The 'year of the child'
Mary Kenny
I was — and remain — extremely sceptical when I first heard about the United Nations Year of the Child project. 'This must be the year,' I heard a child guidance expert say, 'in which we finally get a Ministry for Children and a Ministry for Marriage off the ground.' Bells rang in my head. Here comes another gravy-train with all sorts of new jobs for these experts, I thought. All the old humbugs are going to come out talking about baby-battering over lunch at the Dorchester. Everyone will be in on it, like all those ladies running off with other people's husbands one minute and the next minute working themselves limp in a campaign for downtrodden wives. I thought, the abortion lobby is going to be big in the Year of the Child — it's just their sort of thing. And sure enough, they are — all the planned parenthood programmes marching apace into innocent countries telling them that the way to be happy is to be like us.
But the Year of the Child has not been an entirely partisan thing. The project, indeed, has been so big, so successful, that everyone has had a slice of the action. The sociologists and the abortionists, the Royal Family and the Catholics, the journalists and the professionals and the publishers and the international bureaucrats — we've all had something from the Year of the Child. One does wonder, at the end of it, how much children will actually benefit.
Will there be fewer children orphaned, abandoned, abused, hungry, deprived, wretched or dead? I wonder. It seems to me that everything that is happening to the world we live in is bad for children. Violence, television, pornography, divorce, terrorism, alcoholism, materialism and the splitting up of families, the fragmentation of society — all are intensely bad for children. What we need to do for children is not erect new bureaucracies or devise new projects organised by international bodies; what We need to do for children is to stop living the way we do. We need to stop putting things before people, stop putting our own ambitions before giving time and thought to family life and stop conducting our lives on the basis of material commodities.
I'm a fine one to talk. I do absolutely everything the wrong waY around. Indeed, I am the archetypal urban, deprived mother. I live in a small city flat and let the children watch dreadful things on television because I'm too tired to read them stories. I wallop hell out of the oldest one, shouting at him all the while, 'I'm bloody well going to show you that violence dccesn't pay if it kills me.' Wallop, wallop. wallop. I stuff them with sweets because haven't got the energy to impose any more discipline and besides, they've just got to have what they see advertised on television, haven't they? I let them stay up until all hours because I'd sooner drink gin and blather on the .telephone than go to the trouble of making them stay in bed. I think the way that children are brought up nowadays is dreadful, and I'm the orle doing the bringing up. I get showered with advice from friends who are themselves in no position to talk. 'What you need is a garden.' What you need is to live in Wimbledon.' But the mothers I know who live in the suburbs are going around the bend just as quickly as I am. In fact some of the sociologists say that suburban mothers are even more neurotic and addicted to trail' quillisers than urban ones. Actually, the people I really envy are those simple Bengali and Sicilian peasants. all those lucky, lucky women who have, plenty of children and plenty 'of grans, mothers, aunties, uncles. cousins and in-laws to help them raise thern; those furtunate people who lead lives that are supported by others around them, not lives of bleak isolation in which they have to take so many decisions alone. All those people, in other words, that the International Year of the Child would really like to help.
Physician cure thyself indeed.
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