Songs of Innocence (32 page)

‘Poverty must not be a birthright,’ the work and pensions minister, Baroness Hollis, declared in 2000.
⁴²
‘Our strategy is to
halt the transmission of low expectations, low aspirations and low outcomes from parent to child.’ A ‘Sure Start’ programme, similar to one already running in the United States,
was set up to bring mothers and babies from poor estates into the state’s ambit. Five hundred million pounds was spent on setting up centres in the hope people would arrive to ask for
developmental advice, health advice, advice on how to stop smoking. Unsurprisingly, the poorest mothers, the teenage mothers and the mothers who coped least well were the least likely to want to go
to a centre to be told how to be better, and so the scheme was only a partial success.

Everywhere, though, there was a sense that something big should be done. Children’s rights were once again in the ascendancy when Britain ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the
Child in 1991, giving children the legal ‘right’ to various things – to have special protection, to be able to pursue their talents, to participate in achieving a better future
for all children. There was almost nothing, it seemed, that the state could not now promise the child. The British government, underlining an article in the UN convention, even promised its
children the right to ‘grow up in an environment of happiness, love and understanding’,
⁴³
though how this was to be achieved was
never made clear. The government did not choose to dwell upon these ‘rights’ when it made its periodic reports to the United Nations about its progress towards its goals.

And yet the feeling persisted – indeed, continued to grow – that all was not well in the world of the child. Save the Children summed up the situation thus:
‘From a very early age, the majority of children’s time is taken up by structured activities, leaving very little space for individual choice. Increased perception of danger in public
spaces, (adult-centred) consumerism, an achievement-oriented society, child poverty and public prejudice against children on the street are factors contributing to a narrowing of the private space,
and hence the liberty, of today’s children. Children’s wishes often come secondary to what adults deem necessary, safe, educative or more convenient.’
⁴⁴
Despite this apparent catalogue of complaints, Save the Children was able to conclude that children’s lives were getting better. Others begged to differ. Day
after day, year after year, the press was full of stories expressing an increased sense of children’s vulnerability, of a perceived jeopardy and threat, if not to their present then to their
wellbeing at some future, unspecified date. Parents were repeatedly injuncted to take precautions, to protect their young.

In July 2000, just to pick one example, the
Daily Mail
reported that the Imperial Cancer Research Fund had warned that one child in three would grow up to be a ‘cancer
victim’, and had linked this risk with childhood diet. It then featured three families talking about their lifestyles, and accompanied by advice from ‘cancer experts’:
‘WATCH their weight. Obesity has a clear link with bowel and breast cancer. MAKE a point of examining your children’s skin, and see your GP about any moles that grow, weep, hurt or
appear suddenly. MAKE sure your children eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. Bowel cancer is less likely to strike if you have a high-fibre diet. LOWER their intake of fats,
salt and nitrates. AVOID plastic packaging and cookware. Plastics contain chemicals that may disrupt the fine hormone balance in the body.’ The list of injunctions seemed interminable –
and this was just what parents were now meant to do to avoid one perceived, far-distant future risk.

The internet, too, had to be policed. ‘Popular concerns have been expressed that using a computer is a solitary and potentially addictive activity, provoking fears
that some children might become so obsessed with the technology that they will socially withdraw from the off-line world of family and friends,’ a report on children’s computer use
suggested.
⁴⁵
‘Children, as symbols of the future themselves, are at the heart of debates . . . about the “new” dangers that
these technologies might bring for the Net generation.’

The potent belief that when we look at our children we look at the future of mankind was at work, and with a new intensity, in the years around the millennium. It was as if the soul of the human
race had been taken out of the dark drawer where it had been hidden during the rationalist, thrusting years of the 1980s and 1990s, examined, dusted off and found to have been damaged. Something
was going wrong – and the explanations, the exhortations to do better, to do different, were myriad. By 2000, even the Incorporated Association of Preparatory Schools, an organization whose
members were largely devoted to getting children into the top public schools and therefore not noted for their lax attitude to educational achievement, was concerned that children were being pushed
too hard. At the association’s conference that year, the headmaster of Dulwich College Preparatory School worried aloud about the private tuition many children were forced to undergo in order
to pass entrance exams: ‘They deserve a childhood. They need our protection. There is a need for children to have a life and enjoy it.’
⁴⁶
The problem, he suggested, was parents’, not children’s, fear of failure, of the shame they would endure if their offspring failed to win places at the most
over-subscribed private schools.

