That letter

I think I see why this was published in the Telegraph:

They are pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults and exposed via the electronic media to material which would have been considered unsuitable for children even in the very recent past.

Can anyone come up with a coherent reason why this is a particularly bad thing? Preferably without going off on a tangent about the general issue of weather it’s OK to aim advertising at children?

Also, and perhaps more tellingly:

Since children’s brains are still developing, they cannot adjust – as full-grown adults can – to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change.

Apparently, children don’t find it easier to learn new things than adults. Instead, their ‘brains develop’ (presumably with inherited insticts?) in a process that requires an absolute minimum of change in their surrounding environment. So sending them off to school would be out, then?

All in all, it looks like a typical badly thought out exercise in small-c conservativism. “Modern chidren don’t have the exactly the same experience of childhood that we did. This must be stopped!”

It’s adults who are upset by rapid cultural and technological change.

What is the difference between “rapid change” and “the effects of rapid change”? If the rapid changes are having rapidly-changing effects, we’re back were we started. If the effects aren’t changing rapidly, what does it matter if the changes themselves are rapid?

Anyway, there are plenty of things Cameron or Blair’s replacement could do – ban advertising of junk food during children’s programming, fund better school dinners, legislate for longer and more flexible parental leave, stop the selling off of school playing fields… ‘At least they’re not in Bangladesh’ doesn’t seem to be a useful response.

I don’t think the point is greatly improved. Children are in many ways better at adjusting to change than adults are, because they don’t have fixed ideas about the world that are becoming outdated (or they do, but those ideas would become outdated anyway just by the process of growing up, even without any surrounding change).

I think what they’re trying to say is that adults are bad at keeping up with rapid change and adjusting our behaviour to support our children in a changing environment, and that children suffer because of this failure. And the fact that children’s brains are still developing makes them particularly vulnerable to our failures. But the sentence as it is doesn’t make any sense to me.

C’mon, people, this isn’t too hard to understand, if you want to. Children are on a schedule of rapid changes of their own, and therefore don’t necessarily react well to a completely different (and orthogonal) economically-driven changes. For that matter, it seems pretty well understood (by people who study such things — I only read about it) that children, possibly because they’re changing so rapidly on their own, are best raised in a somewhat static envoronment.

So, that’s what I understood from it, anyway. But don’t let me stop anyone from quibbling about infalicitous prose — this *is* a blog, after all.

Is it that they have just formulated the claim that children need stable home environments very poorly? It seems that young children would have a better capacity to deal with societal change in the sense that they do not have an extensive set of built up expectations (i.e. about society/culture). However any change in society that makes it more difficult for parents to provide a stable home environment (i.e. regular hours, time with parents, “normal” stress levels, etc…), affects children negatively. Thus, there is an indirect connection between changes in, for example, a society’s view on work and children’s ability to cope with this changing view.

Well, maybe it would work better with examples. What is ‘cultural change’ here – immigration? women working? What’s technological change – computers? closed-circuit cameras? biometric ID cards? The letter seems to be pointing to junk food and televisions, but they are not examples of children’s failure to adapt.

In what sense is the rapidity of the change the most important feature? And how rapid are these changes really, on the scale of a child’s life? (And isn’t it beyond a cliche to say that children are far better at adapting to and understanding new technology than their parents? Is there anyone left on the planet who hasn’t heard the joke about getting your kids to set the video for you?)

Man, ray- you’ve made 5 out of 15 comments, all saying the same thing. Saddly I don’t suspect that’s a record, even around here, buy maybe it’s time to drop it or move on to a different point.

“I know there are regions of the internet where masturbation is regarded as a fundamental human right, but CT isn’t one of them.”

Sorry to bite, but of course it’s a fundamental human right. It would be a gross violation of civil liberties to ban masturbation. We’re not even talking about consenting adults, here, just personal autonomy.

We’re not even talking about consenting adults, here, just personal autonomy.
Um, that’s exactly the distinction we’re talking about thank you.

…ever more rapid technological and cultural change.
I suppose I just don’t see why this statement is considered so outlandish. Overly vague (as to specific ages and specific effects), but completely reasonable. I think saying “social” change would have connoted their meaning more clearly, but if you were to say “kids develop better in a relatively stable environment and should spend plenty of time away from technology including in the out-of-doors” then I think it’s undisputable.

I find it easy to believe that there were some real advantages for British children being brought up in the Asterix years, say 1955-1965, that you refer to, compared to 1995-2005. Rather odd, however, for the writers not to suggest that, on average, other things being equal, children might do better with two parents in the household, both being the biological parents. Perhaps they didn’t wish to attract accusations of family fascism? Or perhaps their imaginations didn’t run to such fantastical notions?

