GENERATION SEX

The destruction of childhood is

A 26-YEAR-OLD woman has just become a grandmother. She gave birth at 14, her daughter at 12. On the present trend, she will be a great-great-great grandmother by the age of 60. Since the age of menarche decreases as the diet improves, this no doubt represents the triumph of junk food over malnutrition. It will also symbolise the compression of the generations that is one of the most noticeable — though not necessarily noticed — social trends in modern Britain. Children become prema- turely adult, while adults remain perma- nently infantilised.

The idea that there is a natural progres- sion in life and that there is a time and place for everything (not necessarily now and here) has been more or less eradicated in the area in which I have the honour to live and work. Uncles and aunts in Birm- ingham are often younger than their nephews, while one's siblings — or, more usually, one's half-siblings — are often younger, sometimes by a decade or two, than one's own children.

When I look at a group of patients wait- ing to consult me, among whom there are young children, I no longer feel able to work out the relationships between them. The person I assume to be a child's granny or sister often turns out to be its mother. The person I assume to be its mother is often its grandmother or sister. Needless to say, fathers are not much in evidence in this generational mêlée; they are in hiding from their parental responsibilities.

The compression of the generations is also seen in the friendships that young people form. When I was a child, it was more or less unthinkable that I should be close friends with someone more than a year older or younger than myself. It was impossible because those older than I would have had both knowledge and expe- rience that would have rendered me of lit- tle interest to them, while those who were younger would have been too ignorant and inexperienced to interest me. I don't think this was in any way unusual, but was the general attitude of all children at the time.

In the brave new world of the slums, however, one finds that inseparable friend- ships are often formed between adoles- cents of 13 or 14 and adults of 26 or even 30. How is this possible? I was a reasonably intelligent, if somewhat sullen and priggish, youth, but none of the thoughts that I con- sidered deep at the time could possibly have interested a person of even minimally mature knowledge and experience.

The fact is that, by the age of 13 or 14, the slum youth is as well versed in the only culture he or she will ever know — popular culture — as he can ever be. He will know all about the only matters that count in this culture: sex, drugs, videos and rock 'n' roll. The fund of his knowledge is by then com- plete in all essentials. Between the 13- and the 30-year-old there is little difference in mental refinement. Neither will have any horizon beyond that of his immediate expe- rience, which can only ever be more of the same. Life has been lived by the age of 12.

Not infrequently I am confronted by a female patient aged 20 who is distraught at the break-up of her relationship with her boyfriend. I ask her how long she has been with him and, just as the journalistic rule about the required residence in a foreign country before reporting on it is four days or four years, and nothing in between, so the answer to my question is either two weeks or ten years.

An intimate relationship lasting ten years begun at the age of ten! (It always breaks up at the point of pregnancy, when the boy suddenly realises that he is not ready yet to settle down and be a father to his child for the rest of his time on earth.

Celebrate children! He owes it to himself to abandon his off- spring before it is born.) The sexual relationship between the no- longer happy couple began at the age of 11, often with the complaisance of both sets of parents, or at least both mothers, and often with the connivance of a doctor. This in a country that sees any physical contact or expression of affection between a father and his daughter, of whatever age, as a sign of sexual abuse.

But the compression of the generations is not confined to the underclass, the hege- mony of whose cultural influence has more or less replaced that of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie in this country. Since the most sincere form of compassion is imita- tion, it is essential that we should copy the underclass as far as we can. And inasmuch as it is necessary, therefore, to reduce the distance between childhood and adulthood, we call the pupils of our schools 'students', even before they have reached secondary school. And, since it is part of the distinc- tion between pupils and students that the latter are self-directed rather than coerced in their studies, we are absolved (at least semantically) from responsibility when our children fail to learn such things as the cor- rect use of the apostrophe. Their failure is the result of their own lack of motivation.

More recently, a report commissioned by the Lord Chancellor's department has sug- gested that the children of parents involved in uncontentious divorces should have their say in the subsequent arrangements. Osten- sibly this will be so that children may receive emotional support from profession- als for the distress they often suffer when parents divorce (Keynesian management of demand for counselling and counsellors).

But behind the proposal we see another instance of adults trying to shed their responsibilities to minors. What from one point of view is a compassionate attention to the opinions of children is, from anoth- er, a brazen attempt to make them co- responsible for a situation which they themselves did not create. To involve them in the divorce of their parents simultane- ously forces them to mature beyond their years while allowing their parents to evade their responsibilities which would once have been deemed inescapable: that is to say, to make children into adults and adults into children.

A world of ever greater complexity and also choice requires a longer period of mat- uration, not a shorter one. Street wisdom is life idiocy, and he who matures first learns least. The complete inability to learn from their own experience arises from their early assumption, and of those around them, that their knowledge is complete. I once overheard a colleague of mine, clever man who did not suffer fools gladly, upbraiding his ten-year-old son. Tor Heaven's sake,' he said, 'stop behav- ing like a child.'

`But I am a child,' he replied.

He was wise beyond his years.