Tarred
with a brittle brush
July 7, 2006
Understanding
of the history of ideas about childhood informs this study
of today's young people telling it like it is, argues
Victoria Neumark
The story of childhood: Growing up in modern Britain
By Libby Brooks
Bloomsbury £8.99
In 2004 Friends of the Earth discovered that Tesco's Snack
Pack of carrots for children cost 13 times the equivalent
in their Value (cheapest) range.
In 2005, NCH, the children's charity, announced that their
survey showed that 14 per cent of children had been bullied
via text message. One in 10 children and young people
suffers from mental illness at some time, a Home Office
survey revealed in 2003. "Where is it now, the glory and
the dream?" asked the poet Wordsworth (1807, Ode:
Intimations of Immortality), ruefully reflecting on the
dimming of childhood's fresh vision by the stale usages of
adult life. Good question.
Guardian journalist Libby Brooks, in a book that should be
bedside reading for educators and legislators, surveys the
terrain of modern childhood from its wilder ASBO shores to
its pampered snooker-table-for-Christmas heartlands. She
writes with crisp precision about policy issues, with
tenderness about the lives of individual children, and with
admirable succinctness about the history of ideas about
children. Analysis of this history is so important, because
it influences every "fact" and piece of "common sense" that
we think we know: from whether or not a child is born with
the mental blank slate (tabula rasa) on to which knowledge
can be printed that philosopher John Locke declared in the
18th century, to whether or not art-show pictures of naked
children arouse paedophiles (actually, the most widespread
trigger is said to be children's clothing catalogues).
Libby Brooks uses a simple device on which to hang her
exploration of current issues and views: she traces the
lives of nine children over a year. The individuality of
each is lovingly limned - a little girl picking up a big
leaf, a teenage girl's careful make-up, a boy's bragging of
his play-fight bruises - and their stories woven deftly
into the wider picture.
There is Rosie, who lives in the country with her little
sister and her parents and is just getting her new teeth.
She's confident and lovable and her life prompts
reflections about play and work-life balance.
She's a proficient player, one of those inventive children
who make it clear that play is "children's work", as
Montessori put it, but also a protected space for human
development, as psychologist Erik Erikson affirmed. It's a
privilege to dip into Rosie's life, and into the lives of
Lois, a nearly-10-year-old whose mother is a photographer,
and Adam, a six-year-old who doesn't watch television.
Others have more problematic childhoods. Majid is a refugee
from Iraq, and his sense of dispossession and worry about
his relatives fuels a strenuous relationship with the
British social system. Lauren is a teenage mother, which
ought to be a problem but actually isn't. And Nicholas has
a high-achieving London family which seems to have squashed
quite a lot of the life out of him, poor poppet, in the
name of no-risk, fully-occupied, pre-networked attainment.
And then there are the ones where the alarm bells ring.
Allana, mixed-race, from a single parent family on a
council estate, with delayed speech.
Laura, self-harming, bulimic, several suicide attempts,
alone in her new white bedroom. And Ashley, just getting by
on the tough Peckham streets, wheeling and dealing and so
outwardly tough at 15 that he can hardly crack a
spontaneous smile, except when he talks of his wild dream
of living in Barbados with his grandparents. To be financed
by saving up from state benefits.
Ashley's story made me cry - the sheer human misery and
waste of it, with his mum falling out of bed ill and his
"friends" sharing their robberies with him and absolutely
nothing to look forward to - whereas Rosie's made me laugh.
She's going to have jelly and cake at her wedding, not dull
old alcohol. And then there are some incidents which raise
an eyebrow or two: Nicholas has some hilarious wriggling to
do to explain why he turned in his friend for breaking a
school rule.
As Libby Brooks says, explaining why she has felt qualified
to write about children when she has none of her own:
aren't they all our children? And if they are not; if they
are ASBO'd and demonised and consigned to rubbish jobs and
rubbish housing, or if they are locked up as precious
little princesses whose only way to make contact with the
real world is to slash their pretty little arms with
razors; what on earth are we doing? Searching questions
from a well-researched book, and ones to which Rosie has a
good answer: "Without children this world would be dull;
this world would be empty. Because everyone starts off as a
child and without children there'd be no people."
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