It is one of life's little ironies that, just as neuroscience has confirmed the huge importance of attachment in early learning, the people who once selflessly took on the role of faithful assistants to each generation are no longer available to do the job. Women, released from their traditional roles as helpmates and home-makers, have now left home in their millions to join men in the workplace.It's not been easy for them. Many have found themselves dreadfully torn between the competing demands of work and childcare - even Madonna once got quite tearful about it in a television interview. On the one hand, there's the huge cultural pull of economic freedom and self-realisation, the ultimate prize of success and status in a man's world after millennia of unsung martyrdom. On the other, there's the deep biological urge to nurture one's offspring.Now that, after several decades of equal opportunities, some of the shine has gone off the world of work, a majority of women surveyed on the subject say they'd prefer the childcare option.
But work, as often as not, still wins the day. The British economy has now adjusted to women's independence and the cost of living has gone up to take account of their earnings. Taking several years off the career ladder and/or losing several years' pay is a luxury many mothers no longer feel they can afford. In the space of a couple of decades, a huge daycare industry has grown up to fill the childcare gap. And much of that industry consists of institutional care.
There is a world of difference between personal loving attention in a familiar domestic environment and the sort of care that can be provided by a day nursery for children under 3. Unless staff ratios are extremely high, there's little chance of much one-on-one attention and no one is likely to be as attuned to a particular infant's wavelength as his or her own dedicated carer.
What's more, in the UK where many private nurseries are run on a shoestring, staff are often low-paid and poorly qualified, and there may be a worryingly high turnover. To ensure a baseline of "good practice", the Government has introduced a legal framework of accountability procedures, which means that nursery workers are kept busy with bureaucracy and box-ticking. This eats into the time available for personal interaction with the children and lowers morale, leading to more staff absences and problems with turnover.
Official reports have repeatedly assured parents that nursery care doesn't damage children's chances of success at school - in the case of children from poorer backgrounds, it may even improve school performance, at least in the short term. But scores on school tests are not the only measure of wellbeing in early childhood.
Indeed, focusing on the academic at this stage seems rather to miss the point: long-term academic success, like long-term emotional resilience and social competence, is rooted in a young child's sense that he is loved and secure. There has so far been little research into the emotional effects of institutionalised early care, but what there is gives cause for concern.
Government researchers have noticed a "small but significant difference in a large group of children" for whom daycare led to "withdrawn, compliant or sad" behaviour or to higher levels of aggression. This suggests that the children concerned are under stress and recent projects measuring levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) in their brains during and after the nursery day confirm this. Even in some children who are quietly well behaved and causing no concern to staff, hormone levels indicate more stress than a small human brain should have to cope with, and these levels remain high even after the child has gone home. Children whose brains have been marinated in cortisol at an impressionable age are at a higher risk of emotional and social problems as the years go by.
More and more authorities on early childcare are now speaking out on the subject. The internationally respected psychologist Steve Biddulph, whose book Raising Boys has been a vade mecum for parents and teachers for more than a decade, recently published Raising Babies: Should Under 3s go to Nursery? In it he warns parents and politicians that we're in danger of rearing "a colder, sadder, more stressed and aggressive generation of children" and that "quality nursery care for young children doesn't exist. It is a fantasy of the glossy magazines."
To provide the best start in life for a boy, his parents have to provide the personal care he needs in a way that fits with a 21st-century lifestyle. They may be able to juggle their lives to look after him themselves, by job-sharing or working from home, or by one taking time away from work for domestic duties. Or they might find someone else to become an extra “attachment figure - perhaps another family member, a trusted childminder, or a work colleague who'd like to share both job and child-rearing responsibilities.
Once it's established that the best sort of care is personal, there are a wide range of possible solutions.
But adults need person-to-person contact too, and everyone caring for a small child needs a support system, to avoid mental meltdown. We take great pains in our systemised society to prepare women for the physical aspects of pregnancy and childbirth, but very few to help with their social and emotional needs after the birth.In a 21st-century world, this social face of child-rearing has practically disappeared. For both men and women, social life has gravitated over the past 30 years away from the domestic sphere to the workplace, reflecting women's move into men's traditional domain.
It's also become increasingly competitive, with everyone very aware of how others might judge them (is my house spotless enough? Am I a sufficiently yummy mummy?).
It's becoming clear that in order to reinstate traditional feminine strengths (whether demonstrated by men or women), we have to develop a more collaborative, less judgmental social life around the raising of children. In 2007, the National Childbirth Trust, which had previously concentrated mainly on preparing mothers and fathers for childbirth, extended its scope to include supporting parents, and helping them to support each other, in the months and years after the birth. It would be relatively easy for locally based organisations - children's centres, maternity units, local health centres and so on - to put prospective and new parents in touch with each other to create social support groups.
This would have advantages not only for adults but also for their offspring. Although boys don't usually show an interest in playing with other children until into their third year, they benefit from social mixing right from the start. It builds up immunity to childhood illnesses, gives a stimulus for new activities, and provides their scientific inquiring minds with more data on the human condition, including the very difficult concept of "sharing", which takes most boys a long time to acquire.
In the days of large families and close communities, this happened naturally. And in the long run the male of the species may learn as much about empathy from each other as from their adult caring community.In a world in which new parents often live some distance from their own family, it should also be possible to put them in touch with experienced older mothers and fathers, who could offer informal advice, reassurance and perhaps occasional babysitting.
Child-rearing wisdom has traditionally been handed down through the female line, and cross-generational contacts between both genders are desperately needed in the 21st century. In a fragmented modern world, it's difficult for young parents to make informal, non-professional contacts with other mothers and surrogate grandparents - but it shouldn't be beyond the combined power of the web and local children's services to match people of similar profiles who'd have a good chance of hitting it off and forging long-term relationships.
One thousand days. That's roughly how long it takes for a newborn baby, muling and puking in his mother's arms, to be miraculously transformed into a walking, talking little boy, bursting to break out of domesticity and into the wider world. If all's gone well in those thousand days, he’ll have moved far beyond his native Stone Age heritage.He'll have a growing understanding not only of the natural world and the fundamentals of human nature but also of his own technological age, and he'll have more than 500 words to help him to learn more and tell excitedly about his findings.
But it depends - particularly in the first 18 months - on personal care. In a society obsessed with systemised solutions, we've forgotten the significance of love in raising happy, balanced children. It's led us to accept practices which - in a healthy, wealthy society, after more than 50 years of peace and prosperity - are frankly shameful.I spotted an example recently when, walking my dog in the local park, I overtook three young nursery workers who were chatting animatedly among themselves. Each of them, like me, held a leather lead, but while I had just one dog on the end of mine, their leads divided into three strands, each attached to the waist of a tiny child. The tethered toddlers were safe, of course, and were getting some necessary exercise. But, as they milled about, bumping into each other, they were learning nothing but bewilderment and confusion. Their parents were presumably out at work, earning the nursery fees that entitled their offspring to less personal attention than my family dog.Something is seriously wrong with a society that accepts this as inevitable. As one harassed mother recently told a nursery worker as she handed over her toddler: "I don't have time to bring up my son." If boys are to receive the high-quality personal attention they need at the start of their lives, we have to find 21stcentury ways of tipping the domestic balance away from systems and institutions and back to personal interaction and parental collaboration. Because without the love, learning and language that comes from personal care, boys are more likely than girls to grow "colder, sadder, more stressed and more aggressive" with every passing year.
Argentine 17 yo with 7 Kids
Argentine teenager Pamela Villarruel poses with her seven children outside her parents' home in the town of Leones in Cordoba Province, northern Argentina, May 11, 2008. Pamela, 17, bore all seven children in just three pregnancies, having her first boy in 2005 when she was 14 and the other six girls in two deliveries of triplets in the following two years. Pamela and her children currently sleep in the living room of her mother Magdalena who supports them all by house cleaning. The father of Pamela's first son abandoned them, the father of the first set of triplets was forced out of the house by the family for beating her, and Pamela refuses to identify the father of the more recent triplets. Magdalena requested to have her daughter's fallopian tubes tied to avoid any further pregnancies, but was denied as Argentine law prohibits the procedure to be done on minors.
Avoid Kids For Happiness
NEWLYWEDS seeking to survive the difficult first three years of marriage should add boxing gloves to their wedding list - and delay parenthood, according to ongoing research at Iowa University.
Erika Lawrence, a psychology professor, has discovered from studying 164 couples that nearly a third of newlyweds are physically aggressive to each other. Pushing, grabbing and shoving are the most common tactics, she has reported in the Journal of Family Psychology.
Wives are a third more aggressive than husbands, she says. But while aggression is often thought to worsen over time, her study shows otherwise: newlyweds who are moderately aggressive (throwing stuff, grabbing, shoving or slapping) usually maintain a stable level of aggression. But highly aggressive couples who initially kick, bite or hit, develop more restraint, reaching the same level as non-aggressive couples by the third year of marriage.
"One potential explanation is that severe aggression is easier for couples to recognise as a problem than moderate aggression. They may be more motivated to change it," says Lawrence. It's also possible that severe aggression causes couples to withdraw from each other, leading to less interaction and opportunity for conflict.
Fisticuffs aside, Lawrence's latest piece of published research, funded by the US National Institute of Mental Health, cautions that couples experience a notable drop in marital satisfaction in the first year of parenthood. The decline in satisfaction is far more severe in couples with a new baby than in newlyweds without children.
More dismally, even couples who planned to have babies quickly suffered significant declines in marital satisfaction. And people who were happiest as newlyweds experienced the greatest drop in wedded bliss after their bundle of joy arrived.
The study of 156 newlyweds (104 who became parents and 52 who remained childless)does have some good news: Lawrence says that her research indicates that marital satisfaction levels rebound by the time the baby is 18 months old - especially in couples who had a strong relationship to start with.
"The initial adjustment of parenthood shakes the foundation of the marriage for a year or so. But as couples go through it, it's helpful to know that it's temporary."
Licence Parents
The case for forcing birth control on unfit mothers Minette Marrin
The Dutch are odd. They seem so moderate, so practical, so sensible - a nation of considerate egalitarian cyclists - yet they take their virtues to extremes. They pursue common sense to a fault. For instance, there are plenty of arguments in favour of mercy killing, yet few nations feel quite able to make it legal. The Dutch did, with enthusiasm, long ago. The same is true of legalising cannabis and prostitution.
Another example of this tendency emerged last week. Reports hit the blogosphere that a Dutch socialist politician, Marjo Van Dijken of the PvDA party (the social democratic Labour party), is putting a draft bill before the Dutch parliament recommending that unfit mothers should be forced by law into two years of contraception. Any babies wilfully conceived in that period should be confiscated at birth. Unfit mothers would mean those who have already been in serious trouble because of their bad parenting.
There is, I suppose, a grain of common sense behind all that, but Van Dijken has taken it to what seem like scary extremes. One imagines Dutch do-gooders on bikes, descending on all the imperfect mothers of Holland and bearing away their babies in countless bicycle baskets, like totalitarian ex-post facto storks.
In person Van Dijken sounds less alarming. She explains that the professionals who come into contact with families in difficulties all say the same thing. They see the same problems repeated again and again in certain families. It's obvious from when social workers are forced to take the first child into care that it won't be the last.
Dijken's idea is to try to prevent a new pregnancy in a family whose existing children are already in care until the situation has improved enough for them to be able to come back home. Two years might be a suitable period. If, after the suggested two years of compulsory contraception, the family is still not safe for children, the contraception order could be extended by a judge's review. "If there's a better way, a less invasive way, I will never mention my proposals again," she says.
If hers is not the answer to the problem, the question remains: what should be done about unfit parents? Children are increasingly being damaged by them. At the extremes, chaotic mothers who are prostitutes or addicts or mentally ill or just what my own mother called inadequate are condemning their children to the same miserable and disordered lives. Man hands on misery to man, as Philip Larkin wrote, and so does woman.
Less extremely, many children are also being damaged by parents who are not so obviously unfit, but still bad enough to do serious harm. On Friday questions by Michael Gove, the shadow education secretary, revealed that more than 4,000 children aged five or under were suspended from school in Britain because of their troubled and violent behaviour. Of the 400 suspensions of children aged just two and three, 310 involved physical assault and threatening behaviour. Numbers of exclusion in all groups under 11 are increasing, mostly because of uncontrolled or violent behaviour.
According to Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, nursery and primary schools are seeing more parents who have simply lost control: "It's down to poor parenting." Very bad behaviour at school at an early age is just the tip of a disastrous iceberg; hidden under the surface lies a future of illiteracy, unemployment, crime, broken relationships and unhappiness.
Even before children of unfit parents get to schools, their destiny is blighted. Increasingly scientists are beginning to understand that neglect retards cognitive development or impairs it – as with the extreme cases of children in Romanian orphanages, who have never recovered from the personal and sensory deprivation they suffered. Language skills and social skills not learnt in infancy may never be learnt; trauma will be hard-wired into the brain.
In plain English, an infant whose mother never reads or plays with him or her, who is constantly uncertain what will happen next and whether he or she will eat, or whether the mother will be enraged or demanding or high, is a child with a permanently damaged future. The cost of bad parents to such an individual is terrible, but it is also very high to the rest of society.
Given all that, it cannot be right for inadequate mothers to go on giving birth to babies who are destined to be damaged and to inflict damage on others. Equally, it seems wrong to think of interfering with a woman's freedom to have a baby. So we are left with the question of which evil is greater – interference with the mother's freedom or the damage to her child and to society.
As John Stuart Mill said: "To bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society." A moral crime, I agree. But Mill goes on to say that "if the parent does not fulfil this obligation, the state ought to see it fulfilled, at the charge, as far as possible, of the parent".
Taxing unfit parents, rather than temporarily sterilising unfit mothers, might seem more acceptable. But there are several glaring problems with this solution, too. Such parents won't have any money to tax. And besides, the most unfit parent of all is the state; in this country its nurslings are condemned to exceptionally high rates of illiteracy, poverty, crime and mental illness.
On Mill's argument, the state here ought to be taxed for the disastrous treatment of its "looked-after" children. A simpler way to reduce the number of damaged children would be to give parents incentives not to have more than two children; after two, benefits would be withdrawn and larger housing could be withheld.
It seems to me unfair to deny people any children at all. But it might be right to reduce the number to two. That would be fairer to taxpayers than expecting them to support families larger than their own and it might persuade genuinely unfit mothers that it is not in their interests to keep producing babies; they will be better off without.
Superboy
Rare condition gives toddler super strength
Liam Hoekstra was hanging upside down by his feet when he performed an inverted sit-up, his shirt falling away to expose rippled abdominal muscles.It was a display of raw power one might expect to see from an Olympic gymnast.
Liam is 19 months old.
But this precocious, 22-pound boy with coffee-colored skin, curly hair and washboard abs is far from a typical toddler. "He could do the iron cross when he was 5 months old," said his adoptive mother, Dana Hoekstra of Roosevelt Park. She was referring to a difficult gymnastics move in which a male athlete suspends himself by his arms between two hanging rings, forming the shape of a cross.
"I would hold him up by his hands and he would lift himself into an iron cross. That's when we were like, 'Whoa, this is weird,'" Hoekstra said.
Liam has a rare genetic condition called myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy, or muscle enlargement. The condition promotes above-normal growth of the skeletal muscles; it doesn't affect the heart and has no known negative side effects, according to experts.
Liam has the kind of physical attributes that bodybuilders and other athletes dream about: 40 percent more muscle mass than normal, jaw-dropping strength, breathtaking quickness, a speedy metabolism and almost no body fat.In fitness buffs' terms, the kid is ripped.
"We call him The Hulk, Hercules, the Terminator," his mother said.Liam can run like the wind, has the agility of a cat, lifts pieces of furniture that most children his age couldn't push across a slick floor and eats like there is no tomorrow -- without gaining weight.
"He's hungry for a full meal about every hour because of his rapid metabolism," Dana Hoekstra said. "He's already eating me out of house and home."
Liam's condition is more than a medical rarity: It could help scientists unlock the secrets of muscle growth and muscle deterioration. Research on adults who share Liam's condition could lead to new treatments for debilitating ailments such as muscular dystrophy and osteoporosis.
If researchers can control how the body produces and uses myostatin, the protein could become a powerful weapon in the pharmaceutical arsenal. It also could become a hot commodity among athletes looking to gain an edge, perhaps illegally, on the competition, experts said.
For Liam, the condition has one potential drawback: Infants and toddlers need some body fat to feed brain growth and the development of the central nervous system.Without adequate body fat, a child's growth can be stunted and the central nervous system can be impaired, said Dr. Erlund Larson, an internist at Hackley Hospital who is familiar with Liam's condition.
That Liam appears to be thriving, physically and mentally, is almost as amazing as his feats of strength. The product of a troubled mother who gave him up for adoption at birth, Liam was born with a suite of medical problems.
The fact that Liam was adopted by a physician assistant's family hundreds of miles from his birthplace -- a stable family with the knowledge and means to give him all the food, nurturing, horseplay and love he needs to thrive -- might be the most miraculous part of his story."God works in mysterious ways," said Neil Hoekstra, Liam's adoptive father.
Myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy was first documented in beef cattle and mice in the late 1990s, according to scientific literature.
In 1997, researchers at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore determined that Belgian Blue cattle, an unusually muscular breed, had mutations in the gene that produces myostatin. Those scientists also produced muscular mice by deactivating the rodent version of the myostatin gene, according to scientific journals.
The first human case was documented in 2000, in a German boy, but wasn't reported in medical literature until 2004. The condition is so rare in humans that scientists don't know how many people have it, said Dr. Kathryn R. Wagner, a genetics expert at Johns Hopkins.A genetic mutation prevents some people from producing myostatin. Those individuals can have twice the normal amount of muscle mass, according to medical literature.
In Liam's case, the myostatin his body produces is rejected by muscle cells. He and others with his condition can have up to 50 per cent more muscle mass than the average person, experts said.
The result of both types of myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy generally are the same: above average growth of skeletal muscles, incredible strength, a warp-speed metabolism and minimal body fat.
"Liam's never had any body fat," his mother said. "The only fat he has is in his cheeks."
The so-called myostatin blockade has generated tremendous interest in the bodybuilding community. Some nutritional supplements claim to block myostatin, but researchers have said the claims are not scientifically valid."If the myostatin protein is knocked out, muscles grow and rejuvenate much more quickly," Dr. Larson said. "It has potential for great abuse in the future as the new steroid."