Hurrah!! Thanks, Chris, for posting this letter.

I’m not sure whether or not those individual items are good or bad for kids. Tim Burke has edged me to more of moderate on the video games thing, but I’m just happy that people are trying to make the needs of children a national or cross-national priority. I want there to be discussions about what is good for kids, rather than what is good for adults and good for the economy. I want there to be public policy centered on the needs of children. I’m sick of the whole “children are resilient” meme that takes all these items off the agenda.

Russell has pointed out some of our fun discussions we’ve had on this topic in the blogosphere. I want it out of the blogosphere and in the newspapers and in political science papers at APSA.

Ah, ray, but what if “regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives” turned out to be likelier, more satisfactory and safer with two biological parents present? With all the usual qualifications – “on average”, etc, etc.

Every sperm is sacred.

DM on 23, you’re talking about me, you realise. ;)

Why the Torygraph? Because it’s a better paper than the Times, which stopped being the serious paper of record some time ago. Why not the Grauniad? Because when complaining about education, it helps if your letter is spelled correctly.

I largely agree with Jo’n at 11, and sorta with BobCat at 26. But who doesn’t? The whole JonBenet thing exposed a consensus that dressing your six year old up in a way which would be sexy ten years later is deeply creepy and disturbs most of us.

Does anyone disagree with the point Chris summarised starting with “School starts too young …”? This seems obvious. (Though I think competition is fine for older children.)

To summarize:

–No one disputes points 2-5.

–Point 1 needs some clarification to be meaningful.

–It is disputed whether point 4 should emphasize interaction with 2 biological parents.

–Point 6 needs to define more clearly why early sexualization is a bad thing.

Anyway, I agree with Laura. This is a interesting and important topic; the quibbling is disappointing.

Ok, I suspect this has degenerated too much for a good conversation, so I’ll be flip too. Here’s an answer to dearieme’s question: no mention of divorce in a letter to the Telegraph for the same reason that the letter didn’t appear in the Guardian — no point in preaching to the converted?

No, I’m being flip — divorce is a sort of third rail of discussion of childhood (btw, it is divorce you wanted to discuss, not adoption, right — being with adoptive parents seems not to have bad consequences; it is being with a single parent or one parent and their partner who is not your parent that seems to be a problem — at least according to US conducted research). I went to a great series of public policy seminars about childhood a few years ago, which included high ranking civil servants and senior academics and was sponsored by a church organisation, and no-one talked about divorce. I mentioned it in my own contibution to the Torygraph bloggish discussion, which they haven’t yet posted (maybe the obvious link between me and one of the signatories rules me out).

But part of the reason for that was that it was so hard to get past the “children are so robust that they are ok no matter what is done to them” theme that the pomo-influenced academics peddled (that Laura finds so annoying). That, and a wierd version of child liberation that assumes that because some children cope well with lots of responsibilities at young ages there is no relevant difference between them and adults for policy purposes (except in law — such people are rarely content when children are tried as adults, but sometimes say such things as “if we try them as adults we should give them adult rights” rather than the more sensible “they are children, so we should not try them as adults”).

What’s the evidence for the declining mental health of young Britons that seems to be the letter’s premise? This is a genuine question.

On the rest of the letter, I see what looks like a plausible policy stance in the remarks on testing in primary education.

But the rest is finger-wagging conventional wisdom, non sequiturs, and pop social sciencey cliches e.g. “ever more rapid technological and cultural change,” “fast-moving hyper-competitive culture,” “pushed by market forces.”

And the condescending peroration: “a sensible first step would be to encourage parents and policy-makers to start talking about ways of improving children’s well-being.” I guess it’s a staple of Brit polemic to assume your interlocutors are idiots, but, really, have parents ever stopped talking about ways to improve children’s well-being? Is there a politicial anywhere who doesn’t have a ready line about the well-being of children? So the problem cannot be that there is no discussion. If the problem is that debate is diffuse and cliched, this letter is part of the problem.

Maybe it’s just me, but the sight of a six year old girl dressed in a mini skirt and t-shirt saying “Porn Star” does not require a lot of thought to be considered a bad thing.

It doesn’t require a lot of thought because we find it disturbing – although not everybody does, as evidenced by the fact that people dress their children that way. But how does that lead us to conclude that it must be bad for the children, and why does the letter connect that to exposure of children to “unsuitable” material?

