The Story of Childhood (12 page)

But with the Enlightenment came a growing interest in the impact of nurture, and in particular the benefits of education. John Locke confidently pronounced that, ‘of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. 'Tis that which makes the great difference in mankind. The little, and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies, have very important and lasting consequences.'

Locke believed that because education was responsible for these differences between individuals, ‘great care is to be had of the forming of children's minds, and giving them seasoning early, which shall influence their lives always hereafter'.

Rousseau's rejoinder, that ‘nature provides for the child's growth in her own fashion', was not the return to ancient notions of nativism that it might seem. Rousseau firmly believed that a child's morals and thinking could be shaped through nurture, but was concerned with the way that educators interacted with their charges. He believed that a child was born with the capacity to learn at her own pace, and wanted teachers to be directed by this, rather than imposing adult ‘reason' on children before they were ready.

Rousseau was one of the first thinkers to divide childhood into discrete stages: the Age of Instinct, in the first
three years of life; the Age of Sensations, up to twelve; and the Age of Ideas, at puberty. He believed that children only developed their ability to reason during the third stage, rejecting Locke's imperative to reason with children from infancy. ‘Those children who have been constantly reasoned with strike me as exceedingly silly,' he observed. He suggested that, rather than training the child out of its natural state, educators should ‘leave nature to act for a long time before you get involved with acting in its place'.

Rousseau thus provided a foundation for the ideal of childhood innocence. The opposition of innocence and corruption continues to inform the adult-inflected version of childhood today. But the development of sciences of the mind and body at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century embedded another opposition which would go on to influence contemporary thinking about children: that of nature versus nurture.

As the children's culture theorist Stephen Kline points out, the position of families and schools as the locus for nurture gained currency during the intense social and economic upheavals of the nineteenth century: ‘It was the industrialising Victorians who took this new attitude [tracing back to Locke and Rousseau] seriously, who worked at undoing the feudal matrix of socialisation with its strict definition of children based on the family's property rights.'

But the belief that character could be moulded through learning was challenged by advances in the biological sciences. When Charles Darwin posited his theory of natural selection in 1858, the science of genetics was in its infancy. Darwin abolished the Cartesian distinction between people and animals, arguing that both humans and apes shared a common ancestor. He described the process whereby organisms which inherit traits that make them better adapted to
their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring.

According to the concept of natural selection, evolution results over time from the selecting out of traits that do not assist environmental adaptation. Darwin theorised that these inherited characteristics were passed on by minute entities he called ‘gemmules'.

Though radical in the way that it challenged the teachings of the Church, not everyone welcomed Darwin's theory. The German socialist Friedrich Engels dismissed it as a conjuring trick: ‘The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes's doctrine of
bellum omnium contra omnes
and of the bourgeois doctrine of competition together with Malthus' theory of population.'

Darwin's findings were also implicated in early eugenic thinking, originally espoused by his first cousin Francis Galton. Galton believed that the proper evolution of the human race was being thwarted by misguided social philanthropy, which encouraged the ‘unfit' to bear more children and ran counter to the mechanism of natural selection. He argued that a kind of artificial selection was necessary; he called it ‘eugenics,' from the Greek word for ‘good birth'.

But running alongside this academic emphasis on heredity was a growing popular obsession with how parents might influence their children's intellectual and emotional development. From the fashionable behaviourism advocated during the 1920s and 1930s, to the affectionate indulgence that followed the Second World War, belief in the importance of nurture was ascendant in care manuals of the time.

The absolutist positions of child as tabula rasa or child as adapted ape are no longer tenable. The more that is learnt about the human genome, the more is being discovered about
how genes influence human behaviour and vice versa. The focus of investigation has shifted to the manner in which this symbiosis is played out.

As neurobiologist Steven Rose has pointed out: ‘Simple-minded claims that there are “genes for” this or that trait … without understanding that how a gene is expressed depends both on the active cooperation of many other genes, and on the cell within which the genome is embedded, are misleading. Nor is “the environment” a simple concept, embracing as it does everything from the entirety of the cellular DNA via the organism as a whole, to the ever-changing physical and living worlds in which all life is embedded.'

So how might ‘interactionism' inform the way that children are brought up? In 2002, researchers presented some startling results as part of a cohort study of young men born in Dunedin, a city on the South Island of New Zealand, in 1972. A proportion of the boys in the study were maltreated during childhood, and many of that group went on to exhibit antisocial and violent behaviour themselves. Taking an interactionist approach, the researchers tested the boys for differences in one particular gene which controlled an enzyme in the brain, and then compared this with their upbringing.

What they discovered was that those with the gene for developing high levels of the enzyme monoamine oxidise A (MAOA) were virtually immune to the effects of childhood maltreatment. But boys with a less active version of the same gene, and lower levels of MAOA, became significantly more antisocial if subject to abuse. Neither a poor upbringing nor a poor genetic inheritance were alone responsible for an unhappy adult outcome; this required a combination of the two.

Longitudinal research projects like the one from Dunedin
demand time and resources, but they reveal findings which those that only examine a specific gene and outcome fail to do. As Professor Richie Poulton, who presented the 2002 study, noted: ‘The key that unlocks genetic effects is a good life history. Looking at genes is the easy part; you then need thirty years of good, broad, detailed information about the participants.'

As more sophisticated investigations like this one are conducted, the bitter feuding between the nature and nurture camps shows little sign of abating. While protagonists on both sides now wisely qualify their positions, they continue to berate the opposition for putting up straw men in order to caricature their stance as naive environmentalism or genetic determinism.

