Turning family hierarchy on its head
Century of the Child V&A Museum of Childhood, London
We think of the Scandinavian countries as leading the way in terms of liberal, caring welfare values – all free nurseries and ridiculous amounts of paid childcare time for dads. Yet at the dawn of the 20th century, Norway, Sweden and Denmark were poor and backward, with child labour widespread. Significant advances in public welfare weren’t seen until the Fifties. Since then, however, these countries have put children at the centre of society’s development – or so this intriguing exhibition argues – and they’ve sold this attitude to the rest of us through world-beating design. Products from an extraordinary range of Scandi-meganames are marshalled to back this up, from Marimekko and Moomin books to Babybjörn and Ikea.
Yet you’re left with an uncomfortable feeling that the child-centred, Nordicinspired freedoms of the 20th century may now be going into reverse.
The show takes its title from Swedish social theorist Ellen Key’s 1900 bestseller The Century of the Child, in which she proposed that the creativity, education and rights of children should be society’s principle focus. There’s clearly no anxiety about a “nanny state” in a country where children were intended to be so well integrated there was no need for nannies at all.
While it’s good to see children’s design classics from iconic designers such as Alvar Aalto and Arne Jacobsen, it’s the more humble, but nonetheless huge-selling products such as the zig-zag-shaped Tripp Trapp high chair from 1972 that seem to most embody the utopian principle of a world in which children and adults don’t hide from each other in the old “children should be seen and not heard” fashion, but feel completely comfortable in each other’s proximity.
A Babybjörn promotional photo from 1973, showing a fetchingly tousled blonde family walking in woods, sums it up. Here the adults dress like children, in jeans and wellies. And, the way the parents stare into each other’s eyes suggest that the well-being of the family as a whole stems from Mum and Dad’s physical intimacy.
This sense of healthy, relaxed permissiveness is apparent even in Carl Larsson’s 1899 art nouveau-flavoured illustrations to his book A Home, based on his own free-living domestic arrangements, in which a pre-pubescent girl looks boldly back at us dressed only in black knee-high socks – an image that would probably be censored today.
Rather than “stop mucking about with your chair”, Scandinavian furniture designs such as the Nanna Ditzel spinning-top-like Tressure range give children a message about creatively exploring. Lego, one of the most successful toys of all time, was designed by Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen in 1939, to promote children’s motor development.
Copenhagen’s original junk playground, opened in 1943, was imitated in London, seen here on film, with children leaping around a terrifying-looking arrangement of planks and tyres, designed, in the words of its founder, to get children to take “really dangerous risks and overcome them, in a free and permissive atmosphere”.
If none of that, and much else in the exhibition, would be permitted in today’s health and safety-obsessed, sexually anxious world, the sense of the retrenching division of the generations isn’t only one way. This exhibition shows us a physically outgoing realm where there are no computers, Playstations or Xboxes. Today, however, it’s children who are escaping from adults, rather than the other way around.
Until Sept 2. Tickets: 020 8983 5200; vam.ac.uk/moc