The Guardian view on childhood: hope needed
Things can’t only get better. We have travelled a very long way from the optimism of the 90s. The report from Action For Children, showing that many children and most parents and grandparents believe childhood is getting worse, is only the latest sign of a profound change in outlook. A pervasive insecurity is creeping down the age groups. Some of this is financial: the endless cruelty of austerity policies continues to bear hardest on families with children – and the more children they have, the more vicious the workings of the system. A country in which families find themselves cutting back on food, medication, heating and clothing because benefits are no longer paid for more than the first two children is a country where the safety net has been ripped away; and with the net gone, the fear of falling comes to dominate life. The government claims that this is an incentive to parents to find work, but most of the families affected are already in work, and the jobs available seldom pay enough to make up for the loss of benefits.
Beyond that, austerity has meant the destruction of children’s services, the impoverishment of schools, the closures of libraries. Parents are forced out to work, but the kind of help and support that the state might provide for their children is also withdrawn.
The fear most raised in the Action for Children survey was bullying. This is made more insidious, if not more visible, by the pressures of online life. Adolescence is in any case a time of heightened and painful selfconsciousness. But the combination of aspirational marketing and the remorseless need for status and belonging that social media rouse but often cannot meet means that children today, even those with no material worries, are in some ways under greater pressure than their parents could ever imagine. Added to these personal insecurities are the great impersonal challenges of the future, chief among them climate change but also the fear of poverty. Automation and globalisation have taken traditional securities away even for those who felt most comfortable. Although they have made winners, too, the winnings have not been fairly shared.
There is something peculiarly offensive when ministers blather about children “gaining resilience through activities such as sport and music”, as the education secretary, Damian Hinds, did in response to Monday’s report. This is not just because schools’ provision of both sport and music has almost vanished except for the richest children, who will least need resilience. It also perpetuates the myth that it is character which determines success, and so the poor are respon
sible for their own misfortunes. Character matters, of course. But the pure luck of birth is a much more powerful determinant of outcome in today’s Britain. Until we have a government which faces that fact squarely, more children will fear for their future – and they will be more right to do so.