Uninnocent Children

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

To read this article in Deutsch, Francaise, Italiano, Portuguese, Espanol, copy and paste the complete URL("http://www.g21.net/do188.htm") and enter it in the box after you click through.

Kevin Carey

KEVIN CAREY says that in the muddle of our attitudes towards our children the one clear characteristic is selfishness.

Even where records exist, it is difficult to trace causality without trawling through millions of words of private journal (I, for example, write more than 500 words per day), so I cannot say how much Gide knew of the theories of Freud; but I clearly remember feeling an inner jolt when reading Symphonie Pastorale; the child in fiction had lost its unquestioned innocence. Of course fiction is crammed with knowing children, assuming the language, responsibility and heroism of adults but Freud's specific adduction of their sexuality changed the child/adult relationship forever. They were ours no less than they ever had been but they were competitors.

The terms of trade in sexuality changed radically with the conjunction of the contraceptive pill and rock music. Since then, as our children have become more knowing, though no wiser (a condition frequently misdiagnosed as sophisticated) and as nutrition has (though not as much as is thought) advanced the age of puberty, we have become confused about what we think a child is.

How can these creatures, whom we dress in clothes fit for prostitutes, be supposed to simper in their first Communion frocks?

If this confusion was simply a matter of private parental agonising it would be bad enough, even though it is parents who give way to the ruthless pestering of their consumerist-driven offspring, but we are in serious danger of treating our children in such a contradictory fashion that they lose their bearings altogether.

We are so frightened that there is a rapist behind every bush and a killer behind every steering wheel that we will not allow them to roam free and take risks. We then complain that they always want to be driven everywhere and insist on sitting in their bedrooms playing computer games. We resent the fact that there is a severe shortage of child and youth leaders and miss these most because we will not give our children our own time. We are, at least in the narrow pursuit of self-advantage, unethical but expect the external ethical influence of the school to right the wrong.

In Britain this muddle has been highlighted by the release in the past month of the two children who, eight years ago, killed James Bulger, a 2-year-old. They had, to be generous to their parents, been badly brought up. They had toyed with the child in full public view in a shopping mall for a considerable time while the public walked by on the other side, only to turn vengeful once these untidy scraps of humanity were tried in the full glare of an adult court.

They were, oddly, in being considered adults, thought to have behaved worse by toying with and killing a stranger than those hundreds of parents a year who kill their own flesh and blood. Adults who, admittedly, live in appalling poverty and squalor are thought less culpable than these children even though, for all their deprivation, adults can attempt to gain some control over their lives and some support in their helplessness.

The contradictions do not end there.

The recent advances in fertility technologies mean that children are being treated ever more as consumer goods and we shall soon have designer babies. We have taken our biological urge for children and grafted it onto our redundant acquisitiveness. At the same time, however, these very children become a bar to our own gratification; they demand our time and our money, our patience and even our affection.

It is useless to invoke nostalgia at this point; Freud, though massively misleading, has pronounced; the Macdonalds phenomenon cannot be put back into its box; the technologies of fertility and genetic selection will become ever more sophisticated.

What we need is a strategy for dealing with our individual and collective bewilderment. The starting point for this is surely the recognition that children are not the individual property and concern of the nuclear family.

The little Bulger child was murdered by the two boys because no member of the public had the nerve to ask them why they were mistreating him.

There is a shortage of youth leaders because we think every person but ourselves is a potential child molester when almost all child molestation is domestic. We drive them to school because there is too much traffic of which our car is a part. They will only walk if scores of us make a pact that we won't drive and that, until traffic levels fall, there is a rota of parents who keep a distant eye on children as they enjoy their little adventures and diversions.

Likewise, instead of expecting other people to volunteer to provide what amounts to créches for our children while we make more money or indulge ourselves, blessedly freed from them for a couple of hours, we need some organised rotas.

Although I am a social optimist, I think this has got past the point of altruism, the best we can hope for is mutuality but that would be a great deal better than the situation we have now where children are becoming prisoners because we will not allow them to take risks but neither will we trust others.

The next stage is more painful. We will have to insist that children give up a fragment of the time they spend studying economics, history and maths in order to learn just a little about human relationships and parenting. This is not another call for increased education in sexual mechanics, though there is nothing intrinsically wrong in that, but we no longer live in a society where children are born into simple, rural communities, marry within a narrow local context within their own social class and die at the age of forty.

Thirdly, no matter what we think about the reasons why some adults lead lives blighted by poverty and wrecked by drugs, it is immoral to consign their children to this fate. Whatever our views on the distribution of income and wealth and the role of taxation we have to recognise that children are public, social phenomena.

Matters have reached such a pitch of selfishness in Britain that although the Government has recognised this position and is pouring money into benefits and services for children in poverty, it has to hide its moral acts in case it is thought too generous by better off taxpayers. Better to do good by stealth than not at all; but better still to do good so that it is recognised and woven into our social fabric.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

| THE PREVIOUS DAY ONE | THE NEXT DAY ONE |