Songs of Innocence (31 page)

As children were increasingly seen as a distinct market, they came under increased pressure to consume. One of the biggest fears around children – as ever – was their diet. But now,
instead of worrying about the lack of nutritional value in an endless succession of meals consisting of tea and bread, the medical profession was worrying about the pressures on children to eat
certain unhealthy foods – or, conversely, to stay thin. And while some children were eating the wrong foods, and some were not eating enough, one adolescent in six was now considered to be
obese. It was almost as if affluence itself was eating into the fears around children. Food additives, vitamins, junk food . . . somehow, child consumerism seemed to be running away with itself.
There was a feeling that the nation had put a ticking time-bomb under itself, which one day would explode with the after-effects of obesity and other indulgence-related conditions.

Everywhere, children were under pressure. There was pressure to achieve at school, as a new government elected in 1997 set targets for literacy, numeracy and GCSE results. There was pressure to
be slim, in order to be able to look good in fashionable clothes. There was pressure to have the right stuff, the right audio equipment. Pressure to have seen the right films, to be able to achieve
the right levels in the right computer games. Pressure, maybe, to grow up too soon. Somehow, it all seemed to be one big rush. And parents were feeling a sense of loss.

‘Where did all the innocence go?’ asked one writer in the
Scotsman
,
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wondering aloud what had happened to the magical
sunny days, picnics and sand-pies of the Enid Blyton novel. Fear seemed to be everywhere, the author suggested. She quoted a woman whose eleven-year-old son, needing to take
a taxi to ice hockey practice because his mother’s car was off the road and – presumably – because public transport was considered too dangerous, had panicked, fearing the taxi
driver might abduct him. His mother, far from telling him to buck up and be grateful that she was forking out for a taxi, as a mother from an earlier age might have done, were she able to fund such
a thing, insisted he phone her the minute he arrived.

The answer to her question was that the ‘innocence’ and the magic had been swept away by a new desire abroad in the adult world – the desire to extract added value from
children. Having lost their old traditional economic value, children had gone through a phase in which their parents sometimes struggled to work out what they were getting from their relationships
with them. Now the future was becoming clearer. The ideal child of the 1960s, like the ideal child of the 1930s, had spent his life – even her life, sometimes – roaming free in the
idyllic English countryside, picking blackberries, fishing, occasionally getting into a scrape or two. The ideal child of the 1990s had no time for such japes, even if he or she were allowed to go
on them. Because now the child had to earn his or her keep in new and more complex ways. Take sixteen-year-old Zita Lusack, for example, interviewed by the
Mail on Sunday
in 1994, with her
mother looking on proudly, about her ambition to be a top gymnast. Zita weighed seven stone, but was still trying to lose weight in order to achieve the childlike physique demanded by her sport,
the newspaper reported: ‘Dinner has become a portion-controlled ready meal she eats in the car during the hour-long ride to her training base at Heathrow. “I work out for four hours
every night except Mondays and Thursdays, most of the weekend, and, before competitions, Thursdays, too. Sometimes I think it’s worth the sacrifice, but there
are
times when I don’t. I’ve been training for ten years now. But when I turn eighteen, it will be all over.”’ Or fifteen-year-old Juanita Rosenior, who in 1999 was working in
her spare time as an editor for
Children’s Express
: ‘My day consists of seven 45-minute lessons. I spend my time swapping career ideas with my friend, Ebony, who encourages me,
and we work together as a mini study group. We do this through phone calls, meetings, shopping and general socialising. Being a child of the technology era, my prized possession at the moment is my
new mobile phone which comes in handy at lunch times.’
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Or three-year-old ‘Ella from the West Country’, described in the
Observer
, winning a Miss Pears competition: ‘The nine other finalists milled around, being brave and confused, the organisers tried to clear the stage, cameramen stood on chairs to get
a glimpse of the triumphant winner. She was crying. She didn’t want to be Miss Pears 1997. She didn’t want to be here, in a big hall surrounded by strangers who were calling out her
name and asking her to look their way, smile please and look cute. She didn’t want to sit on the plush throne and wear a spiky crown and smile prettily and toss her locks.
“Mummy,” she sobbed. The photographer . . . sighed as he clicked. “Beware ambitious parents,” he said, then, “Come on, Ella, smile.” . . . Later she crouched in
a corner, knees up in her red dungarees, while her dad answered questions (yes, he was pleased; yes, their prize was a trip to Florida and Disneyland; yes, Ella was only three years old; yes, it
was all wonderful) and pushed melting chocolate biscuits into her rosebud mouth.’

The child of the nineties was beginning to realize that achievement – achievement which would require tough, focused, hard, nose-to-the-grindstone labour – was the route to a
parent’s heart. This state of grace usually needed to be attained through academic excellence, but it could alternatively be reached through sporting prowess, through beauty or even through
stardom. The key to becoming the ideal child of the nineties was to be better – or preferably, best.

Feeling the strain

Stanley Kasumba had lots to say about his life that was positive – he got on very well with his parents, for example. And he had a strong sense that each generation had
to be better, to achieve more than the one that went before. Born in 1990 and growing up in north London, he felt he had seen quite a bit of life. But at the same time, things seemed to have been
well mapped out for him.

‘When I was younger I was in football clubs, small teams within the area. And there would be reading workshops from the library. Everything was really set. It wasn’t really your
freedom. It would be like your mother telling you, there’s this thing you should do,’ he said.
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‘My parents are very ambitious
for me. I think now that’s what parenting is about – they put everything they have into their children. They want them to do the best. Maybe that wasn’t really the case in the
past. In the past parents would be preoccupied with so many things that they wouldn’t channel everything into their children.’

