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YOUTH BEHAVIOUR Short-term gimmicks are not the answer The air is filled with the sound of stable doors slamming. Now that British teenagers are officially the worst behaved in Europe, policy-makers of all complexions are battling it out to dream up half-baked schemes to redeem them. But can anyone seriously imagine today’s disaffected youth thronging to join in the ‘‘fun activities’’ of a youth club in every town, as suggested by Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, in a multi-million pound scheme to keep them out of trouble by providing them with more ‘‘facilities’’? And as for the Institute for Public Policy Research’s suggestion of a legal extension of the school day, well that sounds suspiciously like internment. You’d need barbed wire to keep them in. An alarming number of young people are now seriously damaged by the fall-out of 20 years of social and cultural change. Rather than trying to stick Elastoplast on the gaping wounds appearing in society, we should be looking at what’s gone so comprehensively wrong and trying to put it right. And, most critically, acknowledging that the problems start long before the teenage years. Earlier this year, Unicef informed us that, on a wide range of measures of well-being, British children scored lower than any others in the developed world. We can’t be surprised if unhappy children turn into self-destructive and anti-social adolescents. But, as one of the richest, most successful nations, we should be asking what’s gone wrong with childhood. The answer isn’t rocket science. In the process of becoming so wealthy and successful, we took our eye off the ball in terms of rearing our young. We lost track of certain essential and very obvious ingredients for healthy child development – real food (as opposed to processed junk), real play (as opposed to sedentary screen-based entertainment), real education (not just the pursuit of test results and targets) and, perhaps most important of all, the opportunity for children to spend time talking to and learning from the loving adults in their lives. It wasn’t that the adults of Britain stopped caring about our children. We just stopped caring about childcare. A competitive consumer economy depends on people believing that stuff is more important than relationships. You’re a winner if you’ve got stuff, a loser if you haven’t. So earning enough for a new kitchen matters more than chatting to the children in the old one. Buying children off with the latest wide-screen television or PlayStation beats hanging around at home while they go out to play. The day-to-day personal attention needed to nurture and civilise a child disappeared – because we just didn’t value it. As a harassed mother said recently to a nursery worker I met: ‘‘I don’t have time to bring up my child.’’ She’s far too busy out earning the money to pay the nursery fees. Government policy has helped this problem on its way. New Labour’s twin aims were a strong economy and social justice. To achieve the former, they allowed the market to develop without restraint; to achieve the latter, they took unprecedented control of education. In the absence of parental time and attention, the forces of marketing and education increasingly mould our children’s lives and minds. Marketers are deeply interested in children. In the past decade, they’ve recognised the vast potential for generating sales through pester power and ‘‘guilt money’’ (parents buying presents to compensate for their lack of presence at home). The nag factor is now a vital element in selling a vast range of products, from junk food to family holidays, to cars. And since most children now have a television in their bedroom, access to the minds of the next generation of consumers is startlingly easy. Multi-million dollar budgets and the services of top psychologists are now devoted to winning children for particular brands by the promotion of a ‘‘cool’’ lifestyle – sexy, superficial, self-obsessed. Children learn early that winners are cool and losers aren’t. It would be nice to think that education might counter the culture of cool by introducing children to other sources of human satisfaction – intellectual inquiry, art, music, sport – civilising and hopefully socialising them along the way. But when government sets tough targets for achievement in national tests and ignores everything else, schools begin to focus exclusively on exam results, and the prospect of a wider, more liberal education flies out of the window. These ham-fisted policies have also managed to infect education with a winners or losers ethic. Children from middle-class homes tend to do better in tests, so they’ve been winners from the start, while those from poorer backgrounds have sunk to the bottom. To try to even things up, the Department for Education and Skills has tightened the screws on failing schools with even more targets – this year there are even some for language development at the age of five. But, like most of life’s important lessons, basic language skills are caught, not taught. Children learn to talk through interaction with their parents and other adults at home. If, as is increasingly the case, they turn up at school with little previous experience beyond staring at a screen they’re in no fit state to enter the educational hurdles race. Disadvantaged children today (especially boys, who lag behind girls in developmental terms) are the victims of a double whammy. An obsessively competitive education policy, hyper-controlled from the centre, means they’re victims at a very early age of a culture of failure at school. And a completely unregulated market economy then scoops them up into a self-indulgent – and ultimately self-destructive – culture of cool. It’s no good trying to counter the effects of this mess with more state-sponsored ‘‘edu-care’’. For care to work, it has to be personal – full-time for tiny babies, quite a lot of time for the under-fives, and around the edges of the school day for older children. It’s personal care that provides children with emotional resilience and a sense of social responsibility. Handing them over to state institutions doesn’t work. And leaving them at the mercy of predatory market forces is just neglectful. In the long run, the pursuit of stuff is nowhere near as important for society as making sure that all our children get the love, time and attention they need. What society needs is a complete overhaul of work-life balance and attitudes to child-rearing. Lame suggestions for engaging those youngsters we’ve already failed in ‘‘fun activities’ or compulsory extra hours in school aren’t just laughable, they’re tragic. Sue Palmer http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jhtml?xml=/portal/2007/07/27/nosplit/ft-teens-127.xml |
