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RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS MISERABLE CHILDREN TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Andrew Brown Producer: Chris Bowlby Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 12.04.07 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 15.04.07 2130-2200 Tape Number: Duration: 27.34” Taking part in order of appearance: Penelope Leach Developmental Psychologist David Willetts Shadow Education Secretary Professor Hugh Cunningham Historian of childhood Beverley Hughes Minister for Children Professor Richard Layard Economist, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE Julia Margo Senior Research Fellow, IPPR Lena Nyberg Children’s Ombudsman, Sweden BROWN: There have never been societies with richer children than ours; nor, perhaps, have there ever been societies where parents and governments have felt so uncertain about how these precious children should be brought up, and worried so much about whether they are happy. LEACH: There is a fashion which I don’t altogether share - and some people will be cross to hear me say it, but I don’t care - to view childhood as some kind of, it sometimes seems, almost magical thing in itself. To me, you’re a child because you’re growing to be an adult one day and that’s kind of the point. WILLETTS: I think there was someone who said I’m not particularly happy, but I’m not unhappy about it. So we have to be careful about just making happiness the thing because sometimes you’re engaged in things which are tough and they don’t exactly make you happy, but they’re also deeply satisfying and fulfilling. BROWN: David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary. Before him, Penelope Leach, an influential psychologist. Both in their different ways quite sanguine, yet something rather horrible does seem to be happening to childhood in Britain today. One small statistic collected by the thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research or IPPR: it is almost certain that someone under the age of nineteen will try to kill themselves while this programme goes out. 24,000 young people made the attempt last year: one every 22 minutes. All this is a far cry from the childhood that today’s grandparents remember. It seemed a few decades ago that progress would abolish forever childhood misery. Hugh Cunningham is a historian of childhood: CUNNINGHAM: Healthy and happy children, that phrase is often invoked in the early 20th century. I’m always struck in 1942 someone wrote that ‘the story of English childhood is moving towards a happy ending’ as though all children were at last about to achieve this healthy, happy childhood. I think actually what happens is that in the late 60s, early 70s people begin to become pessimistic about the likelihood of achieving this. I think until then, they were pretty confident that things were getting better. BROWN: The most recent dent to this confidence came from a report produced for Unicef, which claimed that British children were the least happy in Europe: only the United States, among developed nations, was a worse place to grow up in. Beverley Hughes is the Minister for Children. HUGHES: I don’t accept that those are a fair picture necessarily of children and young people today and that’s because the report drew from surveys that were done in 2000 and 2003 of young people who were aged between 11 and 15 at that time; and that means those are children and young people who were born between about 1985 and 1992 and spent most of their formative years not under a Labour government and of course who’d now be, at the time when the report was published, something between 16 and 22 years old. So I think it’s dated and I think there’s some methodological problems with it. But I do accept that you know whatever its validity as a piece of research, that what it was saying chimed with a number of concerns I think people have about some groups of children and young people today and whether they are happy. BROWN: The survey has touched a nerve, no matter what may be the validity of the criticisms levelled at its methods. None of the obvious and popular explanations for children’s unhappiness stand up very well in the light of the international comparisons made in the Unicef report. Some countries which have more childcare than ours, and more working mothers, seem to have happier children; so do other countries where mothers more often stay at home. Countries with lower rates of marriage than ours can have happier children; so can countries where families are more stable. Even poverty does not seem to make children miserable on its own. After all, practically every parent who is today nostalgic about the better childhoods of the past is remembering a time of much smaller material abundance, and much lower expectation. But perhaps it is higher expectations which are themselves the problem. LEACH: We know there are a lot of poor children and I think to be a poor child in a society as aspirant as ours and as materialistic as ours is very, very difficult. Children are herd animals - they want to do what other children do, they want to have what other children have - and therefore to be much poorer than the average probably does make you bloody miserable. BROWN: Poverty and happiness are the special subjects of the economist Richard Layard, whose research into what he calls the science of happiness has been influential with the government. Although the government could until very recently boast that it was rapidly lifting a great many children out of poverty, Lord Layard believes the problem of misery is broader than that. LAYARD: I don’t see why one shouldn’t believe these surveys and some of the questions are very specific like, for example, ‘are most of the other children in your classes kind and helpful?’ is a very concrete question; and whereas you get something like 70% or more saying yes in Scandinavia and Germany, here we get 43%. I think that’s very depressing and disturbing. Also the US is very low. And I link this to the fact that levels of trust in the society as a whole have been falling very much in the US and in Britain. I attribute this to the philosophy and individualism that your job in life is to be as successful as you can compared with other people. That’s obviously a formula that can’t produce more happiness in society because it’s impossible for more people to be more successful compared with other people and we need to move towards a society in which people think their job is to contribute to the welfare of other people. MARGO: We know from research into the impacts of consumerism on childhood that children’s sense of their status and role in society, it is much more sensitive and delicate than adults’ BROWN: Julia Margo, co-author of a recent IPPR report on children and young people . MARGO: Children react to messages from advertisers about kinds of products and lifestyles associated with a high status in society much more than adults do. They’re much more susceptible to these kinds of messages and ideas and they’re much more prone to anxiety about their status. BROWN: And are British children disproportionately exposed to these kind of messages from advertisers? MARGO: Well what’s quite worrying actually is that the most recent research suggests that British children are more brand aware than their US counterparts even, which gives some indication of our kind of children’s brand awareness. It’s a very serious problem here. BROWN: Commercialism is only one aspect of a wider problem which worries almost everyone who talks about modern children; and this is the disappearance, or blurring, of the traditional boundaries between childhood and adulthood. A whole cluster of worries come together here. Childhood, considered as a period of innocence, ends much earlier than it used to. This is partly a matter of sexualisation and earlier puberties; a point illustrated by two small stories from last week, when the teachers’ union called for a ban on sexualised clothing and it emerged that a ten-year-old girl, on the run from a care home in South Wales, had picked up, and slept with, a twenty year old man who was charged for this offence. But he escaped jail when the judge in the case agreed that he might very well have believed her claim to be sixteen. So we spend less time as children, and less time as parents, too. In between, there is a period of prolonged adolescent freedom, in which we shop among alternatives. There is always choice. Companies are just as happy to sell to children as to adults. Even in countries which have made a stand against the commercialisation of childhood, like Sweden, children’s unhappiness is discussed in very adult terms. Lena Nyberg is the Children’s Ombudsman in Sweden. NYBERG: Children in Sweden, they are having a quite good time because we have a high living standard in Sweden in many ways. But we also have some problems and if you listen to children and young people themselves, they would say that the working environment in schools, bullying, stress and also custody issues, that’s some of the most common issues that children would like to discuss with us. I would also highlight the problem with the mental illness we have among young people because that’s a growing problem and I don’t think that grown-ups are aware about the problem enough because we have a quite good health situation when it comes to the physical health, but we have a huge problem with mental illness among young people. BROWN: Children and young people can be unhappy in surprisingly adult ways, and modern psychiatry suggests that we can understand and change these things. Richard Layard. LAYARD: There’s been huge progress in the last twenty years, especially identification of the areas of the brain where happiness and unhappiness are experienced, which correlates very well with what people say about how happy they are, so we should take very seriously what people say about how happy they are and how happy they look. As regards our ability to produce happiness, of course first people come into the world with very different potential for happiness. That’s a very sad and harsh fact about life. Then that potential interacts with their experience. BROWN: When you say people come in with very different potentials for happiness, essentially you are saying that we - society, the government - have to look at some people and say that if you’ve got a melancholic temperament there’s not that much that anybody can do about it. LAYARD: No, I think there is a lot that people can do and I think the fact that we have now discovered really for the first time in human history systematic treatments for depression is one of the most important developments actually in the last fifty years if we’re talking about human happiness. And certainly I would include medication in that as well as modern evidence based psychological therapies. This is