Somehow, the debate was turning in on itself. Increasingly, it was not the fears themselves – delinquency, early pregnancy, abuse, abduction, internet porn – but the fear of the
damage the fears were doing, that was exercising public opinion. The panic about children’s
wellbeing began to give way, in short, to a panic about panic. This took
specific forms – the concern that new rules demanding criminal record checks of adults working with children could close sports clubs and bar perfectly blameless people from jobs through
technicalities, for example. ‘Would You Dare to Help This Child?’ the
Daily Telegraph
asked in 2009, its question posed next to a photo of a small boy lying on the floor by an
upturned bicycle. ‘What sort of society is it where adults suspect other adults, and children are taught to suspect anyone other than their parents, who are often the people who cause them
greatest harm?’ The article drew ninety-nine comments on the paper’s website, almost all of them supportive of the author.

Even terrible crimes against children were now met by the fear that fear itself would be the outcome. After the murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne in 2000, by a man named Roy Whiting, who had
already served a prison sentence for child abduction and indecent assault, a ‘but’ crept into the comment pages: ‘There is not a parent in Britain whose heart does not ache for
Sarah Payne’s family,’ wrote Susan Dalgety in the
Edinburgh Evening News
. But the worst effect of the crime would be its effect on all youngsters: ‘Children who would
otherwise have been outside in the summer sun, revelling in the glorious freedom of the school holidays, will be trapped indoors because of their parents’ fear of evil strangers. And a
generation of youngsters, already swaddled in cotton wool, will be warned to treat everyone, even their next door neighbour or local shopkeeper, as a potential abductor.’

The problem went deeper than mere over-protectiveness, though. A 2007 book summed up the state of play. Its title was
Toxic Childhood
. The problem, it suggested, was too much technology,
not enough exercise, too much fattening food, all leading to low self-esteem and a risk of developmental disorders such as dyslexia or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Too many children
were
failing to bond with their parents: ‘This is the “elephant” standing full square in the living room of every family in the developed world.’

The author described a sulky girl she had once seen, standing on the steps of the Ufizzi gallery in Florence, licking an ice-cream with evident adolescent angst. This poor girl, unaware of the
attention she had attracted, became a symbol for all that ailed the Western child: ‘Poor child. Poor parents. Poor western civilisation . . . How did she get like that? Perhaps she’s
spent ten years feeding on burgers, pizza and ice cream, washed down with sugary cola. Maybe she spends long hours in a virtual world of her own, absorbing the messages of the marketing men,
playing computer games rather than real ones, staring at TV programmes rather than going out to play in the sunshine. Does she lie awake till the early hours, watching unsuitable TV and texting her
chums? Has this sedentary, screen-based lifestyle led to problems at school in concentrating, controlling her temper or relating to other people? And are her parents bewildered that their beloved
little girl seems so troubled, when they’ve provided her with every luxury money could buy?’ The answer, in the author’s mind at least, was a resounding ‘yes’.

The book, alarmist as it was, was backed by an enormous number of child development experts, no fewer than 110 of whom signed a letter its author wrote to the
Daily Telegraph
on the
subject. A rise in special educational needs, she said, was particularly worrying: ‘Today’s special educational needs turn all too often into tomorrow’s mental health problems,
antisocial behaviour and crime.’ The author, along with the experts, had seen the future. And it frightened them.

Children, when seen from a distance by an adult world which fears for its own future, often seem to cause alarm. Look close up and the scene is usually calmer, more reassuring.
As the American academic John Sommerville put it in the 1980s: ‘Babies are the enemy. Not your baby or mine, of course. Individually they are all cute. But together they are a
menace.’
¹

A closer look at one modern childhood, then, might prove reassuring. We might meet Florence Bishop, for instance, born in 2000 into a middle-class family in the south of England, early one
weekday evening. Aged seven, Florence was wearing her school uniform on this particular evening and was in the middle of her piano practice. She loved her little magnetic toys, and her
hamster.
²
In November, she had already written a list for Father Christmas. She was brimming with health and full of enthusiasm for life. In
her no sign whatsoever could be detected of bad diet, poor parenting, incipient delinquency. Hers was the very model of a calm, happy, well-regulated childhood. If anything, Florence’s life
was possibly
more
regulated than her parents’ would have been. She knew exactly what time she must board the school bus each day, and she had always to be sure she had the right books
with her. Her mother, unlike her mother’s mother in the 1970s, had a full-time job but one or other parent was
always at home to greet her when she returned from
school; to ensure homework was done and the correct number of vegetables eaten at teatime. Perhaps they worried a little more than their own parents would have done. Florence always had to carry a
mobile phone so they could be in touch; she was not yet considered old enough to go out alone. Yet the cadences of Florence’s early life carried only a few distant echoes from the heat and
the noise and the sense of alarm that were filling up the public arena during those years. And the same, almost certainly, could be said for most children.

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:

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.