ABSTRACT
Children are cooped up indoors, passive and apathetic and unable to create their own fun and entertainment. Their imagination is dulled by too many hours of watching television and playing sedentary computer games. They are corrupted by commerce and advertising, tormented by bullies, and traumatized by testing. Or so we are told – over and over and over again. Exhortations about the harm children are coming to arrive daily via
the media, and a plethora of recent books warn about the ill effect modern life is having on the new generation. I would argue that most writers are allowing their rather romanticized view of, and nostalgia for, their own childhoods to influence their inquiry into how children’s lives have changed in recent times. Some of their concerns are also shaped by a distinct unease about modern living and a disdain
for affluence – even, in some cases, by a snobbish haughtiness towards ignorant, ‘materialistic’ parents. In September 2006 the Archbishop of Canterbury and more than
100 eminent experts, including children’s authors, scientists, health professionals, teachers and academics joined Sue Palmer, education consultant, broadcaster and author of Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World is Damaging our Children and What we can Do about It, in signing a letter to the London Daily Telegraph warning that ‘modern life leads to more depression among children’ (Abbs et al. 13 September 2006). Children are suffering, the experts claimed, as a result of our ‘junk culture’. The modern world is not providing kids with what they need to develop, which includes: ‘real food (as opposed to processed “junk”), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in, and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives’ (Abbs et al. 13 September 2006). A year on, the signatories of the original letter were joined by other
professionals, academics and writers, claiming that since they first expressed their concern about the marked deterioration in children’s mental health ‘research evidence supporting this case has continued to mount’ (Abbs et al. 17 September 2007). In the follow-up letter to the Daily Telegraph these experts wrote: ‘Compelling examples have included UNICEF’s alarming finding that Britain’s children are amongst the unhappiest in the developed world, and the children’s charity NCH’s report of an explosion in children’s clinically diagnosable mental health problems’ (Abbs et al. 17 September 2007). Apparently children are not only deeply unhappy, they are also
stressed out. In October 2007 a report titled Community Soundings, published by Cambridge University’s Primary Review Group, and hailed as ‘the first major investigation into British primary schooling since the Plowden report’ of 1967, claimed there is a ‘deep anxiety’ today about children and childhood. The report’s findings generated alarming headlines in the media. ‘Pressure of tests “means primary school pupils lose their childhood”,’ reported the Times. ‘Study reveals
stressed-out 7-11 year-olds,’ said the Guardian. ‘UK youngsters “stressed and depressed”,’ claimed ITN News. Writers, commentators and policymakers across the Atlantic have
painted an equally bleak picture of modern childhood. In her book It Takes a Village then US First Lady Hillary Clinton wrote, ‘Everywhere we look, children are under assault: from violence and neglect, from break-up of families, from the temptations of alcohol, sex, and drug abuse, from greed, materialism and spiritual emptiness’ (Clinton 1996: 11). We are told that one worrying outcome of modern living is that chil-
dren are suffering from something called ‘nature deficit disorder’. In his book Last Child in the Woods Richard Louv, co-founder and chairman of the US organization Children and Nature Network, argues that children are suffering from ‘diminished use of senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses’ as a result of their ‘alienation from nature’ (Louv 2005: 34). He argues that modern life is narrowing our senses until our focus is mostly visual, appropriate to the dimensions of a computer monitor or television screen. Screen-based technologies and expensive toys are reportedly the
culprits of all kinds of evil. US child development expert David Elkind writes in The Power of Play: How Imaginative, Spontaneous Activities Lead to Healthier and Happier Children that ‘Children’s play – their inborn disposition for curiosity, imagination and fantasy – is being silenced in the high-tech, commercialised world we have created’ (Elkind 2007: ix). The power of play is being destroyed by inexpensive toys available in enormous quantities and seemingly unlimited variety and sedentary screen play, argues Elkind. Unhappy children, we are told, turn into unhappy, maladjusted and
often badly behaved teenagers. According to the UK think-tank IPPR (the Institute for Public Policy Research), British teenagers are ‘the worst behaved in Europe’. Research published in the IPPR report Freedom’s Orphans: Raising Youth in a changing World shows British fifteen-year-olds are more likely to binge-drink, take drugs, have under-age sex and get into fights than their counterparts in Germany, France and Italy (Margo 2006).
