Reclaiming Childhood - Dr Helene Guldberg
Swimming in the fjords
What a lovely childhood Dr Guldberg had! Helene’s words painted idyllic scenes of swimming in the fjords in Norway, playing in the woods and developing her social skills beyond the control of interfering adults.
Contrasting her happy days of sledging fast in proper snow with the problem childhoods of today’s British children, she had at first approached her book on childhood as a project of reclaiming the good old days. Where once children were given space and told ‘go and play’, they are now wrapped in cotton wool. Parents made paranoid by government warnings don’t let them out of their sight or the control of other, Criminal Records Bureau-checked professionals. No wonder kids could get really fat and want to play computer games all day.
But she found from her research that it wasn’t really like that. We all, kids and parents, seem to have bought into huge myths about childhood and, even more crucially, adulthood itself. The myriad reports put out by the many charities, government departments and quangos have an extraordinary capacity to turn concerns into policy and everyday practice.
Helene quoted many reports that used emotive language and, she said, questionable research practices to supply the media with an ever longer list of things that can go wrong and damage children for LIFE.
What doesn’t really hurt you makes you stronger
In one example of many Helene quoted, from 2006, a load of kids aged 11-16 were shown a choice of emoticon-type smiley faces. These ranged from ‘completely happy’ through ‘happy’, ‘neither happy nor unhappy’, ‘sad’ and down to ‘completely sad’.
“Who thinks above 60% of these kids said they were ‘happy’ or ‘completely happy’?” asked Helene of us (we were a little slow to react to the unexpected invitation to interact). Not many hands went up.
Surprisingly, a whopping 87% of kids said they were ‘happy’ or ‘completely happy’ (9% ‘neither happy nor sad’, only 4% ‘unhappy’ or ‘completely unhappy’). The anti-good news bias in responses for the media, however, resulted in the headline factoid that ‘One-and-a-half million children are not happy’ – but that’s extrapolating the result of the research to the whole population of children and adding the 9% ‘neither happy nor sad’ to the 4% who actually said they were ‘unhappy’ or ‘completely unhappy’. That gives 13% of that whole child population “not happy”. (I think the headline should have read ‘The kids are alright’!)
Helene gave us many examples of the skew that our concerns about children put on our perceptions and amplifies problems. When Baroness Susan Greenfield (a prominent neuroscientist) pronounces that the ‘screen culture’ may be damaging children’s brains, that idea will be taken up as gospel - despite there being no actual research, scientific or otherwise, that can back it up.
Children are not being turned into couch potatoes by this increased fear for their safety, Helene said. They are being turned into couch prisoners, hostages to their parents’ fears.
Yet parents are being blamed for the supposed crisis of childhood. Experts keep saying we parents have no time for our kids; we’re greedy for our own pleasures and work too much to feed and morally educate them properly.
OMG! I’m in the Daily Mail!
The aspect of Helene’s research and book that suddenly and unexpectedly catapulted her into the public eye was her stance on bullying. She stressed that she was against bullying and children being hurt and abused by other children. But she asserted that what is now considered bullying, alongside genuine bullying, would once have been viewed as completely normal aspects of growing up.
‘Exclusion from peer groups’ is considered bullying by some. Intervention in these kinds of situations is robbing children of their chance to learn how to negotiate very basic interactions. That is far more damaging than the slights being prevented.
When Helene got home from her book launch, a little the worse for wear (“I should have eaten something”), she crashed out but answered nature’s call in the small hours. Deciding to check her emails while she was up, she found that press, radio and TV were clamouring for her opinion. A Daily Mail headline read ‘Academic says bullying may be good for children’. Despite that crucial ‘may’ in the headline, articles appeared globally before she had even been consulted or interviewed about her work.
Unpleasant experiences are part of growing up and cannot and should not be treated as potentially scarring children for life. They pick up on these adult concerns and start to see normal child behaviour as damaging.
Helene stressed that parents’ role is too care for and educate kids in life. We should be gradually and gently introducing children to adult life as they grow and develop. Adults should be adults with children, but children also need time among themselves to be children and we shouldn’t try to treat them as little adults because adults and children are fundamentally different beings.
The discussion:
There was a lot of sympathy for Helene’s position among the 40-odd people there and many spoke of their experiences and views on how the processes of protection had been taken too far. Several people even thought Helena was conceding too much to those protection processes.
Blame culture, fears of being sued, the destruction of trust between adults, the generally smaller families, the unnatural confines of urban life, the claustrophobia of kids not allowed out, the CRB checks, the amplification of risk, the tensions between parents and teachers, the elevation of self-esteem to all-importance, the pervasive social disengagement, the assumption that all kids are victims – that’s just a small section of topics raised in the lively exchange of views. You had to be there…
In conclusion, Helene said that although we all had our roles to play in our daily lives, it seemed unlikely that these long-standing concerns, growing ever more out of hand, could really be reversed without a change in thinking at the top levels of civil society. That feeling that we have gone too far co-exists with the ever more rabid headlines. We need to change what we do and how we think about childhood at the cultural level. Amen to that.
Buy Helene’s book, it’s available on Amazon.
Dan Travis’ review of Helena’s book can be read below.
http://dantravis.typepad.com/dan_travis/2009/02/recaliming-childhood-a-review.html
The February Brighton Salon 2009 was produced and chaired by the salon’s Director Dan Travis.
We would like to thank:
Peter Travis of Bellerbys College for hosting the event once again; the students and staff of Bellerbys; Pam and her friends from the Philosophy in Pubs (PIPS) discussion group, for joining us and for their trenchant contributions; the several newcomers to the salon, for their attendance and views; the regular Salonistas; and, of course, Dr Helene Guldberg, for a challenging, candid, informative and provoking presentation of her work.
This report is a personal view of the event by The Brighton Salon’s reporter-at-large and does not necessarily represent the views of anyone at all (sorry for misrepresenting you during the meeting, Sam!). If you have anything at all to add, subtract or multiply, contact me at jo.e.bell@btinternet.com
Details of the next Brighton Salon in March will be posted asap.
Now let’s all go away and think about what happened there that night.
Sean Bell
Posts
