The summer holidays stretch before many parents like a problem to be solved.
How much freedom should we give the children? Will they be safe? Will they
be able to cope on their own? The small, gap-toothed and quietly spoken man
in front of me has been yelling at you not to worry for years. Frank Furedi,
61, the most quoted sociologist in the media (there's a research study to
prove it), thinks we live in a society in which we're all encouraged to
worry too much. And whether it be for the sake or our own health or the
safety of our children, very little of it is productive.
Last month, in a well-publicised report for the think-tank Civitas, Furedi was
decrying the rise in police checks for adults working with children because
they have “succeeded in poisoning the relationship between the generations”.
Later this year an updated edition of his best-known book, Paranoid
Parenting (Allen Lane), will be published. It's a demolition of daily
campaigns that convince us that children are in danger from disease,
obesity, paedophiles and lurking safety hazards.
Furedi is sitting in his double-fronted Victorian house in Faversham, Kent,
sipping a Pepsi Max in obvious defiance of all those alarmist fizzy-drink
warnings. Yet he is not altogether in tune with his teachings. He's
clock-watching so that he's not late to pick up his son Jacob, 12, from
cricket. He's telling me how he goes to see the doctor too often; that he
has been worried about his prostate since listening to a recent radio
programme. And though he and his wife (Ann Furedi, the chief executive of
the British Pregnancy Advisory Service) have tried to be as paranoia-free as
possible - Jacob was allowed to go to the park and shops by himself from the
age of 7 - he confides that he's not immune to worry. “Occasionally my wife
tells me to practise what I preach when I react like a typical paranoid
father,” he says. “Our lives and emotions are so heavily invested in our
children, we all find it difficult to be practical.”
The State makes parents feel vulnerable
Such self-confessed fallibility is endearing, and surprising too, given
Furedi's reputation as an academic rottweiler. A Hungarian émigré and
founder of the British Revolutionary Communist Party in the 1970s (disbanded
in 1998), he has been accused by environmentalist George Monbiot of heading
a group of neo-conservative ex-Trotskyites systematically infiltrating parts
of the British Establishment with free-market libertarianism, a claim that
Furedi denies. His politics now seem a long way from communism as we know
it. He says he's always been deeply suspicious of the State and resents the
way it makes everyone, particularly parents, feel more vulnerable than they
should.
“Back in my childhood, the expression over-protective parent was used as a
criticism, but today it's seen as a responsibility,” says Furedi, Professor
of Sociology at Kent University since 1975. He wrote Paranoid Parenting in
2001, prompted by the countless warnings of risk he received from health and
local authorities as soon as Jacob, his only child, was born. But the risk
of abduction or harm is tiny, he says,certainly less than that of taking a
child on a car trip.
He says he has updated Paranoid Parenting because, since he first wrote the
book, the “idiotic” (one of his favourite words) has become the norm: safety
measures preventing parents from taking photographs of their children at
school, or stopping them playing conkers, or from going anywhere near a
public bonfire on November 5, are common.
“All these things that are important aspects of kids' lives are being
gradually undermined. There's also an increasing mistrust of adults, where
they are no longer allies but potential enemies.” Furedi points to our
automatic assumption that adult interest in children is suspicious or
sexually motivated, something that research has indicated does not exist to
the same extent in other countries. It's so pervasive that sometimes he
can't help feeling it too.
Furedi says we need a cultural change
“I remember going to the gym with my son when he was 6 or 7 and there was this
guy taking a lot of interest in him. I remember saying to myself ‘What the
hell's going on here?' But then I had a reality check and realised that he
was behaving normally, and if I'd been my father, in his time, he'd have
just viewed it as a friendly gesture and welcomed the interest that was
being shown.”
What we need, he says, is a cultural change where we regard childhood
differently, where adults are allowed to hug children, but also to have
responsibility for them; looking after them if they look in trouble, telling
them off if they're behaving antisocially. That way children would be less
fearful and become more engaged in adult ideas of social responsibility, and
adults would tune their emotional radar to real sources of concern, rather
than having to rely on criminal record checks.
Furedi denies that he wants to go back in time, but what he says constantly
harks to a better past: old-fashioned, let-'em-take-care-of-themselves
parenting. His theories seem to have their roots as much in his own
extraordinary background, as in the hours of contemplation and
self-inquisition that he tells me also lie behind them.
Born to a Jewish family in Hungary, his mother was a concentration camp
survivor and his watchmaker father spent the war on the run from the Nazis,
first pretending to be a regimental doctor and then spending the last six
months of the war in the same hotel as German high command. It would be the
last place they would look, he correctly reasoned.