For Liam's parents, the most pressing challenge is feeding the boy enough protein every day to fuel his body's high-performance motor. The wiry but muscular toddler eats six full meals per day and still struggles to gain weight.
Dr. Larson, the first physician to suspect Liam had myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy, said he was amazed by the toddler's strength. "He was able to grab both of my hands and nearly do an iron cross," Dr. Larson said. "This is not something that happens for most men, ever, and here is this kid with this kind of power." Larson said Liam's strength gives him a huge edge over other children, physically and in terms of self-confidence. "When you've got that kind of power and that kind of strength, the world is open to you," Larson said. "He's agile because he's so strong -- when you've got that incredible power as a kid you're going to try a lot more things."
Liam's father, a die-hard University of Michigan fan, already is dreaming big things for his adopted son. "I want him to be a football player. He could be the next Michael Hart," Neil Hoekstra said, referring to U-M's star running back.
Liam was born four weeks early and had a small hole in his heart. He also had eczema, enlarged kidneys, was lactose intolerant and had severe stomach reflux that made him vomit several times each day, his mother said.No one knew then that the baby was among the few people known to have myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy.
Dyna Hoekstra said her suspicion that Liam was physically different quickly intensified. Two days after he was born, Liam could stand up and support his weight if someone held his hands to provide balance, she said. His heart and kidneys healed within a few months, but it took 18 months before he stopped throwing up daily.
Liam's muscular thighs at 5 months of age gave him the appearance of a miniature Lance Armstrong. By 8 months, Liam was doing pull-ups and, a month later, climbing up and down stairs, his mother said.What really amazed his parents was the way Liam fell. "When he fell backward, he would land on his butt, but he never hit his head on the ground," Dana Hoekstra said. "His stomach would tense up and he would catch himself before his head hit the ground. You could see his stomach muscles. He had a little six-pack."
Liam has given his mother a black eye and once punched a hole in the plaster wall during a tantrum. "That's called attitude," his mother said.
After a series of stunning physical exploits, Dana Hoekstra's father -- retired Muskegon attorney Darryl Cochrane -- told Dr. Larson about the boy."Grandparents like to brag and Darryl was bragging about how powerful this kid was," Dr. Larson said. "I had to see for myself."
Dr. Larson said Liam exhibited phenomenal strength. "When I saw him I knew he had some condition," said Dr. Larson, who considered it "a wild longshot" that Liam could have myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy.After Dr. Larson observed Liam, the boy's pediatrician referred the toddler to the genetics clinic at Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids. Doctors there said Liam was well below average for height, weight and head circumference.
But they noted "significant hypertrophy (enlargement) by the Hoekstras. The diagnosis: Myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy.of his leg, calf and arm muscles as well as increased strength," according to medical records provided. The doctors at Spectrum said Liam likely inherited the condition from his biological father, who was reported to be unusually strong, according to medical records. An ultrasound performed on Liam when he was 14 months old revealed he had 40 percent more muscle than average, Dana Hoekstra said.
Liam's condition also caught the attention of Johns Hopkins researchers who were studying myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy.
A blood test determined that Liam did not have the genetic mutation that blocks all production of myostatin. Rather, he has the myostatin blockade, his mother said. His is one of roughly 100 known cases in the world, according to experts and medical literature.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins wanted to include Liam in a study of people with the condition. When they found 100 adults to participate, Liam was no longer needed. That was a relief for his parents, who did not want to subject Liam to the painful muscle biopsy that would be required of everyone in the study.
Dana Hoekstra said she was prepared to allow Liam to be part of the Johns Hopkins study if it could have led to new treatments for muscular dystrophy patients.For now, the Hoekstras are content to let Liam lead a normal life. They have no plans to take the advice of friends who have jokingly suggested they hire an agent for Liam to line up pro sports deals or modeling contracts.
"It's great that he's going to have some extra muscle mass, but I don't want him to be viewed as some kind of freak," his mother said.
Dr. Larson said Liam shouldn't be viewed or treated differently than other children."He's a normal kid. He's just got that lucky twist," Dr. Larson said. "It's going to be fun to watch him grow."
High Tech Kids
My 2-year-old daughter surprised me recently with two words: "Daddy's book." She was holding my Kindle electronic reader.
Here is a child only beginning to talk, revealing that the seeds of the next generation gap have already been planted. She has identified the Kindle as a substitute for words printed on physical pages. I own the device and am still not completely sold on the idea.
My daughter's worldview and life will be shaped in very deliberate ways by technologies like the Kindle and the new magical high-tech gadgets coming out this year — Google's Nexus One phone and Apple's impending tablet among them. She'll know nothing other than a world with digital books, Skype video chats with faraway relatives, and toddler-friendly video games on the iPhone. She'll see the world a lot differently from her parents.
But these are also technology tools that children even 10 years older did not grow up with, and I've begun to think that my daughter's generation will also be utterly unlike those that preceded it.
Researchers are exploring this notion too. They theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.
"People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. "College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences."
One obvious result is that younger generations are going to have some very peculiar and unique expectations about the world. My friend's 3-year-old, for example, has become so accustomed to her father's multitouch iPhone screen that she approaches laptops by swiping her fingers across the screen, expecting a reaction.
And after my 4-year-old niece received the very hot Zhou-Zhou pet hamster for Christmas, I pointed out that the toy was essentially a robot, with some basic obstacle avoidance skills. She replied matter-of-factly: "It's not a robot. It's a pet.
These mini-generation gaps are most visible in the communication and entertainment choices made by different age groups. According to a survey last year by Pew, teenagers are more likely to send instant messages than slightly older 20-somethings (68 percent versus 59 percent) and to play online games (78 percent versus 50 percent).
Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and the author of the coming "Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn, has also drawn this distinction between what he calls the Net Generation, born in the 1980s, and the iGeneration, born in the '90s and this decade.
Now in their 20s, those in the Net Generation, according to Dr. Rosen, spend two hours a day talking on the phone and still use e-mail frequently. The iGeneration - conceivably their younger siblings -spends considerably more time texting than talking on the phone, pays less attention to television than the older group and tends to communicate more over instant-messenger networks.
Dr. Rosen said that the newest generations, unlike their older peers, will expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and won't have the patience for anything less.
"They'll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up," he said. "They should be just like their older brothers and sisters, but they are not."
The boom of kid-focused virtual worlds and online games like Club Penguin and Moshi Monsters especially intrigues Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist and associate researcher at the University of California Humanities Research Institute.
Dr. Ito said that children who play these games would see less of a distinction between their online friends and real friends; virtually socializing might be just as fulfilling as a Friday night party. And they would be more likely to participate actively in their own entertainment, clicking at the keyboard instead of leaning back on the couch.
That could give them the potential to be more creative than older generations - and perhaps make them a more challenging target for corporate marketers. "It's certainly no longer true that kids are just blindly consuming what commercial culture has to offer," Dr. Ito said.
Another bubbling intra-generational gap, as any modern parent knows, is that younger children tend to be ever more artful multitaskers. Studies performed by Dr. Rosen at Cal State show that 16 - to 18 year olds perform seven tasks, on average, in their free time - like texting on the phone, sending instant messages and checking Facebook while sitting in front of the television.
People in their early 20s can handle only six, Dr. Rosen found, and those in their 30s perform about five and a half.
That versatility is great when they're killing time, but will a younger generation be as focused at school and work as their forebears?
“I worry that young people won't be able to summon the capacity to focus and concentrate when they need to,” said Vicky Rideout, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which will release a sweeping survey on the technology and media habits of children and teenagers this month.
Children my daughter's age are also more likely to have some relaxed notions about privacy. The idea of a phone or any other device that is persistently aware of its location and screams out its geographic coordinates, even if only to friends, might seem spooky to older age groups.
But the newest batch of Internet users and cellphone owners will find these geo-intelligent tools to be entirely second nature, and may even come to expect all software and hardware to operate in this way.
Here is where corporations can start licking their chops. My daughter and her peers will never be "off the grid." And they may come to expect that stores will emanate discounts as they walk by them, and that friends can be tracked down anywhere.
"If it's something you grow up with, you have a completely different comfort with it than someone who has had to unlearn something about the world," said Mr. Rainie, of the Pew project.
It's not yet clear whether these disparities between adjacent groups of children and teenagers will simply fade away, as the older groups come to embrace the new technology tools, or whether they will deepen into more serious rifts between various generations.
But the children, teenagers and young adults who are passing through this cauldron of technological change will also have a lot in common. They'll think nothing of sharing the minutia of their lives online, staying connected to their friends at all times, buying virtual goods, and owning one uber-device that does it all.
They will believe the Kindle is the same as a book. And they will all think their parents are hopelessly out of touch.
Cotton Wool Kids
OUR ANXIETY as parents and efforts to bubblewrap our children may be putting them at more risk than we suspect. In a world of zero tolerance and risk aversion, many loving middle-class families have made their children's lives virtually risk- and responsibility-free. That security comes at a price.
In my clinical practice with children, youth and families, I am seeing a disturbing trend: kids from these good homes in safe neighbourhoods are so desperate for opportunities to grow up and have some age-appropriate adventure that they turn to dangerous and delinquent alternatives. They've never used a pocket knife. Never been allowed to use the stove or operate a power tool. They are told to stay out of the deep end of the pool, even when the lifeguard is on duty. They never ride public transport to school. All that protection ignores what our children need: manageable amounts of risk and responsibility to help them grow up.
When I ask parents about their experiences as children, they often talk about far too much responsibility, and reckless risk-taking. They also, if pushed, tell me they learned valuable life lessons from their near-misses, including the commonsense that they see lacking in so many young people today. While I'm against exposing children to excessive amounts of risk or responsibilities beyond their years, parents know the right amount of both gives children the "risk-taker's advantage".
Children who thrive need opportunities to challenge themselves. It's through these rites of passage that they, like our generation before them, learn responsibility for themselves and others, understand they have real strengths they can use, and come to know they can be trusted.
It's an odd paradox that today's parents (I have two teenaged children myself), feel so much fear when in fact our children are safer physically than at any time in history. Just because there are school shootings doesn't mean our kids are at risk. Just because a three-year-old is kidnapped in Portugal doesn't mean the children on our streets are in danger.
In fact, today, our children are far less likely than a generation ago to be the victim of a drunk driver, to smoke, to get pregnant early, to drop out of school, to be assaulted, or to die in a traffic accident. We adults lived in a far more dangerous world with rates of sexual activity as high or higher than that of today's youth, with more abductions, and more exposure to physical violence.
The change isn't because we've hidden our children in our homes and provided them video games, or are driving them to and from school every day. The increasingly safe lives of our children are largely attributable to the unsexy world of better public education, advances in emergency medicine and community prevention efforts. What that means is that the people who deal with our children pass criminal records checks and are better trained to be with them.
The danger now is that we fail to take advantage of the safer communities we've made for our kids. Instead, we are creating an entirely new set of problems for children: anxiety disorders are increasing among children, showing up in both children and young adults who are ill-prepared for the challenges of independent living, university, or work; obesity among children is reaching epidemic proportions, along with Type II diabetes and threats of shortened lifespans, largely the result of children being driven everywhere and coddled in structured activities that don't provide nearly enough exercise; and we are forcing some of our most-loved children to find adventure in the only way they can, through reckless self-endangerment, all in an effort to find the rush that comes with feeling a little older and a little more responsible for their own bodies and minds.
The problems that plague bubblewrapped children are preventable. While I'm a strong advocate for seatbelts, bicycle helmets and other safety gear, I hear from the kids themselves how desperate they are for a chance to use "dangerous toys" like pocket knives and the kitchen stove. And I hear them pleading to navigate their communities on their bicycles or walk to a friend's house. Sadly, parents are missing a valuable opportunity to coach their kids in how to stay safe while they're still young enough to listen and the consequences are most often small. I'd rather have my eight-year-old learn to ride a bicycle on a busy street with me at his side, than have him experience traffic for the first time behind the wheel of a car.
It's easy as a parent to say "No" and protect our children. But it's just as important we also say "Yes" and provide our offspring with the same opportunities we had to experience enough risk and responsibility to become competent, caring adults with contributions to make to our community.
Pre Natal Benefits
MOTHERS who exercise during pregnancy are helping to boost their child's IQ, according to research by American psychologists.In a challenge to the conventional wisdom that intelligence is 80% genetic, Richard E Nisbett, a psychologist and father of two, argues that recent findings point to a pivotal role for mothers. Fathers, whether absent or doting, have relatively little influence over their offspring's intelligence.In a new book, Intelligence and How To Get It, Nisbett highlights the important part the mother plays in shaping her childrens ability to learn and reason, starting shortly after conception. "Children whose mother exercised 30 minutes a day score around eight points higher on standard IQ tests than children whose mothers were more sedentary," he said last week. "Breast-feeding for up to nine months may increase IQ by as much as six points." Previous generations of mothers were encouraged to avoid doing much exercise after the first three months of pregnancy.
The latest research suggests that using light weights, stretching and even running can be beneficial to some, though not all.Official advice in Britain is that the more active and fit most women are during pregnancy, the more easily they will adapt to their changing shape and weight gain. It will also help them to cope with labour.In Hollywood, both Halle Berry, the actress, and Christina Aguilera, the singer, have talked about doing baby-friendly track exercise during their pregnancies.Isla Fisher, the Australian actress, said she would never undertake exercise for herself, as she hated it, but tried it for her infant, Olive.
Exercising large muscle groups increases the growth of neurons and adds to the blood supply of the brain,” writes Nisbett. Exercise and breast-feeding combined, he says, will raise a typical child's IQ to about 114, 14 points above average.Nisbett also argues that the way mothers talk to their children can help to increase their IQ. He encourages parents to ask questions to which they already know the answers and, if necessary, explain how they know them. This is said to encourage children to seek answers to their own questions.Nisbett praises middle-class families in particular for setting what he calls "anticipation exercises", in which children are asked to make predictions, such as where a submerged duck will surface in a pond.He also says that children who successfully complete a task should be praised for their hard work rather than be called clever, because hard work is something over which they have control.His ideas are catching on. In Texas, mothers are being taught how to create an "educationally rich" atmosphere at home for their children, especially during the summer holidays.
Nisbett says the choice of school also helps. He praises Kipp, or Knowledge Is Power, the fast-expanding private school chain in the US, which trains poor urban children and their mothers to study 12 hours a day and take only short holidays. Kipp IQ scores match those of expensive private schools.He admitted there is a thin line between mothers who artfully guide their children towards success and "helicopter parents" who hover over their offspring and suck all the pleasure out of their childhood. "But the mother is the most important IQ agent here. In families dominated by a father, there are higher mathematical skills but that's all we contribute, I'm afraid," he said
The responsibility is not welcomed by all mothers. Ayelet Waldman, a Californian author who caused a stir in 2005 when she admitted that she loved her husband more than her three children, said mothers were already under too much pressure.Waldman, 44, whose latest book, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace, is published this week, said mothers were under pressure to take part in their children’s education in a way their own parents never contemplated."Just remember . . . little you do to your kids damages them for ever," she said."Lighten up."
Taking Children
Scotland's most senior social workers have called for greater understanding from politicians, the public and parents in controversial instances where children are removed from the family home.
In the wake of several high-profile cases, involving parental issues with obesity, anorexia and learning difficulties, Fred McBride, from the Association of Directors of Social Work, told The Times that there was a need for a mature debate with politicians about what level of risk professionals could reasonably be expected to deal with.
Mr McBride said that a conversation was needed "in broad terms" about where the threshold for removing a child should be, so that everyone understood that when social workers intervened, they did so with good reason. "This is about more clearly defining it so that families, the public, the professionals, the politicians and the newspapers are clearer about what can be expected. That's what our conversation should be about - a framework for supporting decision- making," he said.
Mr McBride, who is the convenor of the association's standing committee on children and families, said that very seldom did his profession's work involve single issues. "So its extremely unlikely that social workers would intervene to the extent of removing children from home, for instance, on the basis of obesity.
"What's much more common is that we intervene to that extent on the basis that the health, welfare and safety of the children are at stake."
Everyone, he said, passed judgment on the issues which his profession had to deal with - from sterilisation of parents, closed-circuit television in households, to a belief that drug- abusing people whose habit was under control could care for their children perfectly well.
"There are all kinds of public and political views on these things. We can't be expected to operate, it seems to me, in that kind of very polarised sense of what's acceptable." In the absence of any consensus, social workers were blamed for under-intervention as fast as they were blamed for over-intervention.
Mr McBride, who was head of social work in Dundee at the time of the death of Brandon Muir - the toddler killed by his mother's drug-abusing boyfriend - said that official reports had shown clearly that the danger to Brandon could not have been foreseen. He said he regretted the "irresponsible" reporting in the press of these issues. "It is not just about being harmful to professionals and agencies, but is also harmful to the children. If it feeds a degree of professional anxiety and causes under-reaction in future by professionals, then that is as dangerous to children as over-reaction."
In addition, it led to child protection services being swamped with referrals, the vast majority of which did not require action, and when that happened "there is a real danger that we miss stuff".
"Newspapers in particular seem to want life to be black and white, right and wrong. They don't like us if we operate in the grey areas. But we do, we operate on the horns of dilemmas all the time. What they need to know is they are damaging efforts to protect children."
Mr McBride made a plea for the work his frontline staff must do. "It's the most incredible balancing act. It requires a huge degree of professional skill and knowledge, and a huge degree of courage and confidence.
"Some of the cases that frontline practitioners are having to deal with now are significantly more complex than I had to deal with 25 years ago. They are more complex because society is more complex. Things are getting worse. In terms of chaotic substance abuse, all the evidence suggests it is much more prevalent.
"In Scotland we are removing more children into public care than ever before. These children at risk are getting much, much younger. We are seeing many more children under the age of 12 and a significant number under the age of 5. Previously the optimal age of children coming into care was 14 or 15.
"If we continue we will reach a point where we run out of foster carers, and see a return to group care for the very young children that we saw 40 years ago — an orphanage situation. God forbid we return to that."
Mr McBride's views were supported by David Crawford, head of social work at Glasgow city council, who said: "We are forever between a rock and a hard place. The public expect us never to fail to get it wrong, never to fail to intervene, and on the other hand, equally never to interfere when that's disproportionate and unfair to families."
