by Abrams, Fran
Childhood, when dragged into the amphitheatre of public debate, has always been an emotionally charged subject, and increasingly so during the twentieth century. Perhaps, too, it has always been associated with a measure of fear. There is something about childhood that adults find mysterious, unknowable. Maybe it is that feeling that children are not creatures of the past – that is, they can never quite be equated with the children their parents once were; nor the present – their licence to practice in the outside world has strict conditions on it – but of the future. They represent something that is not yet known, something unformed yet precious, something vitally important which could potentially go wrong. They represent, in any age, a huge investment both of money and of time. Sometimes, the return has seemed uncertain. And so that uncertainty has given rise to myths, both great and small, which have persisted, in slightly altered forms, from one generation to the next.
The greatest myths, of course, are the oldest, the most enduring. The myth that children are somehow closer to nature than adults are; and that in being so, they can see and feel truths that adults cannot feel. The child as the seer, as the beating heart of all that is good and pure and honest, has perhaps receded during the twentieth century, but it sang out loud and strong during the eighteenth and nineteenth, through the works of poets such as Blake – ‘Sweet babe, in thy face, holy image I can trace’3 – and Wordsworth:
I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm.4
And, as the flipside of the same coin, the myth that children harbour evil, that, being the germinated seed of the original sin of Adam and Eve, they begin corrupted and must be civilized if they are to become adult humans in a functioning society, has been just as persistent. From the pre-enlightenment version, based on straightforwardly biblical views, to the devil children of twentieth-century fiction – Golding’s young savages in Lord of the Flies, Damien in The Omen – this evil, corrupting child has hung around the edges of society, almost as if there was some need for it. The feeling that there is a dangerous child ‘underclass’ must surely flow from the same spring: from the street arabs of the nineteenth century to the knife and drug gangs of the early twenty-first, the same fear has hung in the air. Children can be dangerous, they can be corrupting, they can be born of evil.
And again, another facet to the same potent belief: that if there exists a corrupted body of children – never our own, of course – then there must also be a larger, corruptible body which is susceptible to its wiles. The children of nature portrayed by Blake and Wordsworth had a sort of untouchable, homely innocence. But the real myth was never about those children, safe in their cradles before the hearth. The real myth was about other people’s children, and the threat they posed. Charles Kingsley’s little sweep Tom, emerging blackened from the fireplace in The Water Babies into a rich girl’s bedroom, and the ‘stranger danger’ panics of the late twentieth century both pointed in their own ways to this belief – that out there, in the forest, some threat was lurking.
And to these big myths, small myths cling and grow. The vulnerable child can be vulnerable in myriad ways. He can be vulnerable – and the future of the nation with him – because of monsters, bad men, poor nutrition, an unhealthy lifestyle. The early twentieth-century fears about a bread and tea diet breeding a puny urban underclass, and the early twenty-first-century panics about junk food, household chemicals and asthma, all spoke to the same fear. The Edwardians worried about what would become of the Empire, and consequently the nation’s prosperity and security when adults in the cities had their children running back and forth to the alehouse for them; a century later, the adults of the early twenty-first century worried about who was going to pay the benefit bills for a generation dragged up in workless homes on sink estates by parents who had barely tried to show them a model of a functioning nuclear family. While parents close to home were doing a good job, were those elsewhere sneaking rotten apples into the barrel? Would the next generation be strong enough to protect and nurture this one in its dotage? In short, if children were the future, what sort of future would they be?
So, there was much that persisted, much that was circular, in the world of the child when viewed from a historical perspective. Perhaps the twentieth-century notion that childhood was something unique and separate and different from adulthood, and that therefore a child should have independent ‘rights’, began to go into recession at the beginning of the twenty-first. Perhaps, increasingly, the public focus in the new millennium actually – while paying lip service to the notion of rights and individuality – became more fixated on the idea that all children should achieve set goals, that all children should be ready to play their allotted parts in the future of the nation. Perhaps the idea of changing power relations within a family, the 1970s and 1980s feeling that parents were no longer so firmly in the driving seat, was giving way, as the century turned, to a new disciplinarianism, a return to the old notion that actually the key to bringing up a child was not so much freedom as parenting – and the right kind of parenting, at that: ‘While establishing a routine is often very hard work and requires a lot of sacrifices on the part of the parents, hundreds of thousands of parents around the world will testify that it is worth it because they quickly learn how to meet the needs of their babies so distress is kept to a minimum,’ wrote Gina Ford in her new Contented Little Baby Book, considered a major source of advice for twenty-first-century parents.5
Yet while some things stayed the same and while some were cyclical, there was much, too, that changed. The story of childhood from the last days of Victoria to the new millennium was the story, if you like, of how the state swallowed its children. Never before had governments had so much to say, so much to do – or indeed, anything much to say or do – about children. Now, in an era when the fingers of the state reached into most walks of human life, the child became a key focus for public policy: a phenomenon which reached a crescendo as the twentieth century came to a close.