His mother let him take care of himself
Through most of Furedi's childhood, his father was in jail at the hands of the
Stalinist regime (“he was a loudmouth, very right-wing and not too
diplomatic”) and his overstretched mother let him and his sister more or
less take care of themselves. He recalls often catching a train to Budapest
and back on his own from the age of 7.
The family fled to Canada, after the 1956 Hungarian uprising, when Furedi was
9. He left home at 16, joined the Army, went to McGill University, got
involved in “extreme” politics, of unformed political hue he says. It
involved occupying university buildings to try and radicalise political
teaching and he found himself blacklisted when he applied for PhD courses.
He decided to study in London instead.
His emerging - and to many puzzling - brand of Marxism brought him notoriety
among leftwingers when he opposed Arthur Scargill during the 1980s miners'
strike because of his refusal to hold a ballot, and he criticised the Anti
Nazi League for preventing freedom of speech. Some have called it extreme
right-wing libertarianism. Furedi calls it upholding free speech and the
rights of individuals above institutions. He prefers to be called a humanist
rather than a libertarian.
He vehemently opposes what he calls the “medicalisation” of society, the
process by which existential problems, such as shyness, active behaviour,
poor schoolwork, are recast as medical problems such as social phobia, ADHD
and learning difficulties. This is the result, he says, of “cultural
drivers” (by which I think he means short-termist, vote-grabbing
politicians).
“There's a fear market, which the pharmaceutical and other industries benefit
from,” he says. “I wouldn't trust them any more than the Department of
Health's idiotic campaign on child obesity. The idea of what it means to be
human is constantly downsized, making us imagine that we are more mentally
ill, have more invisible diseases, and are less able to cope with chronic
diseases than we imagined. It encourages people to feel less in control of
their lives.
“I see the impact of this in quite a devastating way. You go to a
nursery and you find every year the number of dyslexic children grows, and
you know that it's both real but also principally the result of culture, and
not biological causes.”
Furedi claims that, in private, many journalists and academics see the sense
in what he says. He seems faintly bemused by why he has attracted such
spleen from people like Monbiot. What he says is outspoken but nuanced, he
says. Others would say the consistent anti-state agenda behind his academic
efforts, and his involvement with the magazine Living Marxism, which
regularly caused outrage by appearing to defend the indefensible, certainly
haven't helped.
Perhaps it's also down to a natural, intellectual pugnaciousness inherited
from his father. There's the curious spring of the fighter in his walk, and
a slight, tense withdrawal when he feels challenged. He tells me a revealing
story. Since infancy, his father scolded him when he didn't stand up for
himself and encouraged him to fight back if he was pushed around. So that's
what he did. When he was 17 and living in Montreal, he went on a bus to see
his girlfriend. Between getting off the bus and getting to her house, Furedi
claims to have got into three fights. “It was a very anti-Semitic area and I
got a lot of abuse. But I relished the opportunity to make something of it.”
Shortly after that, he vowed never again to confront problems in that way, or
to embarrass his own children into action.
“If I don't exercise I become a bad person”
Now he has other physical outlets. He goes to the gym three times a week, but
not to keep fit. “I take physical exercise seriously. If I don't do it, I
become very uptight and a bad person. I find it phenomenally relaxing.” He
and his wife love climbing and skiing, which, he says, absorb most of their
disposable income. But he's definitely not faddy about his food, with lots
of fatty meat (”the Hungarian diet”) on the family menu, not much junk
because he wants Jacob to understand quality in food, but not too much
emphasis on fruit and veg either “because we want to encourage him to eat
whatever he wants”.
But it's clearly not easy running against a tide of human anxiety. “I've been
to my doctor several times with worries. I would like to be less concerned
than I am, but that's me.” And when he tells me about the planning he and
his wife do to allow their son as much freedom as possible without isolating
him from friends and safety-concerned parents, and about worried parents of
schoolmates turning up on the Furedi doorstep to report that they've found
Jacob out on his own...well, it all sounds quite pressurised.
Furedi doesn't blame any parent for leading an anxiety-filled,
health-conscious life. “It's very difficult for any individual to adopt a
parenting style that is fundamentally different from anyone else's. We
interact with each other, we are influenced by similar fashions, and I don't
suggest that anyone should adopt a childcare strategy that isolates you from
the rest of the world. But I can see the day when we are more mature in
making choices and don't have to pee in our pants about every new
experience.”
We await the revolution.
Child safety in numbers
11.7m under 16s in England and Wales
68 children were abducted by strangers in 2002-03
166 children are killed on the road every year
96 children drowned in 2002
917,498 children were injured in falls in 2002
Source: Times database