I submit that this part of the letter is really a complaint that children are being exposed to the idea of sex earlier than the authors like. But I also submit that they’re confusing things they don’t like with things that are harmful – here and in the rest of the letter.

“sedentary, screen-based entertainment”

How can complex, nonlinear, and open-ended games like SimCity, Civilization, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion not be cognitively healthy?

being with adoptive parents seems not to have bad consequences

Don’t tell Velleman…

“Does anyone disagree with the point Chris summarised starting with “School starts too young …”?” A definite “dunno” from me; perhaps it depends on what school consists of.

That’s not the reason for the tests, ray, and the complaint ranges wider than the tests. The extensive testing is in fact a crucial part of wide ranging accouontability measures — the idea is supposed to be that they measure desired outcomes which might have been achieved just about any way, and hence indicate the quality of the schooling (when appropriately used in a Value Added index). It is the corrolary of the quite radical school choice system they use (radical when looking from the US anyway). The drive to encourage new kinds of schools (including the fundamentalist schools) is an attempt to make choice more “real” — but the idea is that people need good information about the performance of the schools.

One of the difficulties with any accountability regime is this: you are trying to get a sense of what is going on in the school so you can hold the school accountable. But in order to do that the tests need to be reaosnably high stakes for the kids, because you are testing their achievement, so you need to get them to take them seriously. Accountability regimes in the US haven’t dealt with this well; but the culture around testing in the UK means that kids feel a good deal of pressure, and teachers feel pressure to teach the stuff that will be tested (which is only a fraction, if an important fraction, of a rounded primary experience).

“Early formal schoolwork” means early by just about any standards — certainly kids are doing formal schoolwork in reception class, when the kids are one year younger than they would be in Kindergarten in the US, and two years younger (or more, perhaps) than when they would start school in Germany. My sense is that the French start early too, but its unusual. There’s also no reason to believe it is especially effective in triggering early learning — play, and relaxing interaction with caring adults are mostly important for their own sake and for the emotional wellbeing of the kid, but they are also pretty effective for academic learning (we’re talking about young 5 yr olds and 4 yr olds here).

The letter writers aren’t for dumbing down the curriculum or anything like that either — some of them I know are enthusiastic about the national literacy and numeracy strategies (which seem to have been pretty effective at improving literacy and numeracy, though the studies showing that are not methodologically perfect).

I think I can even help on that! The very early years weren’t formal even in those years (partly because mostly kids didn’t start till after the very early years). After that (I mean after the early years) there was a lot of rote learning — much less sophisticated and intellectually challenging than what is now done. But most schools practiced pretty early, if rather informal, streaming (much earlier than you would do now) and in the lower streams there would be a lot of non-academic but practical learning. My grandfather (maternal, not paternal, but someone who influenced my dad quite a bit) taught what they delightfully called Educationally Sub-Normal primary kids (a much larger group than you might think) and other “lower stream” kids from the 1920s to the late 60’s, and his curriculum was almost entirely things like woodwork, gardening, music, etc. Of course, there were jobs for people with practical skills but not much formal education then. We must have readers who attended primary school in the 40’s and 50’s (ie prior to the progressive reforms which evolved in the early to mid 60s). What was it like?

Thanks bruce. Exactly right. People need to distinguish between prudery and the ability to put sexuality in its proper place (which is not in the forefront of the lived experience of young children). If the latter soemtimes looks likes the former so be it; I suspect that accusations that the latter is the former are usually either from the deeply screwed up or are mischevious (to put it kindly).

This inspires me to imagine a depressing Brian Aldiss-type satire whereon the high-calorie junk food, the high-pressure schooling, early sexualization of children, and neoliberalism combine in synergy to produce a generation of kids who learn calculus and Greek at 5 (hey, John Stuart Mill did it!), become sexually mature at 7, enter the work force at 10, due to the rescission of child-labor laws, and die at 30.

Sam, I don’t have much actual research at hand to link to, but can acquire some if you’re curious. The primarily anecdotal evidence I have from women friends about their own experience and from both female and male friends who work wtih abused children is that children with sexualized appearance face more pressure from others to sexualize their behavior, too. More simply, the “come hither” light goes on, whether the kid intends it or not.

One could argue that the root problem is a rotten culture of guys. I do argue that. But in addition to reforming the education and morals of boys, it seems only sensible to me to help keep girls out of some of the obvious snares and pitfalls. This is one of them. There’s no compensatory good to offset the trouble that prematurely sexualized appearance brings.