If raising children had always been a huge investment for the family, it now became an equally major investment for the state. As the century wore on, a parent’s investment in his or her child became increasingly an emotional rather than an economic one – or rather, the desired emotional return grew as the expected economic return dwindled. At the same time, governments took on an ever greater economic, and therefore political, investment in the child. Education, health, criminal justice – all these areas of public policy became battlegrounds over which opposing camps fought over children and their upbringing. Huge sums were spent. And so the collective investment became somehow greater – both personal and political – because every taxpayer – every family – had an ever greater stake in every other taxpayer’s children. Naturally, that led to everyone feeling they were entitled to an opinion not just on how to raise their own children, but on how others should raise theirs too. Children, according to modern theorists on the subject, became not just the means of social reproduction – which they had always been – but also the agents of desired social change.6 And so the perceived consequences of educational failure, emotional disruption or delinquency become more socially pressing; linked both to a feeling that an investment was going to waste, and to a fear that this huge, optimistic social project could be failing.
Investments in health, in housing and in education were all, in effect, investments in the future of the nation. And so it was hardly surprising that a kind of paranoia would continue to grow, even as that investment brought its returns in terms of better health and greater safety for children. As the infant mortality rate plummeted, before and after the war, and as the numbers of child deaths from accidents also fell,7 the sense that everyone had an interest in th
e health of other people’s children also grew. And the idea took hold that perhaps some people were not tending to their children as they should be doing. And so the notion of bad parenting became an obsession for the media. It fed back, of course, into the deeper notion of the child’s vulnerability. And that, too, was fed by the growth of developmental theory during the twentieth century – mainly as a result of Freud’s notions about the stages of psychological growth through which a child must pass, and the desperate consequences of a failure to do so. There was a growing sense, then, that a healthy, well-nourished, well-nurtured childhood was essential not just for the future wellbeing of the individual, but for the future wellbeing of the state.
That feeling had always been out there, of course. But now it gained a new intensity. The ideal child of the late Victorian era had been a quiet creature, seen but not heard, obedient and pure. The ideal child of the early twentieth century was elfin, sprite-like, delicate, while the ideal child of the later twentieth century was an increasingly robust, rosy-cheeked creature. All those children, though, had lived an existence centred on the home and on the family. Now, the child became – in theory, if not in practice – a social being even more, inextricably linked to the current and future wellbeing of society itself. When the issue is viewed from this angle, it is clear that social problems were bound to attach themselves to the child. Somehow, the old post-war optimism had completely vanished from the political rhetoric surrounding the life of the child by the end of the century. While a discussion about children in the 1960s would probably have centred on how parents should raise them, what worked and what did not; a discussion about children in the twenty-first century would almost certainly focus at some point on what on earth was going wrong. Old certainties, such as they were, had vanished. Suddenly, children seemed vastly more important than they used to – there were fewer of them – and their emotional stock had risen as their economic stock had fallen since 1945 – although children still worked, fewer were expected to contribute to family budgets. And this, in part, must help to account for the growing sense of unease among parents. Increasingly, children had spending power without earning power. And, increasingly, parents found themselves forking out for the luxuries which their children, cuckoo-like, were demanding from the comfort of their family nest. A parent’s investment in a child – both emotional and financial – had grown. And from there arose uncertainty about whether it was all worth it. What was it all for? Children were no longer there to sustain the family, to take over from where their parents left off in the family business or trade. They were no longer there, even, to support their parents in their old age. They were just there.
And from there, maybe, arose the guilt. In essence, the Western world was becoming an increasingly uncertain place. And the role of the child within it was equally uncertain: if we don’t know who we are, who we want to be or how we’re meant to get there, then how can we guide our young? Maybe, then, the time has come for retrenchment. Maybe the twentieth century will come to be seen, in terms of children and their history, as the century of choice. The century when thinkers like Freud, with his focus on the individual and his needs, like Neill, with his belief in freedom, and even like Benjamin Spock, who told parents to relax and all would be well, were in the ascendancy. The century in which children became the focus of a great attempted feat of social engineering. In which the child as an individual was asked to assert himself, and in which, sometimes, he even did. Was the experiment a success? The jury is out, but the tone of the debate – more myth than reality, of course – would certainly say no. So perhaps the twenty-first century is bound to be a century of retreat, for a time at least, towards old certainties – more discipline, stricter targets.
