruler but to draw free-hand. Adam strokes the broccoli before he begins to sketch it. At the next table their teacher is demonstrating how to use the aqua pastels. It becomes hard to concentrate on Adam’s table so they pause and look on as he gently eases the colour from a pencil score on paper with a wet paintbrush.

  Now everyone is colouring in, but they have lost the chance to sit anywhere because they were making so much noise. People are crowding round the bin to sharpen their pencils. As the noise level rises again, it sounds as if there is an undercurrent of singing in the room. But there is no one secret song of childhood. It’s just that when heard together the individual blethers blend into a strange musical hum.

  Adam wants to know if this is the green for broccoli. ‘It is Adam, it is, trust me,’ insists his friend, but he’s not satisfied and goes back to the art corner to find a choicer tone. He returns with a flourish: ‘I’ve got a green at last from the beautiful man!’ Sometimes he talks like he’s an entertainer, performing as well as doing. He dips his paintbrush in the water – ‘Wrong end!’ and then, ‘Not enough water!’ You are as involved with your neighbours’ drawings as your own. ‘Adam, do you like mine?’ He uses a deep red to colour in the seeds of the cucumber.