Songs of Innocence (33 page)

And again, another facet to the same potent belief: that if there exists a corrupted body of children – never our own, of course – then there must also be a larger, corruptible body
which is susceptible to its wiles. The children of nature portrayed by Blake and Wordsworth had a sort of untouchable, homely innocence. But the real myth was never about those children, safe in
their cradles before the hearth. The real myth was about other people’s children, and the threat they posed. Charles Kingsley’s little sweep Tom, emerging blackened from the fireplace
in
The Water Babies
into a rich girl’s bedroom, and the ‘stranger danger’ panics of the late twentieth
century both pointed in their own ways to
this belief – that out there, in the forest, some threat was lurking.

And to these big myths, small myths cling and grow. The vulnerable child can be vulnerable in myriad ways. He can be vulnerable – and the future of the nation with him – because of
monsters, bad men, poor nutrition, an unhealthy lifestyle. The early twentieth-century fears about a bread and tea diet breeding a puny urban underclass, and the early twenty-first-century panics
about junk food, household chemicals and asthma, all spoke to the same fear. The Edwardians worried about what would become of the Empire, and consequently the nation’s prosperity and
security when adults in the cities had their children running back and forth to the alehouse for them; a century later, the adults of the early twenty-first century worried about who was going to
pay the benefit bills for a generation dragged up in workless homes on sink estates by parents who had barely tried to show them a model of a functioning nuclear family. While parents close to home
were doing a good job, were those elsewhere sneaking rotten apples into the barrel? Would the next generation be strong enough to protect and nurture this one in its dotage? In short, if children
were the future, what sort of future would they be?

So, there was much that persisted, much that was circular, in the world of the child when viewed from a historical perspective. Perhaps the twentieth-century notion that childhood was something
unique and separate and different from adulthood, and that therefore a child should have independent ‘rights’, began to go into recession at the beginning of the twenty-first. Perhaps,
increasingly, the public focus in the new millennium actually – while paying lip service to the notion of rights and individuality – became more fixated on the idea that all children
should achieve set goals, that all children should be ready to play their allotted parts in the future of the nation. Perhaps the idea of changing power relations within a family, the
1970s and 1980s feeling that parents were no longer so firmly in the driving seat, was giving way, as the century turned, to a new disciplinarianism, a return to the old notion that
actually the key to bringing up a child was not so much freedom as parenting – and the right kind of parenting, at that: ‘While establishing a routine is often very hard work and
requires a lot of sacrifices on the part of the parents, hundreds of thousands of parents around the world will testify that it is worth it because they quickly learn how to meet the needs of their
babies so distress is kept to a minimum,’ wrote Gina Ford in her new
Contented Little Baby Book
, considered a major source of advice for twenty-first-century parents.
⁵

Yet while some things stayed the same and while some were cyclical, there was much, too, that changed. The story of childhood from the last days of Victoria to the new millennium was the story,
if you like, of how the state swallowed its children. Never before had governments had so much to say, so much to do – or indeed, anything much to say or do – about children. Now, in an
era when the fingers of the state reached into most walks of human life, the child became a key focus for public policy: a phenomenon which reached a crescendo as the twentieth century came to a
close.

If raising children had always been a huge investment for the family, it now became an equally major investment for the state. As the century wore on, a parent’s investment in his or her
child became increasingly an emotional rather than an economic one – or rather, the desired emotional return grew as the expected economic return dwindled. At the same time, governments took
on an ever greater economic, and therefore political, investment in the child. Education, health, criminal justice – all these areas of public policy became battlegrounds over which opposing
camps fought over children and their upbringing. Huge sums were spent. And so the collective investment became somehow greater – both personal and political – because every taxpayer
– every family – had an ever greater stake
in every other taxpayer’s children. Naturally, that led to everyone feeling they were entitled to an opinion not
just on how to raise their own children, but on how others should raise theirs too. Children, according to modern theorists on the subject, became not just the means of social reproduction –
which they had always been – but also the agents of desired social change.
⁶
And so the perceived consequences of educational failure,
emotional disruption or delinquency become more socially pressing; linked both to a feeling that an investment was going to waste, and to a fear that this huge, optimistic social project could be
failing.

Investments in health, in housing and in education were all, in effect, investments in the future of the nation. And so it was hardly surprising that a kind of paranoia would continue to grow,
even as that investment brought its returns in terms of better health and greater safety for children. As the infant mortality rate plummeted, before and after the war, and as the numbers of child
deaths from accidents also fell,
⁷
the sense that everyone had an interest in the health of other people’s children also grew. And the
idea took hold that perhaps some people were not tending to their children as they should be doing. And so the notion of bad parenting became an obsession for the media. It fed back, of course,
into the deeper notion of the child’s vulnerability. And that, too, was fed by the growth of developmental theory during the twentieth century – mainly as a result of Freud’s
notions about the stages of psychological growth through which a child must pass, and the desperate consequences of a failure to do so. There was a growing sense, then, that a healthy,
well-nourished, well-nurtured childhood was essential not just for the future wellbeing of the individual, but for the future wellbeing of the state.