Stanley was doing A-levels and hoping to go on to university, and he was aware of competing pressures upon him. Parents, wanting him to do as well as he possibly could. Friends, whispering in
his ear suggestions on this or that way to break the rules – at thirteen or fourteen, a spot of vandalism; at fifteen or sixteen, some illegal drugs. In many ways, Stanley’s teenage
years could be characterized as a delicate juggling act – which, it had to be said, he appeared to have carried off with aplomb. And yet at seventeen he looked back with a kind of envy on his
younger self: ‘As I grow older, I think back and I think: “Oh, man! Look how old I am.” I’m not that old, but I remember when I was eleven and we used to play in the park,
and when I was twelve, and the first day I walked to school. I don’t feel as joyful. There’s always that thought – what am I going to do, why am I feeling this way? I’m so
much in control
of my life. Then, I didn’t have to think about anything. I could just be free and happy.’

One of the striking things about Stanley was his tendency to reflect in this way about his circumstances, his past, his future, his state of emotional equilibrium, or otherwise. The 1990s child,
it seemed, was a child in touch with his own feelings and able to express them, perhaps in a way which few earlier-born children would have been. Perhaps it was not so surprising, then, that when
the United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, published a report on child ‘wellbeing’ in a range of rich countries based on statistics from just before and just after the
millennium, it found the United Kingdom and the United States in the bottom third of the table on five of the six measures they used. The United Kingdom’s children were found to be the worst
behaved; the least content in their family lives. Overall, their levels of personal happiness and wellbeing were found to be the worst of any of the twenty-one developed countries included in the
study. The only measure on which the UK’s youth scored well – in the middle of the table – was health and safety. These findings quickly became the subject of controversy, with
academics disputing the comparability of the data. But they did provide an interesting picture of how British children were feeling – not so much, perhaps, of whether they were
actually
safe, healthy and getting a reasonable education, but of whether they and their parents thought they were. So, for instance, British children tended to rate their health as being
quite poor, while in fact their chances of dying young were low – in case of accidents – or average – in the case of disease. Similarly, the British fifteen-year-old achieved
above-average scores in English, maths and science, and at the same time were more likely than the average to expect only low-skilled work on leaving school.

Was the British child now just better at expressing his or her feelings than his Czech or Dutch counterpart? If so, why would he or she choose to express negative emotions, while the Dutch child
–
who was judged the most well-appointed of all – expressed positive ones? Certainly, the British child was more likely to live in a single-parent or a
step-family than any other apart from the American child, and less likely to sit down to eat a family meal on a regular basis. He was, though, likely to say that his parents spent a good deal of
time talking to him. Whatever the reasons, it certainly seemed the British child, around the time of the millennium, was not a particularly happy child. Which was, in historical terms, surprising.
After all, the British child was more likely than ever to live to adulthood; more likely than ever to receive a university or a college education, more likely to have plentiful food, a warm home, a
family car.

Somehow, it seemed, the nation’s children had become all mixed up. And not just ‘mixed up’, in an emotional sense. In a practical sense, their lives were becoming more mixed
up, too, with the lives of adults. They spent more time with their parents – Stanley’s family would enjoy a walk in Epping Forest together on the weekend, or would take a trip to
Margate. Somehow, their worlds were not so separate as they had been. They watched the same television programmes as their parents, stayed indoors more, rather than going out with friends. There
was a wider sense, too, in which children’s lives had been mixed up with those of adults – a phenomenon which had been demonstrated in the reaction to the Bulger murder. Children were
now a part of society. Their world was no longer seen as being some separated place, some walled garden or woodland glade where they could frolic, childlike and undisturbed. The adult world was
their world, and vice versa: witness, for example, the adult tendency to read
Harry Potter
books, or to visit theme parks unaccompanied by children. Somehow, this left children exposed to
all the pressures of the adult world. And at the same time it led to a sense of panic among adults, about where childhood had vanished to. Children were felt to be indulging in adult vices –
drink, drugs, violence. And, as ever, there was conflict over who was to blame.
The children themselves, for going off the rails? Their parents, for failing them by being
divorced, going out to work (mothers), not going out to work (fathers)? Or society, as a whole, as an entity? Increasingly, the feeling was that society was to blame.

During the mid-1990s, then, the political focus began to turn on children. An education reform act in the late 1980s had begun the process of focusing on what children should be learning at
school, and on ensuring they left with the ‘right’ knowledge, gained under a national curriculum. Now, with the advent of a new Labour government, the drive – in every area of
life, it seemed, and children were certainly no exception – was to drive up ‘standards’. At school, they must achieve better results. More of them must go to university. Overall,
they must be better provided for; they must do more; they must be better; they must improve. A whole range of grand schemes were conceived. By 2008,
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the targets towards which the government’s department for children and schools would be working would include breastfeeding, childhood obesity, bullying, social care
assessments, preventable child deaths, exam performance, drug misuse, teenage pregnancy and youth crime, to name but a few. The state now felt the need to measure and improve every aspect of
children’s lives. Parents, meanwhile, sometimes seemed to be there largely to be blamed when things went wrong. The state, naturally, would take the credit where things went right.

Even before Labour came to power in 1997, John Major’s Conservative government had begun the process with a plan to ensure every child received pre-school education. For a while, this
particular programme was felt to be a possible panacea for all the perceived ills from which children were suffering. Catch them early, the theory went, and it might be possible to nip all these
social ailments in the bud: low standards, delinquency, truancy, unemployment, even crime. But the revelation – hardly new – that educational under-achievement had social causes led to
deeper thinking.
Perhaps what was needed was not so much a programme to tackle educational under-achievement as a programme to tackle child poverty. The government set
itself a target of cutting relative child poverty by a quarter before 2004 – something which, by and large, it did achieve.
⁴¹
The strategy
was to try to tackle long-term unemployment on the basis that children born into workless families were very likely to under-achieve themselves.