Idolising Children

IDOLISING CHILDREN

Donahoo argues that idolising is a form of worship that adversely affects our children’s development in their early years, and creates citizens who no longer understand their roles and responsibilities. It makes parents feel unnecessarily guilty and anxious. Without blame or finger-pointing, Idolising Children examines how we arrived here and looks at what needs to change so that communities as a whole are responsible for raising children.

Donahoo

Obsessed with our own youth and wanting perfect, genius children who live in a world of designer clothes and toys, it’s time for us to find new ways of parenting and a new kind of childhood. With humour, insight and emotion, Daniel Donahoo reflects on the place of children in our society by looking at everything from fertility rates, childcare, the role of the media and the day-to-day joys and challenges of being a parent.

Daniel Donahoo

IDOLISING CHILDREN ‘Broadranging, lively and sharp. Something has gone badly wrong with childhood in this corporatised world, and Daniel Donahoo is willing to lift the lid on the whole third-rate deal offered to young families today.’ STEVE BIDDULPH author of Raising Babies

Idolising Children

DANIEL DONAHOO is a fellow at OzProspect, a non-partisan, public policy think-tank. He is a 29-year-old father of two young boys and lives with them and his wife in a house built of stone and mud in Central Victoria. Daniel has worked in early childhood services as a childcare worker, a toy librarian, a child road safety educator and in children and family services in state government.

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For Tania, Felix and Kolya, whose contribution to this book is far greater than mine. And for my mum and dad, from whom I am still and will always be learning.

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Idolising Children

Da n iel Don a ho o D; M IEKJ>

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A New South book Published by University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA www.unswpress.com.au © Daniel Donahoo 2007 First published 2007 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Donahoo, Daniel. Idolising children Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 978 086840 932 0. 1. Parent and child. 2. Parenting. 3. Child rearing. I. Title. 306.874 Design and cover photo montage Di Quick Cover photo Getty Images Printer Griffin Press

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Contents

Acknowledgments

7

Preface

9

Introduction: Child idolising

15

Chapter 1 Childhood histories: Images, ideas and myths

25

Chapter 2 The Peter Pan syndrome: Struggling to grow up

47

Chapter 3 In decline: Birth rates and fertility decisions

67

Chapter 4 Childcare: Parents, centres and community

92

Chapter 5 The community as classroom: Educating children to learn

118

Chapter 6 Media and children: Improving a poor relationship

141

Chapter 7 Marketing children: Pre-teen supermodels and brand imprinting

161

Chapter 8 Keeping children safe: Walking to school in a society of strangers

180

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Chapter 9 The imperfect child: The hypocrisy of our obsession

196

Chapter 10 When I’m 64: Neglecting the wisdom of age

217

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Conclusion: Honouring, not idolising?

235

Notes

246

Bibliography

251

Index

255

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Acknowledgments

Without the support, patience and editing from my wife Tania Andrusiak this book wouldn’t be in your hands. Without the belief from my publisher Phillipa McGuinness this book wouldn’t have made it out of my head. Without my gorgeous and energetic sons Felix and Kolya, I wouldn’t have given this book so much heart. Thanks to Tim Watts for the encouragement, guidance and opportunity. Thanks to Heather and Dennis Brown for offering their house as my impromptu office. It was the perfect writer’s retreat. Thanks also to Don Edgar and Steve Biddulph, whose work I admire and whose engagement and criticism have been invaluable. Thanks to Sally Heath, who first published the ‘3 am’ essay in The Age and encouraged me to write more. And to everyone who has spoken to me, who has agreed and disagreed, who has challenged, criticised, supported, scribbled on and in many other ways been a part of the collaborative process that was the writing of this book, I want to say thank you.

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Preface

If you touch me gently and tenderly if you look at me and smile at me if you, now and then listen to what I have to say before you talk - then I will grow really grow Anonymous

I first put pen to paper to write about children and parenthood at 3 am on 14 January 2002, sitting in a plastic chair in Frankston Hospital. My son Felix, then three days old, was lying on his stomach in an incubator in front of me. He was glowing under UV lights. A good dose of jaundice had struck. He had been feeding poorly and sleeping very little. His mum was exhausted, at home and hopefully sleeping. I was the night-watch dad. And really, that was all I could do. Watch. Every three hours or so, the nurses brought me a bottle and I’d feed him. On occasion he’d vomit or poo. After watching the first time, I showed the

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nurses that I’d be right to clean him up when it next happened. The rest of the time, he was encased in plastic and UV. So, what was left to do? Watch and write. I couldn’t sleep. I positioned myself so that when he opened his eyes, if he could focus that far, he’d see me. While I’d worked in children’s services and knew that current opinion suggested newborns didn’t have a sense of time, I was not going to give this child even a sniff of abandonment. That stubbornness was born more out of my own needs than his. Already I was feeling the pressure to be the perfect parent, a new style of father for the 21st century. I’d wipe his bum. I’d clean his vomit. Hell, if I could emit UV light I’d suspend myself over that crib. The truth is, my presence may or may not have been that significant. While he was doing fine under the UV lights, I was barely holding my sleep-deprived body and mind together. Every half-hour or so I’d push my finger through the holes in the incubator and let the reflex action of his little hand clasp my finger. I’d look into his eyes, whisper through the hole and fill my sense of helplessness and vulnerability with small actions that I thought might help. They did help. They helped me immensely. In the essay I wrote that night, the last sentence showed my newborn son had a strength and capacity beyond the construction of vulnerability that his new world had built around him as a sick baby. The line was ‘He held me’. Every time I pushed my hand into the crib, it was his reflex action that gave me support. It was his hold that made me feel better. And this is an alternative way to look at the parentchild relationship. Even a newborn baby has the capacity to give support, to undertake actions (reflex or otherwise) that give those caring for them the desire to keep providing that support. I realised that this boy wasn’t a passive little human just absorbing the external influences that surrounded him. He could shape them and change them a little so that they

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better suited his developmental needs. I believe he needed me to be there for him that night. The reflex hand reaction grasping my little finger might be just a reflex, but it’s one that is designed to bear influence over the adult world. It gives us a sense of connectedness and love that a child of that age has no other way of communicating. So, I kept smiling. I stayed awake. Watching and writing. In the morning, my wife and her mother came to take over. My eyes squinted in the morning sun. It was hot and a January blue sky. When I put the keys in the car door I felt the need for that small hand around my finger. I started to shake. I opened the door, sat in the car and started to cry. Children participate with and influence adults during their developmental years. They do it time and time again with great effectiveness. They have to be able to do this because they need to make sure they get as much of the good developmental stuff as possible. You see, the job of a child is to become an adult. To grow, to learn, to develop. It’s not a simple process, but it is an inevitable one. It may never be as perfect as we’d like it to be. But because it only happens to each of us once, it is as perfect as it can be. Children and young people are active participants in that process. They are the ones who challenge and lead parents and adults to teach them. They push for boundaries to be set, they decide who to go to first, and where they are likely to score a developmental win. It’s like any team sport with multiple players and opposing teams. And it’s not just teenagers who are pushing the boundaries into the adult world. This participation begins with cries at birth, with first smiles and subtle actions right through childhood and youth. Idolising children asks us to celebrate the trials and tribulations of growing up. It questions whether there is any value in seeking the unattainable ideal of a perfect childhood. It will ask us how we, as adults, can better support the active participation of children and young people in their own development, and the

