Childhood is changing, that much is certain. But a debate has erupted over how our modern, electronic culture is damaging children. There is real cause for concern, writes Marie Murray
The Death of Childhood. Childhood Contaminated. Generation Stressed. Junk Culture. These descriptions of childhood, robbed, eroded, tainted and invaded in the 21st century, headline the great debate that erupted in Britain this week when 110 leading paediatricians, psychiatrists, psychologists, teachers, academics and authors posted an open letter in the Daily Telegraph. The letter called on the British government and the general public to understand the realities and subtleties of child development.
The signatories to the letter read like the Who's Who of British expertise, with heavyweights such as Sir Richard Bowlby, Dr Penelope Leach, Dr Dorothy Rowe and Prof David Pilgrim among them. What they say cannot be dismissed easily, sidelined as an isolated perspective, uncorroborated, aberrant, clinically unsubstantiated or academically uninformed. It may not be palatable but it is impressive.
Expressing concern at the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children's behavioural and developmental conditions, their letter warns that society seems to have lost sight of children's emotional and social needs.
IT HAS BECOME clear to the signatories that "the mental health of an unacceptable number of children is being unnecessarily compromised and this is almost certainly a key factor in the rise of substance abuse, violence and self-harm amongst young people".
The letter identifies a number of negatives in children's lives. One key problem they cite is the impact of technology on the developing brain, "which is not able to adjust, as full-grown adults can, to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change". They express concern about the way in which children are "pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults". They specifically identify the unsuitability of the electronic media material to which children are exposed.
Children, they say, need what developing human beings have always needed. They need life to be real. They need real food, real play and real adults: not junk food, sedentary screen-based entertainment and absent adults. Children need "first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with real-life significant adults in their lives".
Children also need time. They need protection from stress. The authors point out that "in a fast-moving hyper-competitive culture, today's children are expected to cope with an ever-earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum".
Of course these authors acknowledged that the problem is a complex socio-cultural one with no simple solution and so they petitioned parents and policy-makers to start talking, as a matter of urgency, about ways of improving children's well-being. This is why the "Hold on to Childhood" campaign was launched in Britain this week. And it has brought an avalanche of letters, commentary, condemnation, critiques and confirmation of the concerns to the debate. The talking has certainly begun.
But what about us here? What relevance, if any, has this debate for Irish childhood? It would be easy to dismiss the concerns as those of our neighbours, not our own, were it not for the fact that responsible parents, paediatricians, psychologists, psychiatrists, teachers, childcare experts and mental health professionals in this country have also been issuing warnings for a long time about the stresses on children, the erosion of innocence, the sexualisation of children and the influence of inappropriate media images on the heart and mind of the child. It might not strike us so forcibly if this was not the week the airwaves seemed to ruminate on how to control young Junior Cert students celebrating their results without alcohol poisoning, street violence and queues for STD clinics the following day.
Parents have long been aware of the developmental need for play, the fact that children need space to initiate their own creative, imaginative, symbolic worlds, not just be passive recipients of prefabricated fantasy.
The problems of diet and obesity, anorexia and bulimia, and the increasing levels of childhood depression and adolescent ennui, angst, self-harm, substance abuse, alcohol consumption, suicide and unprovoked attack have also been articulated in this country.
But while concerns have been aired, they have not always received media persistence and have been responded to with the fleeting inattention of the soundbite: significant for a day, disposable, dispensable, replaceable.
This has left parents unsupported and clinicians, who are aware of how mentally unprotected childhood is and who wish that the Government would protect it more, left without sufficient sustained support for their endeavours.
The genuine concern of experienced clinicians who work with children and adolescents has often been relegated to the moral panic of cranks, the arrogance of interfering experts or the nanny-state mentality of the morally preoccupied. Real debate has been stifled by polarities, claims and counterclaims, by proponents of single causality, and the outrage of vested interests that do not want their targeting of child consumers to be curtailed.
Arguments about childhood have, therefore, become predictable. Any attempt to critique current childhood is dismissed as a retreat into a nostalgic, idealised childhood of former times that ignores the harsh realities of poverty and physical hardship experienced in the past. Health and dental benefits, educational opportunities, issues of social and gender equality and even life span were inferior to those enjoyed by children today. But there were also freedoms, mental space, time, structure, opportunities to be close to animals and nature, to use the imagination and to learn to cope with adversity.
Far from being shortened, others protest that childhood has become extended into adulthood because young people are not being asked to grow up. They say that they have neither the necessary real-life experiences, nor challenges, to undertake the adult role. They have been cosseted and confined in perpetual immaturity and electronic hyper-reality and do not know how to cope with the real world. They have no time with their parents, no role models to guide them and no experience of functional family life.
The child, it could be said, requests no more than the adult enjoys: the sedation of substances, the salve of consumerism and constant electronic entertainment to counteract the loneliness of Western individualism.
Some people point out that we have inverted our protections: that we have become physically overprotective and psychologically remiss; imagination has been colonised and entertainment has become an inane anaesthetic. They say that we do not allow children the freedom to play, run, climb and explore outdoors yet we allow them to enter the darkest and most dangerous mental enclaves of violent and pornographic encounters and we then express surprise when the behaviour of vulnerable minors mirrors what they have seen. This mental milieu in which they are reared is toxic to development and were it a physical pollutant there would be public protest and Government action.
Finally, there are many who point out that each generation has panicked about the next, and that children today will adapt and emerge as badly or well adjusted as we did from the bizarre child-rearing ideology of past times that saw corporal punishment as the panacea for child rearing. But we need to remember that many did not emerge unscathed from those ill-informed practices and many adults continue to struggle with mental distress inflicted by that insensitive time.
CURRENT CHILDHOOD IS not harbouring the demise of civilisation. But there are practices today that will rightly outrage future generations. Among them will be the awful insensitivity of adults to the emotional rights of the child to protection from the mental violence of age-inappropriate media exposure that intruded into their childhood, abused their innocence and packaged, marketed and sold their childhoods.
There is, therefore, an opportunity in our British neighbours' outpouring about the theft of childhood to examine our own cultural conditions and what appropriate measure we might put in place to protect the mental health of children, which our own Irish research has also identified as problematic. This is our chance to embrace what is best in the conditions of life for children today but also to challenge what is inappropriate to their developmental needs. And this time, perhaps, we might ensure that we do not enter either/or debates that proclaim that the past was perfect and that the present is pernicious, but instead manage, as advised, to keep it interactive and real.
Marie Murray is a clinical psychologist, author and director of psychology at St Vincent's Psychiatric Hospital and St Joseph's Adolescent Services, Fairview, Dublin.