Reclaiming Childhood

Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear

Helene Guldberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415477222
• eBook ISBN: 9781135226251
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Children are cooped up, passive, apathetic and corrupted by commerce… or so we are told.

Reclaiming Childhood confronts the dangerous myths spun about modern childhood. Yes, children today are losing out on many experiences past generations took for granted, but their lives have improved in so many other ways. This book exposes the stark consequences on child development of both our low expectations of fellow human beings and our safety-obsessed culture. Rather than pointing the finger at soft 'junk' targets and labelling children as fragile and easily damaged, Helene Guldberg argues that we need to identify what the real problems are – and how much they matter.

We need to allow children to grow and flourish, to balance sensible guidance with youthful independence. That means letting children play, experiment and mess around without adults hovering over them. It means giving children the opportunity to develop the resilience that characterises a sane and successful adulthood. Guldberg suggests ways we can work to improve children's experiences, as well as those of parents, teachers and 'strangers' simply by taking a step back from panic and doom-mongering.

PART I
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE HISTORY

A balance sheet of modern childhood

ONE
A CHILDISH PANIC ABOUT THE NEXT GENERATION

The relentless forces of modernity are pressing in from all sides, slowly but surely squeezing out the novelty, the independence, the adventure, the wonder, the innocence, the physicality, the solitude – the juice, if you will – from the lives of today’s children.

(Chris Mercogliano, 2007, p. ix)

Children are cooped up indoors, passive and apathetic and unable to create their own fun and entertainment. Their imagination is dulled by too many hours of watching television and playing sedentary computer games. They are corrupted by commerce and advertising, tormented by bullies, and traumatized by testing. Or so we are told – over and over and over again.

Exhortations about the harm children are coming to arrive daily via the media, and a plethora of recent books warn about the ill effect modern life is having on the new generation. I would argue that most writers are allowing their rather romanticized view of, and nostalgia for, their own childhoods to influence their inquiry into how children’s lives have changed in recent times. Some of their concerns are also shaped by a distinct unease about modern living and a disdain for affluence – even, in some cases, by a snobbish haughtiness towards ignorant, ‘materialistic’ parents.

In September 2006 the Archbishop of Canterbury and more than 100 eminent experts, including children’s authors, scientists, health professionals, teachers and academics joined Sue Palmer, education consultant, broadcaster and author of Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World is Damaging our Children and What we can Do about It, in signing a letter to the London Daily Telegraph warning that ‘modern life leads to more depression among children’ (Abbs et al. 13 September 2006). Children are suffering, the experts claimed, as a result of our ‘junk culture’. The modern world is not providing kids with what they need to develop, which includes: ‘real food (as opposed to processed “junk”), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in, and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives’ (Abbs et al. 13 September 2006).

A year on, the signatories of the original letter were joined by other professionals, academics and writers, claiming that since they first expressed their concern about the marked deterioration in children’s mental health ‘research evidence supporting this case has continued to mount’ (Abbs et al. 17 September 2007). In the follow-up letter to the Daily Telegraph these experts wrote: ‘Compelling examples have included UNICEF’s alarming finding that Britain’s children are amongst the unhappiest in the developed world, and the children’s charity NCH’s report of an explosion in children’s clinically diagnosable mental health problems’ (Abbs et al. 17 September 2007).

Apparently children are not only deeply unhappy, they are also stressed out. In October 2007 a report titled Community Soundings, published by Cambridge University’s Primary Review Group, and hailed as ‘the first major investigation into British primary schooling since the Plowden report’ of 1967, claimed there is a ‘deep anxiety’ today about children and childhood. The report’s findings generated alarming headlines in the media. ‘Pressure of tests “means primary school pupils lose their childhood”,’ reported the Times. ‘Study reveals stressed-out 7–11 year-olds,’ said the Guardian. ‘UK youngsters “stressed and depressed”,’ claimed ITN News.

