Our modern technological life isn't designed with our children in mind, so maybe it's time we tried to put them first, writes SHEILA WAYMAN
EVERY TIME you are late and rushing to get the family out of the house, one of life’s incontrovertible truths slaps you in the face: children will not be hurried.
We adults may be dashing about trying to keep up with all the “important” things in life but little children operate in their own time zone – and so they should.
The trouble is the more we try to drag them along in the slipstream of our frenetic 21st century lives, the less likely they will be able to cope when the time comes for them to lead the rat race.
Huge technological and cultural changes have transformed the lifestyle of people in the developed world over the past 25 years – largely for the better. But it has all happened so fast we haven’t noticed that changes which benefit adults aren’t always so good for children.
One of the UK’s most respected child development and education experts, Sue Palmer, started to see that back in 1997 when, specialising in linguistics, she began to investigate why listening and language skills were declining among children.
She soon realised it was related to many factors outside the education system.
Nine years later she first made her name with the publication of her book Toxic Childhood, which looked at how a cocktail of side effects from cultural change damages the social, emotional and cognitive development of a growing number of children, with knock-on effects on their behaviour.
"I can't understand why I annoyed so many people with that book," she tells The Irish Timesfrom her home in Edinburgh. "It was straightforward, trying to catalogue something that was happening. They were calling me a 'doom-monger'."
A former headmistress and a mother of one, she is unrepentant about the rather bleak picture she painted of contemporary childhood in the UK. “You have to look at what is happening and what is best for children and also that education alone can’t put it all right. They’re social issues.”
Indeed, her thesis seemed to be confirmed by a Unicef study published the following year. Its 2007 overview of child wellbeing in rich countries ranked the UK last in a list of 21 countries, right behind the US. Netherlands topped the list, with Ireland coming ninth.
Irish parents can take some comfort from how our children consistently fare better in such surveys.
Early this month a new study of health and wellbeing among children found that childhood here is healthier and happier than in neighbouring England, Scotland and Wales. The study, Young People's Health in Great Britain and Ireland, co-authored by NUI Galway, reported that Irish youths were more likely to exercise vigorously, to live with both parents and to be satisfied with their life in general.
However, that study was conducted in 2006 and there is always a worry that the stories of dysfunctional childhood that we hear today emanating from the UK may be our tomorrow, if we don’t learn from their mistakes.
A primary education system driven by league tables would be one such pitfall best avoided along with, perhaps, the pre-school “hot housing”, now enshrined in a legal framework called the Early Years Foundation Stage for anybody looking after children aged one to five outside the home.
As Palmer explains: “It has 59 targets children should reach by the time they are five and one of them, wait for it, is ‘write in sentences, sometimes using punctuation’. If you tell them in Scandinavia, some of the audience laugh and the others cry. It is such nonsense.”
Neither would she recommend the UK’s child protection policy, which, she argues, has caused community breakdown.
“By saying anybody who as much as looks at a child has to be checked erodes the basis of trust,” she says. She reiterates the old saying that it takes “a village to raise a child”, and that all adults need to welcome children into the community and not be terrified that any well-meaning involvement with young people may be misconstrued.
“I think Ireland still has more of a community feeling and more of a family ethos, because of Catholicism as much as anything,” suggests Palmer, who will be here next Saturday to address the Galway City and County Childcare Committee’s annual conference on “raising bright, balanced children in the modern world”.
“The world has been changing incredibly fast and will go on changing faster but children are just the same as they have always been, so they need the same basic experiences they have always needed in their early life,” she says.
“We can’t think we can fast-forward them into the 21st century and miss things that have naturally occurred for children ever since the species began.”
Babies are a lot closer to their Stone Age past than their technological future. They are born in “slow time” and their brains and bodies have to develop the same way as they always did.
The good news, in these recessionary times is that, apart from food and clothing, other key requirements for early childhood development are all free: love, talk, song and play. Yet vested interests in our consumer society con us all into thinking that the things that really matter are the ones you buy.
“The most important thing is real life experiences with real life human beings,” she stresses. “If you go straight to a screen of any kind, it is a two- dimensional, flat, unreal experience.”
She goes along with US and Australian medical guidelines that there should be no TV for the under-threes. “Three to seven you would want to minimise it because that is when they have to keep their brain moving at a relatively slow speed in order to learn to read and write. They need play and talk and stories and song; about the age of six and seven they need to learn to read.”
By the age of nine and 10, once they are confident readers, screen activity is fine – provided it is monitored and does not become the only thing in their life.
Parents also have to bear in mind that the longer children devote to screens, the more access marketers have to them.
“Children are being reared by screens from a very, very early age to pester their parents because they think that is how their parents will show love. They learn very quickly that love is stuff,” says Palmer.
The marketing industry knows that if a six-month-old child sees the same little character on the screen a number of times, it will recognise it in the supermarket, point to it and the chances are the parent will buy the product.