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development of their world. This book avoids the polarised debates surrounding children, parents and families. It does not buy into dogmatic convictions that pervade our discussions about childhood. Black-and-white answers to the complexities of childhood development simply add to the overflowing bucket of parental guilt. Working parents feel guilty about not being at home with their kids, while stay-at-home parents feel guilty about not being at work. We feel guilty about not helping our children with their homework, about buying takeaway dinners, about not allowing them to participate in as many after-school activities as they’d like (or we’d like!) and we feel guilty about not giving them enough time to just ‘vegg-out’ in front of the television. We all feel like we’re not doing enough, that we’re doing something wrong, or that we’re on the verge of making a huge mistake that will impact on our child’s life forever. This is the pressure and stress of our culture’s obsession with childhood and youth. And it is doing more harm than good. This book isn’t about blame. The situation we find ourselves in is just that: a situation. Dwelling too much on whose fault it is won’t help improve it. Parents are not to blame. Children are not to blame. We simply find ourselves in a complex world that changes so quickly keeping in touch is a challenge. I believe that a majority of us accept that the systems governing the lives of our children can be improved. But many of us feel powerless to make a significant difference. I don’t claim to have all the answers. If anything, I want this book to encourage the reader to think about what can change, and how we can involve children and young people in our lives, and the lives of our community even more. This book is not a self-help manual. It does not tell parents how to raise their children. This book argues that ‘good enough’ parenting is the best kind of parenting and probably the only kind of parenting). Instead of getting hung up on ‘good’ parenting or ‘bad’ parenting, I want us to think about how we collectively support mums and dads, how they support each

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other and how the responsibility for the development of children belongs to every member of the community  not just parents. Why do we strive to be younger? How is it that youth has become so desirable? Idolising children also questions our adult obsession with fighting the ageing process. It asks that we celebrate wisdom, intergenerational relationships and wrinkles. This book wants to fight back against Botox. This book is a call for us to consider how we view children. It challenges us to examine all the different images and ideas we have about childhood and youth, and to question whether or not they are adequate. These discussions and ideas don’t belong to me. They lie underneath the surface of the current debates about childhood. They are discussed in playgroups, in suburban parks and in children’s play centres. These ideas align with the growing unease over the direction our world is taking, and the lack of control we appear to have over it. Like many others who put pen to paper, my aim is to widen the debate. My aim is to make us feel a little bit uncomfortable about the current status quo and challenge ourselves to treat children and young people in ways that will improve their ability to develop into well-rounded, capable future citizens. I am suggesting that we need new images of childhood and youth. We need to strip back the ideas we take for granted, challenge the assumptions we have made about children and young people, and consider whether they are indeed truths or simply cultural constructs created to suit particular agendas. What are our agendas today? What power struggles exist between adulthood, childhood and youth? And are these agendas and struggles contributing in a positive or negative way to the development of children, to thriving experiences of adolescence and young adulthood? If we’re to make progress, we must re-evaluate what childhood and youth means and how it relates to the other ages and stages of life. A new image of childhood that matches our constantly changing and developing world would give us a different platform

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from which to debate issues like childcare, media representation of children and fertility decision-making. We should stop looking for a difference between adults and children. Stop talking about how tech-savvy they are and we are not. Quit it with the comparisons of mature or immature young people. There is room for us all to be a bit of both  right into old age. There are differences, but they are insignificant compared to our similarities. At our emotional core we are the same. Let’s hold each other’s hands. Let’s show each other love. Let’s jump in mud puddles, roll in the grass and throw fallen leaves in the air. Then, let’s help clean each other up when we are done.

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Introduction Child idolising

When I hear people say ‘I want my children to enjoy their childhood; there’ll be time when they’re older to learn about those things’, I hear the voices of those who are scared of life. I hear the voices of adults with no insight, no imagination, no understanding. These adults have a view of childhood as some kind of discrete interval, rather than just a few years from the continuum of life … How fortunate we are that the spirit, courage and curiosity of young people remains undefeated by such adults. John Marsden, author

JonBenét In 1996, the world first saw images of murdered six-year-old child beauty-pageant star, JonBenét Ramsey. Posing in heavy make-up and coquettish clothing, her eyes stared with the blankness of a supermodel, and her smile seemed forced and uncomfortable. With the discovery of JonBenét’s body in her parents’ Colorado basement on Boxing Day that year, the extremities of our youth-obsessed culture were starkly illustrated alongside our destructive tendency to idolise children. But it wasn’t just the

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tragedy of her death that drew the world to this story. It was the controversy surrounding her short life. As details were revealed, we were confronted with images of a little girl dressed like a young woman. Images of JonBenét, documented in photos and video footage, sat in stark contrast to our ideas of what a childhood should be. There was little to illustrate the joy of just being a kid. There was no obvious respect for this young girl’s personhood. Instead, we saw weighty demands and the rigours of the competitive adult world. Many of us felt confused, uncomfortable and angry. Like JonBenét Ramsey, thousands of child beauty-pageant competitors every year are treated as child idols. These children portray images of adult beauty that some people believe is for the satiation of adult egos: to temper uncontrolled insecurities and unspoken fetishes. Whether or not this assessment is true, child beauty pageants stand as an extreme example of our society’s obsession with childhood and youth. But this idolising of childhood isn’t isolated to tragic examples such as JonBenét Ramsey’s story, as we will observe through the pages of this book.

What is idolising childhood? The idolisation of childhood and youth is the worship of an idealised childhood, not the respect of the reality of childhood. It is the desire for something that doesn’t exist: for younger looking skin and youthful exuberance into old age. Idolising children is an unspoken cultural belief that we can preserve innocence within childhood, that youth is free of any real responsibility and that somehow childhood and youth are separate and unique compared to the rest of our life. This isn’t true. Childhood and youth are an integral part of who we are as individuals. We shouldn’t divide ourselves into ages and stages. We don’t need the tags like baby-boomers or

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Generation X or Y; instead we should be working to create a society for all ages, where birth and death are the triumphant bookends to an entire life and where there isn’t innocence in childhood or inflexibility in older age. Of course we wish for a place free of the stress, fear and danger of these times. The desire for a utopia is not new and will not go away. And, given the excessive amount of bad news transmitted at a million images a minute by the globalised world media, it isn’t surprising that we want to believe there is a place that is ignorant of it all. Our idolising of children and young people has turned childhood and youth into our earthly utopia. Childhood is where we get an easy ride, and children don’t know how good they’ve got it. Youth is wasted on the young, right? If only it was an easy ride. Children see the same news we do, they hear their parents talk, they fight over toys and experience negative emotions, as well as positive emotions. In short, they experience the same world we do. Children were never innocent. Our children are imperfect. Childhood and youth have their own unique challenges and perks, but that is no different to any other life stage. We need to lower our camera lenses for a moment and consider that we might not be getting the full picture.

Blinded by the light Our desire to pretend childhood is something that it isn’t means we misunderstand important aspects of childhood. We carry our ideas of what childhood should be in an evangelistic manner. We are so busy proclaiming how important children are and waving our hands in the air as we talk about all the good things we do for them, we often miss the point. We know that children are important, the professionals and politicians have explained it all and the evidence is overwhelming. But somehow we regularly forget what that means in terms

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of how we support the development of children and young people. We must relearn to appreciate why children are important and what that means for the adult world. Children engage with the world through play, and we assume this is always fun and enjoyable because our image of play is as recreation. But play is the work of children. Play for children can be frustrating and always involves learning and meeting challenges; it is a challenge to know so little and have to find ways to interpret and understand the complexities of the world. So children must play, but it isn’t all fun and games. Children will get frustrated. They will get upset or tired, just like we do. If we begin to consider ideas like this, we can begin to make sense of our idolising. If we consider that children are important but that they are no more or less important than the individuals and community whose responsibility it is to raise them, then we can start to ditch the dogma. Through this book we will gradually break down our idealised views and images of childhood and youth. The ideal, the perfect, the desired isn’t helping us meet the needs of children and young people: because of our idolising, we have many of those needs wrong in the first place.