leading us into a world in which there’s far less misery than we had in the past. BROWN: How widespread then is depression among adolescents? LAYARD: Well the estimates are something like 10% in early adolescence rising to something like 16% in later adolescence. When you say depression, I’m also including anxiety disorders. These are major problems and of course people don’t like to talk about them. Parents don’t like to talk about it because they’re ashamed of it. Often these problems are not identified for years and years and years and clinics which treat adults say in their late twenties for anxiety disorders will find that on average people have had this disorder for say ten years, ten wasted years. BROWN: This feels like a new and shocking perspective, but perhaps it isn’t. Historian Hugh Cunningham. CUNNINGHAM: We need to remember that the early 20th century placed something that people have always been conscious of, but they gave it a kind of new name - adolescence - and adolescence lasted from what 14 or so to in some people’s view about mid-20s and famously was a time of difficulty. I mean you might have a happy childhood, but no-one ever heard of a happy adolescence. The words don’t go together. BROWN: Even so, there is some evidence that we are, in Britain, less likely than elsewhere to navigate safely the currents and the dangerous shallows of adolescence. If it is a naturally miserable age, should they be spending quite so much time discouraging each other? Julia Margo has in her research discovered that British children have less adult guidance than children elsewhere in Europe. MARGO: While in countries like Italy and Germany, you find that young people spend a lot of time with their parents and they spend a lot of time with their friends, in the UK they spend a lot of time with their friends and not enough time with their parents. Okay, so the concern is that messages from the peer group will now kind of undermine any messages from adult society about the way that we should behave and communicate and we do know that you get a kind of ‘Lord of the Flies’ effect. I hate to say it, but when you take a big group of young people, stick them in a room together, particularly if they’re young boys and there’s no adults around, they tend towards you know disorder and chaos. BROWN: Adult authority recedes from modern childhood. This isn’t quite the same as a gain of freedom or even a lack of supervision. In some ways children are less free to run around and play than ever before because the motor car has made most of their traditional pursuits far too dangerous. And the scrutiny of a peer group can be closer and more unforgiving than that of the most ferocious parents. No lack of supervision there. But the traditional role of adults as referees between young people has shrunk. The period of freedom from authority starts earlier, and continues much longer than ever before in history. Could anything be done to reduce this period of prolonged adolescence? Penelope Leach shares the anxiety about its emergence. LEACH: One of the things that’s happened is that we have invented somebody called an adult who is not a parent. It wasn’t a voluntary matter until very recently and the vast majority of adults were willy-nilly parents. So now we have these child-free people who are adults who haven’t got children and don’t propose to have children, as well of course as lots of childless people who wish they were parents. So starting it from that end, I think that’s a change. In a way I sort of think it’s a pity that we’ve decided that if we’re only going to have one or two children per any couple that the thing to do is to wait till the very, very end of female fertility to have them in order to pack as much child-free life in as we can first because in a way it would work better if we put the children in at the beginning of the adulthood and had lots and lots and lots of years afterwards. I hesitate to say it because society isn’t organised that way and I would be the first to be bursting into tears if young people that I knew were saying well we’re going to have our family now at 18, 19, 20 because it wouldn’t work. But it could and it could have. We could have used contraception that way instead of this way and it might have been better for parents and children if we had. MARGO: If you analyse the data coming from the Unicef report, the closest correlation between their measurement of children’s overall well-being and any other indicator relating to childhood is the teenage fertility rate. So if you look at a teenage fertility rate of a country, if it is high your children’s emotional well-being is poor and the line is an almost direct correlation. So we know teenage fertility is somehow associated with the way that we care for and respect our children; and when we don’t, we have high teen fertility and poor child emotional well- being. BROWN: Julia Margo. Unhappy, maladjusted children are a problem for everyone; unhappy, maladjusted adolescents still more obviously so. Our distress at the thought of young people going without what they would like is not wholly selfless. It is, at least partly, that we are afraid that they will come and take it, perhaps from our children, on the street. No government can avoid stepping in when children’s unhappiness has consequences for all of society. David Willetts is the Shadow Education Secretary: as a conservative intellectual, he must be sceptical about the role of