The fear and the myths, though, are not just myths and fears about children. They are myths and fears about mankind; ones which have emerged and re-emerged throughout the ages because they have drawn people together as external threats tend to do. Almost as if in uncertain times – and times often have been uncertain – there is a reassurance about it. If the evil, the poison, the violence, is out there, prowling around the dark boundaries of the camp, then those huddled inside nearest to the fire may take comfort in the rhythms of their own lives. Perhaps with retrenchment, with greater cohesion and a clearer sense of common purpose, will come the realization that for the most part there is little out there to fear but the fear itself.
Epilogue
In the Spring of 2011, two Canadian psychologists laid bare a contradiction at the heart of modern family life: that parenting seemed more demanding, more arduous with each passing year, and yet was somehow increasingly idealized in the popular imagination. Their study aimed to find out why.
The academics set up an experiment, with two groups of parents. The first was asked to look at information on both pros and cons – the financial cost of up to £150,000 per child, balanced by the possibility that the child might later provide support to the parent in old age. The second group was given information on the cost, but not the benefits.1
So, which group would speak most warmly of the joys of parenthood? The group which had been allowed to contemplate the prospect of a happy old age with its adult offspring at its knee? Or the group which had just realized if it had had one less child, it could have spent the money on a small second home? The result, of course, was that the more parents were asked to confront hard-edged financial reality, the more they in fact focused on the warm, fuzzy feelings parenthood gave them. In short, they were fooling themselves.
In the midst of a recession, as youth unemployment soars and children become ever more costly and burdensome, the question of why parents have them is thrown into ever-sharper relief.2
The question has hung around at the margins of public debate for decades. As the American academic John Sommerville put it in 1982: ‘At a time when we were confident that our work was making their future brighter, it was easy to think of children as innocent and refreshing . . . Children are more obviously a liability nowadays.’3 Since then, things have continued to get worse. Children no longer contribute to the family purse as they did in the early years of the twentieth century. Over the past fifty years, traditional industries and the labour market conditions that enabled children to follow their parents into a profession or a trade have all but disappeared. They no longer have a major economic role except as consumers, and they lack a clear economic future as young adults. Yet, as some American academics have put it, children’s emotional capital has risen, just as their social and economic capital has fallen.4 Parents, like the ones in the Canadian study, are upping the ante to justify their unwise investment in child-rearing. As the Canadian psychologists put it: ‘The idea that parenthood involves substantial emotional rewards appears to be something of a myth.’5
For the most part, the adult world continues to maintain the fiction that everything’s fine; that so long as its offspring are safe and warm in the family home, all will be well, which is convenient, since so many of those offspring are finding they can’t move on into adulthood.
In March 2012, the Huffington Post ran a piece by a recent American college graduate. Its headline, ‘Why Generation Y Can’t Grow Up – A Recession Tale,’6 said it all.
The author, Tyler Moss, had a Masters degree, an ocean of debt and ‘a barren desert of unemployment opportunities’ confronting him. He’d measured his life by milestones – driving test, first legal drink, college – and was left wondering what it had all been for.
He concluded that if the ‘Millennials’, as he termed his generation of recent graduates, were drifting, they had good reason to do so. In an age of extreme uncertainty, the choices were apparently stark: work incessantly in the hope of clinging to the career ladder in an increasingly precarious climate, or embrace the life of the perpetual adolescent.
Put in those terms, it seemed obvious why so many had plumped for the second option; why so many were, to put it bluntly, choosing not to confront their future, opting ins
tead for a series of coffee-shop jobs – the life of the perpetual backpacker.
‘I can guarantee our Depression-era ancestors, living in the cardboard boxes of their Hoovervilles, thought little past the evening’s cabbage soup,’ Moss wrote. ‘We live a blind carpe diem that avoids eye contact with tomorrow but with the future so precarious, and with no real choice in the matter, successes and failures are measured by the day.’
Across the Western world – certainly in Britain – young people have been drawing much the same conclusion – although perhaps most of them haven’t articulated it with quite the same pristine clarity. This generation is set apart from those who suffered in the recessions of the 1980s, or even of the 1930s, by a major factor: the loss of hope.