Mr Crawford said that the checks and balances in the system were not appreciated by the public. To remove a child, social workers first had to convince a sheriff that failure to intervene would leave the child seriously at risk. "This is not to deny that social workers are influential players, but we don't make the decision. Sheriffs, children's panels, sometimes they take our recommendations, sometimes they don't. Parents have rights and access to solicitors. "I know my social workers are subject to a far greater level of scrutiny than I would have got 20 years ago. It is a far safer system."
Mr Crawford said it was essential that people understood that social workers operated in a very complicated world. "What people also struggle to understand is the speed at which circumstances can change. One of the things that you will never get is a set of rules, because of this. Our workers are working on the finest of judgments."
Mr Crawford pointed out that being bound by confidentiality meant that his profession could appear defensive. "Because we can't comment on individual cases, there's a huge amount of information which isn't and can't be in the public domain. The public need to understand that if this was their child, they would not want to me to authorise a statement saying, let me tell you what's really going on."
French Parenting
When New Yorker Pamela Druckerman moved to Paris, she marvelled at the perfect behaviour of the children. In her book, French Children Don't Throw Food, she reveals the secrets of gallic parenting.
When my daughter, Bean, is 18 months old, my husband and I decide to take her on a little summer holiday. We pick a coastal town that's a few hours by train from Paris, where we've been living (I'm American, he's British). We have lunch and dinner at the little seafood restaurants around the old port. We quickly discover that two restaurant meals a day, with a toddler, deserve to be their own circle of hell. Bean is briefly interested in food: a piece of bread, or anything fried. But within a few minutes she starts spilling salt shakers and tearing apart sugar packets, then demanding to be sprung from her high chair so she can dash around the restaurant and bolt dangerously towards the docks. Our strategy is to finish the meal quickly. We leave enormous, apologetic tips to compensate for the torn napkins and langoustines around our table. After a few more restaurant meals, I notice that the French families all around us don't look like they're in hell. Weirdly, they look like they're on holiday. French children the same age as Bean are sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food or eating fish and even vegetables. And there's no debris around their tables.
And it's not just meal times that are different. Why don't my French friends need to end a phone call hurriedly because their kids are demanding something? Why haven't their living rooms been taken over by teepees and toy kitchens, the way that ours has now that I have twin boys as well as Bean? In a work of investigative parenting, I decided to figure out what French parents are doing differently. Here are a few basic rules.
1. Teach your children four magic words
In French there are four magic words: please, thank you, hello and goodbye. Please and thank you are necessary, but not nearly sufficient. Bonjour and au revoir - and bonjour in particular - are crucial. Making kids say bonjour isn't just for the benefit of grown-ups. It's also to help kids to learn that they're not the only ones with feelings and needs. In Britain and the US, a four-year-old kid isn't obliged to greet me when he walks into my house. He gets to skulk in under the umbrella of his parents' greeting. Part of what the French obsession with bonjour reveals is that, in France, it isn't accepted that kids can have this shadowy presence. The child greets, therefore he is.
2. Only give them one snack a day
In France, the gouter is the official and only snack time. It's usually at 4 or 4.30pm when kids get out of school. It has the same fixed status as other meal times and is universally observed by kids. It helps to explain why French kids I see at restaurants are eating so well. They are actually hungry because they haven't been snacking all day.
3. Provide a clear framework
The cadre, or framework, is a visual image that describes the French parental ideal: setting firm limits for children, but giving them tremendous freedom within those limits. Almost all the French parents I meet describe themselves as strict. This doesn't mean that they're constantly ogres. It means that they are very strict about a few key areas. The point of the cadre isn't to hem the child in; it's to create a world that's predictable and coherent to him. French parents stress the cadre because they know that, without boundaries, children will be overpowered by their own impulses. The cadre helps to contain all this inner turmoil and calm it down. That could explain why my children are practically the only ones having tantrums in the park in Paris. A tantrum happens when a child is overwhelmed by his own desires and doesn't know how to stop himself. The other kids are used to having to accept non. Mine aren't.
4. Silence children with a look
Les gros yeux (the big eyes) is the look of admonishment that French adults give children. Many French adults still remember being on the receiving end of the big eyes. "She had this look," Clotilde Dusoulier, the Parisian food writer says of her mother. With both her parents, "There was this tone of voice they used when all of a sudden they felt you had stepped over a line. They had a facial expression that was stern and annoyed and not happy. They would say, 'No, you don't say that.' You would feel chastised and a bit humiliated. It would pass.
5. Let them know who's boss
When I talk to parents in Paris, what I hear all the time is "C'est moi qui decide" - it's me who decides. There's another slightly more militant variation, "C'est moi qui commande" - it's me who commands. Parents say these phrases to remind both their kids and themselves who's the boss.
6. Don't be good, be 'sage'
I often hear French parents telling their kids to "be sage". Saying "be sage" is a bit like saying, as we would in English, "be good". But it implies more than that. When I tell my daughter to be good before we walk into someone's house, it's as if she's a wild animal who must act tame for an hour, but who could go wild again at any moment. When I tell her to "be sage", I'm also telling her to behave appropriately. But I'm asking her to use good judgment, and to be aware and respectful of other people. I'm implying that she has a certain wisdom about the situation and that she's in command of herself. Underlying all of this is the idea that I trust her.
7. Just say non
French experts view learning to cope with "no" as a crucial step in a child's evolution. It forces them to understand that there are other people in the world, with needs as powerful as their own. French parents are more inclined to view a child's somewhat random demands as caprices - impulsive fancies or whims. They have no problem saying no to these.
A French psychologist writes that when a child has a caprice - for instance, his mother is in a shop with him and he suddenly demands a toy - the mother should remain extremely calm and gently explain that buying the toy isn't in the day's plan. Then she should try to 'bypass' the caprice by redirecting the child's attention; for example, by telling a story about her own life. ("Stories about parents are always interesting to children," the psychologist says. After reading this, in every crisis I shout to my husband: "Tell a story about your life!")
8. Do 'the Pause'
French parents don't have a name for the Pause; it's just common sense. But they all seem to do it, and to remind each other that it's critical. "Don't jump on your baby at night," says paediatrician Michel Cohen. "Give him a chance to self-soothe, don't automatically respond, even from birth." Could this explain why French babies "do their nights" (sleep through) so early on? It's such a simple thing.
9. Give kids as much freedom as they can handle
The French emphasis on autonomy comes from Francoise Dolto (a titan of French parenting and a household name, like Dr Spock used to be in America). "The most important thing is that a child will be, in full security, autonomous as early as possible," Dolto says in The Underlying Stages of Childhood. Giving kids a degree of independence, and stressing a kind of inner resilience and self-reliance, is a big part of French parenting. The French call this autonomie - autonomy. They generally aim to give children as much autonomy as they can handle. This includes physical autonomy, like class trips (in France, there are hundreds of different sleep-away colonies de vacances - holiday camps - for kids as young as 4). It also includes emotional separation, which encourages children to build their own self-esteem and doesn't depend on praise from parents and other adults. French parents seem slower to intervene in playground disputes, or to mediate arguments between siblings. They expect kids to work out these situations for themselves. French playgrounds are famously free-for-alls, with teachers mostly watching from the sidelines.
10. Allow kids to have their own swear word
Caca boudin (poo sausage) is a swear word, but one that's just for little kids. They pick it up from each other, around the time that they start learning to use the toilet. Saying caca boudin is a little bit of a betise (small act of naughtiness). But parents understand that that's the joy of it. It's a way for kids to transgress. The adults I speak to recognise that since children have so many rules and limits, they also need some freedom to disobey.
Getting Them To Eat
Of course French children like certain foods more than others and there are plenty of finicky French three-year-olds. But I have never met one who ate just one type of food. Their parents would not let them exclude whole categories of textures, colours and nutrients just because the children want to. The extreme pickiness that has come to seem normal in the US and Britain looks, to French parents, like a dangerous eating disorder or, at best, a wildly bad habit.
I suspect that it starts with babies. French parents do not start their babies off on bland, colourless grains. The first foods that French babies typically eat are steamed and pureed green beans, spinach, carrots, peeled courgette and the white part of leeks. Babies in the US eat vegetables, too, of course, sometimes even from the start. But we tend to regard vegetables as obligatory, vitamin-delivery devices, and mentally group them in the 'dull' category.
French parents treat their legumes with a whole different level of intention and commitment. They describe the taste of each vegetable and talk about their child's first encounter with celery or leeks as the start of a lifelong relationship. "I wanted her to know the taste of carrot by itself. Then I wanted her to know the taste of courgette," says my neighbour Samia. Like other French parents I spoke to, Samia views vegetables - and fruit - as the building blocks of her child's incipient culinary education and a way of initiating them into the richness of taste.
No one suggests that introducing all these foods will be easy. The French Government's free handbook on feeding kids says all babies are different. "Some are happy to discover new foods. Others are less excited, and diversification takes a little bit longer." But the handbook urges parents to be dogged about introducing a child to new foods and not to give up even after they have rejected a food three or more times. French parents advance slowly. "Ask your child to taste just one bite, then move on to the next course," the handbook suggests.
The author adds that parents should never offer a different food to replace the rejected one. And they should react neutrally if the child will not eat something. "If you don't react too much to his refusal, your child will truly abandon this behaviour," the author predicts. "Don't panic. You can keep giving him milk to be sure he's getting enough food."
One extension of the tasting principle is that, in France, everyone eats the same dinner. There are no choices. "I never ask, 'What do you want?' It's, 'I'm serving this,'" Fanny, a publisher and mother of four-year-old Lucie and three-month-old Antoine tells me. "If Lucie doesn't finish a dish, it's OK. But we all eat the same thing."
British or US parents might see this as exercising power over their helpless offspring. Fanny thinks it empowers Lucie. "She feels bigger when we all eat, not the same portions but the same thing." Fanny says that British visitors are amazed when they see Lucie at a meal. "They say, 'How come your daughter already knows the difference between Camembert, Gruyere and chevre?'"
She also tries to make the meal fun. Lucie is a seasoned chef because she makes cakes most weekends. Fanny says she has Lucie play some role in making dinner, too, by preparing some of the food or setting the table. "We help her but we make it playful," Fanny says. Once Lucie has tasted everything she is allowed to leave the table. French kids learn to linger over longer meals as they get older. And as they start going to bed later, they eat more week-night dinners with their parents. Eating together teaches the kids table manners, social skills and how to make conversation. There is no question of eating on the couch, in front of the TV or while looking at the computer.
I once saw a US couple convene a nervous meeting over whether their four-year-old can have a lollipop. But refined sugar does exist. And French parents know it. They do not try to eliminate all sweets from their childrens' diets. For a French kid, sweets have their place and are a regular enough part of their lives that they do not gorge like freed prisoners the moment they get their hands on any. Mostly, children seem to eat them at birthday parties, special times at school and as a treat. At these occasions, they are usually free to eat all they want. When I try to limit my sons' intake of candy at their creche's Christmas party, one of their caregivers intervenes. She tells me I should just let them enjoy the party and be free.
I think of my skinny friend Virginie, who pays strict attention to what she eats on weekdays, then eats whatever she wants on weekends. Kids, too, need moments when the rules do not apply.
As in most realms, French parents aim, at mealtimes, to give kids both firm boundaries and freedom within those boundaries. I'm not sure exactly when I started serving my kids meals in courses but I now do it at every meal. It is a stroke of French genius. This starts with breakfast. When the kids sit down, I put plates of cut-up fruit on the table. They nibble on this while I am getting their toast or cereal ready. They can have juice at breakfast, but they know that for lunch and dinner we drink water. At lunch and dinner I serve vegetables first, when the kids are hungriest. We do not move on to the main course until they at least make a dent in their starters - sliced avocado, tomato in vinaigrette or steamed broccoli with a little soy sauce.
My kids come to the table hungry because, except for the gouter, they do not snack. It helps that other kids around them are not snacking either. But getting to this point required a steely will. I do not cave in to demands for bread or a banana between meals. And as the kids have got older they have mostly stopped asking.
Retro Parenting
My parents once drove the family back from the south of France in a clapped-out VW, back seats down to make room for the handy double ceramic sink they'd picked up in Toulouse. I sat on the draining board, a toddler curled up in the rinser, with the others squeezed alongside in nylon sleeping bags. None of us wore seat belts. The car broke down. It started up again and kept going, but only as long as we didn't stop. This journey was not atypical, nor was the holiday itself (camping in an ex-army tent without an attached ground sheet). My parents were not considered bad parents or dangerous drivers. This was the 1970s.
Among people who survived 1970s parenting and are now parents themselves, there's a divide between those who look back and shudder and the 'it never did me any harm' mantra of a growing band of retro-rearers. Their views were confirmed by a recent study which found that, despite water shortages, inflation peaking at 23% and widespread strikes, 1976 was the best year to be a child in Britain, thanks largely to a heatwave and parents with more time to enjoy it with their kids.
Nowadays, with widespread frustration at state regulation, conflicting advice from parenting "experts" and the shattering of the old job-for-life securities, it's no wonder that 1970s-style parenting seems to be making a comeback.
It's now uncool to be seen to be too health-and-safety-conscious; far sexier to aspire to cycle-helmet-eschewing bohemia. The most popular play dates are with families that have perilously high treehouses, half-supervised by parents who don't ban toy guns ("Boys will be boys"). There's a yearning for risk and adventure.
I know parents who travelled across India on a moped, kids squished between them. They made it seem glamorous, rather than dangerous. One of the most laid-back - and happy - mothers I know recently bought her four-year-old a penknife. As Bear Grylls - the retro-rearer poster boy - says: "If you mollycoddle kids, you disempower them." There's a growing recognition that children, especially boys, have feral instincts that cannot be channelled by the chess club. Helicoptering over them doesn't help.
The retro-rearer mum is the antithesis of the tiger mum, although even she struggles to let go completely. Her primary concern is her child's happiness and she will let her child develop at their own pace, as long as they don't fall too far behind. (Maths tuition is complemented by heavy investment in guitar and singing lessons - she's got a hunch she's given birth to the new Florence Welch.) She views Ofsted as sinisterly Orwellian, although she will move house or find God to get the kids into an "outstanding" school - especially now the family has embraced the state sector because it can no longer afford private school fees. The dream would be a Scandinavian-style 'forest school', where lessons take place outside and curriculums are child-led. As Steve Jobs said, the future's in creative thinking.
You'll spot her photogenic progeny chaotically piled into a prang-scraped VW Transporter eating bags of Haribo ("Anything to keep them quiet"). You'll see them wandering around festivals such as Latitude and Port Eliot, half-naked, caked in mud, looking for parents who have been distracted by someone saying something fascinating about grammar and ukuleles in the Idler tent. Their under-10s all resemble the McCartney children circa 1978.
It's not the 1970s, thank goodness. Whereas real 1970s parenting was about putting the grown-ups first and letting the kids get on with it, retro-rearing is arguably modern self-conscious parenting in a different guise. We all desperately want to do the right thing, and the most laid-back parent today can only ever take a 1970s-lite approach, because what is acceptable, and legal, has changed.
Forty years ago, nobody would raise an eyebrow if you topped the cot with chicken wire to stop a baby climbing out - "It's for their own safety!" Now, you would have social services knocking on your door. Back then, 23% of pregnant women boozed regularly, according to a recent survey, and 77% of parents also smacked their kids. Again, not something we want to emulate, not when it's far more effective to confiscate their Nintendo DS.
The pressures on mothers are arguably greater now. If you're working, there's only so long you can nurture 'creative play' (fighting, trashing the house) without losing it and ordering them to watch telly so you can catch up on your emails. Perhaps we're also more conformist than we like to think. We may have a Jamie Reid Sex Pistols print on the wall, but we'll be bringing out the Union Jack bunting for the jubilee, and we have this crush on Prince Harry. As for our kids? Just as ungrateful as we were. They still roll their eyes when you ask them what they did at school. And they still moan on long car journeys, even though they don't have to share the car with a sink. They don't know they're born.
Abandon Babies
FOUNDLINGS? In 2012? Yes, mothers still dump unwanted newborns in boxes and steal away. Foundling wheels were an artefact of medieval times; but they reappeared in 2000 in Hamburg, where a lot of abandoned babies were dying. Now Germany has around 200 places where a mother can either leave her baby - heated 'baby hatches', usually with an alarm to summon a carer - or where she can give birth anonymously. They have taken charge of around a thousand babies, many of whom will never know where they came from.
Such refuges are "a last chance to give an opportunity to save a life," says Gabriele Stangl, chaplain of the Waldfriede hospital in Berlin, which runs one. But there is a problem: abandoning children is illegal. The German constitution gives citizens a right to 'knowledge of their origins' and fathers a right to help bring up their children. Both are breached when a mother gives birth anonymously. Baby hatches are tolerated, but operate in a legal grey area.
Ever since the Hamburg hatch opened, there have been arguments over whether to ban or sanction them. The debate intensified in February with the publication of a study by the German Youth Institute, which found that the anonymous services had lost trace of a fifth of all abandoned babies. Foes have long insisted that baby hatches do not save lives (neonatal deaths have not dropped). They compete with services that offer more responsible care, argues Terre des Hommes, a child-care charity. In 2009 the German Ethics Council, an independent body, said baby hatches and other anonymous birth services should be replaced by 'confidential child delivery' with a limited anonymity right. Since the Youth Institute findings such demands have grown louder.
That is not good enough, says Mrs Stangl. The mothers are nameless out of fear, perhaps of parents or partners. Many deny their pregnancy even to themselves; some who use the hatches are so desperate that they deliver their own babies. More than 90% of the women who come to her hospital seeking anonymity accept disclosure after counselling. But denying them the right to remain unknown would drive some away. Mrs Stangl would not go as far as France, which is relaxed about anonymous delivery (and has plenty of angry parentless children). She wants German baby hatches regulated but protected, and will fight to keep hers open.
Nature vs Nurture
To improve social mobility we must nurture the poorest in society. But nature will always hold some people back.
"Give me the child until he is 7 and I will show you the man." The maxim of St Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, is the cited rationale of Michael Apted's superb documentary 56 Up, now in the middle of its run. Apted has followed at seven-year intervals a generation of children born in 1956, which makes them part of the last wave of social mobility.
The things that everybody says about social mobility are all true. That's why everybody says them. But there are also some true things to say about social mobility that nobody says. As I watched the latest episodes of 56 Up, the pictures of Neil, Nick, Symon, Suzy and the rest of the gang made me realise what they were.
