Archbishop attacks poor parenting

Dr Williams says parents are abusing children by default

"Infantile" parents are depriving children of the skills needed to function properly as adults, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said.

Dr Rowan Williams said children were "bombarded" by inappropriate advertisements and were forced to sit too many exams at school.

In a lecture at the University of London, he said pressuring children to behave as adults was abuse by default.

Adults must take responsibility for the development of children, he said.

"Childhood is most positively valued and fostered when we resist infantilism," Dr Williams said in his Citizen Organising Foundation lecture.

[The greater focus on school tests is] another form of our obsession with results and productivity Rowan Williams

"When adults stop being infants, children can be children," he said.

He said children were being raised in a society that lacked "maturity", where "apathy and cynicism" were the common reactions to public issues.

Stable environment

BBC correspondent Robert Pigott said Dr Williams was blunt in his message to the nation's parents to "grow up".

Dr Williams warned that negligent parents were producing children unable to observe or listen, something he insisted was borne out by studies of the physical development of their brains.

In the lecture, he said childhood should be a time to learn and play in a stable and secure environment.

Instead, he said children were being "bombarded" by "unjust" pressure from adverts.

"What is a proper regime of regulation for advertising aimed at children? I would say that is a question of some urgency," he said.

He claimed the pressures of modern life and the exaggerated value placed on productivity at work were leading to children being abused by neglect.

And he said there was a greater focus on school tests, which he said was "another form of our obsession with results and productivity".

"It is a particularly malign one," he said.

Dr Williams has warned in the past about the damage done to children by encouraging them to behave materialistically and sexually before they are equipped to do so.

He said the problem had grown more common in recent years.