Idolising and missing the point We are confused about what is in the best interests of children and young people. We think we have to spend more time with them, more quality time. Maybe we do. But maybe it is more important to consider why we need to spend more time with them and how we choose to spend that time. Ask yourself, why do I want to spend more time with my children? How many reasons can you come up with? How important are those reasons? This book is not arguing that we should spend less time with children. Rather we should think more about why and how we spend that time. Do we spend time with our children because we

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love them, because we feel we have a responsibility to do it, because we should help them with homework, or take them to sports? Do we do it because that is what we are supposed to do? Because we want our children to achieve, or because we want them to be happy? And, if spending time with children is important, why just spend it with our own children? Why not the children and young people of our friends, or in our community  as a sports coach, a tutor, a neighbour? Now, go and ask your children why they want to spend more time with you and see what their answer is? And what if you have teenagers and the answer is they want to spend less time with you? Respecting the views of our children means considering this and working out ways to exist together, support each other and learn how we as adults can provide the developmental framework that lets our children engage with their development. Children aren’t here to be imagined, or idolised, or worked out. We live with them, we help raise them and they raise us to be parents), we share our lives with them. We need to ask them, to consider them and respect the answers they give. As the adults, it is up to us to make a comfortable space for children and teenagers to express their views and believe they are being taken seriously.

Where do we see it and what does it do? Our idolising is seen in the way the advertising industry represents children and young people  an industry that actively distorts our images of childhood for its own benefit. It is observed in the growing push by parents to provide children with a mindboggling array of experiences through after-school classes and co-curricular activity. It is heard in parental conversations about our children’s overwhelmingly positive academic achievements. When we idolise childhood, we distance children from the adult world. We isolate them from the continuum of the lived

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human experience and confuse our ideas of what it means to be a child. We misunderstand childhood and youth as a time free of responsibility, as innocent and hidden from experiences dealt with in the adult world. We confuse the ignorance of youth as innocence. Children and young people are not innocent, they are on a knowledge path  each day they learn and understand more about the world in which they live. As adults, guiding them on that path we face the challenging situation of trying to establish what they should know and when. However, in our modern world we cannot control this. In the face of reality television, of the images on the nightly news, of Internet search engines, of the lyrics and stories from popular rap artists like Eminem, of the school yard, the peer group and in the face of society in general we can’t stop our children from seeing this world as it is. Despite our lack of control, we want to believe that we still have it. We try to ban television shows that show sex, violence and profanity because we have decided they are not suitable for young children. We talk about sheltering children, protecting them and shielding them from undesirable aspects of our society. But is that what we are really trying to do? I think we are trying to shield ourselves more than our children. We don’t want to lose our imagined belief that childhood is innocent and precious. We can’t handle the idea that children have their own way of understanding and interpreting the events they see on the world news or hear as part of playground gossip and play. Our society finds it easier to restrict junk food, advertising, and television rather than undertake the more difficult task of teaching children to self-regulate, to engage with the world and make the right decisions about things. We don’t trust them to make good decisions because we don’t respect that we’ve given them those skills. And if they can’t make decisions, they can’t make mistakes  so how will they learn? We regard childhood as the best of all life stages; the time that is most important, most enjoyable and worthy of idolising. Which means the best of your life is over once it has really begun

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 and we spend the rest of our lives trying to relive our youth, rather than live the age we are. It is an unfortunate situation. Contemporary childhood resembles Jim Carrey’s character, Truman, in The Truman Show. It is constantly under the spotlight: being watched, discussed and analysed. But children are barely aware of it. And, just like Truman, are certainly not in on the discussion. Idolising childhood gives us greater focus on protecting and shielding an idea, when we should be guiding and supporting our children’s understanding of sex, politics and everything else. We should be supporting them to make decisions and helping them realise they will make mistakes, and those mistakes can hurt. Idolising children creates paradoxes. Our parental desire to give our children a breadth of experience clashes with the overprotection and risk aversion that has seeped into parenting culture. Our fears are so compounded by risk aversion measures taken by governments, we no longer feel comfortable allowing our children to climb trees or ride their bikes to school. Many new parents spend sleepless hours fearing sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), despite the small percentage of infants affected by it. At the same time as we surround our children’s lives with adult fears and expectations, we romanticise our own childhoods and watch media images that fictionalise childhood and youth as an extra special time that’s free of the constraints of the adult world. These images, however, are not created for children. We promote these fictions for adult interests and the adult world. It’s no wonder that children are filled with angst by the time they reach adolescence. The reality of their lived experience doesn’t match the one they’re presented with. Our ideas about what’s in the best interests of children may not really be in their best interests. Our idolising of children does not support the changes required to adequately foster children’s development through to adulthood. It supports our ideas and images of what we think childhood and youth should be. But it’s not just about children. Our idolisation of childhood and youth affects all our lives.

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Demography = destiny Demography has conspired to provide our culture with fewer children, smaller families and older first-time parents and grandparents. This in part leads to child scarcity and a greater value being placed on the children who do exist. It means that in an era when we are more affluent than ever, we can shower children with gifts and meet their material needs more than ever because there are fewer children to share the abundance. Fewer children means we have been able to focus more attention on them; only-children have the luxury of two adults to cater to their wants and needs. More parents work these days, fathers are being asked to take on a greater role and parents feel guilty about picking their children up from after-school care. It is a very different world for children than a few decades ago. The result is more and more attention and more and more wants being met. This means our idolising becomes a potent economic force as more and more money is directed towards markets for children and young people, which allows industry to distort our instincts. And we are being sold images of childhood and youth that encourage us to continue along the current path; a path where we fear for our children’s wellbeing and safety constantly, where we restrict their capacity to explore the world on their own and in doing so perhaps we are limiting their ability to develop into adults capable of supporting themselves and developing their own ideas.

Nothing wrong with age There is nothing wrong with ageing. But our idolising of childhood and youth and all that comes with it means we have created a negative image of ageing and growing old. This is a disservice to us and our children. Our children need people of all ages to help raise and guide them towards adulthood; to share

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insights into life so that when they grow up they can shake their heads in wonder and say ‘Wow, now I understand.’ We must acknowledge that everyone’s stage of development and place within the human continuum is valuable. We need to make sure people take the journey through this continuum, rather than stalling in one spot and never moving. Of course, some of us will do that, but it is a luxury most of us can’t afford – and to be honest, why would you want to? Young children learn early to cope with change, to drive change. They develop so quickly they are forced to deal with a whole gamut of changes as they grow. So, if from our very first breath we are dealing with change, perhaps change is one of the things we do best  something we are supposed to do. If this is the case we need as diverse a group as possible to support the change we consistently face in life. We don’t need a philosophy of children first, we need one of a society for all ages: inclusive, supportive and diverse. We are all responsible for supporting the development of the children in our community. It is our duty to engage with adolescents along their journey to adulthood. It is our obligation to let children be children, to delegate responsibility, to encourage maturity and to welcome the coming of age.

Honouring childhood and youth Idolising children isn’t done with the heart, it is done with the head. We think and read and assume we know what is in the best interests of our children, when what we need to do is feel what is in the best interests of our children. If we are to break down the culture of idolising and learn how to respect and honour childhood and youth, we need to understand that children and young people experience the same world that we do. They react to it, just as we all do.

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We need to honour childhood and respect children. This must come from the heart because it is at that level that we are equal with children and young people. They cannot compete with our level of education or years of lived experience, but they can love like we can. Where are the benefits in this? The benefits are what we will explore in this book. The benefits are new ways of looking at the issues and challenges faced by children, parents, families and society. We could cut through the garbage of our debates about childhood and youth and find something that can really make a difference. If we are not respecting and honouring children and young people, do we really think we are going to come up with the right solutions for the problems facing not just them now but the future world they will inherit? Everyone responsible for developing our economic systems and physical environments affects the social and emotional development of children. Everything we do impacts on their lives. We must all begin to consider how children react and engage with the work we do. We must do this out of respect for children and young people as human beings. Not to preference them but to bring them to the same level of engagement and consultation that other age groups in our society enjoy. What is required is a reinvestment in community. Not through government-funded projects but through reconnecting with our neighbours. In this way, an investment in community is an investment in our children’s futures. Our children need to see conversations in supermarkets and bank teller lines. They need to be allowed to walk to school and talk to the people in their street. They need to be shown that their society is something with which to celebrate and engage  not to fear and retreat from. They need to be allowed to contribute; to be treated with the same respect as adults and play their own part in shaping and building their community. After all, it is theirs to inherit.