The first is a direct application of the Jesuit maxim. The Government's strategy identifies what it rather dismally calls the 'key drivers' of social mobility. The main determinant of social position at 19 is attainment at 16. Social position at 16 is, in turn, mostly determined by attainment at 11. And the main determinant of position at 11 is attainment at 7.
The key drivers, in other words, all point back to Ignatius Loyola, the patron saint of what policy nerds call the 'early years'. In fact, it goes all the way back. How children perform in tests when they are 31/2 years old is a strong predictor of how well they do at school years later. If social mobility were the only objective of policy it would make sense to throw the effort into ensuring that fewer children were gifted such wrong beginnings. We can skip the bits about the low-carbon economy because it's all about home.
The second truth that Apted revealed was in the pictures. The allure of the series is that we see each subject, seven years older each time, with the images speeded up as in a wildlife film. We witness the dissolving of beauty and the slow effect of time. It's oddly moving to feel sorry for someone just because they look older at 56 than they did at 28. The commentary invites us to conclude that these people are playing out a destiny rooted in class, but the pictures are telling us something much subtler than that.
In his envy-inducingly good book Nature Via Nurture, Matt Ridley explains genetic science by analogy with beauty. Human beauty, he says, depends on things such as face shape that are mostly genetic. But beauty is also about nurture. Exercise, diet, haircuts and horrible accidents all affect beauty. The society we live in sets a standard of beauty. It used to be that to be plump was to be beautiful and to be skinny was ugly. It still is in poor countries but less so in rich countries. And beauty, of course, fades. We see in the 56 Up children what looks like a hard life etched into their faces. Ageing is an ineluctable genetic fact but it varies according to the lives we lead.
The genetic aspect of human life chances is never mentioned in social mobility arguments. This is mostly because it sounds like a counsel of despair, as if the drama of a life has been scripted by the invisible author of the genetic code. But Ridley's point about beauty, encapsulated in his title, is that genes are not a blueprint of the future. The argument between nature and nurture, carried on in our time between professional exaggerators such as Steven Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould, is misconceived. Genes are not fixed. Nature too gets nurtured.
But, if there is no need to be scared of genetic arguments, it is true that hereditary inheritance places limits on the ambitions of social reformers. Thirty five per cent of all pupils go on to higher education but only 17 per cent of children who had free school meals do so. Someone who thinks genetic inheritance does not matter would say 35 per cent of every social group should go to university. But as we do inherit genes from our parents, 35 per cent is surely unlikely.
Social mobility is such a tough test for a government to set itself because the pattern of individual choices inadvertently makes it harder. In particular, we are all a little more prone to marry someone like ourselves than we once were. Of all the women of the 56 Up generation, 39 per cent married into the same social class. By the time women born in 1976 married, the number had risen to 56 per cent.
It is now more common than ever for poor dads to marry poor mums. The nature and the nurture interact and children from poor homes turn up, on the first day of school, less literate, numerate and articulate than their peers. There are exceptions to the rule, but as a rule, they never catch up.
Get Them To Try New Foods
A paper published this month in Developmental Psychology, the journal of the American Psychological Association, shows that children with prenatal experience of garlic were more likely to eat the strongly flavoured bulb than those whose mothers had not eaten it during pregnancy. The research suggests that mothers who want their children to eat a varied diet should do likewise during their pregnancies.
Scientists tested the preferences of two groups of children between eight and nine years of age. The children were given a meal consisting of a burger and beans they would usually eat, along with two portions of potato gratin, one of which was heavily flavoured with garlic.
"While all the children initially avoided the garlic-flavoured potato, the group that had been exposed to it in the womb ate a lot more than the control group," said Professor Peter Hepper. "Interestingly, when we gave them garlic in the second meal a month later, that group ate even more than they did the first time."
According to Hepper, this is the first time that researchers have been able to demonstrate a causal link between prenatal flavour experience and long-term food preference in later life. "Identifying safe diet is a key feature of our evolution, and we now think this begins in the womb - if the mother knows something is safe, this is passed on to the child in the womb."
It has been established that children can learn about taste by drinking amniotic fluid in the womb. This is how they learn to recognise their mother's milk. But eating a varied diet in pregnancy doesn't produce a child who will eat everything that is put in front of them. Hepper says prenatal exposure to certain foods merely "reduces resistance to novelty in flavours" - so there may still be rows at dinner time.
Raising Successful Children
PHRASES like 'tiger mom' and 'helicopter parent' have made their way into everyday language. But does overparenting hurt, or help?
While parents who are clearly and embarrassingly inappropriate come in for ridicule, many of us find ourselves drawn to the idea that with just a bit more parental elbow grease, we might turn out children with great talents and assured futures. Is there really anything wrong with a kind of 'overparenting lite'?
Parental involvement has a long and rich history of being studied. Decades of studies, many of them by Diana Baumrind, a clinical and developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the optimal parent is one who is involved and responsive, who sets high expectations but respects her child's autonomy. These 'authoritative parents' appear to hit the sweet spot of parental involvement and generally raise children who do better academically, psychologically and socially than children whose parents are either permissive and less involved, or controlling and more involved. Why is this particular parenting style so successful, and what does it tell us about overparenting?
For one thing, authoritative parents actually help cultivate motivation in their children. Carol Dweck, a social and developmental psychologist at Stanford University, has done research that indicates why authoritative parents raise more motivated, and thus more successful, children.
In a typical experiment, Dr. Dweck takes young children into a room and asks them to solve a simple puzzle. Most do so with little difficulty. But then Dr. Dweck tells some, but not all, of the kids how very bright and capable they are. As it turns out, the children who are not told they're smart are more motivated to tackle increasingly difficult puzzles. They also exhibit higher levels of confidence and show greater overall progress in puzzle-solving.
This may seem counterintuitive, but praising children's talents and abilities seems to rattle their confidence. Tackling more difficult puzzles carries the risk of losing one's status as 'smart' and deprives kids of the thrill of choosing to work simply for its own sake, regardless of outcomes. Dr. Dweck's work aligns nicely with that of Dr. Baumrind, who also found that reasonably supporting a child's autonomy and limiting interference results in better academic and emotional outcomes.
Their research confirms what I've seen in more than 25 years of clinical work, treating children in Marin County, an affluent suburb of San Francisco. The happiest, most successful children have parents who do not do for them what they are capable of doing, or almost capable of doing; and their parents do not do things for them that satisfy their own needs rather than the needs of the child.
The central task of growing up is to develop a sense of self that is autonomous, confident and generally in accord with reality. If you treat your walking toddler as if she can't walk, you diminish her confidence and distort reality. Ditto nightly 'reviews' of homework, repetitive phone calls to 'just check if you're O.K.' and 'editing' (read: writing) your child's college application essay.
Once your child is capable of doing something, congratulate yourself on a job well done and move on. Continued, unnecessary intervention makes your child feel bad about himself (if he's young) or angry at you (if he's a teenager).
But isn't it a parent's job to help with those things that are just beyond your child's reach? Why is it overparenting to do for your child what he or she is almost capable of?
Think back to when your toddler learned to walk. She would take a weaving step or two, collapse and immediately look to you for your reaction. You were in thrall to those early attempts and would do everything possible to encourage her to get up again. You certainly didn't chastise her for failing or utter dire predictions about flipping burgers for the rest of her life if she fell again. You were present, alert and available to guide if necessary. But you didn't pick her up every time.
You knew she had to get it wrong many times before she could get it right.
HANGING back and allowing children to make mistakes is one of the greatest challenges of parenting. It's easier when they're young - tolerating a stumbling toddler is far different from allowing a preteenager to meet her friends at the mall. The potential mistakes carry greater risks, and part of being a parent is minimizing risk for our children.
What kinds of risks should we tolerate? If there's a predator loose in the neighborhood, your daughter doesn't get to go to the mall. But under normal circumstances an 11-year-old girl is quite capable of taking care of herself for a few hours in the company of her friends. She may forget a package, overpay for an item or forget that she was supposed to call home at noon. Mastery of the world is an expanding geography for our kids, for toddlers, it's the backyard; for preteens, the neighborhood, for teens the wider world. But it is in the small daily risks - the taller slide, the bike ride around the block, the invitation extended to a new classmate - that growth takes place. In this gray area of just beyond the comfortable is where resilience is born.
So if children are able to live with mistakes and even failing, why does it drive us crazy? So many parents have said to me, "I can't stand to see my child unhappy." If you can't stand to see your child unhappy, you are in the wrong business. The small challenges that start in infancy (the first whimper that doesn't bring you running) present the opportunity for 'successful failures,' that is, failures your child can live with and grow from. To rush in too quickly, to shield them, to deprive them of those challenges is to deprive them of the tools they will need to handle the inevitable, difficult, challenging and sometimes devastating demands of life.
While doing things for your child unnecessarily or prematurely can reduce motivation and increase dependency, it is the inability to maintain parental boundaries that most damages child development. When we do things for our children out of our own needs rather than theirs, it forces them to circumvent the most critical task of childhood: to develop a robust sense of self.
There is an important distinction between good and bad parental involvement. For example, a young child doesn't want to sit and do his math homework. Good parents insist on compliance, not because they need their child to be a perfect student but because the child needs to learn the fundamentals of math and develop a good work ethic. Compare this with the parent who spends weeks 'helping' his or her child fill out college applications with the clear expectation that if they both work hard enough, a 'gotta get into' school is a certainty. (While most of my parent patients have graduated from college, it is always a telltale sign of overparenting when they talk about how "we're applying to Columbia.")
In both situations parents are using control, in the first case behavioral (sit down, do your math) and in the second psychological ("we're applying.") It is psychological control that carries with it a textbook's worth of damage to a child's developing identity. If pushing, direction, motivation and reward always come from the outside, the child never has the opportunity to craft an inside. Having tutors prep your anxious 3-year-old for a preschool interview because all your friends' children are going to this particular school or pushing your exhausted child to take one more advanced-placement course because it will ensure her spot as class valedictorian is not involved parenting but toxic overparenting aimed at meeting the parents' need for status or affirmation and not the child's needs.
So how do parents find the courage to discard the malpractice of overparenting? It's hard to swim upstream, to resist peer pressure. But we must remember that children thrive best in an environment that is reliable, available, consistent and noninterfering.
A loving parent is warm, willing to set limits and unwilling to breach a child's psychological boundaries by invoking shame or guilt. Parents must acknowledge their own anxiety. Your job is to know your child well enough to make a good call about whether he can manage a particular situation. Will you stay up worrying? Probably, but the child's job is to grow, yours is to control your anxiety so it doesn't get in the way of his reasonable moves toward autonomy.
Parents also have to be clear about their own values. Children watch us closely. If you want your children to be able to stand up for their values, you have to do the same. If you believe that a summer spent reading, taking creek walks and playing is better than a specialized camp, then stick to your guns. Parents also have to make sure their own lives are fulfilling. There is no parent more vulnerable to the excesses of overparenting than an unhappy parent. One of the most important things we do for our children is to present them with a version of adult life that is appealing and worth striving for.
When Does Life Begin? Debate
You're in a burning building with a 5-year old child and a canister of a dozen frozen fertilized human eggs. You only have time to save one of them. What do you do?
If you choose the canister, congratulations; you're not a hypocrite. You can feel proud of your ideological purity as you're carted off to jail for negligent homicide.
If you choose the child, good for you; you recognize that the life of a living, breathing, self-aware child is worth at least 12 times as much as the "life" of a tiny spec of organic matter.
And what's the cut-off point? What about 50 fertilized eggs? What about 100? 1,000? 10,000? If you choose to save the child's life over "saving" a whole freezer-full of fertilized human eggs, you're admitting that the kid is a human life, but fertilized eggs are not.
Of course, the response to this is invariably "that's a ludicrious situation that would never happen. It's not as simple as that!"
To which I reply, "You're absolutely right. It's NEVER that simple. Life doesn't work that way; pregnancy, and how to handle it, is the most private, personal, emotional decision a woman can make, and isn't subject to anyone else's value judgments. Which is why it's not something that should be legislated."
Under Parenting
As the school holidays kick in, parents everywhere will be launching into frantic schedules to keep their children entertained. From organising playdates to ferrying between endless activities, the pressure to be events manager for our kids is now greater than ever. But though it is clearly important for children to do more than sit around watching TV, experts say the temptation to hyper-parent can cause children to lose their sense of self reliance and independence.
Psychologist Madeline Levine, whose book, Teach Your Children Well, has just been published, argues that parents who do so much to 'help' their children are often doing more harm than good. "It's an exhausting cycle of constantly monitoring their work and performance, which in turn makes them feel less competent and confident, so that they need even more overseeing."
Levine's is one of a clutch of new books with stern names such as Mean Moms Rule, A Nation of Wimps and Sally Koslow's Slouching Toward Adulthood, which stress that we should be stepping back from our children, whatever their age.
Underparenting, not overparenting, is the new approach. Here's how to do it.
1 Don't be their entertainment director
Boredom is educational; it gives the brain downtime and space to think, and bounces the child into using their own resources and imagination. "If play is always parent-led - let's make a cake, let's do a jigsaw - then however much fun, it makes the experience slightly second-hand for the child because they have not had to do any thinking," Amanda Gummer, a psychologist and play specialist, says. "If we are always spoon-feeding them quality time, we are denying them the chance to develop their own decision-making skills."
2 Don't do their homework
Homework is designed to help children work out how to think for themselves. Legitimate parental help includes buying books, e-mailing them information or suggesting where to look, and pointing out possible mistakes in the finished product. "It tips into the overparenting category if you tell them the correct spellings or answer questions yourself," says John Dunford, an education consultant.
3 Limit activities
Research at Columbia University suggests that affluent children ferried to endless activities are far more likely to be depressed and anxious, yet 84 per cent of British parents still believe that a busy schedule is positive. "Children whose lives are built on a scaffold of activities are often high on adrenalin and find it difficult to undertake quiet pursuits that would encourage healthy development and cognitive skills," Karen Sullivan, author of Kids Under Pressure, says. "They don't interact as easily with others because they are always ready to move on to the next thing; they don't even have brilliant relationships with their parents because everything is timetabled and winding, lazy chat never occurs."
4 Make them buy their own Hollister T-shirt
Give the over-8s a realistic amount of pocket money (the average is £4.44 a week, rising to £5.65 for 11-year-olds and £8.38 for 15-year-olds, according to an annual Halifax Pocket Money Survey). Then let them make their own decisions and learn to budget. But it only works if they won't get those things any other way, Jonathan Self, author of The Teenager's Guide to Money, warns.
5 Bin the tutors' phone numbers
Tutoring is OK if the child has to sit a school entrance exam or if they are struggling in a subject and need a short-term confidence booster. But if your aim is simply to propel them to the top of the class or avoid looking like a slack parent, it can be counterproductive. You undermine their fragile confidence ("Mum thinks I'm stupid") and run the risk of turning them off learning altogether, says Janette Wallis, from The Good Schools Guide.
6 Make them walk
The sight of a four-year-old being pushed in a buggy, all hunched shoulders and gangly legs tangled in the wheels, is increasingly common. It is bad on two counts: it doesn't help them to achieve the government target of three hours' activity a day and it stops us communicating with them. "Generally from the age of 3 they should be walking," says Dr Pat Spungin, a child psychologist and trustee at the charity What About the Children?. "What message are we giving children if, every time they whine 'I'm tired', they get to be pushed along?"
7 Sibling squabbles are good
Do not intervene unless one child is constantly bullied or there are physical injuries. If you can bear to stand back they will learn about compromise, survival and the art of negotiation. "You'll often be surprised how quickly your children can work things out when left to their own devices," Dr Spungin says
8 Don't stand under the climbing frame
They may fall, but they probably will not because children are better than we think at risk assessment. "Parents - especially mothers - tend to intervene too early with a warning not to climb any higher," Dr Gummer says. "That stops the child making their own judgments. Assessing risk is a basic developmental skill that has to be learnt early." Studies show that children's physical skills and their brain's ability to organise and control their behaviour ('executive function') have significantly declined in 60 years: in one study, the executive function of five-year-olds in 2010 was at the level of three-year-olds in 1950.
9 Don't praise them for brushing their teeth
Too many scattergun positive words thrown about become background noise to a child and can lead to an unappealing sense of self-entitlement. Praise does not create self-esteem at all, Dr Edward Hallowell, author of Happy Child, Happy Adult, says. It's working hard on a task then succeeding that raises a child's confidence.
10 Put the camera away
By attempting to document every moment of our child's life, not only do we run the risk of creating the kind of narcissistic teenagers who take constant pictures of themselves for Facebook, we also risk pressurising children to perform for the camera. "It's a way of creating a Photoshop reality that puts a lot of pressure on the child to act in a certain way," Meg Sanders, co-author of The Madness of Modern Families, says. "You're also distancing yourself from reality. If you are always thinking, 'this is a moment I have to save', it's disengaging you from the action, and making you an onlooker rather than a participant."
11 Never set your own table
Chores can make children feel valued and important, but only if they are meaningful and useful. "Children like to feel that they are playing their part in family life and to be included," Dr Richard Woolfson, who recently carried out a survey of children's chores, says. Psychologists say the right chores create a can-do, industrious attitude in children that spreads to other areas of their lives. Have a rota of table-setting and toy-clearing for younger ones, and progress to more responsible tasks by the ages of 9 or 10, such as helping to change sheets and making their own packed lunches.
12 Don't rush in if they fall over
If every child could be brought up as a third child, life would be easier, Dr Spungin says. Parents have less time to rush to third children so they tend to dust themselves down after a fall and get on with it."When you make a fuss over children they get frightened and think that maybe it is worse than they thought," she adds. "You want to create the kind of child who can pick themselves up, assess how bad it is and whether it's worth crying or not, and to ask for help if they need it."
13 Never peel a grape
Indulging fussy eaters by picking pith off an orange or cutting every last trace of fat off a piece of ham will just result in them finding new things to complain about. Fighting over food is rarely about the food itself; it's a power game with an overanxious parent. Pretend that you don't care what they eat, talk about anything other than food at the table and clear away without comment - and without offering any other food, Karen Doherty, co-author of Seven Secrets of Successful Parenting, says.
14 Don't put a ten-year-old to bed
It's tempting to keep the old routines but Sullivan says that "you should always be testing the water a little, to see what they are capable of doing. Last year, my six-year-old son had a friend for a sleepover. After their bath, the little boy got out, dried himself with unbelievable efficiency, folded his towel, put on his pyjamas and then folded his dirty clothes and put them in his bag. My son stood like a starfish - arms and legs out - waiting to be dried. Given the chance, children can shine at doing things for themselves and make our lives easier in the process."
