“The outside world is perceived as full of dangers – traffic; strangers. Yet
inside, on the computer, they have access to a world which children of
previous generations wouldn’t have had.” He believes this ever-intensifying
concern over every aspect of our children’s lives, goes back to a
fundamental change in their economic status. A hundred years ago children
were breadwinners. But after the war, as male earnings rose and women went
out to work, the money began to flow the other way. Parents began to think
they might be able to buy a better life for their children – and began to
invest in them more heavily. This led also to a greater emotional
investment.
“It’s called the ‘sacralization’ of childhood,” he says, “where parents seek
emotional gratification from their children. It’s as if they have to pay for
it. It’s partly because we’ve got fewer of them. But there does seem to be
something different too. What I think parents are doing is trying to provide
happiness for their children. And because of all the other pressures on
them, some of them can only think of happiness by buying them things.” This
progression from stern indifference to frantic overindulgence can be mapped
through the decades by child-rearing manuals. “Nearly all of us have
suffered from overcoddling in our infancy,” John B. Watson said in 1928.
“The fact that our children are always crying and always whining shows the
unhappy, unwholesome state they are in. There is a sensible way of treating
children. Treat them as though they were young adults. Never hug and kiss
them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the
forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning.”
In the years before and after the war, such views were followed routinely,
promoted chiefly by Frederic Truby King, who advocated feeds every four
hours, an hour’s fresh air each day and limited physical contact. But by the
1950s change was in the air. Benjamin Spock, whose 1948 book Baby and
Child Care became the bestselling nonfiction publication in the world
after the Bible, advocated greater flexibility. “Trust yourself,” he said.
“You know more than you think you do.”
But if Spock ushered in a more laidback attitude to children it was not
destined to last. A new wave of parenting gurus seemed determined to inject
guilt into the mix. “A baby should never be left to cry. It may make her
feel tired, and she’ll be irritable and hard to soothe,” Miriam Stoppard
said in her New Babycare Book, published in 1990. “More importantly,
she’ll learn that pleas for attention go unheeded, and that there’s no
loving response when she needs it. If she’s denied friendship, she may grow
up introverted and shy.” And so it continues, with parents seeking ever more
inventive ways to indulge their children. Yet in doing so, they have led
them into new kinds of danger.
In 1954, the year after sugar came off the ration, spending on sweets and
chocolate jumped by £100million to £250million. Eight years later Professor
John Yudkin announced that obesity was now the greatest threat to the
nation’s health, particularly that of its children. No one took much notice.
Today, consumers in the UK spend more than £5.5billion a year on
confectionery, and the medical profession continues to talk of health
problems being stored up for the future.
Perhaps parents were looking the other way, seized by what seemed a much more
immediate danger. During 1963 and 1964 Ian Brady and Myra Hindley killed
four children and buried their bodies on Saddleworth Moor, near Oldham. The
discovery of their crimes in 1965 gripped the nation. Parents who had
reminded their children not to talk to strangers began to get a sense of
their vulnerability. Despite the furore, life did not immediately change for
most children. But as televisions appeared in living rooms across the
country the images of such crimes did begin to creep closer to home.
Like Yudkin and his warnings about sugar and obesity, Dr Henry Kempe made
little impact when he coined the phrase “battered baby syndrome” in 1962.
Family values were so central to childhood that the idea of children being
abused within their own families took years to take hold. When Mary Bell was
convicted in 1968, no one thought to ask whether she might herself have been
a victim. It emerged later that her own mentally disturbed mother had
repeatedly tried to kill her and that she had been the victim of violent
sexual abuse.
When the mother of a little girl called Maria Colwell, who had been happily
living in foster care for most of her life, demanded custody in November
1971, the courts overrode the child’s objections and decreed that she would
be best off with her natural parent. Fourteen months later she was dead,
battered to death by her stepfather. She was not the first, but something
had changed. Neighbours and relatives who had informed the authorities some
30 times of the abuse, demanded action. A public inquiry was held, and
Barbara Castle, the Social Services Minister, promised nothing like this
should ever happen again.
“Who Killed Maria Colwell?” the Daily Mail asked, before
answering its own question: “We did. The death of this little girl has
helped to open our eyes.” And it had – parenthood would never be
so innocent again. We never learnt the names of all those countless
anonymous children who died before Maria at the hands of their families. The
names of those who inevitably came after – Tyra Henry, Jasmine
Beckford, Kimberley Carlile, Victoria Climbie – have spun down the
decades.
We have never been so aware of our children’s fragility, of this sense that
they could easily disappear, nor of the sense that if they did it would be
our fault. And yet the notion is glaringly at odds with the reality.
“Violent deaths of children have never been lower since records began,” says
Colin Pritchard, of the University of Bournemouth. “It’s almost unimaginable
to have your child in the hands of someone such as Ian Huntley.” The chances
of a child being killed by a stranger in any given year are about one in
three million. Between 80 and 90 per cent of child murders, according to
Pritchard’s research, are committed by family members. And his figures
suggest the murder rate at the millennium was a third of what it was in the
mid1970s. He believes we have a hopelessly skewed attitude to child safety.
Children are around 30 times more likely to die in a road accident than they
are to be killed by a stranger, he points out. And even that danger has
dwindled fast. In 2005 the road death toll for children under 14 was a third
of the figure for 1986.
He believes the number of pyschopaths who kill children is tiny but remains
constant over time. The huge drop in the murder rate, he argues, must
therefore be down to good work by social services in protecting children
from their relatives. The NSPCC disputes his figures but is not able to
produce any alternative ones to support its rather more gloomy analysis of
the situation.
“I think there has been some progress around child deaths, and safeguarding
children. But I still think the child protection system fails to identify
all cases of child abuse,” says Christopher Cloke, the charity’s head of
child protection awareness. “I don’t know if we’re too risk averse. We need
to ensure safeguards are in place”.
And while the death rates may be falling, and with them the rates of nonfatal
injury and abuse, there are still other ailments besetting the nation’s
youth. Nicholas Tucker of the University of Sussex and , author of The
Rough Guide to Children’s Books, says today’s parents still allow
their children to do many things their forebears would never have done.
“This thing about risk aversion has been rather exaggerated. I think more
parents are interested in their children and that means you might think
about risk a bit more. On the other hand, the old-fashioned parent would
never have let teenagers go out boozing. They wouldn’t have wanted them to
see all the various films that would have been considered unsuitable. It
would once have been unthinkable for a child to take drugs, but now many
parents turn a blind eye.” But, he admits, the world of children’s
literature is certainly less safe, less certain of society’s values, than it
once was.
“In Enid Blyton you never stole, you never swore and you drank ginger pop.
Parents were pretty well nonexistent. In books written since then, you don’t
get away from the parents quite so easily, and they even have their own
problems. Children have to hold things together.”
Generally, though, he says, things aren’t too bad. Childhood, despite all the
worries, has essentially got better. “Historically speaking, many children
have never had it so good. They have nicer food, they are not cold in the
winter, their teachers are much nicer and there’s more awareness about
bullying.
So maybe the situation isn’t so terrible. Yes, children have lost a lot of
that glorious freedom to roam in the woods or on the bombsites which they
had in the postwar years. But maybe for most children that was little more
than a brief, carefree interlude between the years of child labour and the
years of overprotectiveness. Perhaps it isn’t even such a bad thing for
parents to worry a bit.
“The opposite of worrying is just smugness, isn’t it?” Tucker says. “And you
don’t want that.”
