A nation of babysitters
First, let us not submit to the selfindulgence of moral panic: there has never been a time when British children have been less afflicted by poverty, disease and malnutrition. The new Unicef league table for 'child well-being' across 21 industrialised countries, for all its disturbing statistics, gives little sense of historical perspective. Much of the information it collates is seven or eight years out of date. The report also idealises the notion of childhood and, in its litany of figures, glosses over the reality of human experience through the ages.
St Augustine was under no illusions about the capacity of even the youngest child to be brutal and selfish: 'Myself have seen and known even a baby envious; it could not speak, yet it turned pale and looked bitterly on its foster-brother.' William Golding's Lord of the Flies describes the universal truth that children, unrestrained, will revert to amoral primitivism. 'As a child, I thought I hated everybody,' wrote Philip Larkin, 'but when I grew up I realised it was just children I didn't like.'
Nonetheless, it is hard to shrug off a 'report card', however flawed, that suggests Britain is the worst of all industrialised countries at nurturing its young. Of the six categories covered — material comfort, family and peer relationships, health and safety, education, behaviour and risks, and children's subjective sense of their own wellbeing — Britain, like the United States, was in the bottom third in five. The UK is in bottom place 'by a considerable distance' for the number of young people who smoke, abuse drink and drugs, or engage in risky sex. On education, Britain comes 17th out of 21. This country leads the developed world in teenage pregnancies. There is much food for thought here, and cause for shame.
Labour has already squawked that the report, because many of its statistics predate the year 2000, does not reflect the full impact of the government's second-term 'investment' bonanza. That this should be seen as the main line of defence by ministers is in itself revealing. In fact, one of the report's most prominent findings is that 'there is no obvious relationship between levels of child well-being and GDP per capita. The Czech Republic, for example, achieves a higher overall rank for child well-being than several much wealthier countries including France, Austria, the US and the UK.' Child poverty is always unacceptable. But — in this context — it is a symptom of deeper cultural problems rather than their root cause.
The shocking decline of social mobility and the brutalising effect of violent crime have played an important part. So too has modern family structure. 'At the statistical level,' the Unicef report concludes, 'there is evidence to associate growing up in a singleparent families and stepfamilies with greater risk to well-being — including a greater risk of dropping out of school, of leaving home early, or poorer health, low skills, and of low pay.' Small wonder, then, that Britain's children are faltering. According to the Office for National Statistics, 19 per cent of children lived in lone-parent households in 1996. Now that figure has risen to 23 per cent. Shamefully, the welfare system now provides perverse incentives for couples to split up: an out-of-work couple living apart will typically receive £78 per week more in benefits than if they marry or co-habit.
This is not to say that lone parents are to blame for the problems experienced by British children. Far from it: single mothers are often the struggling heroines of their communities in which there are no male role models other than the violent action heroes of DVDs and computer games. The flaws lie in the welfare system itself and the destructive behaviour it encourages. It should not be taboo to address such issues. On the contrary, it is morally imperative to do so.
It would be quite wrong, moreover, to imagine that the pathologies explored in this report card are confined to the 'underclass'. The depressing portrait that emerges from Unicef's findings is of a generation of parents who cannot find the time for their children. In the table that lists the percentage of 15-year-olds who eat the main meal of the day with their parents several times a week, Britain languishes at the bottom, ahead only of the US, New Zealand and Finland.
To explain this depressing trend, the finger of blame has already been pointed at feminism (women spend too much time working), Thatcherism (we all work too hard), permissivism (moral breakdown has undermined the institution of the family) and Gordon Brown's policies (a tax system that is indifferent to parents who stay at home). A better starting-point is to ask how, culturally, we now regard children.
The recent row over Catholic adoption agencies and gay couples contained an important clue. At its heart was the question of gay people's 'right to adopt'. The truth, of course, is that there is no such 'right', for gay or heterosexual people. Parenthood is, or should be, a set of daunting responsibilities, a fundamental surrender by the present to the future, and a decision to invest the remainder of one's life in the nurturing of another.
All too often, however, having children is now seen as a 'lifestyle choice' rather than a sacred undertaking. As with marriage, the relationship between parents and children is becoming increasingly contractual: the extent to which today's parents are prepared to sacrifice their own comforts and liberties is diminished. When people speak of 'childcare' now, they mean paying someone else to look after their offspring rather than doing it themselves. Once a nation of shopkeepers, we have become a nation of babysitters.
A child is not a commodity, or an entitlement, but a blessing entrusted to his or her parents as leaseholders. That is the precious principle that has been lost in the modern mix. Until it is recovered, no politician can do much about the sad story told by this report.
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