15 Don't answer for them
Parents of a shy child will often take over the child's conversations to protect them from having to do what they fear most, but that means they don't get a chance to practise their social skills. Step back, Anthony Gunn, a psychologist and author of Raising Confident Happy Children, says. If they're reluctant to talk to or even to greet adults, start a conversation yourself (briefing the other adult beforehand) and draw the child in. "Even if he says one word, it's fine - it's all about taking small steps."
16 Don't spoon-feed them if they can use cutlery
Though it's tempting to make a reluctant child eat by making train noises or distracting them while you shovel food into their mouth, it risks turning food into a battleground."If they haven't eaten, you just have to bite your lip and clear away after 10 or 15 minutes," Hollie Smith, author of Dealing with Difficult Eaters, says. "Small children require less food than you might realise: they might not eat much for a couple of days but over two weeks you'll see that they are getting what they need."
17 No phonics until school
Learning to read is probably the most anxiety-inducing thing that children do, with some phonics books now aimed at three-year-olds. "Introducing synthetic phonics to two, three and four-year-olds is a disaster," Dr Richard House, a lecturer at the University of Roehampton, says. "If you start before they are developmentally ready they will experience failure, and their natural love of learning will get lost." Studies in areas that leave the teaching of reading to later , such as Germany and Scandinavia, repeatedly show that they end up with keener adolescent readers.
18 Let them make their own friends
Engineering playdates is fine when children are too young to find their own friends, but by 7, parents should step back, Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, author of Making Sense of your Child's Friendships, says. "They will make mistakes but only then will they find out who they are compatible with." Children whose parents preselect their friends generally end up with disastrous choices at secondary school because they have never learnt to negotiate their own path.
19 Don't bother with educational toys
Children of 3 and 4 can learn just as much by repeatedly taking the lid on and off a shoebox as they can from all-singing, flashing 'educational' toys, Krister Svensson, of the International Toy Research Centre in Stockholm, says. His finding was backed up by Professor Lydia Plowman, at the University of Stirling, who found that hothousing toys aimed at toddlers, such as mini-laptops or games consoles, were no better at teaching basic skills than traditional toys.
20 You don't have to listen to them all the time
We are taught to hang on their every word to avoid crushing their fragile egos, but small children can sometimes be intensely boring, Nigel Latta, a clinical psychologist in New Zealand, says. "That you get bored with your kids from time to time is normal. As long you spend some time properly listening to them, it's fine to tell them at other times that you need a break and that they should go off and play."
The Bragging Wars
MOMMY BLOGGERS (and their daddy counterparts, too) agree about almost nothing. Some favor co-sleeping; others do not. Some favor banning video games; others do not. Similar disputes surround breast-feeding, vaccines, cursing and whether it’s O.K. to force-feed your child broccoli.
But a rare consensus has emerged on at least one topic. What subject could possibly be so clear-cut it has elicited once-in-a-generation unanimity?
That parents should stop bragging about their children.
That’s right, apparently the civil rights issue of our age is that you have the right to remain silent — and I have the right not to hear about — how your daughter learned to read at 16 months, your son scored 12 goals in the soccer game, and your darling got into Brown, his first choice! (All these example were taken from actual, antibragging diatribes.)
Consider these headlines from recent months. BabyCenter: “I Hate Hearing About Your Gifted Child.” Café Mom: “8 Most Ridiculous Things Moms Brag About.” WebMD: “How to Handle Parents Who Brag About Their Kids.” Yahoo! Voices: “Are You Sick of Being One-Upped by Fellow Moms?” Berkeley Parents Network: “My Friends’ Saintly Kids.”
Don’t get me wrong. I get the annoyance. A friend of my wife’s once boasted about her daughter’s high Apgar score. But I’ve also heard plenty of parental brags that seemed not only justified, but downright heartwarming: the tone-deaf parent marveling at a child who can sing; the parent who never went to college proud that a child got a scholarship; the harried mother of three grateful that an older sibling is acting sweet toward a newborn.
Parenting is tough enough; can’t you take a victory lap every now and then?
So why has this otherwise minor corner of family life elicited such strong feelings? Part of it may be that we live in an era when many children scurry from pottery class to gymnastics to the chess club. With more activities come more chances for scores, ribbons and gold stars. Also, with Facebook, Facetime, Twitter and the like, there are more outlets for showing off. “Let me just snap a picture of that trophy you got for taking your first poop!”
Whatever the reason, the time seems ripe for a truce in the bragging wars. I set out to devise some guidelines for acceptable chest-thumping.
1. Brag about how good a child you have, not how good a parent you are. Adriana Trigiani, the best-selling author of “Big Stone Gap” and “The Shoemaker’s Wife,” says she’s most annoyed when parents trumpet their child-rearing skills instead of their good fortune. “I’ve noticed when parents brag, it’s usually a reflection of their wonderful parenting skills and not their child’s natural abilities,” she said. “When I see people like Donald Trump on TV taking full credit for how his children turned out, that’s the kind of bragging that gets under people’s skin.”
2. Brag about effort, not accomplishment. One of the signature parenting ideas of the last few years — praise effort not achievement — applies equally well to boasting. Brad Meltzer, who wrote “The Fifth Assassin” and two nonfiction books about children, says he doesn’t mind if parents talk about their children’s passions. “If you say, ‘My kid loves reading,’ that’s O.K.,” he said. “If you say, ‘My kid is the best reader in his grade,’ I start the hate machine.” He added: “It’s the difference between murder and manslaughter. It’s all in the intent.”
3. Brag in context. Mr. Meltzer says he generally doesn’t mind if parents brag, as long as they don’t pretend they’re Stepford parents and their children are little angels. “I want to hear the bragging in the context of real, gritty, poopy life,” he said. “If you’re trying to sell me your perfect life, the hate machine starts humming again.”
4. Follow “the bragging formula.” Another common piece of advice — each time you criticize someone, you should give multiple compliments — applies equally well in reverse. Each boast about a child should come surrounded by three negatives. My son is on the honor roll (but still wets his bed).
Laura Zigman, the best-selling author of “Animal Husbandry” and “Her,” says that she welcomes such a bragging formula but is concerned that for braggy parents, even the counternegative might end up being boastful. As she wrote in an e-mail, “My son got an A+ in Sanskrit ... but he still can’t write his name in Mandarin!! #dummy!” or “His room is so messy he’s going to discover new particles of matter in it someday! #MIT-bound.”
5. Don’t brag about something everyone else struggles with. Ms. Zigman says that she doesn’t want to hear that you’ve nailed some child-rearing problem she hasn’t. “I don’t want to know what ‘healthy eaters’ your kids are,” she said, “unless you’re posting photos of your kids stuffing their faces with Cheetos and Oreos. If you post photos or updates of how much they love kale chips — for real — I will hide you from my feed. #childkalebrag”
6. In-and-out brag. Approach bragging as your child approaches cough syrup: If you must do it, get it over quickly. Ian Frazier, the author of “The Cursing Mommy’s Book of Days,” says he usually doesn’t mind when parents discuss their children. “The pleasure you take in something your kid does is greater than the pleasure in something you do yourself,” he said. But after a while, “my eye starts to droop.” Parents need to heed such warning signs, he said. “Ignoring them is the same as making a loud cellphone call about your hammertoe surgery on the train.”
7. Avoid double bragging. Ms. Zigman says parents are also not allowed to use their children’s lives to draw attention to their own past glories. Your child’s SAT scores are not an excuse to remind us of yours. As Ms. Zigman wrote: “Don’t brag about taking your kids on college tours if they’re tours of Ivy League schools and if you yourself went to an Ivy League school. That’s a double brag.” (“Was so weird to be back in Cambridge with my teenage son this weekend! Past and present colliding!”)
8. Bragging to Granny is allowed. Everyone agrees that boasting to your own parents is not just acceptable, it’s desirable. Mr. Meltzer says: “There is, of course, the Grandparent Exception. You can brag all you want to the child’s own grandparents. And grandparents can — and will — brag back. This isn’t a choice. It’s nature.”
9. Bundle brag. But even such intrafamily bragging has pitfalls. Ms. Trigiani, who has six siblings, said when speaking to her mother, she is careful to compliment her own daughter, Lucia, only after doing the same to all of her nieces and nephews. “I start with the oldest, and do it in order,” she said. “Oh, my gosh, Anna just read another book this week, and Matt won that swimming thing.” Only then does she toss in an aside about Lucia. Ms. Trigiani calls it “bundle bragging.”
“You bundle brag when you don’t want to trump,” Ms. Trigiani said. “When the whole family is doing well, then a light can be shown on one unit.”
AS A PARENT, I find the unspoken reason this topic elicits such passion is that the same feeling underlies both the braggers and the antibraggers: fear.
Most parents are quietly petrified that we don’t know what we’re doing or, worse, that we’re doing something ruinously wrong. As Ms. Trigiani said: “When a parent brags, part of it is pride. And part of it is relief, because this child is doing something wonderful in a world where a lot of bad things happen.”
Bragging about our children is a way of relieving our anxiety that we’re not total losers as parents. The opposite instinct, what we might call “reverse bragging” — “My kid’s more screwed up than yours”; “I’m such a bad mom, I never go to the playground without a martini”—comes out of the same place.
If there is to be a truce in the bragging wars, it’s because both sides want the same thing: reassurance that they’re doing a passable job at something that’s very hard.
Vitamins
Most parents’ ideas of giving their child the best start to life naturally centre on postnatal issues such as breastfeeding and a safe nurturing environment. Important though these are, many other factors can influence their offspring’s long-term future before they are born, and, indeed, sometimes before they are conceived. We have known for years that parents’ lifestyles, particularly whether and how much they smoke or drink alcohol, can affect a growing baby and leave scars that can stay with them for life.
But the role of essential nutrients — or lack of them — hasn’t always been so well understood. While any sensible would-be parent will do their utmost to improve their diet and lifestyle, most don’t take in enough micronutrients to fully protect their baby.
Research published in the latest edition of The Lancet has highlighted a worrying link between iodine deficiency and low IQ in children. The team behind the study found a direct correlation between mild to moderate iodine deficiency during pregnancy and lower than average IQ scores in subsequent offspring. This is an alarming finding given that a study five years ago and published in the same journal suggested that more than half of UK schoolgirls had some degree of iodine deficiency.
Then there is folic acid, high doses of which (400 micrograms a day) reduce the risk of spina bifida and related conditions. Since the early Nineties women have been advised to take a daily supplement from before conception until the 12th week of pregnancy, yet surveys suggest that most do not.
And why do so few pregnant women take extra vitamin D? Surveys in my practice suggest no more than a fifth do so, despite long-standing advice that they should. Although typically associated with rickets, nearly every cell in the body has a receptor for vitamin D and it is becoming increasingly clear that there is much more to its role than maintaining healthy bones.
Researchers are looking at vitamin D’s role in a predisposition to diseases as diverse as cancer of the colon, dementia, multiple sclerosis and diabetes (children born to mothers with low levels of vitamin D are more likely to develop diabetes, and supplements appear to protect them).
A University of Sheffield study has shown that as many as three quarters of women giving birth in spring have low levels of vitamin D; spring is the worst time of year for deficiency as the vitamin is made by the body when it is exposed to sunlight — and none of us gets enough over winter.
So what can women do about these three? There are no hard and fast guidelines on iodine intake during pregnancy, except that pregnant women should try to achieve 250mcg a day through their diet (be wary of natural seaweed or kelp-based supplements as the iodine content can vary tremendously and you may end up taking too much).
Advice regarding folic acid and vitamin D is much clearer — take a supplement, whatever your natural intake through diet or exposure to sunlight.
I don’t normally advocate multivitamin and mineral supplements but pregnancy, and the months leading up to it, is the ideal time to take one that has been formulated for the job (general supplements often contain too high a level of vitamin A).
There are a number of daily products on the market that contain the right amounts of folic acid (400mcg), vitamin D (10mcg) and iodine (140 to 150mcg), as well as a few other vitamins and minerals you probably don’t need.
Please bear in mind, however, that supplements are not substitutes for a healthy balanced diet. In general it is always better to try to meet your daily requirements through eating the right foods — for iodine that can be difficult if you are a vegetarian or don’t eat fish, and often impossible for vitamin D and folate due to the high intakes required.
What Mother Ate
A baby’s birth weight depends more on what their mother ate during childhood than during pregnancy, scientists have discovered.
The study of more than 3,000 women in the Philippines shows that, contrary to popular belief, calorie intake during pregnancy has little impact on the size of the baby at birth.
The nutrition that a mother received during her own infancy and even before birth appears to influence the size of her children more strongly. This means that our health is affected by our maternal grandmother’s diet.
Presenting his work at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Christopher Kuzawa, an evolutionary biologist at Northwestern University, Chicago, said: “There is quite a bit of converging evidence that the quantity of calories you consume during pregnancy does not have a big effect on the baby.” The findings suggest that women who are well nourished as children are biologically programmed to be more “generous” in delivering nutrients to their own offspring during pregnancy.
The study, which began in 1983, enrolled 3,000 pregnant women who kept notes of their food intake before the birth. Their children were tracked, with many now having families of their own.
The latest findings analysed the link between nutrition and the birth weights of 225 third-generation children. The strongest predictor for birth weight was the mother’s nutrition early in life, including what a baby’s grandmother ate during pregnancy.
In a second study, the birth weights of 80 babies were compared with the mother’s body mass index and her leg length. Leg growth is sensitive to periods of poor nutrition, making it a good proxy for the quality of diet during childhood. The results showed that 15 per cent of the difference in birth weight across the group could be explained by childhood nutrition, compared with only 6 per cent linked to the mother’s BMI.
Professor Kuzawa said that a mother’s body was probably so good at buffering the supply of basic nutrients that within a healthy range calorie intake made little difference to the baby. “You don’t have to count every calorie to ensure that baby turns out optimal. You can relax in the sense that not every kind of dietary choice you make is going to have a deleterious effect,” he said.
The Over-protected Kid
trio of boys tramps along the length of a wooden fence, back and forth, shouting like carnival barkers. “The Land! It opens in half an hour.” Down a path and across a grassy square, 5-year-old Dylan can hear them through the window of his nana’s front room. He tries to figure out what half an hour is and whether he can wait that long. When the heavy gate finally swings open, Dylan, the boys, and about a dozen other children race directly to their favorite spots, although it’s hard to see how they navigate so expertly amid the chaos. “Is this a junkyard?” asks my 5-year-old son, Gideon, who has come with me to visit. “Not exactly,” I tell him, although it’s inspired by one. The Land is a playground that takes up nearly an acre at the far end of a quiet housing development in North Wales. It’s only two years old but has no marks of newness and could just as well have been here for decades. The ground is muddy in spots and, at one end, slopes down steeply to a creek where a big, faded plastic boat that most people would have thrown away is wedged into the bank. The center of the playground is dominated by a high pile of tires that is growing ever smaller as a redheaded girl and her friend roll them down the hill and into the creek. “Why are you rolling tires into the water?” my son asks. “Because we are,” the girl replies.
It’s still morning, but someone has already started a fire in the tin drum in the corner, perhaps because it’s late fall and wet-cold, or more likely because the kids here love to start fires. Three boys lounge in the only unbroken chairs around it; they are the oldest ones here, so no one complains. One of them turns on the radio—Shaggy is playing (Honey came in and she caught me red-handed, creeping with the girl next door)—as the others feel in their pockets to make sure the candy bars and soda cans are still there. Nearby, a couple of boys are doing mad flips on a stack of filthy mattresses, which makes a fine trampoline. At the other end of the playground, a dozen or so of the younger kids dart in and out of large structures made up of wooden pallets stacked on top of one another. Occasionally a group knocks down a few pallets—just for the fun of it, or to build some new kind of slide or fort or unnamed structure. Come tomorrow and the Land might have a whole new topography.
Other than some walls lit up with graffiti, there are no bright colors, or anything else that belongs to the usual playground landscape: no shiny metal slide topped by a red steering wheel or a tic-tac-toe board; no yellow seesaw with a central ballast to make sure no one falls off; no rubber bucket swing for babies. There is, however, a frayed rope swing that carries you over the creek and deposits you on the other side, if you can make it that far (otherwise it deposits you in the creek). The actual children’s toys (a tiny stuffed elephant, a soiled Winnie the Pooh) are ignored, one facedown in the mud, the other sitting behind a green plastic chair. On this day, the kids seem excited by a walker that was donated by one of the elderly neighbors and is repurposed, at different moments, as a scooter, a jail cell, and a gymnastics bar.
The Land is an “adventure playground,” although that term is maybe a little too reminiscent of theme parks to capture the vibe. In the U.K., such playgrounds arose and became popular in the 1940s, as a result of the efforts of Lady Marjory Allen of Hurtwood, a landscape architect and children’s advocate. Allen was disappointed by what she described in a documentary as “asphalt square” playgrounds with “a few pieces of mechanical equipment.” She wanted to design playgrounds with loose parts that kids could move around and manipulate, to create their own makeshift structures. But more important, she wanted to encourage a “free and permissive atmosphere” with as little adult supervision as possible. The idea was that kids should face what to them seem like “really dangerous risks” and then conquer them alone. That, she said, is what builds self-confidence and courage.
"Back in graduate school, the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids?"
The playgrounds were novel, but they were in tune with the cultural expectations of London in the aftermath of World War II. Children who might grow up to fight wars were not shielded from danger; they were expected to meet it with assertiveness and even bravado. Today, these playgrounds are so out of sync with affluent and middle-class parenting norms that when I showed fellow parents back home a video of kids crouched in the dark lighting fires, the most common sentence I heard from them was “This is insane.” (Working-class parents hold at least some of the same ideals, but are generally less controlling—out of necessity, and maybe greater respect for toughness.) That might explain why there are so few adventure playgrounds left around the world, and why a newly established one, such as the Land, feels like an act of defiance.
