The Children’s Society is to be congratulated for undertaking this inquiry into the state of childhood and children in Britain today and for producing a wide-ranging report, which goes well beyond the usual narrow focus on children as learners; or children as yobs; or children as victims.
We really need a vision of the good childhood so that policies are coherent and the same standards apply to marginalised children as to the average.
The Children’s Society (TCS) was uniquely positioned to undertake this work because of its own work for over a hundred years with children who are marginalised: runaways; care leavers; severely disabled or living in poor communities, and because of its strong values base and links to the Church.
The best part of the report is the Afterword by Rowan Williams. He asks “how can we raise confident, happy and creative human beings if we do not have some shared ideas about what human maturity and happiness look like?”
And he provides a good answer. “The truth is that learning to see clearly one’s own emotions and creating that element of distance from them is to create some space for the reality of a human other”.
In short this report is telling us that adults have to change if children are to be better cared for. Quite.
But the report itself gets off to a terrible start. On page 2 it says:
‘The problems children face are connected with the changing world in which children are growing up. More families now break-up and more mothers go out to work. Women’s new economic independence contributes to this rise: it has made women much less dependent on their male partner, as has the advent of the welfare state’.
Don’t get me wrong: I agree children suffer from family break-ups but why put the blame onto working mothers?
According to UNICEF British children are at the bottom of the well-being index, while Scandinavian children are at the top. Yet in Denmark the rate of lone parenthood is the highest. On the TCS analysis this is inexplicable. The reason of course is that in Denmark there is an excellent social support system and much lower levels of child poverty. In other words, the welfare state, far from being part of the problem, is part of the solution.
In fact, one of the frustrating things about the TCS report is its incoherence: the author of the chapter on the Family doesn’t seem to have spoken to the author of the excellent chapter on Inequalities, which calls for more energetic action on the part of the government to cut child poverty.
In my constituency in Co. Durham there is a lightbulb factory and 90% of the shop-floor workers are women who must fit this round their caring responsibilities. This is why the enhanced maternity rights, equal pay and flexibility won by successive Labour governments are so important.
I have lost count of the number of separated mothers who have come into my surgery at the end of their tether because the absent parent is refusing to pay child maintenance, or are worried that abusive fathers are going to get access to their children (because as far as I can tell the “best interests of the child†are trumped by the man’s “right to a family lifeâ€). The average family break-up causes poorer women and children and richer men. This is a disgrace for which both individual absent parents and state agencies should take responsibility, repent and change.
Single mothers who work are struggling to do their best for the children: take Sharon, she has 3 jobs: as a teaching assistant, as a dinner lady and finally as the school cleaner to keep her 3 teenage sons. She wants them to go to a good local school and came to see me, because she couldn’t afford the bus fares which are going up by £540 this year. She is not to blame, she is to be applauded. She is not the culprit, she is the victim.
This aspect of the report is a huge shame. First it belies the excellent work TCS does. They have now, very sensibly, set up a new strand of work on fathering, and it is also a distraction from the many good things in the report.
The section on Lifestyle – how cyp use their leisure time is excellent. The co-option of children into consumerism and the banality of much screen based entertainment is well documented. The risks to young peoples’ physical and mental heath are well spelled out and the recommendations to control advertising and make more space for play and sport are eminently sensible, practical and achievable.
The overall message of the report is that our society has become too competitive and too individualistic but the solution proffered is itself individualistic and lacks the empathy enjoined by Rowan Williams.
The chapter on Values states “An essential element in a good life is the feeling that you are the captain of your soul and that in the end things can be all right inside you whatever happens outside. If you have your own “inner life, it becomes more possible to treat the misfortunes of life as opportunities to rise to a challengeâ€.
I’m afraid this just reads to me like the words of someone who has never had a real difficulty… Or put it another way: try saying that to Sharon: these problems with the bus fares are an opportunity for you to rise to a challenge!