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Chapter 1 Childhood histories: Images, ideas and myths

When we raise our children, we relive our childhood. Forgotten memories, painful and pleasurable, rise to the surface … So each of us thinks, almost daily, of how our own childhood compares with our children’s, and of what our children’s future will hold. Richard Louv, author

History in a shopping centre I met Rose (not her real name) while working in Doncaster Shopping Centre’s Disney Store. I was asked to work the day Rose came to visit, to juggle and perform magic tricks. Rose was thin, pale and smaller than her six years. What was left of her wispy hair was covered with a straw hat. In Melbourne to receive treatment for cancer at the Royal Children’s Hospital, she was visiting the store with her parents, representatives from the Starlight Foundation and executives from Disney. She was a big fan of Disney’s animated movies, especially The Lion King. My job that day was to make her visit an event: to roll around with her on the star-covered carpet and keep everyone smiling. What I first saw was an innocent and fragile child needing constant

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care. But over the hour we played on the floor, throwing soft toys and arguing over favourite characters, these images unravelled. Rose was possibly nearing the end of her short childhood. But despite her illness she played with vigour and smiled with true delight. She was at once weak and strong, vulnerable and invulnerable. She suffered in the days following chemotherapy, but with each passing day some strength would return and she understood how good it was to use the energy she had. Rose’s short history was one of determination, of regular hospital visits and many hundreds of needles and blood tests. None of it would have been pleasant. But in an outer-suburban shopping centre she showed everybody present how she got the most out of each moment. She did this for herself but also for her parents, as it was Rose’s mum who was more fragile. It was her parents who wore their tiredness and weakness in every expression and movement. Rose radiated calm and happiness, perhaps coming from a unique understanding of why she was the centre of attention. As it appeared to me, Rose bore some weight of her parents’ suffering, and through her own six-year-old level of understanding she did what she could to make each moment special. Not so much for herself but for those most important to her. My short time with Rose taught me how easily we misrepresent children, make assumptions and thrust upon them our adult interpretation of their situation. Adults can never again see the world as a six-year-old, but the six-year-old viewpoint is not devoid of awareness or understanding. The unique experiences and development of that six-year-old child inform her awareness and understanding. Rose displayed much more ability and understanding than we were giving her credit for.

Images of childhood As adults, we see the world of children through adult eyes. We see childhood and youth within a historical framework written, interpreted and understood by adults, not children. And that

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means, to an extent, we are blinkered. We can try to be childcentred, but it will always be from an adult perspective. The history of childhood is a history of images: of baby Jesus in a manger, rosy-cheeked cherubs and the sullen faces of dirty children working the mines; pictures of young lads shining shoes on the streets of 18th century London, of 1950s school boys with perfectly parted hair lining up for the cane, of a photograph from the Vietnam war of a naked girl fleeing the napalm bombings. It is the made-up face of JonBenét Ramsey, the family photographs of our own children or in World Vision images of African children with distended, hungry stomachs. All of these images elicit different responses, different thoughts and feelings in us. They are all of different places and times, but we know them all and they impact on our ideas of childhood. We are in a state of confusion about childhood. To us, childhood is both innocent and evil. It is free of responsibility, yet a time of transition into responsible adulthood. It is precious and special. It is remarkably banal and normal. We are faced with challenging questions about the nature of childhood as we watch the images represented in the media and struggle with the raising of our own children. The questions we want to ask are confronting. Do children need to encounter the breadth and depth of emotions for their development, or should we try to shield them from the traumatic and stressful experiences of life? Are children inherently innocent, or inherently ‘bad’? In what framework do we comprehend tragic incidents such as the 1993 murder of UK toddler James Bolger by two 11-year-old boys? These questions are not easy, nor comfortable to ask. The first academic text of childhood history, Centuries of childhood, portrayed childhood through interpretations of images of children in paintings, drawings and various styles of dress. The author Phillipé Aries got the world thinking very specifically about childhood. He invigorated debate about how our interpretations of childhood have varied across the centuries, asserting that, ‘in medieval society, the idea of childhood did

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not exist.’1 As Aries saw it, as soon as infancy ended, adulthood began. Children were not educated in medieval times, but trained in the culture. So children began work young and married much younger than they do today. Children dressed as adults, toiled alongside adults and were a functioning part of the economy. Childhood, as we understand it, is a product of our modern affluent world. Aries’ book was ground breaking. Previously, no one had dedicated an entire thesis to a discussion about childhood. Prior to the 1970s very little had been written discussing children as people, or childhood as an idea. Aries opened the floodgates. This means that children, until recently, have been ‘kept from history’.2 Aries’ work came just as we began to seriously segment childhood and youth into a variety of different stages: infancy, primary, adolescence. This has perhaps helped us identify the evolution of childhood into a series of life stages that continue to become more prevalent as our society becomes more complex. This work has spawned greater analysis of childhood. So much so that today childhood images from hundreds of years of history all coalesce to provide us with a mixed bag of contradictory ideas about what childhood should be. Perhaps we would have better answers if children were empowered to produce images of themselves, which is something they have not been able to do previously. As historian Harry Hendrick explains, ‘… children are not in a position either to write their own history, or to ask awkward questions of those who exercise power and control over them.’3 Power will always be unequally distributed between adults and children. In this light, we should consider the intention behind the various images of childhood, and ask whose interests they are really serving, children or adults? This question opens up the possibility that despite our best intentions and slogans about how important children are, we still put adults first. And if we acknowledge this we can begin considering and discussing the edges of debates about childhood, not just the safe centres.

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Our society ignores many important questions because we are caught in the mythology of childhood and youth. Myths bundled up in popular culture and parenting books leave us feeling less certain and more uncomfortable about childhood and how we guide it. This means parents often feel alone, helpless and even a threat to their own children, rather than part of the community of people responsible for guiding and supporting them. Why is it that we regularly see raising children as a burden when there is so much in it for us? The history of childhood is a history of different ideas that produce different theories on how we should raise children. But those ideas no longer stack up in the modern world. We need new ones that don’t contradict. We need images of childhood and youth that respect our relationships with children and young people and make us feel equal to the task of raising them, supporting them to become capable adults. Well, at least a place from where we can give it our best shot. However, if we are to talk openly about what we desire for our children and whether our obsession with childhood and youth is healthy, we must consider the histories of childhood.

Perceptions of childhood No single childhood is perceived in the same way. A person who suffered childhood abuse will have a different concept of childhood to another raised in a loving extended family. Think of your own childhood, or your children’s experience of childhood and how different they are. Even children in the same family experience childhood in different ways and become different people because of it. Consider the famous Australian brothers Tim and Peter Costello. Child historian Karen Taylor explains it like this: ‘[W]hat I found was that families did not choose the way they wanted

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to treat children from an infinite variety of options. They were directed in their choices by the economic, political and social structures of their time.’4 This has ramifications for us all. We have ideas about our own children and what we want their childhood to be. But even as individual parents we are restrained from providing what we may regard as best for our children, due to circumstances beyond our control. More significant is Taylor’s research into child abuse in Australia and America that challenges the core definition of childhood. In regards to child abuse, she noted that ‘the same behaviours were not considered abusive universally, nor consistently over time’5. That is to say, what we once may have regarded as not abusive we now consider unacceptable. And while some people may regard the way one family treats their children as abusive or undesirable, others will not see it this way. This is played out in child development arguments about corporal punishment and the ongoing debates about smacking children. The history of childhood reveals that children have not been treated with the reverence we afford them today. Indeed, in other cultures children are still made to work and, in many ways, are viewed quite differently from our idea of childhood. Our greatest challenge is to consider how much conviction we should have about the way we raise and treat our children today. Are our actions really in children’s best interest, or our own? And how do we determine whose interests should be first anyway? Whatever the era, childhood has always been seen as a first step: the beginning of life, of a human story. Most historians agree on a period of childhood infancy where, if they were to survive, children required a level of care and support from the adult world. But beyond this point, there is much debate. Aries contested that medieval children joined the world of adults as soon as they were weaned. Human beings in medieval times, according to Aries, didn’t have a concept of childhood. Their image of children was that of miniature adults.