the state, but at the same time, the past whose best elements he is trying to conserve can only be preserved by state action. Perhaps he is struggling with these contradictions as much as the rest of us. WILLETTS: Governments have significant responsibilities when it comes to mental health, when it comes to schools, they’re increasingly involved in early years provision, they have some powers over the regulation of advertising. So there are a lot of powers at governments’ disposal and while governments can’t do everything they should at least when they do have control over things try to create an environment that supports families and protects childhood rather than allows this sort of invasion that’s going on in the quality of childhood to carry forward. BROWN: What exactly is this invasion into the quality of childhood? WILLETTS: Well I think childhood is over supervised, I think we’re all putting far too much pressure on our kids, and I think it’s very hard for people to relax. Parents feel under so much pressure. They endlessly feel they’re being blamed. But I think that if we could all just allow, create a little bit more space in which children are allowed to be children and then know there are boundaries for their behaviour and boundaries that can be set by adults who don’t necessarily all have to be in some sort of professional position, I think that is in the long run interests of our children and our society rather than this invasion of childhood from so many different pressures, including commercial pressures. I think it’s another thing that governments can do. It can’t do it completely, but where you can protect children from some of the commercial pressures that are clearly bad influences on them, I think government should. BROWN: So the conservatives favour government action to help preserve the innocence of childhood, while the Labour government sees itself as responding to parental pressure rather than interfering in the normal course of family life. Beverley Hughes. HUGHES: I’m absolutely clear and so is the government that it is parents who bring up children and there’s no way we would want to transgress in terms of that responsibility or infantilise parents. What parents themselves are saying is that they want more support from local services. They want it on their own terms, they don’t want to be told what to do, but they want a range of information, advice, maybe parenting programmes that they can opt into if they need support and if they haven’t got that support from you know other informal sources. BROWN: You’re saying that there is a growing appetite for advice on parenthood. Where do you think this appetite comes from? Why are people now less certain about how to be parents? HUGHES: I think that is a really interesting question and I wouldn’t like to generalise and say that parents are more uncertain across the board about how best to be a parent, but I do feel that I have picked up that parents are a little bit more uncertain than they perhaps used to be when things were simpler, particularly around setting boundaries, setting limits and particularly are concerned about how they best protect their children from a whole range of influences that you know previous generations just wouldn’t have experienced. Because the rise of information technology, children are spending more time we know with their peers, particularly when they get to teenage years, than they used to do and less with their families - so it seems to have created a rather more uncertain landscape for parents. BROWN: But who are to be our guides across this uncertain landscape? Should it be the experts whose opinions are brought to us by the state, or those whom the market prefers? Traditionally the guides were grandparents, but they are not often nowadays to hand in the way that a book can be, or even a DVD. David Willetts. WILLETTS: For me as a Conservative, the experts that I particularly respect are those experts who often discover that behind the folk wisdom there is a deep understanding of children and they often come up with evidence that confirms a lot of what your granny would have told you if you were still seeing your granny every day as you were raising your kids. BROWN: To offer you an irresistible sound bite, you seem to be arguing for a granny state rather than a nanny state. (Laughter) WILLETTS: Well I think part of … I love it - a granny state, not a nanny state… part of what’s happening of course is that I think one of the reasons for all these how to do it books is that parents do feel incredibly insecure and maybe if we did rely a little bit more on granny, we’d do a bit better . BROWN: So everyone agrees that the parents themselves don’t feel they know how to bring up happy children on their own. They need expert help. Someone who might fit the bill perfectly is Penelope Leach, whose books on baby and childcare were hugely influential, and who is now herself a granny. LEACH: I don’t think we can make rules for bringing up children because I don’t think we know what we want children to be like. And anyway society is changing so fast that to have as an ideal a child who will fit in to the way we’ve got things now would be totally hopeless because things won’t be like that in ten years time. So I think the whole thing’s got a bit rigid, but I do see why there is definitely a feeling among parents that what you want is books and television programmes and so on that tell you what to do and they