The Story of Childhood Read online

  For my mother, Susan Anne Riddell, and for

  my godchildren, Freddy Haines and

  Omni Thiessen Molteno

  Contents

  Introduction

  Rosie

  Lois

  Allana

  Nicholas

  Adam

  Laura

  Majid

  Ashley

  Lauren

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography

  Introduction

  Sometimes it bothers me that I don’t know the way to Troon. It was always my mother who drove us there. Growing up in Glasgow, Troon was the beach we went to for breaks and bank holidays. Two hours from the city, over the Fenwick Moor, it has a famous golf course, but that’s not the reason we went. I’m not sure why she picked it as our holiday place. She tells me now that she wanted somewhere she could get home from in a hurry. Alone with a small child, my mother worried terribly about sudden illness and her distance from the familiar.

  So the steady seaside town became our wee family’s regular haunt. Troon in my mind is mapped through repetition: the places we went in the order we went to them, season by season, year by year. Sometimes it rained, but everything else stayed the same: the gritty car park, the sharp grass dunes, the wide promenade where bigger boys brought their bikes. The treacherous and winding cliff walk, so narrow in places that we had to walk single file. If you don’t concentrate, you might get too close to the edge. The distance to the rocks below grew smaller as I grew up, really only a full body’s length, but the danger signs stayed red.

  Across to the diffident town centre. Regalia, the ladies’ dress shop, with a twirling display of coloured plastic clip-on earrings by the cash register. The Copper Kettle, with its sticky plastic banquettes and triangular menu stands. Always cheese and ham toasties and chocolate cake. The sweet shop, an Aladdin’s cave of Gibbs barrels. Cola cubes and soor plooms, cherry lips and pineapple chunks, racketing into the pan of the weighing scales by the quarter ounce. Treasure deposited in white paper pokes. And always one sugar mouse from the open glass jar on the counter. I chose the colour then saved it, best until last, eating it slowly like an observance, ears first.

  Could I find my way back now? Along the motorway, to the roundabout where you can first see the sea, past the bend in the road where there were horses in a field, through the streets to the threadbare bank with the graffitied shelter. Would the memory be stained and feathery, like the pretend treasure maps I soaked in tea to make the paper look aged? There are footprints in the sand, but now on a foreign shore for me.

  Human beings are story-loving creatures. We tell tales as a way of understanding ourselves. But as individuals, and as a society, the most potent story we ever tell is the story of childhood.

  This book is made up of stories of childhood as told by people who live there. Each of the nine chapters tracks one child across a fragment of time, through a series of interviews and observations which took place over a number of months. My native guides have been chosen for how they illuminate a particular archetype of childhood experience, or an especial locus of adult anxiety. Woven through the chapters are trips into more discursive territory, but essentially this is childhood told from the inside, in the voice of the small person.

  The older children were mostly happy to sit and chat about the events of their week. But with my younger guides, the visits were framed around play and visits to the park. I was never interventionist, but sat in the corner while four-year-old Allana commentated on the activities of her dolls, or six-year-old Rosie hand-clapped across her school playground. What I hope has emerged is what children sound like when they are listened to.

  Of course, I cannot claim that their words are presented utterly without mediation. I’m a writer, and I have moulded the material that I was given to suit the themes that I wanted to address. I asked Lauren, the teenage mother, about sex education and not about school dinners, for example. But I always tried to be guided by the particular preoccupations and mood of my guides when we met.

  Nor would I suggest that these nine lives present anything other than an entirely arbitrary selection of experiences of contemporary children. I had archetypes in mind when I began searching for guides: a rural child, a poor child, a child who was also a parent. But their selection was not – and could not be – scientific.

  I spent a long time finding these nine children, through friends, colleagues and voluntary organisations. I asked a lot of them and their families – to commit to my regular visits over a period of months, to allow me to shine my torch into the nooks and crannies of their daily lives. In return, they were given approval of the quotes and descriptions that I wanted to use in this book. Although they corrected me on factual details, no one asked for any substantive changes to the text.

  Their generosity has been boundless, and my thanks feels meagre. Without them, as you will see when you read on, there would be no book.

  In writing about childhood, I have been driven by two ideas.

  Firstly, I believe that in listening to the story of what it is to be young at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is also much to hear about what it is to be older. The Bible says: ‘When I was a child I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face.’ The ending of childhood is inevitably suffused with loss, not least the loss of any ability to witness those years with clarity. The contemporary adult vision of childhood has become so distorted as to render it opaque, and this opacity is seriously affecting how children grow up today.

  The second idea is this: I believe that the arena of childhood will situate some of the most exciting ideological battles of this century, and that progressive thinkers must begin their interrogation of that territory now. In a secular, pluralist society, where adults and children wear the same clothes and read the same books, how do we reach a consensus on the kinds of morals, ambitions and characters we want to share with our children?