If a 10-year-old lit a fire at an American playground, someone would call the police and the kid would be taken for counseling. At the Land, spontaneous fires are a frequent occurrence. The park is staffed by professionally trained “playworkers,” who keep a close eye on the kids but don’t intervene all that much. Claire Griffiths, the manager of the Land, describes her job as “loitering with intent.” Although the playworkers almost never stop the kids from what they’re doing, before the playground had even opened they’d filled binders with “risk benefits assessments” for nearly every activity. (In the two years since it opened, no one has been injured outside of the occasional scraped knee.) Here’s the list of benefits for fire: “It can be a social experience to sit around with friends, make friends, to sing songs to dance around, to stare at, it can be a co-operative experience where everyone has jobs. It can be something to experiment with, to take risks, to test its properties, its heat, its power, to re-live our evolutionary past.” The risks? “Burns from fire or fire pit” and “children accidentally burning each other with flaming cardboard or wood.” In this case, the benefits win, because a playworker is always nearby, watching for impending accidents but otherwise letting the children figure out lessons about fire on their own.
Kids once took special pride in “knowing how to get places” alone, and in finding shortcuts adults normally wouldn’t use.
“I’m gonna put this cardboard box in the fire,” one of the boys says.
“You know that will make a lot of smoke,” says Griffiths.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” he answers, and in goes the box. Smoke instantly fills the air and burns our eyes. The other boys sitting around the fire cough, duck their heads, and curse him out. In my playground set, we would call this “natural consequences,” although we rarely have the nerve to let even much tamer scenarios than this one play out. By contrast, the custom at the Land is for parents not to intervene. In fact, it’s for parents not to come at all. The dozens of kids who passed through the playground on the day I visited came and went on their own. In seven hours, aside from Griffiths and the other playworkers, I saw only two adults: Dylan’s nana, who walked him over because he’s only 5, and Steve Hughes, who runs a local fishing-tackle shop and came by to lend some tools.
Griffiths started selling local families on the proposed playground in 2006. She talked about the health and developmental benefits of freer outdoor play, and explained that the playground would look messy but be fenced in. But mostly she made an appeal rooted in nostalgia. She explained some of the things kids might be able to do and then asked the parents to remember their own childhoods. “Ahh, did you never used to do that?” she would ask. This is how she would win them over. Hughes moved to the neighborhood after the Land was already open, but when he stopped by, I asked how he would have answered that question. “When I was a kid, we didn’t have all the rules about health and safety,” he said. “I used to go swimming in the Dee, which is one of the most dangerous rivers around. If my parents had found out, they would have grounded me for life. But back then we would get up to all sorts of mischief.”
Like most parents my age, I have memories of childhood so different from the way my children are growing up that sometimes I think I might be making them up, or at least exaggerating them. I grew up on a block of nearly identical six-story apartment buildings in Queens, New York. In my elementary-school years, my friends and I spent a lot of afternoons playing cops and robbers in two interconnected apartment garages, after we discovered a door between them that we could pry open. Once, when I was about 9, my friend Kim and I “locked” a bunch of younger kids in an imaginary jail behind a low gate. Then Kim and I got hungry and walked over to Alba’s pizzeria a few blocks away and forgot all about them. When we got back an hour later, they were still standing in the same spot. They never hopped over the gate, even though they easily could have; their parents never came looking for them, and no one expected them to. A couple of them were pretty upset, but back then, the code between kids ruled. We’d told them they were in jail, so they stayed in jail until we let them out. A parent’s opinion on their term of incarceration would have been irrelevant.
I used to puzzle over a particular statistic that routinely comes up in articles about time use: even though women work vastly more hours now than they did in the 1970s, mothers—and fathers—of all income levels spend much more time with their children than they used to. This seemed impossible to me until recently, when I began to think about my own life. My mother didn’t work all that much when I was younger, but she didn’t spend vast amounts of time with me, either. She didn’t arrange my playdates or drive me to swimming lessons or introduce me to cool music she liked. On weekdays after school she just expected me to show up for dinner; on weekends I barely saw her at all. I, on the other hand, might easily spend every waking Saturday hour with one if not all three of my children, taking one to a soccer game, the second to a theater program, the third to a friend’s house, or just hanging out with them at home. When my daughter was about 10, my husband suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult. Not 10 minutes in 10 years.
It’s hard to absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in just one generation. Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s—walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap—are now routine. In fact, they are the markers of good, responsible parenting. One very thorough study of “children’s independent mobility,” conducted in urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods in the U.K., shows that in 1971, 80 percent of third-graders walked to school alone. By 1990, that measure had dropped to 9 percent, and now it’s even lower. When you ask parents why they are more protective than their parents were, they might answer that the world is more dangerous than it was when they were growing up. But this isn’t true, or at least not in the way that we think. For example, parents now routinely tell their children never to talk to strangers, even though all available evidence suggests that children have about the same (very slim) chance of being abducted by a stranger as they did a generation ago. Maybe the real question is, how did these fears come to have such a hold over us? And what have our children lost—and gained—as we’ve succumbed to them?
In 1978, a toddler named Frank Nelson made his way to the top of a 12-foot slide in Hamlin Park in Chicago, with his mother, Debra, a few steps behind him. The structure, installed three years earlier, was known as a “tornado slide” because it twisted on the way down, but the boy never made it that far. He fell through the gap between the handrail and the steps and landed on his head on the asphalt. A year later, his parents sued the Chicago Park District and the two companies that had manufactured and installed the slide. Frank had fractured his skull in the fall and suffered permanent brain damage. He was paralyzed on his left side and had speech and vision problems. His attorneys noted that he was forced to wear a helmet all the time to protect his fragile skull.
The Nelsons’ was one of a number of lawsuits of that era that fueled a backlash against potentially dangerous playground equipment. Theodora Briggs Sweeney, a consumer advocate and safety consultant from John Carroll University, near Cleveland, testified at dozens of trials and became a public crusader for playground reform. “The name of the playground game will continue to be Russian roulette, with the child as unsuspecting victim,” Sweeney wrote in a 1979 paper published in Pediatrics. She was concerned about many things—the heights of slides, the space between railings, the danger of loose S-shaped hooks holding parts together—but what she worried about most was asphalt and dirt. In her paper, Sweeney declared that lab simulations showed children could die from a fall of as little as a foot if their head hit asphalt, or three feet if their head hit dirt.
A federal-government report published around that time found that tens of thousands of children were turning up in the emergency room each year because of playground accidents. As a result, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1981 published the first “Handbook for Public Playground Safety,” a short set of general guidelines—the word guidelines was in bold, to distinguish the contents from requirements—that should govern the equipment. For example, no component of any equipment should form angles or openings that could trap any part of a child’s body, especially the head.
To turn up the pressure, Sweeney and a fellow consultant on playground safety, Joe Frost, began cataloguing the horrors that befell children at playgrounds. Between them, they had testified in almost 200 cases and could detail gruesome specifics—several kids who had gotten their heads trapped or crushed by merry-go-rounds; one who was hanged by a jump rope attached to a deck railing; one who was killed by a motorcycle that crashed into an unfenced playground; one who fell while playing football on rocky ground. In a paper they wrote together, Sweeney and Frost called for “immediate inspection” of all equipment that had been installed before 1981, and the removal of anything faulty. They also called for playgrounds nationwide to incorporate rubber flooring in crucial areas.
In January 1985, the Chicago Park District settled the suit with the Nelsons. Frank Nelson was guaranteed a minimum of $9.5 million. Maurice Thominet, the chief engineer for the Park District, told the Chicago Tribune that the city would have to “take a cold, hard look at all of our equipment” and likely remove all the tornado slides and some other structures. At the time, a reader wrote to the paper:
Do accidents happen anymore?
Can a mother take the risk of taking her young child up to the top of a tornado slide, with every good intention, and have an accident?
Who is responsible for a child in a park, the park district or the parent? - Swings hit 1-year-old children in the head, I’m sure with dire consequences in some instances. Do we eliminate swings?
But these proved to be musings from a dying age. Around the time the Nelson settlement became public, park departments all over the country began removing equipment newly considered dangerous, partly because they could not afford to be sued, especially now that a government handbook could be used by litigants as proof of standards that parks were failing to meet. In anticipation of lawsuits, insurance premiums skyrocketed. As the Tribune reader had intuited, the cultural understanding of acceptable risk began to shift, such that any known risk became nearly synonymous with hazard.
Over the years, the official consumer-product handbook has gone through several revisions; it is now supplemented by a set of technical guidelines for manufacturers. More and more, the standards are set by engineers and technical experts and lawyers, with little meaningful input from “people who know anything about children’s play,” says William Weisz, a design consultant who has sat on several committees overseeing changes to the guidelines. The handbook includes specific prescriptions for the exact heights, slopes, and other angles of nearly every piece of equipment. Rubber flooring or wood chips are virtually required; grass and dirt are “not considered protective surfacing because wear and environmental factors can reduce their shock absorbing effectiveness.”
“Reasonable risks are essential for children’s healthy development,” says Joe Frost, an influential safety crusader.
It is no longer easy to find a playground that has an element of surprise, no matter how far you travel. Kids can find the same slides at the same heights and angles as the ones in their own neighborhood, with many of the same accessories. I live in Washington, D.C., near a section of Rock Creek Park, and during my first year in the neighborhood, a remote corner of the park dead-ended into what our neighbors called the forgotten playground. The slide had wooden steps, and was at such a steep angle that kids had to practice controlling their speed so they wouldn’t land too hard on the dirt. More glorious, a freestanding tree house perched about 12 feet off the ground, where the neighborhood kids would gather and sort themselves into the pack hierarchies I remember from my childhood—little kids on the ground “cooking” while the bigger kids dominated the high shelter. But in 2003, nearly a year after I moved in, the park service tore down the tree house and replaced all the old equipment with a prefab playground set on rubber flooring. Now the playground can hold only a toddler’s attention, and not for very long. The kids seem to spend most of their time in the sandbox; maybe they like it because the neighbors have turned it into a mini adventure playground, dropping off an odd mixing spoon or colander or broken-down toy car.
"According to the study, the new, safer equipment often became boring because children mastered it so quickly. To make it more challenging, kids tended to improvise, walking up the slide the wrong way, or using supports as a climbing apparatus."
In recent years, Joe Frost, Sweeney’s old partner in the safety crusade, has become concerned that maybe we have gone too far. In a 2006 paper, he gives the example of two parents who sued when their child fell over a stump in a small redwood forest that was part of a playground. They had a basis for the lawsuit. After all, the latest safety handbook advises designers to “look out for tripping hazards, like exposed concrete footings, tree stumps, and rocks.” But adults have come to the mistaken view “that children must somehow be sheltered from all risks of injury,” Frost writes. “In the real world, life is filled with risks—financial, physical, emotional, social—and reasonable risks are essential for children’s healthy development.”
At the core of the safety obsession is a view of children that is the exact opposite of Lady Allen’s, “an idea that children are too fragile or unintelligent to assess the risk of any given situation,” argues Tim Gill, the author of No Fear, a critique of our risk-averse society. “Now our working assumption is that children cannot be trusted to find their way around tricky physical or social and emotional situations.”
What’s lost amid all this protection? In the mid-1990s, Norway passed a law that required playgrounds to meet certain safety standards. Ellen Sandseter, a professor of early-childhood education at Queen Maud University College in Trondheim, had just had her first child, and she watched as one by one the playgrounds in her neighborhood were transformed into sterile, boring places. Sandseter had written her master’s dissertation on young teens and their need for sensation and risk; she’d noticed that if they couldn’t feed that desire in some socially acceptable way, some would turn to more-reckless behavior. She wondered whether a similar dynamic might take hold among younger kids as playgrounds started to become safer and less interesting.
Sandseter began observing and interviewing children on playgrounds in Norway. In 2011, she published her results in a paper called “Children’s Risky Play From an Evolutionary Perspective: The Anti-Phobic Effects of Thrilling Experiences.” Children, she concluded, have a sensory need to taste danger and excitement; this doesn’t mean that what they do has to actually be dangerous, only that they feel they are taking a great risk. That scares them, but then they overcome the fear. In the paper, Sandseter identifies six kinds of risky play: (1) Exploring heights, or getting the “bird’s perspective,” as she calls it—“high enough to evoke the sensation of fear.” (2) Handling dangerous tools—using sharp scissors or knives, or heavy hammers that at first seem unmanageable but that kids learn to master. (3) Being near dangerous elements—playing near vast bodies of water, or near a fire, so kids are aware that there is danger nearby. (4) Rough-and-tumble play—wrestling, play-fighting—so kids learn to negotiate aggression and cooperation. (5) Speed—cycling or skiing at a pace that feels too fast. (6) Exploring on one’s own.
This last one Sandseter describes as “the most important for the children.” She told me, “When they are left alone and can take full responsibility for their actions, and the consequences of their decisions, it’s a thrilling experience.”
To gauge the effects of losing these experiences, Sandseter turns to evolutionary psychology. Children are born with the instinct to take risks in play, because historically, learning to negotiate risk has been crucial to survival; in another era, they would have had to learn to run from some danger, defend themselves from others, be independent. Even today, growing up is a process of managing fears and learning to arrive at sound decisions. By engaging in risky play, children are effectively subjecting themselves to a form of exposure therapy, in which they force themselves to do the thing they’re afraid of in order to overcome their fear. But if they never go through that process, the fear can turn into a phobia. Paradoxically, Sandseter writes, “our fear of children being harmed,” mostly in minor ways, “may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.” She cites a study showing that children who injured themselves falling from heights when they were between 5 and 9 years old are less likely to be afraid of heights at age 18. “Risky play with great heights will provide a desensitizing or habituating experience,” she writes.
We might accept a few more phobias in our children in exchange for fewer injuries. But the final irony is that our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have. According to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which monitors hospital visits, the frequency of emergency-room visits related to playground equipment, including home equipment, in 1980 was 156,000, or one visit per 1,452 Americans. In 2012, it was 271,475, or one per 1,156 Americans. The number of deaths hasn’t changed much either. From 2001 through 2008, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported 100 deaths associated with playground equipment—an average of 13 a year, or 10 fewer than were reported in 1980. Head injuries, runaway motorcycles, a fatal fall onto a rock—most of the horrors Sweeney and Frost described all those years ago turn out to be freakishly rare, unexpected tragedies that no amount of safety-proofing can prevent.
Even rubber surfacing doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference in the real world. David Ball, a professor of risk management at Middlesex University, analyzed U.K. injury statistics and found that as in the U.S., there was no clear trend over time. “The advent of all these special surfaces for playgrounds has contributed very little, if anything at all, to the safety of children,” he told me. Ball has found some evidence that long-bone injuries, which are far more common than head injuries, are actually increasing. The best theory for that is “risk compensation”—kids don’t worry as much about falling on rubber, so they’re not as careful, and end up hurting themselves more often. The problem, says Ball, is that “we have come to think of accidents as preventable and not a natural part of life.”
The category of risky play on Sandseter’s list that likely makes this current generation of parents most nervous is the one involving children getting lost, or straying from adult supervision. “Children love to walk off alone and go exploring away from the eyes of adults,” she writes. They “experience a feeling of risk and danger of getting lost” when “given the opportunity to ‘cruise’ on their own exploring unknown areas; still, they have an urge to do it.” Here again Sandseter cites evidence showing that the number of separation experiences before age 9 correlates negatively with separation-anxiety symptoms at age 18, “suggesting an ‘inoculation’ effect.”
In all my years as a parent, I’ve mostly met children who take it for granted that they are always being watched.
But parents these days have little tolerance for children’s wandering on their own, for reasons that, much like the growing fear of playground injuries, have their roots in the 1970s. In 1979, nine months after Frank Nelson fell off that slide in Chicago, 6-year-old Etan Patz left his parents’ downtown New York apartment to walk by himself to the school-bus stop. Etan had been begging his mother to let him walk by himself; many of his friends did, and that morning was the first time she let him. But, as just about anyone who grew up in New York in that era knows, he never came home. (In 2012, a New Jersey man was arrested for Etan’s murder.) I was nearly 10 at the time, and I remember watching the nightly news and seeing his school picture, with a smile almost as wide as Mick Jagger’s. I also remember that, sometime during those weeks of endless coverage of the search for Etan, the parents in my neighborhood for the first time organized a walk pool to take us to the bus stop.
The Etan Patz case launched the era of the ubiquitous missing child, as Paula Fass chronicles in Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America. Children’s faces began to appear on milk cartons, and Ronald Reagan chose the date of Etan’s disappearance as National Missing Children’s Day. Although no one knew what had happened to Etan, a theory developed that he had been sexually abused; soon The New York Times quoted a psychologist who said that the Patz case heralded an “epidemic of sexual abuse of children.” In a short period, writes Fass, Americans came to think child molestations were very prevalent. Over time, the fear drove a new parenting absolute: children were never to talk to strangers.
But abduction cases like Etan Patz’s were incredibly uncommon a generation ago, and remain so today. David Finkelhor is the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center and the most reliable authority on sexual-abuse and abduction statistics for children. In his research, Finkelhor singles out a category of crime called the “stereotypical abduction,” by which he means the kind of abduction that’s likely to make the news, during which the victim disappears overnight, or is taken more than 50 miles away, or is killed. Finkelhor says these cases remain exceedingly rare and do not appear to have increased since at least the mid‑’80s, and he guesses the ’70s, although he was not keeping track then. Overall, crimes against children have been declining, in keeping with the general crime drop since the ’90s. A child from a happy, intact family who walks to the bus stop and never comes home is still a singular tragedy, not a national epidemic.
One kind of crime that has increased, says Finkelhor, is family abduction (which is lumped together with stereotypical abduction in FBI crime reports, accounting for the seemingly alarming numbers sometimes reported in the media). The explosion in divorce in the ’70s meant many more custody wars and many more children being smuggled away by one or the other of their parents. If a mother is afraid that her child might be abducted, her ironclad rule should not be Don’t talk to strangers. It should be Don’t talk to your father.
The gap between what people fear (abduction by a stranger) and what’s actually happening (family turmoil and custody battles) is revealing. What has changed since the 1970s is the nature of the American family, and the broader sense of community. For a variety of reasons—divorce, more single-parent families, more mothers working—both families and neighborhoods have lost some of their cohesion. It is perhaps natural that trust in general has eroded, and that parents have sought to control more closely what they can—most of all, their children.