The hybrid discipline of evolutionary psychology, which proposes that human behaviour may be best understood in the light of evolutionary history, has caused further entrenchment. From its popularisation in the mid-1990s, adherrants made controversial pronouncements on gender differences, in particular with regard to mating preferences and strategies. One such thesis was that rape in humans is an evolved adaptation to help males pass on their genes, which was bizarrely extrapolated from evidence of forced copulation in scorpion flies. Critics countered that such thinking discredited the notion of human nature, just as the Social Darwinist reliance on self-interest had done previously.

In policy terms, the debate about early years tends towards nurture: are young children best looked after by parents or professionals, and how should that looking after be done? The present Labour government's emphasis on early-years provision has earned it the moniker of ‘secular Jesuits' (an order that declared: ‘Give me the boy at seven and I shall give you the man'). Still it remains unclear precisely what the
government thinks public child care is for. To get mothers back to work? To ready toddlers for the labour market? To save children from poor or feckless parents?

There is a risk here that the government will end up holding individual families responsible for structural inequalities. But, as academic factionalism continues, there is precious little clarity about how we should weigh and balance the multifarious factors that can shape a young life. When will Allana's fate be determined, and by what?

Allana wanders into her mother's room with the nonchalance of a practised intruder. There's another television there, a portable CD player, and a pile of unsorted laundry. Allana sits on top of it. She finds a screwdriver, which Sienna says belongs to her daddy. Allana likes to call Sienna's father ‘Daddy' too. When he moved out, Gloria admits she enjoyed the extra space in the bed.

Allana also discovers a dummy which she sucks energetically. She didn't have one as a baby but she loves them now. ‘Is that your dummy, Sienna?' she asks companionably, as though she might actually relinquish her find. She quickly scotches hope: ‘You've already got a dummy, in't you?'

The dummy becomes a theme. Allana compresses herself into her Baby Annabel pram, sitting up on top of the frame, her knees tight against the handlebar. Sienna, who relishes the order of bags, begins packing toys and food into her rucksack for a walk in the park. Allana is now fully a baby, grizzling and kicking her legs. She throws a doll out of the pram. She is almost too heavy for Sienna to push.

They swap roles. Allana counts toys for the baby up to nine, then gets lost and starts making up numbers. ‘You want milk baby?' Sienna sucks hungrily on an empty liquid soap dispenser that has become an improvised bottle. ‘I think her
wants some lunch. Let's go home.' She makes a nest behind the chair in the corner of the bedroom and navigates Sienna in there with her.

After a while, Allana picks up a brush and starts attending to her sister's hair. This is an enterprise of dubious intent. ‘That not hurt, that not hurtin',' Allana soothes as she rakes the bristles through Sienna's tight curls. Both girls have difficult hair to keep, says Gloria, but Allana will never sit still long enough for her to oil it. ‘Don't brush my eyes!' Sienna pleads.

Later, Allana washes her dummy in the bathroom. She is fascinated by the taps, and pretends to be brushing her teeth in order to turn them on then off again, on then off again. She needs to pee. She closes the door discreetly but Sienna bursts in on her. ‘No! No! No!' They are fighting over the door-knob, Allana still with her trousers down. She starts whipping her sister away with a towel, eventually reclaiming possession of the knob.

Gloria calls them down for tea. Allana and Sienna sit opposite each other at the small oblong table in the corner of the living-room, by the arch into the kitchen. They are deadly opponents in the contest of clearing plates. Gloria passes through chicken nuggets, chips and beans. She administers salt and ketchup judiciously. On the local television news there is an item about a sculpture which sounds like a waste of money. Allana eats all her meat. Sienna eats everything but. There are Munch Bunch yoghurts for afters.

Whenever they go food-shopping, Allana asks for spaghetti bolognaise and Sienna wants macaroni cheese. It can be a struggle to buy them what they like, but Gloria usually asks her mum to get some things for her, since she gets a discount because of her job.

On another day, Allana is out on the walkway, hanging off
the arm of a neighbour who props her baby son on her hip. She had him when she was sixteen. Gloria didn't have Allana until she was twenty-six – it just worked out that way. She left school at thirteen, and spent the intervening years working in a college kitchen. Now the neighbour is trying to stop Allana following Gloria down into the yard. Gloria thinks the local council is pretty awful. After Allana ran away they had to wait two years to get a gate on the top-floor landing. She was only two, but she went all the way to the shops on her own. Everyone on the estate was out looking for her. She'd found some money and wanted to spend it.

Back in the flat, the girls roll around on the sofa while Gloria hangs out the washing on the balcony. She calls down to another neighbour below, and they exchange plans for Saturday night. Gloria doesn't get out much, because babysitters are so expensive, but sometimes her mother takes them and Gloria will relax with whatever's on telly and a bottle of wine.

It's a sultry day of heat and cloud. Allana wears navy shorts and a yellow T-shirt with pink sandals. Her nanna bought them a size too big so they keep coming off. Her hair is wild today.

‘Going to the park, Mama?' she asks. Gloria concurs. Back down in the yard, she gets Sienna's pushchair and Allana's pink scooter out of the pram shed. She says Allana's been doing her head in today. Sometimes she just won't listen. She's tired.

On the short walk to the park, Allana zips along the pavement. Her balance is even and the scooter glides smoothly. When she crosses the road, she announces that nothing is coming before proceeding. She stops at bushes along the way and scours them intently. Gloria warns her off. She's been picking up insects lately.

When they arrive at the park, Sienna disembarks then
runs ahead towards the swings and climbing-frames, but waits for Allana to decide what to go on first. Sienna still totters, but Allana strides with torso thrust forward and hips at the best angle to get her legs marching.

She has one twirl on the curly yellow slide, then runs across to the swings. She doesn't like to be pushed. After five minutes of dawdling, tummy then bottom to seat, trying each one in turn, she returns to the big climbing-frame. She tries the rope ladder but can only manage two rungs. The footholds are too far apart for her legs' reach.