  This demands a public statement about what kind of people we want to be. Although New Labour has not been slow to co-opt the language of morality, this is something that many on the left feel uneasy about, fearing accusations of nannying or authoritarianism. Public debate about children and family is still dominated by the right, and stultified by a superficial polarisation between tradition and diversity.

  Essentially, this is a travel book about a state of being. It tells the story of contemporary childhood with the help of those who still reside there. All of us lived there once, of course, and many of us know and love people who live there still. But as we age, childhood becomes another country, a disputed territory of memory and meaning. Its true geography is quickly forgotten, giving way to an adult-imagined universe. Childhood becomes a story grown-ups tell themselves, the yarn we spin to explain away personal frailties and to position collective anxieties.

  Adults may feel that childhood today is in a peculiarly parlous state. Yet contemporary anxieties can be traced back across history. The Greeks saw youth as a potential threat to the civic project. Twelfth-century moralists debated whether a child’s fundamental nature could be altered by nurture. The Enlightenment philosophers proposed the concept of childhood innocence to counter the religious imperative of infant depravity. Social reformers of the eighteenth century believed that children’s need for segregation from adults trumped their capacity for economic independence.

  Of course, growing up today imposes the burdens of the moment – earlier exposure to the adult world, increasing containment and surveillance, the tyranny of consumer and moral choice. The definition of maturity its
elf is in flux as the traditional adult milestones of courtship, marriage and procreation recede, and our popular culture reaches back to youth in order to sustain itself. It is a struggle to reach any consensus on the substance of childhood.

  But the form remains uncontested: that human young must serve an extended apprenticeship, only after which they are deemed competent to become integrated members of society. Was it always so? The French academic Philippe Ariès began contemporary thinking about the state of being a child. In his seminal work Centuries of Childhood, published in 1962, he argued that childhood was not a historical constant but a social and economic construct, first recognised – by the middle and upper classes at least – towards the end of the seventeenth century. In medieval society, he claimed, childhood did not exist: children mixed with adults as soon as they were physically capable, and the private sphere of the family held little sway.

  According to Ariès, between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries a new emotional ethic developed concerning the care of children, promoting what he described as ‘coddling’ in place of traditional indifference. The child, ‘on account of his sweetness, simplicity and drollery, became a source of amusement and relaxation for the adult.’

  He went on to argue that, from the seventeenth century, the growing influence of Christianity – in particular the idea that all infants were burdened with original sin – and a new interest in education found expression in ‘psychological interest and moral solicitude’. Churchmen and reformers came to believe that ‘the child was not ready for life, and … had to be subjected to a special treatment, a sort of quarantine, before he was allowed to join adults.’

  This ‘discovery’ transformed society: the family assumed a greater moral and spiritual function, while schooling effectively segregated children from adults, imposing upon the young of the middle classes the long childhood that we now recognise as standard.

  While Ariès’ work was significant in focusing academic attention on the way that childhood was constructed, it has since been subject to considerable reappraisal. What he traced was the development of an upper- and middle-class version of childhood – which affected a minority of children well into the nineteenth century – while poor children’s experiences were still shaped by poverty and the struggle for survival.

  Other historians have pointed out that, just because a modern concept of childhood did not exist in medieval Europe, this does not mean that a different understanding of it was not present. In particular, medieval scholars have pointed to the inheritance of the Greek and Roman discourses on youth. Indeed, many debates about childhood have their roots in antiquity. Plato could be said to prefigure Locke in his belief that education had the power to transform both society and the individual. And akin to the twentieth century Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, Quintillian, an influential Roman educator who lived in the first century AD, suggested that schooling should be based on stages of development, from infancy to adolescence, and devised specific lessons for each stage.

  However we choose to locate this ‘discovery’, it is certainly arguable that the Enlightenment philosophers did much to consolidate a modern understanding of childhood. John Locke, for example, refuted the concept of innate ideas, bringing the objectivity of reason to the study of the human mind and contending that knowledge and morals originated from experience. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, published in 1693, he introduced the notion of the child as a blank slate, urging that teachers consider their pupils ‘only as white paper, or wax, to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases.’

  But while Locke cautioned parents against being overly affectionate towards their offspring, in order that their minds might be made ‘obedient to rules, and pliant to reason’ from a young age, across the Channel the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned against the early imposition of intellectual structure on the child’s nature. Rousseau’s Emile, published in 1762, was particularly influential in countering the insistence that only a strict and austere upbringing could exorcise a child’s inborn wickedness, flouting the Methodist preacher John Wesley’s injunction to ‘break their wills that you may save their souls’.

  In his hugely popular account of how he would educate an imaginary child, Rousseau emphasised instead the primitive goodness of children, who should be left free to respond to the world around them and only later be nurtured by a responsive teacher. ‘First leave the germ of his character free to show itself,’ he wrote. ‘Do not constrain him in anything, the better to see him as he really is.’