As we parents began to see public spaces—playgrounds, streets, public ball fields, the distance between school and home—as dangerous, other, smaller daily decisions fell into place. Ask any of my parenting peers to chronicle a typical week in their child’s life and they will likely mention school, homework, after-school classes, organized playdates, sports teams coached by a fellow parent, and very little free, unsupervised time. Failure to supervise has become, in fact, synonymous with failure to parent. The result is a “continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children’s opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways,” writes Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College and the author of Free to Learn. No more pickup games, idle walks home from school, or cops and robbers in the garage all afternoon. The child culture from my Queens days, with its own traditions and codas, its particular pleasures and distresses, is virtually extinct.
In 1972, the British-born geography student Roger Hart settled on an unusual project for his dissertation. He moved to a rural New England town and, for two years, tracked the movements of 86 children in the local elementary school, to create what he called a “geography of children,” including actual maps that would show where and how far the children typically roamed away from home. Usually research on children is conducted by interviewing parents, but Hart decided he would go straight to the source. The principal of the school lent him a room, which became known as “Roger’s room,” and he slowly got to know the children. Hart asked them questions about where they went each day and how they felt about those places, but mostly he just wandered around with them. Even now, as a father and a settled academic, Hart has a dreamy, puckish air. Children were comfortable with him and loved to share their moments of pride, their secrets. Often they took him to places adults had never seen before—playhouses or forts the kids had made just for themselves.
Hart’s methodology was novel, but he didn’t think he was recording anything radical. Many of his observations must have seemed mundane at the time. For example: “I was struck by the large amount of time children spend modifying the landscape in order to make places for themselves and for their play.” But reading his dissertation today feels like coming upon a lost civilization, a child culture with its own ways of playing and thinking and feeling that seems utterly foreign now. The children spent immense amounts of time on their own, creating imaginary landscapes their parents sometimes knew nothing about. The parents played no role in their coming together—“it is through cycling around that the older boys chance to fall into games with each other,” Hart observed. The forts they built were not praised and cooed over by their parents, because their parents almost never saw them.
“There’s a fear” among parents, Roger Hart told me, “an exaggeration of the dangers, a loss of trust” that isn’t clearly explainable.
Through his maps, Hart discovered broad patterns: between second and third grade, for instance, the children’s “free range”—the distance they were allowed to travel away from home without checking in first—tended to expand significantly, because they were permitted to ride bikes alone to a friend’s house or to a ball field. By fifth grade, the boys especially gained a “dramatic new freedom” and could go pretty much wherever they wanted without checking in at all. (The girls were more restricted because they often helped their mothers with chores or errands, or stayed behind to look after younger siblings.) To the children, each little addition to their free range—being allowed to cross a paved road, or go to the center of town—was a sign of growing up. The kids took special pride, Hart noted, in “knowing how to get places,” and in finding shortcuts that adults wouldn’t normally use.
Hart’s research became the basis for a BBC documentary, which he recently showed me in his office at the City University of New York. One long scene takes place across a river where the kids would go to build what they called “river houses,” structures made from branches and odds and ends they’d snuck out from home. In one scene, Joanne and her sister Sylvia show the filmmakers the “house” they made, mostly from orange and brown sheets slung over branches. The furniture has been built with love and wit—the TV, for example, is a crate on a rock with a magazine glamour shot taped onto the front. The phone is a stone with a curled piece of wire coming out from under it.
The girls should be self-conscious because they are being filmed, but they are utterly at home, flipping their hair, sitting close to each other on crates, and drawing up plans for how to renovate. Nearby, their 4-year-old brother is cutting down a small tree with a hatchet for a new addition. The girls and their siblings have logged hundreds of hours here over the years; their mother has never been here, not once, they say, because she doesn’t like to get her toes wet.
In another scene, Andrew and Jenny, a brother and sister who are 6 and 4, respectively, explore a patch of woods to find the best ferns to make a bed with. Jenny walks around in her knee-high white socks, her braids swinging, looking for the biggest fronds. Her big brother tries to arrange them just so. The sun is shining through the dense trees and the camera stays on the children for a long time. When they are satisfied with their bed, they lie down next to each other. “Don’t take any of my ferns,” Jenny scolds, and Andrew sticks his tongue out. At this point, I could hear in my head the parent intervening: “Come on, kids, share. There’s plenty to go around.” But no parents are there; the kids have been out of their sight for several hours now. I teared up while watching the film, and it was only a few days later that I understood why. In all my years as a parent, I have never come upon children who are so inwardly focused, so in tune with each other, so utterly absorbed by the world they’ve created, and I think that’s because in all my years as a parent, I’ve mostly met children who take it for granted that they are always being watched.
In 2004, Hart returned to the same town to do a follow-up study. His aim was to reconnect with any kids he had written about who still lived within 100 miles of the town and see how they were raising their own children, and also to track some of the kids who now lived in the town. But from the first day he arrived, he knew he would never be able to do the research in the same way. Hart started at the house of a boy he’d known, now a father, and asked whether he could talk to his son outside. The mother said they could go in the backyard, but she followed them, always staying about 200 yards behind them. Hart didn’t get the sense that the parents were suspicious of him, more that they’d “gotten used to the idea of always being close to their children, and didn’t like them going off.” He realized that this time around, he could get to the children only through the adults; even the kids didn’t seem that interested in talking to him alone; they got plenty of adult attention already. “They were so used to having their lives organized by their parents,” he told me. Meanwhile, the new principal at the school said he didn’t want Hart doing any research there, because it was not directly related to the curriculum.
At one point Hart tracked down Sylvia, one of the girls he’d filmed at the river house. “Roger Hart! Oh my God, my childhood existed,” she screamed into the phone. “It’s just that I’m always telling people what we used to do, and they don’t believe me!” Sylvia was now a suburban mom of two kids (ages 5 and 4), and she and her husband had moved into a new house 30 miles away. When Hart went to visit Sylvia, he filmed the exchange. Standing outside in her backyard, Sylvia tells him she bought this house because she wanted to give her own children the kinds of childhood experiences she’d had, and when she saw the little wooded area out back, her “heart leapt.” But “there’s no way they’d be out in the woods,” she adds. “My hometown is now so diverse, with people coming in and out and lots of transients.” Hart reminds her how she used to spend most of her time across the river, playing. “There’s no river here,” she tells him, then whispers, “and I’m really glad about that.” There will soon be a fence around the yard—she mentions the fence several times—“so they’ll be contained,” and she’ll always be able to see her kids from the kitchen window. As Sylvia is being interviewed, her son makes some halfhearted attempts to cut the hedges with a pair of scissors, but he doesn’t really seem to know how to do it, and he never strays more than a few inches from his father.
When Hart shows Jenny and Andrew the film of themselves playing in the ferns, they are both deeply moved, because they’d never seen a film of themselves as children, and because for them, too, the memories had receded into hazy unreality. They are both parents and are still living in that New England town. Of all the people Hart caught up with, they seem to have tried the hardest to create some of the same recreational opportunities for their own children that they’d had. Jenny bought a house, with a barn, near a large patch of woods; she doesn’t let her sons watch TV or play video games all that much, instead encouraging them to go to the barn and play in the hay, or tend the garden. She says she wouldn’t really mind if they strayed into the woods, but “they don’t want to go out of sight.” Anyway, they get their exercise from the various sports teams they play on. Jenny gets some of her girlish self back when she talks about how she and the boys pile up rocks in the backyard to build a ski jump or use sticks to make a fort. But Jenny initiates these activities; the boys usually don’t discover them on their own.
Among this new set of kids, the free range is fairly limited. They don’t roam all that far from home, and they don’t seem to want to. Hart talked with a law-enforcement officer in the area, who said that there weren’t all that many transients and that over the years, crime has stayed pretty steady—steadily low. “There’s a fear” among the parents, Hart told me, “an exaggeration of the dangers, a loss of trust that isn’t totally clearly explainable.” Hart hasn’t yet published his findings from his more recent research, and he told me he’s wary of running into his own nostalgia for the Rousseauean children of his memories. For example, he said he has to be honest about the things that have improved in the new version of childhood. In the old days, when children were left on their own, child power hierarchies formed fairly quickly, and some children always remained on the bottom, or were excluded entirely. Also, fathers were largely absent; now children are much closer to their dads—closer to both their parents than kids were back then. I would add that the 1970s was the decade of the divorce boom, and many children felt neglected by their parents; perhaps today’s close supervision is part of a vow not to repeat that mistake. And yet despite all this, Hart can’t help but wonder what disappeared with “the erosion of child culture,” in which children were “inventing their own activities and building up a kind of community of their own that they knew much more about than their parents.”
One common concern of parents these days is that children grow up too fast. But sometimes it seems as if children don’t get the space to grow up at all; they just become adept at mimicking the habits of adulthood. As Hart’s research shows, children used to gradually take on responsibilities, year by year. They crossed the road, went to the store; eventually some of them got small neighborhood jobs. Their pride was wrapped up in competence and independence, which grew as they tried and mastered activities they hadn’t known how to do the previous year. But these days, middle-class children, at least, skip these milestones. They spend a lot of time in the company of adults, so they can talk and think like them, but they never build up the confidence to be truly independent and self-reliant.
Lately parents have come to think along the class lines defined by the University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau. Middle-class parents see their children as projects: they engage in what she calls “concerted cultivation,” an active pursuit of their child’s enrichment. Working-class and poor parents, meanwhile, speak fewer words to their children, watch their progress less closely, and promote what Lareau calls the “accomplishment of natural growth,” perhaps leaving the children less prepared to lead middle-class lives as adults. Many people interpret her findings as proof that middle-class parenting styles, in their totality, are superior. But this may be an overly simplistic and self-serving conclusion; perhaps each form of child-rearing has something to recommend it to the other.
When Claire Griffiths, the Land’s manager, applies for grants to fund her innovative play spaces, she often lists the concrete advantages of enticing children outside: combatting obesity, developing motor skills. She also talks about the same issue Lady Allen talked about all those years ago—encouraging children to take risks so they build their confidence. But the more nebulous benefits of a freer child culture are harder to explain in a grant application, even though experiments bear them out. For example, beginning in 2011, Swanson Primary School in New Zealand submitted itself to a university experiment and agreed to suspend all playground rules, allowing the kids to run, climb trees, slide down a muddy hill, jump off swings, and play in a “loose-parts pit” that was like a mini adventure playground. The teachers feared chaos, but in fact what they got was less naughtiness and bullying—because the kids were too busy and engaged to want to cause trouble, the principal said.
In an essay called “The Play Deficit,” Peter Gray, the Boston College psychologist, chronicles the fallout from the loss of the old childhood culture, and it’s a familiar list of the usual ills attributed to Millennials: depression, narcissism, and a decline in empathy. In the past decade, the percentage of college-age kids taking psychiatric medication has spiked, according to a 2012 study by the American College Counseling Association. Practicing psychologists have written (in this magazine and others) about the unique identity crisis this generation faces—a fear of growing up and, in the words of Brooke Donatone, a New York–based therapist, an inability “to think for themselves.”
In his essay, Gray highlights the work of Kyung-Hee Kim, an educational psychologist at the College of William and Mary and the author of the 2011 paper “The Creativity Crisis.” Kim has analyzed results from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and found that American children’s scores have declined steadily across the past decade or more. The data show that children have become:
less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle.
The largest drop, Kim noted, has been in the measure of “elaboration,” or the ability to take an idea and expand on it in a novel way.
The stereotypes about Millennials have alarmed researchers and parents enough that they’ve started pushing back against the culture of parental control. Many recent parenting books have called for a retreat, among them Duct Tape Parenting, Baby Knows Best, and the upcoming The Kids Will Be Fine. In her excellent new book, All Joy and No Fun, Jennifer Senior takes the route that parents are making themselves miserable by believing they always have to maximize their children’s happiness and success.
In the U.K., the safety paranoia is easing up. The British equivalent of the Consumer Product Safety Commission recently released a statement saying it “wants to make sure that mistaken health and safety concerns do not create sterile play environments that lack challenge and so prevent children from expanding their learning and stretching their abilities.” When I was in the U.K., Tim Gill, the author of No Fear, took me to a newly built London playground that reminded me of the old days, with long, fast slides down a rocky hill, high drops from a climbing rock, and few fenced-in areas. Meanwhile, the Welsh government has explicitly adopted a strategy to encourage active independent play, rather than book learning, among young children, paving the way for a handful of adventure playgrounds like the Land and other play initiatives.
If a mother is afraid that her child might be abducted, her ironclad rule should not be Don’t talk to strangers. It should be Don’t talk to your father.
Whether Americans will pick up on the British vibe is hard to say, although some hopeful signs are appearing. There is rising American interest in European-style “forest kindergartens,” where kids receive little formal instruction and have more freedom to explore in nature. And in Washington, D.C., not far from where I live, we finally have our first exciting playground since the “forgotten playground” was leveled. Located at a private school called Beauvoir, it has a zip line and climbing structures that kids of all ages perceive as treacherous. I recently met someone who worked on the playground and asked him why the school board wasn’t put off by safety concerns, especially since it keeps the park open to the public on weekends. He said the board was concerned about safety but also wanted an exciting playground; the safety guidelines are, after all these years, still just guidelines.
But the real cultural shift has to come from parents. There is a big difference between avoiding major hazards and making every decision with the primary goal of optimizing child safety (or enrichment, or happiness). We can no more create the perfect environment for our children than we can create perfect children. To believe otherwise is a delusion, and a harmful one; remind yourself of that every time the panic rises.
As the sun set over the Land, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a gray bin, like the kind you’d keep your recycling in, about to be pushed down the slope that led to the creek. A kid’s head poked out of the top, and I realized it was my son’s. Even by my relatively laissez-faire parenting standards, the situation seemed dicey. The light was fading, the slope was very steep, and Christian, the kid who was doing the pushing, was only 7. Also, the creek was frigid, and I had no change of clothes for Gideon.
I hadn’t seen much of my son that day. Kids, unparented, take on pack habits, so as the youngest and newest player, he’d been taken care of by the veterans of the Land. I inched close enough to hear the exchange.
“You might fall in the creek,” said Christian.
“I know,” said Gideon.
Christian had already taught Gideon how to climb up to the highest slide and manage the rope swing. At this point, he’d earned some trust. “I’ll push you gently, okay?” “Ready, steady, go!,” Gideon said in response. Down he went, and landed in the creek. In my experience, Gideon is very finicky about water. He hates to have even a drop land on his sleeve while he’s brushing his teeth. I hadn’t rented a car on this trip, and the woman who’d been driving us around had left for a while. I started scheming how to get him new clothes. Could I knock on one of the neighbors’ doors? Ask Christian to get his father? Or, failing that, persuade Gideon to sit a while with the big boys by the fire?
“I’m wet,” Gideon said to Christian, and then they raced over to claim some hammers to build a new fort.
Pay Women Not To Have Babies
Merely encouraging bad mothers who give birth year after year to use contraception is no good; we should pay them
Sometimes you just have to come out and say it: we should pay desperately bad mothers to stop them having another child. Okay, now you think I am, at best, a hard-hearted, purple-faced, hang’em-and-flog’em Dickensian villain; at worst some kind of evil Nazi eugenicist. So let’s not dwell on that but more on a little girl I met a few years ago covering adoption stories for this paper.
She was born into a family where the parents had baby after baby, every year or so, for more than a decade. Trouble was, they were just too messed up to look after them. Their kids who were taken into care early were the lucky ones, relatively speaking. Some of her older siblings remained, except each new pregnancy and emotional cluster-bomb of a baby’s removal hardly proved conducive to looking after them. Everyone was severely neglected and heading for institutions of one kind or another. Theirs wasn’t a family home, it was a charnel house of human potential.
I thought of this girl this week when Sir James Munby, the most senior family judge in England and Wales, talked of how some mothers who know they will have babies taken away from them go on to give birth a dozen times or more.
“Eleven children being taken into care, or fourteen children: these are very usual. Repetitive pregnancies and repetitive care proceedings are a distressingly regular occurrence,” he said. It’s hard to imagine a sorrier story. The mother, already ravaged, whether it’s by mental health problems or drug addiction,is traumatised again as her baby is necessarily ripped away. The inherent hope of pregnancy is inverted. It dooms the mother and the new life. Then we came to Sir James’s suggested breakthrough: “Contraception is an important part of the thinking.”
If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.
Contraception, as anyone who has had a baby in this country knows, is already sold hard to new mothers: I remember being roused from a postpartum doze to be offered, by a midwife, the most redundant pack of condoms ever created. That a woman who has passed through Sir James’s courts would not have been encouraged to use contraception by her GP, midwife and social worker is, for want of a better word, inconceivable. Perhaps the efforts that Sir James alluded to are making progress, but I think this is pussy-footing around. Desperate times don’t call for desperate measures, just bold, new ones.
The cost of fostering a child for a year is about £30,000. The cost of the adoption process is about £35,000. Of children who end up being adopted, the average time spent in care is nearly two years. We’re already looking at a £100,000 bill, and that’s the minimum. (This is mere accounting; the human cost is incalculable.)
Why not sit down with such women for a long, hard talk. Say, we know you want to raise a child, but you can’t get yourself back on your feet if you get pregnant now. So here’s the proposal: you choose one of the many common, safe, reversible and long-lasting contraceptive implants. In return, we will give you a monthly stipend for as long as you keep the implant. That money could be used for whatever you need — therapy, addiction treatment, education or fun — for a better life.
The lifespan of a contraceptive implant is three to five years, just enough time to turn a life around. If by then you still want to have another go at parenting, then you’ll have given yourself the best chance at it. I don’t think this is coercion. There is no threat: things remain the same if the woman exercises her free right to carry on as before.
We get squeamish when it comes to reproductive rights. Someone inevitably shrieks about forced sterilisations and the Third Reich. I’d like to separate these ideas: sterilisation belongs to Nazism; but contraception belongs to feminism. I don’t believe in sterilisation, because I believe in the power of change, hope and second chances — all the things that children represent.
Contraception is arguably the best thing that ever happened to women; it’s still transforming our lives. In the developing world, we know that encouraging contraception — delaying childbirth and spacing out siblings — means that mothers and children are healthier, wealthier and better educated. We’d want that for our worst-off too, wouldn’t we?
We also know that incentives work, at least in the short term, for other changes that do people good, such as losing weight. One study just a few weeks ago from King’s College London showed that giving drug addicts just £30 in vouchers made them 12 times more likely to finish a course of hepatitis vaccines. Why panic when it comes to the doubly important point of paying women to get healthier for the sake of a future child? Some say incentives lose their power in the end, but whatever black hole of misery they will have averted is money well spent.
