|
 
Affluent, child-centred Britain is rearing a
generation of disturbed children. It's time we thought about what they
really need from us
Happiness, the one thing we deny them
Go to London's Cottesloe Theatre and you will see the
best new plays in Britain. Burn, Chatroom and Citizenship are short
works about teenagers. Their message is not restricted, though, to the
paying public. Every park and rundown estate in the country features a
similar cast of the self-harming, the suicidal, the confused, the
pregnant, the oikish, the abused and those just struggling to make sense
of childhood. This is The History Boys for Ofsted blackspots. It is
where Mark Twain and Lambeth social services collide. Deborah Gearing's
Burn looks at the excluded; Enda Walsh's Chatroom is about six Chiswick
teenagers and their terrifying encounter in cyberspace; and Mark
Ravenhill's comedy, Citizenship, tells the story of a schoolboy trying
to discover if he is straight or gay. All three playwrights deal with
the lives of children who hold themselves responsible for everything and
for nothing.
The audience in which I sat was hardly distinguishable
from the professional actors. The girls had high-maintenance hair and
Joan Collins make-up. The boys wore baseball caps and hoodies and made
retching noises during the kissing scenes. Both groups seemed
enthralled, as if, like Alice, they were staring into a looking glass.
Reflected back at them, stranger than fantasy, were snapshots of their
own lives.
Many of the stage themes were echoed in last week's
news. One in 10 teenagers claims to have been bullied online; a charity
warns of a sharp rise in suicidal children. Parenting guru, Steve
Biddulph says putting children into nurseries too young may damage them
for life. Student drop-outs are in despair.
This litany goes deeper than alarmist headlines.
Affluent, child-centred Britain is rearing the unhappiest generation in
modern history. A study commissioned by the Nuffield Foundation shows
that childhood depression and anxiety have risen since the mid-Eighties,
and bad behaviour has gone up continuously over 25 years. The World
Health Organisation says English children drink more alcohol, have more
sex, take more drugs and trust their peers less than almost any others
in the world.
And that's before you start on obesity, anorexia,
stomach stapling for 14-year-olds and the 80 per cent of pre-adolescent
children who hate the way they look. While there never was a golden age
of childhood, 21st-century Britain should at least be up for a bronze.
The question is why a sizeable minority of young people, from the poor
to the privileged, is so sad or disturbed. Not for want of attention.
Like the National's playwrights, the government is always putting
children, good or bad, at centre stage. They must have more academies
and extra Asbos. They must be pushed and punished, encouraged or
excluded, named and shamed. No minister ever mentions happiness.
To adults, the hunt for joy has become a cult.
Economist Richard Layard argues that contentment has failed to keep pace
with wealth in Western societies. Human relationships have, he says,
been sacrificed to economic status, with the result that we have grown
no happier in 50 years. Children, meanwhile, have got unhappier. Yet no
one talks about this contentment gap. Government aims, such as ending
child poverty, always carry the assumption that meeting targets will
deliver happiness. But that isn't true, as speakers at a symposium of
the charity, YoungMinds, suggested not long ago. Poverty may not make
children miserable. The problem is that poor people find it harder to be
good parents. Childhood depression is not caused by losing a parent, to
death or divorce, but by the lack of care that may follow. Thinking bad
behaviour is mainly due to the rise in single-parent families is,
according to the Nuffield study, wrong.
Dreams that government, and society, hold for children
are either unattainable or suffocating. Moralisers want cast-iron
marriages; others have a checklist of negatives. We want children not to
be lonely, fat, depressed, delinquent, dead. We want modern ogres, from
Toys'R'Us to burger chains, to stop preying on them. Aware that racing
to secure wealth and status has damaged their own happiness, adults, far
from protecting children, have handed the baton on to them. They must
compete: for school places, exam results, parental time and love; for
their slot in a hierarchy of outsiders. The ultimate aim of fulfilling
individual potential is 'a terrifying and lonely objective', according
to Layard. And that's if you plan to become a merchant banker rather
than the toughest happy slapper in town.
It's easy to define sadness. But happiness is also
measurable, not only by neuroscience, but by asking people how they
feel. Children are tested endlessly on attainment, so why not on
contentment? There are other steps: don't hit children; don't make then
suffer in jail; don't crush them under adult hopes and fears. And don't
indulge in the old lament that we are killing childhood, because we
aren't.
The National's plays are a reminder of the immutabilty
of childhood. The old Eden of innocence may be a garbage-littered park;
for witches with poisoned apples, read drug pushers. But these stories
are the Brothers Grimm for the iPod generation. The authors, especially
Ravenhill, have captured the tribal cruelty, companionship and
wonderment that make children's lives as separate and as magical as they
have always been.
Adults always treat childhood as disputed territory,
under attack. In fact, it is the refuge it has always been from a
society that seems not to care. New Labour's attempt at rebranding the
young was doomed. The jargon of rights and responsibilities cannot be
expected to work when British children, as the UN is always pointing
out, have hardly any rights. First, the government should rectify that
omission. Then it should set itself a happiness test.
Will nurseries and schools make children happy? Can
youth justice be calibrated to turn young people into achievers rather
than alienated failures? Why aren't there more places where children can
meet and fewer laws to isolate them? Politicians get confused about what
children are for. Variably, they are elves to drive the new economy,
enlightened citizens of the future or thugs with their paws clenched
round old ladies' handbags. The only uniting factor is their reputation
for being almost the gloomiest in Europe. Since tough measures have
failed to stop that trend, it is time to rethink youth policy.
Being nicer would not be that hard. The lives of
modern children are tangled, but their demands are ancient and familiar.
'Tell me you love me,' pleads the schoolboy in Mark Ravenhill's play,
but the gay partner he met in an internet chatroom says nothing. Like
the policy makers, he has no such reassurance to give.
Mary Riddell
19 March 2006
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1734245,00.html
home
/
Previous
viewpoint |