  As philosophical inquiry turned from strict reason towards a more emotional and organic description of the world, the Romantic writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteeth centuries embellished the ideal of childhood innocence and joy. William Blake followed Rousseau’s notion of the primitive purity of the child. For Wordsworth – who pronounced, ‘The Child is father of the Man’ – childhood was a ‘lost realm’, a time of mystical communion between the natural and the divine, to be viewed with often cloying nostalgia from the ‘prison-house’ of adulthood.

  Such Romantic enchantments were far removed from the reality of childhood. As Charles Dickens chronicled, for the most part Victorian society brutalised its children, manifestly in its treatment of child labourers but also through the more subtle neglects inherent in the social conventions of the upper classes. Throughout the nineteenth century, reformers campaigned to regulate poor children’s employment and introduce a degree of compulsory schooling through a number of factory and education acts. This was a crucial step towards the creation of a universal childhood experience in Britain which extended beyond the wealthy.

  Many working-class children – and their parents – resented the curtailment of their economic independence. But as Viviana Zelizer, an expert in the social value of childhood, notes of the debate about child labour in the United States: ‘For reformers, true parental love could only exist if the child was defined exclusively as an object of sentiment and not as an agent of production.’

  Zelizer documented this shift in the status of the child, from economically useful to useless but emotionally ‘priceless’. And with the advancement of sciences of the mind in the early twentieth century, social focus turned towards children’s psychological development, and how that might be influenced by their emotional relationships with adults.

  In her fine historical survey of trends in childcare, Dream Babies, Christina Hardyment notes how the two world wars affected popular views of children in this country. In the 1920s and 1930s, parents were encouraged to apply a strictly behaviourist approach to their children by the ascendant child-care advocates of the time, Frederick Truby King and John B. Watson. Conditioning was all: feeding and sleeping were strictly regimented, indulgence kept to a minimum, and good habits introduced early and constantly reinforced.

  ‘[The behaviourist approach was] well-suited to a world recovering from but still apprehensive of war, which saw its children as a generation with a military purpose,’ writes Hardyment. The Second World War changed all this: ‘Once the child-rearing principles of the Third Reich and Stalin’s Russia became threats to freedom rather than models of egalitarianism, a reaction set in, a determination grew to allow the children of the free world to be more free than children had ever been.’ Child-centric care became the norm, exemplified by the likes of Dr Benjamin Spock and, more recently, Penelope Leach, who advised that parents trust their own instincts and have fun with their offspring.

  But the popularisation of clinical theories of emotional and educational development also proved influential. Just as Rousseau had done in an earlier era, practitioners adopted the concept of successive stages. One such theory was offered by Sigmund Freud, in his classic work on psychosexual development, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, first published in 1905. He conceived adult sexuality as the outcome of libidinal drives present from birth, with pleasure being derived from different erotic zones at each developmental phase.

  As Hardyment
notes, although the theory was too overtly sexual to be universally adopted by parents, a diluted version did influence popular thinking about the avoidance of psychological distress. ‘[Parents] moved from the offensive to the defensive. Rather than directing the infant, drawing upon the blank tablet, they became its guardian against a host of fears and anxieties which could, it was believed, produce deviant emotional growth and neurotic disorder.’

  By the late 1940s, uncertainties about applying a strictly psychoanalytical approach to child-rearing led to a renewed interest in behaviourism. In 1953, Jean Piaget offered another theory of successive development, this time concentrating on cognitive and intellectual rather than emotional development.

  Piaget identified four different stages and, in order to explain the inevitable exceptions to them, coined the term ‘mental age’, so a child who exhibited competence beyond her prescribed stage had a higher mental age than her peers.

  As Piaget’s concepts filtered into the public psyche, Hardyment observes, parents began to take the concept of an elastic mental age as a challenge. While they may now have worried less about their children’s secret sexual yearnings, Piaget did not offer them an opportunity to relax. Instead, the focus turned to how parents could stimulate their children in order that they grow up as intelligent as possible. ‘They are now handmaids to intellect instead of emotion,’ she writes.

  Within academic circles, the new discipline of sociology came to challenge what it saw as a deterministic view of childhood. Sociologists have argued that psychologists treat children as incompetent, judging them solely in terms of what they have yet to achieve. They maintain that this standardises childhood, distracting attention from the diversity of ways in which children can develop, often pathologising deviations. Children should be seen as social beings, they argue, rather than as individual developing minds.

  In their essay on the sociology of childhood, Michael Lavalette and Stephen Cunningham, both lecturers in social policy, note the growing interest in children and childhood as social categories within their discipline since the late 1970s. They go on to identify the dominant theoretical approach which has emerged in this country as the ‘new sociology of childhood’. They argue that this approach makes four central claims: that childhood is a ‘social construction’; that children occupy and conduct themselves in worlds that are full of meaning for them, but about which adults understand little; that children are a ‘minority group’; and that children are an identifiable social group. However, Lavalette and Cunningham balk at what they consider the central message of the new sociology of childhood: the postmodernist view that ‘we have to abandon any attempt to arrive at a full understanding of the world, or to assert that there is any broad directionality to human history.’