Whenever I talk like this, people make that “ew” face. I don’t get it. When I spoke to a Catholic friend of mine about the problem of these repeated care proceedings, she said, “Well, people always want to adopt babies,” as if these mothers were brood mares. I just can’t see that as a more compassionate alternative.
I’m thinking back now to the little girl I started with. I couldn’t look into her round blue eyes and wish her existence away. But I can wish that we had done all we could — financial payouts for contraception included — to make sure her mother was ready to look after her.
Child Poverty In NZ
“How long have we got?” I ask Russell Wills. “As long as you need,” he replies.
The Children’s Commissioner is as good as his word. It’s a generous two hours before he wraps up our interview because he has a son waiting to be picked up from school.
He looks tired. Every Monday morning he’s on the early flight from Napier to Wellington, where he puts in two days as Commissioner. First thing Wednesday he’s back here, in his tiny, cluttered office at Hawke’s Bay Hospital, dealing with sick and often seriously disturbed children in the paediatric outpatients department.
Friday he describes as his “peripatetic, could-be-anywhere day”. Often he’s heading somewhere on a plane to give a speech – he averages about one a week. And every seventh weekend, he’s on call.
“My last weekend on call,” he says, “we had a child with pneumonia, which is straightforward, but he had an empyema, so the whole lung was full of pus, from top to bottom. He needed to be put to sleep and have a hole made so that a big fat drain could be put in to let the pus out.”
How old was he? “He was three. That’s common.”
Wills is the sixth person since 1989 to hold the title of Children’s Commissioner, but the first to carry on doing his previous job simultaneously. He insisted on it as a condition of his appointment and Minister for Social Development Paula Bennett agreed.
He had two reasons for wanting to continue practising paediatrics. “I thought it would keep me grounded, but I also thought it would help my credibility with the public and with ministers. And I think it has.”
But back to that last weekend on call. “That weekend,” Wills continues, “I had three children in intensive care and one on the verge of being admitted, and that was a very usual weekend load.” Typically there are 40 inpatients spread between the hospital’s Special Care Baby Unit (or SCBU; he pronounces it “Skiboo” – I unscramble the code later) and the children’s ward. In an average year, the hospital admits 3000 children – that’s an average of eight a day from a region with a population of 155,000.
How come? It’s simple. “Half the children in Hawke’s Bay are born into the two poorest income deciles.” It’s one of five district health board areas that stand out as having high rates of child poverty; the others are Northland, South Auckland, Lakes (Rotorua) and Tairawhiti (Gisborne).
In Tairawhiti, three-quarters of babies are born into deciles nine and 10, the two poorest. (Confusingly, decile rankings in health are the reverse of those in education.) “Imagine that,” says Wills. He barely seems able to grasp it himself.
“The workload across those five DHBs is very similar – high poverty, cold, damp, crowded housing, and a high proportion of Maori and Pasifika families.
“What you get with that is a very high acute workload, particularly with respiratory, skin and gut infections, with all the complications that go with those. We frequently see kids who present late – kids who are really, really ill, needing resuscitation, who ought to have been identified in primary care, but weren’t, for various reasons.”
It’s an eye-opener for young British registrars who come to Hawke’s Bay for experience in paediatrics, observes Wills. “We have diseases that they’ve read about but never seen – tuberculosis, acute rheumatic fever.”
And there’s more. Wills and his colleagues also have a heavy outpatient workload that includes a lot of child-protection work – in other words, looking after children in violent households – and children with severe behavioural problems.
“There are three of us here and that’s most of what we do. We see a lot of quite young children with very severe behaviour disturbance, for a whole bunch of reasons. Typically there’s a mix of domestic violence, major mental illness in parents, serious addictions, very poor family and whanau support, fetal alcohol and fetal drug effects, and so those kids have, as you’d expect, delayed development and very challenging behaviours. So our task is to figure out why they behave the way they do and then start putting them back together again.”
“Some parents have their own needs: low IQ, mental illness, addiction. Then we have to make sure we do that work.”
But the poor are poorer now, they really are. And there are more of them.”
What’s the explanation? He’s not sure. “It’s complex. The solutions are complex too, but they are within our hands.”
What was the appeal? “I just love kids. It’s not very complicated. If I wasn’t doing this, I’d probably be a teacher.”
Children can be very complicated medically, says Wills, but as people, they’re not. “If they like you they give you a hug. If they don’t like you, they tell you.”
But surely it’s difficult dealing with patients who are often too young to explain their symptoms? “Well, sometimes communication is a challenge. It’s just a skill you have to work at. You have to get down and make friends with them. That’s the deal.”
What has struck Wills and his colleagues is that admission numbers no longer fall off in summer. “We used to have this fabulous quiet time in January and February. We don’t get that any more. So we see what used to be winter illnesses – pneumonia, bronchiolitis, that sort of thing – all year round.” Again, it’s the very young who are most affected.
Any idea why? “When you look at the determinants, the strongest associations are crowding and poverty. It seems likely that there are more families bunking in together. Evidence from household surveys suggests that’s true.
“Crowded conditions mean illnesses spread easily. Very commonly families all sleep in the living room because they can only afford to heat one room. It only takes one kid to bring a cold or school sores home. Adults and older kids get a cold, but the baby gets bronchiolitis or pneumonia and ends up in hospital.”
A high proportion of patients are from single-parent households. Other common factors are unemployment and low qualifications. Maori and Pasifika children figure disproportionately.
But Wills shoots down the notion that it’s all about solo mothers or welfare dependency. It’s more complex than that. “Forty per cent of kids living in poverty have a parent who’s working. Half are from two-parent households. Sole parenthood and benefit dependency do not account for our high rate of child illness.”
A crucial factor is the price of housing. “At the bottom end it’s common for families to spend between half and two-thirds of their income on housing, which is why they crowd together. That’s very different from when we were kids.”
And then there are power prices, the very mention of which makes Wills shake his head in mystification. “I’m not an economist, but I simply don’t understand how power prices have gone up the way they have.”
Wills has never shrunk from taking a stand on the issues he regards as important. Before his appointment, as a spokesman for the Paediatric Society, he was an outspoken supporter of former Green MP Sue Bradford’s bill outlawing parental smacking. Now it’s child poverty.
It’s an issue that often gets muddied by ideology, but with Wills you get the impression that dogma doesn’t enter into it. He simply cares about children and thinks it’s shocking that some get a poor start – one that’s likely to hold them back all their lives.
He doesn’t mince words, either, in the way that a risk-averse bureaucrat might. On TV3’s The Nation in June, interviewer Lisa Owen asked whether he agreed with Professor Jonathan Boston – who co-chaired an expert advisory panel Wills set up to investigate child poverty – that it was scandalous that New Zealand treated its elderly so much better than its children.
“Of course I do,” replied Wills. He also agreed with Boston that benefits were “woefully inadequate”.
Such blunt talk might be expected to invite censure from his political masters, but Paula Bennett insists Wills’ stand on child poverty causes her no discomfort. In fact, she says she likes his independence: “I don’t appoint someone and then tell them what to do. I believe in setting people up to do the best job they can and I’m very comfortable with the work that Russell does. Whether he always agrees with the Government or not is completely irrelevant.”
She describes Wills as totally child-centred. “I’ve found him to be incredibly driven by his work for children and never doubted that that’s where his commitment lies. As long as he’s coming from a place of putting children first, then I would support him in whatever work he’s doing.”
The admiration is mutual. Wills took a liking to Bennett when he was first interviewed for the job. She had already signalled her interest in children’s issues with the publication of a Green Paper on child protection. “She said, ‘I really want to make a difference to child protection outcomes and I need some help,’” recalls Wills. It was clearly a factor in his decision to apply for the job.
He and the minister meet regularly. “It’s a free and frank relationship,” he says. “She hasn’t always agreed with what I’ve done or said.”
He agrees he has probably said things that ruffled Government feathers, “but that’s my job. I don’t just upset her. I upset the left as often as I upset the right. I think it’s my job to speak truth to power. I think she’s very comfortable with that. I think she likes people to be frank with her.”
In any case, Wills likes some of the things the Government has done: extending paid parental leave, for example, and putting more effort into early childhood education. He also approves of National’s and Labour’s pledges to extend free doctors’ visits and prescriptions to children under 13, and would be even more pleased if after-hours access to medical care could be made easier for low-income parents who often work shifts or long hours.
It’s not enough, though. Wills wants a national conversation about child poverty. He thinks we should all agree it’s not okay that if a child in New Zealand is born poor, that determines their lifetime prospects.
When I suggest no one would disagree that having 170,000 children living in poverty is a bad thing, he pulls me up. “Actually, there’s a high level of tolerance for this still. When we ask voters what’s the most important thing for them this election, among centre-left and female voters, child poverty is usually in the top three. Among males, business owners and centre-right voters, it’s down at seventh or eighth.”
But child poverty remains an ideological minefield. A substantial body of opinion holds that welfare is already too big a drain on the productive sector. Many of the ideas Wills endorses, such as the universal child payment recommended by his expert advisory group, would inevitably require more welfare spending.
Moreover, there’s concern that throwing more money at poor families risks perpetuating the problem. Child advocate Dame Lesley Max, founder and chief executive of the Great Potentials Foundation, says that a universal child payment, programmed to run out once the child reaches a fixed age, could nudge parents into paid employment as intended, but it could also serve as an incentive to have another child once the payment starts petering out.
Another with misgivings is Wellington welfare researcher and former Act Party candidate Lindsay Mitchell. “There is ample international research showing the rate of single parenthood increases with higher benefit payments,” she says. “There is a strong risk that raising benefits, which also reduces the gap between income from work and welfare, aggravates benefit dependence. Long-term benefit dependence is bad for children. That’s beyond dispute.”
Mitchell describes Wills as a good-hearted man and says it’s understandable that he wants immediate action on child poverty, but adds: “Advocates for greater wealth redistribution need to think about the long-term picture. The breakdown of the two-parent family is a major contributor to child poverty and all the associated risks: ill-health, abuse and neglect, educational underachievement and behavioural problems. The trend won’t be reversed by doing more of what caused it in the first place.”
Wills accepts that there’s no magic bullet. He also agrees that state spending to alleviate child poverty needs to be rigorously monitored to ensure it achieves the desired outcomes. “We just don’t throw money at the problem. We need to know what investments make the biggest difference. Early childhood education [ECE] obviously makes a big difference; that’s important. ECE for kids in poorer areas is a must-have.”
A crucial first step, he says, is to measure the true extent of child poverty – a project his office has embarked on in collaboration with the University of Otago and the JR McKenzie Trust. “You can’t fix a thing unless you can measure it and monitor progress.”
Then he thinks governments should set targets for the reduction of child poverty. After all, they do it with other things. “We have a plan for biosecurity and the road toll. You have legislation, you set targets and you hold government and ministries accountable. That’s what you do.”
Target-setting should be mandatory for every incoming government and it should be linked to the Budget process, he suggests. It would be up to each government to set the target and choose the appropriate policy mix.
“Let’s understand that this really matters, because it affects all of us. Then we need to be clear about who’s affected most, and that’s the youngest children. So which children do we need to invest in, at what age, and how? We need to understand that well and communicate it well.
“And we need to use the language of investment. We have an ageing population. As people leave the workforce, we need to replace them. The proportion of people entering the workforce compared with those leaving is falling. Soon it’s going to be one to one.
“If we want to maintain our standard of living and national super and interest-free student loans, we have to be able to afford it, which means we need our workforce to be as productive as it possibly can be. If half of Maori kids leave school with no qualifications, that ain’t going to happen; we’re in real trouble.”
Note the references to investment. One of Wills’ missions is to get the business sector onside by highlighting the economic cost of children growing up in poverty, requiring expensive medical treatment for poverty-related illnesses, falling into crime, failing to achieve educationally and ending up on welfare – all at a cost to the productive sector.
“The evidence tells us that if we want our workforce to be as productive as it possibly can be, we need to keep doing the good things we’re doing.
“Our education system works pretty well. What we aren’t doing is investing in that period of children’s lives that makes the biggest difference, and that’s ages one to five. That’s when your brain is making those millions of connections every minute. Those connections are determined by the child’s environment.
“Now, if they are growing up in an impoverished environment where those needs are not met, where parents are stressed, where it’s cold and damp and they’re sick, they’re going to arrive at school not ready. By the time the education system picks them up, the damage is done.”
It’s a warning that’s not lost on Phil O’Reilly, chief executive of BusinessNZ. O’Reilly was a member of Wills’ expert advisory panel and has taken the message to business audiences.
“The Ministry of Social Development will tell you that if an 18-year-old kid gets on the dole and stays there for more than about six months, chances are they will stay there forever and die young and without qualifications,” says O’Reilly. “There’s only one answer to that if you’re a business person: well, we’d better invest in them at 18 then, or earlier, to make sure they don’t end up there. I can use that information to make business people see that child poverty can have a long-term economic impact – for example, more taxes – and that they’re not going to get the talent they need, which is what business is most interested in.”
Child poverty is enormously daunting and complex, says O’Reilly, but he admires the way Wills has gone about tackling the issue. The advisory group brought together people who wouldn’t normally sit around the same table – O’Reilly, the champion of private enterprise, found himself alongside left-leaning academics – but he says their deliberations were evidence-led and rose above polemics. He sounds slightly surprised that he wasn’t a lonely voice arguing against an increase to the minimum wage. “The evidence didn’t point to that conclusion, so we didn’t recommend it.”
He admits he found some recommendations in the group’s report “a bit uncomfortable”. They included policy measures that the report warned would be costly and require reprioritisation of government spending or higher taxes. But it was a consensus document and everyone agreed with its overall tenor.
There’s no bright, shiny, simple solution to child poverty, adds O’Reilly, but partly due to Wills’ commitment, there’s now a core of high-level people from both sides of the political divide engaging with the issue.
Surrogacy “ticking time bomb”
A senior judge has warned of a surrogacy “ticking time bomb” in the UK, with large numbers of parents failing to obtain legal permission to take care of their new children.
Mrs Justice Theis said that there were up to 2,000 babies born to British or overseas surrogate mothers each year on behalf of couples here, but only “a few hundred” obtained the parental order that they needed to ensure that the child was legally theirs. If a parental order was not obtained, the child remained the responsibility of the surrogate mother. “A very limited number of parental orders come to court each year. My concern is not for the people seeking parental orders but for those who are not making applications. It is a ticking legal time bomb,” she said.
“If no steps are taken to regularise the legal relationship between the intended parents and the child by way of an application to the court, the surrogate remains the child’s legal mother and retains parental responsibility.” She said she was also concerned about the psychological impact on children who discovered that their “settled” family situation was legally vulnerable.
She predicted particular problems in the event of the death of one parent, separation and divorce, or when the child’s passport needed to be renewed. In the absence of a parental order, the child would be entitled to a claim on the estate of its surrogate mother, she said.
The number of surrogacy arrangements is rising steadily in Britain, with 95 per cent born overseas.
Mrs Justice Theis is one of three High Court judges who hears applications for surrogacy parental orders. She was speaking at a symposium on international surrogacy organised by the International Association of Matrimonial Lawyers in London.
She recently ruled in the controversial case of a British couple in their sixties who had twins born to a surrogate in Ukraine. The surrogate mother disappeared during the conflict with Russia and the couple were unable to prove that she was really willing to give up her babies. Mrs Justice Theis ruled that the couple should keep the babies.
The process for getting a parental order is usually straightforward and costs only about £200. Lawyers say there is ignorance that the legal step is necessary, with parents mistakenly thinking that once they have a British passport for their child or their names on the birth certificate it is enough.
Fiona Kendall, a solicitor at Clarion, a law firm in Leeds, said that agencies should explain the legal steps to their clients. “It would help if the fertility clinics made clear this was something that was part of the process,” she said.
Cafcass, the children’s legal service, said that it dealt with only 241 parental order applications last year, a fraction of the children born to surrogates for UK couples. Currently only couples — married, civil partners or in a long-term relationships — can have a surrogate child. Mrs Justice Theis said that she would shortly be hearing an application for a parental order from a single woman, a test case for the law.
Most British couples seeking surrogate mothers go to India or the US. A group of lawyers is campaigning for liberalisation of the UK law so that more surrogacy can take place within the UK. At present it is unlawful to pay a surrogate mother anything other than expenses, so arrangements are altruistic. They also have no legal backing, so intended parents never know for certain if they will have the baby until after the birth, with the risk that the surrogate mother may change her mind.
Where To For Help?
Children have lost confidence that their GP or school nurse can help them with depression, self-harm or other mental health problems and are turning to the internet and asking friends for help instead, the children’s commissioner for England has warned.
Anne Longfield called it “desperate” that youngsters were forced to use such unreliable sources of information and advice because they did not think their doctor will help. In an interview with The Times, Ms Longfield also said there was a danger that rising levels of mental illness among children was beginning to be accepted as normal, rather than a crisis that needed to be addressed urgently.
The Office of the Children’s Commissioner conducted a study to find out where children seek help if they fear that they are suffering from a mental or emotional problem. It found that two thirds conducted a general search on the internet, typing in terms such as: “I feel depressed, what shall I do?”
Half asked a friend for advice while fewer than half (40 per cent) contacted their doctor and 18 per cent their school nurse. “Every child knows if they are unwell with a stomach ache or hurt their leg, they go to the doctor,” she said. “Unfortunately they don’t have that confidence when it comes to mental health. It is a rather desperate state of affairs when they would prefer to roam around the internet or ask a friend the same age for help first. GPs really need to think seriously about this and ask if they are doing enough. Should they have a GP in each practice who is a specialist in children’s mental health, for example? Should they be advertising the fact that they are in a position to help within their surgeries?” She said that while there were some good websites that could help children who were suffering, it was “a matter of luck” whether they found them.
More likely they would end up on a US site with chat rooms and surveys, or find themselves on an NHS site with explanations of the internal working of the NHS Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service.
The Times has been campaigning for better mental health services for children, in the face of rising demand. The Time to Mind campaign in particular wants more early intervention services to stop problems escalating.
Ms Longfield also voiced concern that the growing problem of children’s mental health was starting to be accepted as just the way things were these days. “Increasing numbers of children are reporting self-harm, anxiety and other serious conditions,” she said. “I think we are in danger of knowing it is becoming more prevalent and accepting it as just how children’s lives are these days, rather than putting into place the sort of responses they need.”
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said it had taken up several reforms suggested by the children’s commissioner, including promoting greater use of counselling in schools.