Writers, commentators and policymakers across the Atlantic have painted an equally bleak picture of modern childhood. In her book It Takes a Village then US First Lady Hillary Clinton wrote, ‘Everywhere we look, children are under assault: from violence and neglect, from break-up of families, from the temptations of alcohol, sex, and drug abuse, from greed, materialism and spiritual emptiness’ (Clinton 1996:11).

We are told that one worrying outcome of modern living is that children are suffering from something called ‘nature deficit disorder’. In his book Last Child in the Woods Richard Louv, co-founder and chairman of the US organization Children and Nature Network, argues that children are suffering from ‘diminished use of senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses’ as a result of their ‘alienation from nature’ (Louv 2005:34). He argues that modern life is narrowing our senses until our focus is mostly visual, appropriate to the dimensions of a computer monitor or television screen.

Screen-based technologies and expensive toys are reportedly the culprits of all kinds of evil. US child development expert David Elkind writes in The Power of Play: How Imaginative, Spontaneous Activities Lead to Healthier and Happier Children that ‘Children’s play – their inborn disposition for curiosity, imagination and fantasy – is being silenced in the high-tech, commercialised world we have created’ (Elkind 2007: ix). The power of play is being destroyed by inexpensive toys available in enormous quantities and seemingly unlimited variety and sedentary screen play, argues Elkind.

Unhappy children, we are told, turn into unhappy, maladjusted and often badly behaved teenagers. According to the UK think-tank IPPR (the Institute for Public Policy Research), British teenagers are ‘the worst behaved in Europe’. Research published in the IPPR report Freedom’s Orphans: Raising Youth in a changing World shows British fifteen-year-olds are more likely to binge-drink, take drugs, have under-age sex and get into fights than their counterparts in Germany, France and Italy (Margo 2006).

A lack of interaction with ‘real-life significant adults’ in their lives is blamed for teenagers’ growing yobbishness. Nick Pearce, director of the IPPR, said:

Adult role models are vital for children to learn about the norms of behaviour and values in our society, but in Britain children spend less time with their parents than is the case in culturally similar countries … Because they don’t have that structured interaction with adults, it damages their life chances. They are not learning how to behave – how to get on in life – as they need to.

(IPPR 2 November 2006)

Whereas 45 per cent of fifteen-year-old boys in England and 59 per cent of fifteen-year-old boys in Scotland spend most evenings with friends, in France that figure stands at 17 per cent and in Portugal at a mere 7 per cent (Margo 2006).

Childhood has gone ‘comprehensively wrong’, argues Sue Palmer. Drawing upon the IPPR research, she wrote that we have ‘lost track of certain essential and very obvious ingredients for healthy child development … perhaps most important of all, the opportunity for children to spend time talking to and learning from the loving adults in their lives’ (Palmer 27 July 2007). Apparently in a world of limitless affluence and labour-saving devices we come to expect everything to be available at the flick of a switch, and therefore don’t realize that child rearing is not conducive to quick-fix solutions. Today’s parents care more about ‘stuff than relationships’, complains Palmer: ‘Earning enough for a new kitchen matters more than chatting to the children in the old one’ (Palmer 27 July 2007).

Around the same time, a report by the UK Children’s Society, entitled The Good Childhood Inquiry, was widely reported as showing that UK children are ‘hostages’ to parental fears, by being denied the freedom to mess around outside with their friends. Parents cannot win. On one hand, they are reportedly allowing teenagers to spend too much time hanging around with their friends outside, not spending ‘quality time’ with their children. On the other, they are creating a generation of ‘battery children’ who are cooped up inside and denied the freedom to socialize.

The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that growing up in modern times–particularly in Britain and America – is Really Bad. And the much publicized UNICEF report Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries apparently proves the doom-mongers right (UNICEF 2007). As is repeated ad nauseam in the press, the UK ranked bottom and the US second from the bottom in UNICEF’s league table of twenty-one industrialized countries for child well-being. Children’s Society chief executive Bob Reitemeier said, ‘We simply cannot ignore these shocking findings. UNICEF’s report is a wake-up call to the fact that, despite being a rich country, the UK is failing children and young people in a number of crucial ways’ (BBC Online 14 February 2007). Al Aynsley Green, the Children’s Commissioner for England, was equally emphatic, if a little more obscure: ‘There is a crisis at the heart of our society and we must not continue to ignore the impact of our attitudes towards children and young people and the effect that this has on their wellbeing’ (Johnston 15 February 2007).