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The miniature adult In medieval times there were no schools, no arcades or Nintendo. In Aries’ opinion there were no boys or girls, only men and women. As soon as they could participate, children were working the fields or following a family trade. Life in the Middle Ages was about survival and every able pair of hands was needed for the job. The foundations of Aries’ argument in Centuries of childhood were images. He identified that children and young people barely appeared in medieval art because there was no idea of childhood to capture. A seven-year-old apprentice was the same as an adult apprentice. A nine-year-old working alongside an adult in the fields or in the kitchen with their mother was part of the adult world. There simply wasn’t time for childhood. When we consider our modern images of our precious children, Aries’ claim that children were regarded as adults is quite confronting. Indeed, some medievalists have gone to great lengths to establish that love and care for children did actually exist. To do this they have gone beyond Aries’ evidence and read diaries, searched Births and Deaths records and tried to reconstruct the daily lives of medieval people. Through this they have tried to illustrate that medieval childhood did actually exist. Young medieval children were granted many responsibilities and freedoms not considered for children today. Until the late 16th century, boys aged 14 and girls aged 12 simply had to exchange mutual words of consent then consummate the union to become married. The church and the state were not involved. 6 While those responsibilities correlate with the pressures of a far lower life expectancy, the fact remains that young people have been given large amounts of familial responsibility until very recently. Our modern understanding of child labour is that of an appalling practice. But into the 19th century, the importance of training children in a family trade or supporting the family unit on their farm was crucial to identity, as well as survival. Children would begin to contribute to the family economy between the ages

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of five and seven. Of course, much of this work would have been demanding, and some of it gruelling. But, before industrialisation and factory work, work tasks were graded by age and had the potential to afford children a sense of responsibility and purpose. There were no formal schools to attend, and children didn’t even learn to read. What else were children expected to do? Our current laws in this country still allow children to begin working before their fifteenth birthday. Other aspects of medieval childhood stand in stark contrast to modern ideas of childhood. Especially in the first year of life, the risk to young children’s lives was extremely high. A range of accepted practices included ‘swaddling’, where children’s arms were tightly bound by their sides in the belief their arms would grow straight, and wet-nursing, which generally involved women from lower classes having children sent to their house to be breastfed during their first year.7 The number of children fed by a single wet-nurse, the conditions of wet-nurses’ homes and lack of parental visits all contributed to high infant mortality rates. High infant death rates meant children were often not named, or were given the name of a previously deceased sibling. Children were buried in unmarked or unnamed graves. Aries used this as another way to portray a society without the same regard for childhood as modern society. And perhaps it did not because the human condition could not psychologically afford it. Before industrialisation, life was physically harder. Perhaps sentimentality was a luxury that was rarely afforded. Along with the ongoing risks to human health and wellbeing, medieval society was far more focused on the simple process of survival. Children were required to be part of the economic and social fabric of society, and until recently this expectation continued to exist. While evidence exists of medieval children’s toys and debates continue over the treatment of children in medieval society, it is undeniable that children were treated very differently from today. It is also undeniable that in our contemporary world we continue

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to maintain the image of children as miniature adults. Children today are still asked to pursue productive lives. Most may not have to milk cows or tend the fields, but just as their mums and dads join the workaholic ranks, children are asked to complete hours of homework a night and produce reports and projects, just as adult workers do. School has become more than a simple 9 am–3 pm affair. In total, it may add up to more than the hard-fought-for 40-hour working week. One mother recently told me that her Grade 1 daughter had to prepare her first public speaking task for the class, and she was very nervous. She had been given a topic on which to prepare a two-minute talk. When I asked her why a seven-year-old would need to do public speaking, the mother replied, ‘To prepare her, of course’. Prepare her for what? Public speaking in Grade 2? I remember participating in something like public speaking in early primary school. However, it wasn’t called ‘public speaking’, it was called ‘Show and Tell’. We weren’t set a topic on which to prepare a talk, and most children participated every week. It took up the whole morning, and no one displayed the nerves associated with a public speaking task. We were keen to get up and tell everyone our news. But then again, maybe only a generation or so ago when I was growing up the world wasn’t quite as fast, hadn’t quite grabbed onto the speed of information technology and become so focused on productivity and achievement. I can’t remember debates over school reports when I was at school  unless they were debates between the children holding the reports and their parents who were keen to see them. There is a sense that we have shifted from a time when there wasn’t an idea of childhood to a time where we have now created a hyper-childhood where the best, and only the best, is good enough.

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The perfect child Modern Western history’s contribution to our ideas of childhood is the image of the ‘perfect child’. Of course, creating the perfect child or perfect childhood is impossible. But this has not prevented us from expending tremendous amounts of energy trying. The idea of the perfect child is a response to many social and economic factors. Our competitive world leads us to feel we must do everything within our power to help our children achieve economic success, or just stay afloat. Additionally, increasing levels of material wealth have seen children become another asset with which to compare ourselves against others. Children have become the latest status symbol, as seen in the growing trend of celebrities publicly embracing designerclad pregnancies and the resulting designer babies. This means Lleyton and Bec Hewitt bring their baby to the Logies, Brad and Angelina fly to Africa for the birth of their child and the Internet hosts more and more sites of baby photos and baby blogs. The perfect child is raised to succeed and be ever more productive and competitive in our society; a child shaped by the economic growth and rationalism of the last 20 years. Our ‘perfect children’ don’t engage in activities purely for fun or pleasure, but because they will contribute to their development into employable citizens prepared for the cut and thrust of the workplace and free market: where nothing less than perfect will do. Even if we’re not celebrities, many parents feel that our children’s successes are a reflection on us: an indication of how well we’ve done in raising them. So our children’s university place or new high-flying job, or the medal they won at the sports carnival, is used by parents in the same way as a new car or promotion. Our tendency to compare and compete, to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ has hardened us. Most parents have at one time or another found themselves commenting on their children’s development compared to that of their children’s peers. And sometimes we question why we do it.

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Parents undergo overwhelming pressure about the impact we will have on our children’s lives. And this drive to not produce a ‘failure’ is one reason we pursue perfect parenting and, in turn, perfect children. It is this pursuit that is causing anxiety to parents, exhaustion in children and stress across all of society. As we become more ensconced in the idolising of children, sociologist Frank Furedi points out that we are also forcing ourselves to regard ‘parents as gods’. And it makes sense: who else can raise child-gods except parent-gods? Furedi’s argument is that parenting is not a ‘complex science’ and, as a way of circumventing our pursuit of perfection, argues for greater community involvement in children’s lives. ‘Parents need to create their own little community of stakeholders in their children’s welfare,’ Furedi says. 8 In our pursuit of ‘the best’ for our children, we may be actually doing the opposite. The ‘perfect childhood’ is what Kali Wendorf, editor of the family magazine Byronchild, calls ‘the synthetic world of childhood’. This world is one where parents work to provide ever more activities for their children; however, these activities don’t support the strengthening of relationships between parents, the community and their children. It is simply an economic exchange. There is no doubt that singly, these things can be beneficial for children. What is of concern is the increasing number of activities children are undertaking, and the complete absorption of children’s time. The core problem with the image of the perfect child is that it has the potential to further narrow childhood, under the guise of supporting its development. We argue that our obsession with filling up children’s lives with activities, pushing them to achieve and promoting their success is in their best interests. However, I suggest that it is a result of an unwillingness to accept that children are very active participants in their own development. While children need adults to be participants in their development, they don’t need to be driven so forcefully. As we will see in coming chapters, children need time to do nothing.