“They are encouraging pester power from about six months. It is teaching parents and children that love is the same as indulgence and it erodes parental authority,” she says. In the age of screen saturation, “it is very difficult for the parent to set boundaries. That is one of the major changes we’ve had.”
We may know what we should be doing, but it is hard to do it. “When the child is at school, the peer pressure adds to the pester power. Once the children’s peer pressure is running the show, we really have lost it then, haven’t we?”
That is why she believes parents on their own can’t hold back the tide; it needs the involvement of other adults and the politicians as well.
Sue Palmer will speak at a conference entitled Nurturing Bright, Balanced Children in Modern Timesin Galway next Saturday, hosted by the Galway City and County Childcare Committee. All parents and childcare service providers are welcome to register for the event which costs €10, including lunch and parking. For more information, telephone 091 752039 or e-mail mail@galwaychildcare.com. See also www.galwaychildcare.com.
Instinctive boy behaviour versus modern life
Boys in particular are suffering from the lifestyle changes over the past two decades because of a growing discrepancy between instinctive male behaviour and what modern life dictates.
As Sue Palmer pored over statistics during her research on "toxic childhood", it became "depressingly obvious" that boys were particularly affected. Her latest book, 21st Century Boys, looks at why and what we can do about it.
The rapid expansion of the “electronic village” is a two-fold problem for boys, firstly because they seem more drawn to screens when they, even more than girls, need robust, outdoor play. Secondly, spending hours in the virtual world exacerbates their natural inclination to be less social than girls. As Palmer canvassed a group of 10 year olds for their views, one reply epitomised the life of a “battery boy”.
“What do you like about being a 21st century boy?” she asked. “Oh, it’s great,” answered one. “I can sit in my room and watch TV or play computer games and if I’m hungry I text my mum and she brings me up a pizza!”
Palmer’s advice to parents of young boys is: “Get them running about – at school ask about PE and music. Boys need to sing and move to music.”
She recalls how a Finnish teacher told her: “Music trains the mind to pattern and the ears to sound – good for the boys.”
Feminisation of education has made the system less tolerant of boys.
“Women are more naturally risk adverse and in a built-up environment, as we increasingly put children into nurseries which often have very little outdoor space, we are increasingly saying to children that they mustn’t run and scream and shout and disturb the neighbours.
“We are far less tolerant of what I think is natural boyish behaviour, which they need to do. It is to do with their natural development.
“So we have to start looking at ourselves,” she stresses. “Boys haven’t changed, it’s us.”
Girls, who are naturally more social and compliant, flourish as schools become less boy-friendly. “I don’t know whether that is because girls are getting cleverer or the boys are just getting pushed out,” says Palmer, who is now researching a book on 21st century girls.
Currently at the “Post-it notes stage”, she is due to deliver the book in December next year. Issues emerging include a big increase in girl violence over the past three years, early sexualisation and the need for perfection among middle-class girls.
“She has not only got to be pretty, beautifully turned out and stick thin, but she has got to have a bucket-load of A stars. It is a really high-pressurised existence for some girls – for all girls really.”
21st Century Boys: How Modern Life is Driving Them Off the Rails and How We can Get Them Backby Sue Palmer is published by Orion Books. £14.99 in the UK
Jedward: 'it's infantilisation of the absolutely ultimate kind'
“Tragic. Awful. It’s infantilisation of the absolutely ultimate kind.” Sue Palmer struggles to find the right words to describe the Jedward phenomenon.
"They look like three year olds with their hair stuck up on end and their nappy trousers," she says of John and Edward Grimes from Lucan, Co Dublin, the 18-year-old twins who were on The X Factor. "They may feel it is about making money and being famous, but this is doing all sorts of damage to how we look at ourselves," she argues.
“Because we don’t let our kids play anymore, we have to watch other people playing for us. As adults that is not such a problem, but for children their physical, emotional, social, cognitive and creative development depends on opportunities to play.”
She is more upset by Britain's Got Talentwhich, she says, put children up on screen to be booed and laughed at and then we watch them cry. "That in itself is symptomatic of a rather sick society."
Children have always liked to put on shows, she acknowledges, but the normal thing was events such as a ballet display or a village talent show.
"That's great because they love to show off, and people who watch them know them and then they go home to bed. But when we are putting them on TV and turning them into a freak show, and that is sadly what The X Factorhas become, I find it very disturbing.
“The conviction is that the thing that matters is the fame. No, the play’s the thing and we ought to get back to doing it ourselves in real life rather than just watching other people do it for money – it’s not even money for themselves, it’s probably money for Simon Cowell!
“We all know don’t we?” she adds. “I watch it occasionally in fascination – I know what’s going on, I know it’s bad, but it just keeps pulling us along, and we’re idiots!”