That feeling had always been out there, of course. But now it gained a new intensity. The ideal child of the late Victorian era had been a quiet creature, seen but not heard, obedient and pure.
The ideal
child of the early twentieth century was elfin, sprite-like, delicate, while the ideal child of the later twentieth century was an increasingly robust,
rosy-cheeked creature. All those children, though, had lived an existence centred on the home and on the family. Now, the child became – in theory, if not in practice – a social being
even more, inextricably linked to the current and future wellbeing of society itself. When the issue is viewed from this angle, it is clear that social problems were bound to attach themselves to
the child. Somehow, the old post-war optimism had completely vanished from the political rhetoric surrounding the life of the child by the end of the century. While a discussion about children in
the 1960s would probably have centred on how parents should raise them, what worked and what did not; a discussion about children in the twenty-first century would almost certainly focus at some
point on what on earth was going wrong. Old certainties, such as they were, had vanished. Suddenly, children seemed vastly more important than they used to – there were fewer of them –
and their emotional stock had risen as their economic stock had fallen since 1945 – although children still worked, fewer were expected to contribute to family budgets. And this, in part,
must help to account for the growing sense of unease among parents. Increasingly, children had spending power without earning power. And, increasingly, parents found themselves forking out for the
luxuries which their children, cuckoo-like, were demanding from the comfort of their family nest. A parent’s investment in a child – both emotional and financial – had grown. And
from there arose uncertainty about whether it was all worth it. What was it all for? Children were no longer there to sustain the family, to take over from where their parents left off in the
family business or trade. They were no longer there, even, to support their parents in their old age. They were just
there.

And from
there,
maybe, arose the guilt. In essence, the Western world was becoming an increasingly uncertain place. And the role
of the child within it was equally
uncertain: if we don’t know who we are, who we want to be or how we’re meant to get there, then how can we guide our young? Maybe, then, the time has come for retrenchment. Maybe the
twentieth century will come to be seen, in terms of children and their history, as the century of choice. The century when thinkers like Freud, with his focus on the individual and his needs, like
Neill, with his belief in freedom, and even like Benjamin Spock, who told parents to relax and all would be well, were in the ascendancy. The century in which children became the focus of a great
attempted feat of social engineering. In which the child as an individual was asked to assert himself, and in which, sometimes, he even did. Was the experiment a success? The jury is out, but the
tone of the debate – more myth than reality, of course – would certainly say no. So perhaps the twenty-first century is bound to be a century of retreat, for a time at least, towards
old certainties – more discipline, stricter targets.

The fear and the myths, though, are not just myths and fears about children. They are myths and fears about mankind; ones which have emerged and re-emerged throughout the ages because they have
drawn people together as external threats tend to do. Almost as if in uncertain times – and times often have been uncertain – there is a reassurance about it. If the evil, the poison,
the violence, is out there, prowling around the dark boundaries of the camp, then those huddled inside nearest to the fire may take comfort in the rhythms of their own lives. Perhaps with
retrenchment, with greater cohesion and a clearer sense of common purpose, will come the realization that for the most part there is little out there to fear but the fear itself.

In the Spring of 2011, two Canadian psychologists laid bare a contradiction at the heart of modern family life: that parenting seemed more demanding, more arduous with each
passing year, and yet was somehow increasingly idealized in the popular imagination. Their study aimed to find out why.

The academics set up an experiment, with two groups of parents. The first was asked to look at information on both pros and cons – the financial cost of up to £150,000 per child,
balanced by the possibility that the child might later provide support to the parent in old age. The second group was given information on the cost, but not the benefits.
¹

So, which group would speak most warmly of the joys of parenthood? The group which had been allowed to contemplate the prospect of a happy old age with its adult offspring at its knee? Or the
group which had just realized if it had had one less child, it could have spent the money on a small second home? The result, of course, was that the more parents were asked to confront hard-edged
financial reality, the more they in fact focused on the warm, fuzzy feelings parenthood gave them. In short, they were fooling themselves.

In the midst of a recession, as youth unemployment soars and
children become ever more costly and burdensome, the question of why parents have them is thrown into
ever-sharper relief.
²

The question has hung around at the margins of public debate for decades. As the American academic John Sommerville put it in 1982: ‘At a time when we were confident that our work was
making their future brighter, it was easy to think of children as innocent and refreshing . . . Children are more obviously a liability nowadays.’
³
Since then, things have continued to get worse. Children no longer contribute to the family purse as they did in the early years of the twentieth century. Over the past fifty
years, traditional industries and the labour market conditions that enabled children to follow their parents into a profession or a trade have all but disappeared. They no longer have a major
economic role except as consumers, and they lack a clear economic future as young adults. Yet, as some American academics have put it, children’s emotional capital has risen, just as their
social and economic capital has fallen.
⁴
Parents, like the ones in the Canadian study, are upping the ante to justify their unwise investment in
child-rearing. As the Canadian psychologists put it: ‘The idea that parenthood involves substantial emotional rewards appears to be something of a myth.’
⁵

For the most part, the adult world continues to maintain the fiction that everything’s fine; that so long as its offspring are safe and warm in the family home, all will be well, which is
convenient, since so many of those offspring are finding they can’t move on into adulthood.

In March 2012, the
Huffington Post
ran a piece by a recent American college graduate. Its headline, ‘Why Generation Y Can’t Grow Up – A Recession
Tale,’
⁶
said it all.

The author, Tyler Moss, had a Masters degree, an ocean of debt and ‘a barren desert of unemployment opportunities’ confronting him. He’d measured his life by milestones –
driving test, first legal drink, college – and was left wondering what it had all been for.

He concluded that if the ‘Millennials’, as he termed his generation of recent graduates, were drifting, they had good reason to do so. In an age of extreme
uncertainty, the choices were apparently stark: work incessantly in the hope of clinging to the career ladder in an increasingly precarious climate, or embrace the life of the perpetual
adolescent.