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The ‘innocent child’ The 18th century French writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau promoted the idea of the ‘innocent child’. Some of his writings explore the concept that it is society that corrupts and harms children. Children, according to Rousseau, need to be raised in a way that protects them from harmful experiences and nurtures their innocence and purity. ‘Love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts … Why fill with bitterness the fleeting days of early childhood?’ he writes. 9 Innocence is one of childhood’s most powerful images: the idea that childhood is free, pleasurable and not tainted by the weight of responsibility, or the hurt of trauma that exists in the adult world. Most of us love to wallow in the romanticism of these ideas of childhood. Of course, Rousseau’s image is at once as true and false as the image of child as miniature adult. As childhood is a process of development, there are aspects of the adult world that children don’t understand, and neither should we expect or ask them to. But they do understand many aspects of life in a way that is appropriate to them at their level of development. Children know that flowers grow, later they learn that water and sunshine make flowers grow, in secondary school science they learn about the process of photosynthesis. Think of the way children come to understand the life cycle and the methods we have developed, from the birds and the bees to the book Where did I come from? and sex education later on. As adults we are entrusted to guide children’s development in their formative years. But how much information we give to children is a question so individual there is no correct answer. We find the image of childhood innocence in debates over TV and video games classifications, in the question of what is and isn’t appropriate for children. The corruption of innocence also sits at the core of discussions of child abuse and domestic violence, and rightly so. Child abuse introduces children to

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something that no person, let alone a child, should experience in a world that respects basic human rights. More than a corruption of innocence, it is a criminal offence. It is interesting to note that in our literary classics, childhood innocence is not as highly regarded or promoted as it is today. From Dickens’ Oliver Twist to Disney’s The Little Mermaid, the child characters may start with certain naivety, yet they participate in the adventure of their own development. They experience new things, interpret them in their own way, and grow and learn from them. Perhaps this is because in the act of story telling, whether fantasy or fact, maintaining the element of innocence is impossible because it is so unrealistic. It also makes for a boring story. The image of the innocent child holds little drama, growth or action. Indeed, a childhood of complete innocence wouldn’t be much of a childhood at all. So in our search for an accurate image of childhood, the innocent child picture is as unhelpful as that of the miniature adult. Rose’s story at the start of this chapter demonstrates that children very rapidly begin to develop their own understanding of the world. Parents observe this daily. We watch our children’s understanding grow in complexity as they mature. They may not experience events in the same way as adults, but they do develop ways of integrating their experiences, learning from them and coping with life. This is a good thing. This is childhood development, and it needs support and understanding. Perhaps Rousseau’s idea of childhood continues to resonate so strongly because amid the pressure and stress of our society’s rapid economic and technological growth, we need an image to which we can escape. Our desire to produce perfect children comes into conflict with our own desire to believe we can escape to a place that has none of the pressures that our competitive world draws out. We like to think of childhood as a place of refuge, protection and innocence because it comforts us to think that we once had that experience. We also like to think that our children are not affected by the demands of modern life. But this is a naive

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assumption if we examine our childcare and education systems, which are designed as places for children in an adult world that demands their parents work, and they learn the skills required to survive in our modern times. These systems support the idea that the important final outcome of all this development is both a high-paying job and an ability to withstand the pressures of the ‘real world’. Ultimately, the image of childhood as innocent stands as a reaction to the Christian view of children being born into ‘original sin’. The picture of the sinful child reflects children as containing an inherent badness that only a life of Christian goodness can correct. Today, in our secular Western world, we like to think we don’t give any regard to the image of children as evil. But we are mistaken.

The evil or bad child The idea that children are born into ‘sin’ developed during the Middle Ages. This is the core reason why baptism occurs in most Christian religions at such a young age. Indeed, in many countries it still does. Today, baptism continues to be predominantly practised on young children. Many proud parents wouldn’t give much thought to the fact that in the eyes of the church they are ridding their child of inherent evil. The historical view that many progressive Christians would abandon was that only through the process of reconciling a child’s sin through baptism could a child be assured of going to Heaven. Of course, hundreds of years ago, infant mortality was so common due to disease and poor nutrition that ‘saving a child’s soul’ had to occur as quickly after birth as possible.10 So important was baptism as a sacrament that the Catholic Church allowed female midwives to perform the sacrament if a child was unlikely to survive long after birth. And if a mother died during childbirth, the midwife was supposed to cut her open

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so she could bring out the baby to baptise it.11 Our modern and secular society has certainly toned down the image of evil children. ‘Evil’ is a strong word. Today we reserve the word for terrorists, and acts of murder and genocide. Instead, we have revised the image as that of the ‘bad child’. Daily we are confronted with the image of ‘bad children’. Bad children are the ones needing to be brought into line by Supernannies. Bad children are the ones who roam the streets unsupervised. Bad children deface walls and trains with graffiti. They smash property. They disobey and distort the other images of childhood we want to retain. There is little room or tolerance for the ‘bad child’ within our image of the innocent and happy child. ‘Bad children’ are rolled out every six months or less on commercial current affairs TV with screamers like ‘Who is controlling these kids?’ and ‘Children terrorising the neighbourhood’. The reporters are serious and the presenters frown in disapproval. And parents whose children’s worst crime is to throw tantrums in front of the confectionary shelves in the supermarket express lane sigh with relief. We’re not that bad at our job, we think. Our children are nowhere near that bad. My God, we say, imagine having a child like that! Thanks to the popular interpretations of psychology, our society has found that the best place to lay the blame for bad children is with the parents. It is a parenting pop culture mantra that ‘bad parents make bad children’. This has become a marketing dream for parenting experts and publishers of self-help books. Desperate not to be bad parents, mothers and fathers rush to the parenting section and stock up on all the latest tips from toddler taming to teenage depression. In many instances children may be better off if we all just trusted our own intuition a little bit more, because children are not evil or bad. Sure, like all of us they are capable of and do bad things, but the only truly evil children you will see are in poorly contrived Hollywood movies. And then, even the ones who see dead people aren’t actually bad.

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The image of the evil child has contributed to mountains of parental guilt and anxiety; what sociologist Frank Furedi calls ‘paranoid parenting’.12 Our ever-increasing knowledge of childhood development and the rate it is cycled through the media, along with stories of bad children and what becomes of them, leaves parents immobilised with fear. We feel we have no choice but to idolise our children. As parents, we do our utmost to be seen as appeasing our children’s needs. Furedi points out that in our work-rich, time-poor society we are stuck in a ‘poisonous atmosphere for parenting’, where we usually just cater to our children’s material needs.13 These are the needs that, in a consumer society, are most obvious and easiest to meet. Are parents stuck in a poisonous atmosphere for parenting? Consider Furedi’s example of the ‘Full Stop’ advertising campaign, funded by the UK National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in May 2000. Shocking pictures on billboards show a loving mother playing with her baby. The caption reads, Later she wanted to hold a pillow over his face. Another picture highlights a loving father cuddling his baby. The words That night he felt like slamming her head against the bed serve as a chilling reminder not to be deceived by appearances … this alleged link between parental incompetence and abusive behaviour has disturbing implications for every father and mother. If anyone can snap and smash the head of a baby against the wall, whom can you trust?14

It may appear extreme, but images of ‘bad parents’ only further entrench the image of the innocent child, holding up the adult/ parent as dangerous, menacing and incompetent. However, an overwhelming majority of parents and adults are not these things. Later we will look at child safety and the role of the child protection lobby whose reports about child abuse and the dangers to children are commonly misrepresented and sensationalised. This does not mean we should ignore the issue of child abuse, but we should place it in a much larger, less hysterical context.