In the US children’s advocates welcomed the UNICEF report. Linda Spears, Vice-president of Corporate Communications and Development at the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) said, ‘I’m more optimistic now than I’ve ever been that this may help galvanize energy on Capitol Hill and encourage advocates to pay attention’ (Johnson 20 February 2007).

In the round, it seems it is pretty awful to be a child in the UK and the US today. But how seriously should we take this panicked discussion about the state of childhood?

Reasons to be cheerful

Most of the problems thrown into the pot when discussing contemporary childhood are not, on closer scrutiny, issues we should be obsessing about. The argument in Reclaiming Childhood is that this depressing depiction of modern childhood is not just flawed and inaccurate but potentially damaging to both children and adults. It could be a self-fulfilling prophecy should some children (though by no means all of them) become depressed, anxious, isolated and stressed. The constant panicking about children’s wellbeing by governments, the media and advocacy groups does children no good. Nor is it good for parents. As sociologist Frank Furedi shows in Paranoid Parenting, it is likely to make parents fret even more about their children and increase the insecurities and hang-ups they have about their abilities as parents (Furedi 2001).

Journalist Libby Brooks provides a rather fitting description of society’s gloomy view of children’s lives in The Story of Childhood: Growing up in Modern Britain (Brooks 2006). ‘Over the past three decades, worries about children’s well-being have been amplified to an excruciating pitch,’ she writes. ‘Childhood has become the crucible into which is ground each and every adult anxiety – about sex, consumerism, technology, safety, achievement, respect, the proper shape of life. This is a time of child-panic’ (Brooks 2006:16).

For centuries people have argued that the younger generation is more alienated and worse behaved than previously. In Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood Steven Mintz notes, ‘Ever since the Pilgrims departed from Plymouth in 1620, fearful that “their posterity would be in danger to degenerate and be corrupted” in the Old World, Americans have experienced repeated panics over the younger generation’ (Mintz 2006: ix). Child-panic is clearly not a completely new phenomenon, but today it has indeed reached an ‘excruciating pitch’.

It is time to take a more critical look at today’s doom-mongering about children. Interpretations of social, economic and lifestyle changes, and their effect on children’s lives, are easily clouded by the researchers’ own experiences, outlooks and feelings. Rather than pointing the finger at easy ‘junk’ targets and labelling children as fragile and easily damaged, we need to try to identify what the real problems are – and how much they matter.

UNICEF’s league table on child well-being

Let’s start by taking a closer look at what the UNICEF report – the so-called ‘proof’ that modern childhood is in dire straights – actually tells us. The report claims to measure and compare, for the first time, overall child well-being across six dimensions. These include material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviours and risks, as well as young people’s own subjective sense of their own well-being. In total, forty separate indicators of child well-being – from relative poverty and child safety to educational achievement and drug abuse – were brought together to present a picture of the lives of children.

Material well-being was measured on the basis of three separate components: relative income poverty (that is, the percentage of children living in homes with incomes below 50 per cent of the national median), the number of households without jobs, and children’s own reported level of deprivation. But what do any of the measures really tell us? A household without jobs in the UK is going to have a higher standard of living than a household without jobs in Hungary or Portugal, for instance. Also, as the UNICEF report acknowledges, there is a big difference between relative and absolute poverty:

[The report] shows, for example, that the child poverty rate in the United States is higher than in Hungary, but fails to show that 50 per cent of median income (for a couple with two children) is approximately $7,000 in Hungary and $24,000 in the United States.

(UNICEF 2007:6)

When it comes to education the UK ranks among the top ten countries in the OECD’s Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA involves giving 250,000 students in forty-one countries a two-hour examination designed to measure their abilities in reading, maths and science. Finland, Canada, Australia, and Japan are top of the table, with Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal in the bottom four places. Norway and Denmark, often hailed for their education systems, are found in the eighteenth and nineteenth places respectively – a long way behind the UK. Britain’s education system is far from perfect: but these findings should warn us against the assumption that it is that much worse than the education systems of other countries.