tend to be rather extreme. There’s the whack ’em brigade and there’s the love ’em brigade. What there isn’t in between is the brigade I’d be in I suppose if I was still in a brigade, which is the sort of let’s think about this brigade, which is slow and boring and takes a long time, you know. BROWN: Time, however, is one of the things that modern parents and children notoriously lack. Although it is the rich who complain about this most, the working poor tend to have even less time for their children, if only because they must work longer hours to make the money that they need. This is true even in relatively prosperous Sweden, where Lena Nyberg, the Children’s Ombudsman, gets thousands of emails a year from children, who are encouraged to write in that way with their problems; she also hears regularly from schools all over the country about what concerns their pupils. NYBERG: Normally parents give their children a lot of time and you can see that a lot of parents spend a lot of time with the children, but you can also see families where parents do not have time enough, especially if you have parents who are single parents, normally single mothers. They can have a very stressful life, not having time enough for children. You can also see families with a lot of work or maybe also you have families that spend too much time in front of the television. Normally I would say that parents are very good parents and spend a lot of time with the children, but you also have exceptions. And you can also see that as a grown up it’s very easy to be stressed and if you are stressed you also provide your child with stress. And you can also provide the child with stress because you have too many spare time activities. You can have too many activities beside school and the school can be enough of activities for many children because you have so many homeworks, especially when you are a teenager. BROWN: The debate about their happiness goes to the heart of the most fundamental question about children: Why do we have them at all? It might have been simple once: children were there for the benefit of their parents, to support them in their old age, and to carry on the family. Besides, they were more or less inevitable in the days before birth control. But nowadays, children appear as an expense, as a constraint on adult freedom, and as an investment of very doubtful value. Very few people justify their children in terms of benefit to the parents. They are instead meant to be valuable in themselves. Yet are we really so much more altruistic than our more fertile ancestors? Richard Layard. LAYARD: We have a lot more parents now than in the past who would say they want their children to be happy; that’s what they want more than anything. But we also have children in particular but also their parents who feel under immense pressure to justify their children’s existence by them being successful compared with other children. These two sets of goals are in quite a heavy degree of tension. BROWN: So the fewer children we have, the more we need them to succeed, and the more we want them to be happy. Yet the more important success becomes, the less likely it is that all children can hope for happiness, since the unsuccessful must always be a majority and so increasingly miserable. Is this setting up an impossible bind? Penelope Leach believes parents and government may be trying too hard. LEACH: Even when I started in this business, it was still very ordinary to have three or four or five living children in a family and it was actually very much easier to be a child in those circumstances because imagine you’re sitting at the supper table. If there’s only you and two adults, there’s nobody to distract them from how you’re not using your knife and fork. You know if there are three or four of you, there’s a good chance that somebody else will do something disastrous and take the pressure off you. I think a lot of the self-consciousness about parenting comes out of a sheer concentration of attention. I also think that since 97 anyway government has played a part in this, whether witting or not. They have accepted that what happens to children very early in life is very important to how they do later and so on. They know we have a lot of families who are much poorer than they should be and that this in a sense predicts disaster later and they seem to have decided that you can kind of legislate and arrange for change. BROWN: But what can we change? What should our arrangements be? We can’t disentangle the problems of children from those of adults. The government, too, sends families mixed messages. They are to be, in Gordon Brown’s great phrase, “hard working families”. But do the hardest-working families have the happiest children? The evidence suggests that they don’t and that it’s the family which plays together that stays together. In fact it’s hard to resist a rather heretical conclusion. Most of what we have seen as the peculiar horrors of modern childhood seem to arise from a lack of authority: they can, in shorthand, be blamed on the Sixties. But that was a complicated decade, with good as well as bad; and one of the distinctive attitudes of the Sixties was a distrust of money, and a belief that material success should not be the measure of everything. We’re never going to get away from a society that cares about status. But one in which status is measured only by material success makes us, and our children, needlessly miserable.