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Of course the issues presented by these conflicting antiquated and modern images of childhood and youth are challenging. If only it was as simple as back in the 1950s, right?

The hygienic child ‘Have you washed your hands?’ Always before dinner at the home of a childhood friend, his mother would ask us this question, to which we would always answer, ‘yes’ – whether or not we had. My friend’s mum always took our answer without question. It was one of those automatic questions, one of those learned phrases all parents find themselves saying and cringing at because they know it comes from their own childhood: a childhood they often swear they won’t repeat for their own children. She didn’t really care if we’d washed them or not. She just had to ask. She was a child of the fifties. The post-war era also produced an interesting interpretation of childhood. In this era of domestic revolution, swamped by all manner of whitegoods to keep the home sanitised, the cleanliness of children also became central  and with good reason. In the century before, the rate of infant mortality was still very high. Most new parents of the 1950s had direct experience of at least one world war in which many children had died, or were forced to live in very poor conditions. And they knew poor conditions because they were the children of the Great Depression. Science had cemented in the social consciousness that cleanliness and hygiene were the best combatants of disease. Disease was primarily responsible for infant deaths, and romantic images of starched sheets and clean, white cloth nappies on the Hills Hoist are images that represent the fifties’ newly hygienic childhood. This picture of childhood provided a platform from which we could begin to value children in a new way. The innocence of childhood could be further revered because our society

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no longer had to grip itself against the trauma of high infant mortality. More time could be invested in childhood because household maintenance was being made far easier with advances in technology. The irony is that today our desire for perfect children means that some advisors tell us we are too clean. Our detergents and cleaners may be no good for crawling babies and may be contributing to the development of asthma. A lack of dirt and exposure to bugs and disease is further decreasing our children’s natural immunity. As with so many ideas about childhood, it is impossible to score a win without also scoring an own goal. While the expectations were nowhere near as demanding as today, the parental role had changed. Children were usually raised on a diet of strict discipline and respect for adults, while receiving little respect themselves. The introduction of child labour laws and compulsory education over the preceding century had created a new period of life for young people. It was a baby boom, and children were in abundance. It was at this time the term ‘teenager’ was first coined for an age group who suddenly had more time on their hands than ever before. Youth culture gained greater public focus because of teenagers’ increasingly perceived lack of responsibility and an amount of free time previously unheard of in a young Western adult world. The increased public attention on youth coincided with a greater privatisation of childrearing. The nuclear family became paramount and the pressure on women to maintain domestic bliss began. If there was a sense of the community raising a child in Australia, the responsibility started to shift clearly at this time. Following World War II, the turn of the century concept of ‘proper mothering’ really took hold, along with its role in providing best outcomes for children’s health and wellbeing. 15 No longer were children the responsibility of the community. That responsibility fell squarely on the shoulders of the mother. The male-breadwinner model was in full force, and children became just another private domestic responsibility.

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If that sounds familiar, it’s because this concept remains today. While more is being done to promote the role of the father and his responsibilities in modern parenting, there is not a corresponding increase in fathers taking a significantly active role in their children’s lives. While unfortunate, it’s not hard to understand. Little has changed in the workplace to promote parttime work, or give women equal pay and access to higher-waged management positions. This means we’ve seen the beginning of the revolution, but at home and work there are certainly many more changes to come. If anything is even less present than the capacity for fathers’ involvement in their children’s lives, it’s that a community has responsibility for the wellbeing and development of our children. If anything, the private world has engulfed children and isolated them from their communities. Few children are permitted to play in the street or go to the park without a responsible adult. They don’t walk to school or inhabit public space until well into their teens because of parental concerns. Of course, the increase in children’s activities in sporting clubs and adult-provided hobbies like music and art fill up children’s weekends and afternoons, and introduce them to other families and adults who coach and support them. But this is usually overseen by parents, and involves transactions and payments  not to mention an overwhelming number of regulations limiting the level of engagement between the community and its children.

The invulnerable child The documentary series from the late 1990s, Myths of Childhood, advises its viewers that, ‘a baby is well designed. We don’t have to worry so much’16 . It is successful in addressing some of the images of childhood discussed here, and places them in their context, to introduce new images that will better support children and their parents.

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All human beings have a level of vulnerability. In the introduction to the book The invulnerable child, the editors quote contributors Lois Murphy and Alice Moriarty: ‘[T]here is no completely invulnerable child,’17 they say. And there is no completely vulnerable child, either. In the opening of this chapter I told the story of Rose to represent the idea of the sophistication and capacity of childhood resilience. Some child advocates, including author Anne Manne, believe that resilience in children is a myth.18 However, I disagree. So does author and psychologist Martin Seligman; in his book The optimistic child he outlines how children have a capacity to deal with a wide range of challenges presented to them in the modern world, from learning to ride a bike through to making sense and coming to terms with the death of a loved one. Indeed, Seligman believes children can also learn optimism, which means we must teach children to cope and be resilient; something we are unlikely to do if we believe resilience in children is a myth. Like adults, children exist along a ‘continuum’ of vulnerability where they are neither completely vulnerable, nor invincible but exist somewhere in-between.19 While children’s levels of vulnerability change, researchers are aware that children have their own developed levels of understanding and coping mechanisms. They don’t necessarily always rely on adults. In The invulnerable child, contributing scientists and psychologists suggest that the experience of anxiety and trauma is crucial to the development of ‘competence’. In this sense, competence is our capacity to deal with stress and adversity. Co-editor of the anthology, E James Anthony, writes ‘[an] understanding of catastrophe plays a crucial role in permitting the child to react emotionally in an appropriate manner and in offering him outlets to help deal with the experience.’20 Experiencing events like death or disaster will certainly affect a child, but they may also afford children valuable developmental insights and provide them with attributes and qualities that give them greater support in their future adult lives.

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In her essay ‘Further Reflections on Resilience’, Lois Murphy observes, ‘[t]he resilient child is oriented toward the future, is living ahead, with hope.’21 Through her research, she identifies that resilience is not more likely to exist in any one demographic or socio-economic sphere, but that resilience is as likely in a child raised in a neglectful household as it is in one raised in a welladjusted one. Resilience comes from what psychologists call both ‘temperamental’ (nature/genetic) and ‘environmental’ (nurture) influences. Put simply, it may be important for children to experience some levels of stress, pain and trauma because their capacity for resilience will be informed by these experiences. If we actively shield children from the breadth of reasonable experiences available to them, it is possible they may grow up to be more vulnerable adults. Our children are not helped by the continued collision between differing images of childhood. The images and the way we use them confuse children (and adults), especially in the way they are used. Children are asked to achieve more and strive for perfection in very grown up ways, while also being asked to maintain our idea of childhood innocence by not watching certain television shows or reading books that may compromise their ‘innocence’. Like all forms of worship, we are selective about which images of childhood and youth we use depending on the situation at the time. This is the culture of idolising children playing itself out: you will be a child and play in your bedroom, but when you go to piano lessons you will not act like a six year old, you will concentrate for a full 45 minutes until you have mastered those scales. However, these images do not have to be mutually exclusive. We can integrate the many concepts of childhood to help build a better understanding of our children. In doing so, we might learn to treat children as human beings who are just as complex and sophisticated as people at any other stage in a human life.

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Multiple histories It is difficult to dispute that images of childhood through history have today culminated in a conflicting melange of confusing messages. This tells us that childhood is more complex than any one interpretation. If we want to start supporting children in the way they deserve to be supported, we would do best to deconstruct the many and varied images of childhood and proceed with a better understanding, using only what is useful. If we are prepared to see childhood this way it can help us invent new and better ways to support their needs and development. I have made some suggestions about what this new image could include. It must be founded on respect for children and incorporate the attitude that a community should raise a child. But really what our new image of childhood and youth should be is open for much further discussion. And, that is what we can now do. In the following chapters we will look at how these images and ideas of children and young people stifle debate and at times limit our ability to meet their needs in today’s world. Just as anyone, if not more so, the needs of a developing child deserve to be met. This is the most basic of all children’s rights: to be seen as a person first, as your equal, without the distorting lenses of our images of childhood and youth.