The UK also has its highest rankings on some of the more objective measures, such as health and safety. Here countries were assessed according to several components: birth weight, infant mortality rates, immunization rates, and deaths and injuries from accidents. After Sweden, the UK has the second lowest rate of deaths from accidents and injuries for young people under nineteen years of age. The US has the second highest, after New Zealand. However, compared with non-OECD countries such as Latvia, Russia or Israel, child accidental death rates are relatively low in the UK and US.

Contrary to the claims made repeatedly by media reports, the UNICEF report did not conclusively reveal that the UK and US are the worst countries in the Western world to grow up in. In fact, it didn’t contain many conclusive insights at all. It did bring together lots of interesting material that compared and contrasted children’s different experiences in different countries, but the data can be interpreted in various different ways.

Wayward youth

The 2006 IPPR report Freedom’s Orphans: Raising Youth in a Changing World was again accepted unquestioningly by the media as evidence that things are Really Bad in the UK. Several papers ran with the headline ‘UK youths “among worst in Europe”.’ According to BBC Online, ‘Measured against German, French and Italian youngsters, British 15-year-olds are drunk more often and involved in more fights, and a higher proportion have had sex’ (BBC Online 2 November 2006).

Nick Pearce, director of the IPPR, said that UK youth are ‘disconnected’ from the adults around them. They lack the ‘soft social skills’ displayed by teens in Europe who spend more time in the company of adults: ‘Because they don’t have that structured interaction with adults, it damages their life chances’ (BBC Online 2 November 2006). But what evidence is there that UK youth do not have ‘structured interaction with adults’?

One of the findings from Freedom’s Orphans that was highlighted by the media was that ‘British teenagers spend more time with other teenagers than in other countries’ (IPPR 26 July 2007). Not only is it unquestioningly assumed that teenagers hanging out together is a worrying phenomenon, but the report does not in fact show that UK youth spend more time with their peers than all other European youth.

Freedom’s Orphans actually found that the proportion of fifteen-year-olds spending time with their friends ‘four or more evenings a week’ was higher in England than in some other countries – such as Poland, Portugal and Denmark, among others. In England 45 per cent of boys and 34 per cent of girls reportedly hang out together most evenings. In Italy the figures stand at 25 per cent for boys and 14 per cent for girls. But there were also several countries – notably Ukraine, Finland and, a country often hailed as a haven of social cohesion, Norway – where a higher percentage of youngsters than in England were found to spend most evenings with their friends. In Norway approximately half of both boys and girls claimed to spend four or more evenings a week with their friends.

The IPPR report opens with the gloomy pronouncement that ‘Commentators fear that British youth are on the verge of mental breakdown, at risk from antisocial behaviour, self-harm, drug and alcohol abuse’ and concludes that ‘These concerns are, to an extent, borne out in IPPR’s findings and other research, presented in this report’ (Margo 2006: vii). But are these concerns borne out in reality? It is often assumed that ‘peer pressure’–particularly among teenagers – is a bad thing. But, as I argue in Chapter 5, friendships serve an important social function, both in early childhood and in adolescence. Why should we assume that if youngsters hang out with each other outside school hours they are necessarily disaffected from adult society?

When looking at the data gathered by the IPPR, it is unclear on what basis everybody has drawn such negative conclusions. The IPPR found that ‘the proportion of young people whose parents spend time “just talking” to them several times a week’ was 62 per cent in the UK. Granted, this figure is slightly lower than some countries, including Denmark at 69 per cent and Hungary at 89 per cent. But the UK figure is higher than a number of other countries’, including Spain at 59 per cent and Germany at 41 per cent. The proportion of young people whose parents ‘eat a main meal with them around a table several times a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I The good, the bad, and the history: a balance sheet of modern childhood
• PART II Freedom and child development
• PART III Taking real responsibility: the role of adult society
• Afterword
• Bibliography