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Chapter 2 The Peter Pan syndrome: Struggling to grow up

Adultescent (ad.ul.TES.unt) n. A middle-aged person who continues to participate in and enjoy youth culture. http://www.wordspy.com

Why grow up? Current romanticised images of childhood and youth and deprecating images of adulthood don’t inspire young people to embrace growing older. Instead of adulthood being a natural and, in its own right, enjoyable stage of human development, the message is that we should constantly aspire to youthfulness. Look at any billboard: youth is fun. Childhood is innocent. And the adult world is stressful and cruel. It’s too much hard work. The message embedded in our media is that adulthood must be actively avoided: and lucky for us, this isn’t too difficult. Our culture is becoming so focused on those who stay child-like, who look young and act young, that it’s becoming harder to grow up. It’s also becoming harder to prepare our children for the complexities and responsibilities of adult life. Call it adultescence or Peter Pan syndrome, midlife crisis or an extreme makeover, youth is what drives this society. Youth is no longer a life stage: it is a lifestyle choice.

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This is not a healthy situation for any society: it is a demonstration of our failure to provide the right foundations for children and young people. It’s an example of how we are neglecting our responsibilities and not undertaking the work of assisting children and young people to develop into independent and competent adults. As author and commentator Don Edgar explains: [W]e have to work in order to be fully human … [W]e have to nurture children who will have the skills, the drive, the knowhow to become capable individuals no longer dependent for survival on their parents. But, we have to do this in ways that enable them to function fully, both to be competent and to feel they are in control of their own lives.1

However, indicated by numbers of young adults who haven’t yet left home and our society’s inability to find appropriate pathways into the responsibilities of senior community, business and employment roles, the latest generation of would-be adults are increasingly lacking in levels of competence and control. How can they grow up when their parents are still seeking and enjoying a lifestyle so similar to theirs? There are few adults prepared to undertake the responsibility for teaching and mentoring young people in ethics, values and the principles of the adult world. According to social convention, young people must finish school, go to university, get a degree, experiment with recreational drugs, travel for a year, come back and find a job, establish a career, fall in love, buy a house, get married, pay off half the mortgage, achieve financial security … and then think about having children. All the while holding onto an intangible concept of youth. The media salves any growing pains by reminding children and young adults that everyone wants their life. They are perfect. They are special. They deserve to get everything they want. Social analyst Hugh Mackay provides an astute observation on what he believes is ‘the outcome of a process that has been brewing for 30 years’. He explains, ‘[T]he emotional growth rate of this generation is being retarded partly by their own parents’

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determination to be the youngest generation ever to hit middle age.’2 While Generation X have grown up ‘wanting it all’ and Generation Y have become the ‘I want it all – now!’ generation, their parents have already had it all and enjoy a level of affluence beyond any previous generation. The ‘adultescents’ are simply a result of this affluence. It’s a case of generations being shaped by cultural and economic forces. Consequently, twentysomethings in today’s society reflect the Veruca Salt manifesto: ‘I want it NOW, Daddy’. Veruca Salt was the self-obsessed and demanding girl from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the chocolate factory. Our young people are often mirroring Veruca because being raised in a consumer-driven economy where all your needs are met means your expectations of what others will do for you increase. You become more reliant on others; and you become less capable of doing things for yourself. Dahl pointed the blame for problematic children in his book squarely at the parents, but it is neither that simple nor constructive to go looking for someone to blame.

A closer look at demographics Blaming adultescents or the parents of Generation Y won’t solve the current demographic situation. This problem reflects rapid and major shifts in our society. Perhaps rates of change over the last half-century have kept us too busy to thoughtfully address the social attitudes and systems that support us all to raise children. It is vital for us to further develop our understanding of this situation. We only see snapshots or cursory analysis of these social attitudes and systems in our media. Generation Y has grown up in a time of booming economies and escalating consumerism and as a result, it is marketers and advertisers who drive generational analysis.

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Generation Y, as a concept, is a form of branding created by the market. And while marketers fall over themselves to provide analysis of this demographic, most interesting social and political perspectives struggle to enter the mainstream discussion. Most of what we understand about adultescents is driven by the question, ‘What do we want to sell the kids of today?’ A more useful response would be: ‘What life do we want to provide for children growing up in the world today?’ Bernard Salt, Director of KPMG, and David Chalke of AustraliaScan Survey are leading contributors to generational analysis, and possibly the most quoted sources on Generation Y. Salt’s analysis is well-documented in his two books, The big shift and The big picture, which suggest reasons for demographic patterns and behaviours like fashion, consumer culture and town planning. Chalke is more likely to be commenting on what brands appeal to Generation Y and how business can respond to shifting attitudes of the generations. They are both respected demographers. They also produce figures and work through arrangements with Australia’s advertising and property industries. In itself, this is not a bad thing. However, it is hard to remove these demographic images from the context of markets and, of course, what is being sold. This must be considered when referring to these sorts of demographic ‘snapshots’ because it delivers an image of Generation Y that young people themselves will listen to. While we’d like to think the subject informs the research, in the mix of modern-day image development and demographics, the development of new generational images is a more fluid exchange. Author and social justice campaigner Naomi Klein revealed the complexity of this exchange in her book, No logo. She identified that Tommy Hilfiger, ‘even more than Nike or Adidas’, has formed a strong relationship with black youth culture, hip-hop and ‘ghetto cool’ through strategic advertising campaigns and the provision of free clothes to high-profile American hip-hop artists.3 This enabled Hilfiger, an adult-focused, all-American company, to achieve

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a cutting-edge and youthful image that sold not only to black American youth but also the much larger market of middle-aged, middle-class American consumers caught up in the fetishisation of black youth culture. Researchers and corporations have the ability then to appropriate labels and cultural ideas. They also have the ability to shape them and allow us to form an identity around them. It isn’t a one-way street; the relationships between research, media, brands and identity are very fluid.

So who are these Peter Pans? It is unnerving to hear twentysomethings proclaim they are consumers first, and citizens second, but this is exactly what Generation Y consultant Peter Sheahan does on his website. 4 Or that they don’t want children or lifelong partnerships. Or that they are interested in an independent life where their desires and ambitions are more important than anything  or anyone  else. The impact of raising children in the private world of the family, rather than the public world of the community, appears to have promoted an ever more individualistic and self-centred culture. Peter Sheahan has built a career on the fact that every business around wants to know what people in Generation Y think, how they act and most importantly, how they spend their money. Peter, a member of that generation, simply reinforces what they all want to hear: young Australian adults are footloose and fancyfree. They have money to burn and businesses need to be savvy to their fickle nature when it comes to trends. Ryan Heath is a former Labor party advisor and another Generation Y author. In his book Please just f* off it’s our turn now, he explores his perspectives on what Generation Y want: ‘I don’t want a mandated 40-hour week. I like being at work. It stimulates me, improves me and I enjoy the time I have with my colleagues.’5 He goes on to defend what he regards as a broadly applicable trend towards people demanding greater control over their working

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hours, claiming: ‘… many skilled blue-collar workers have left the big corporate work shops to set up as self-employed tradies’. Heath’s apparent disregard for the 40-hour week, hard fought for a century ago by his Labor predecessors, demonstrates a lack of empathy for the reality of the working situations available to many Australians. It also intimates a lack of understanding about the opportunities and advantages still only enjoyed by a privileged few, even among those in his generation. In the face of strong media and marketing attention and views presented  even by their own generation  about the thrill of being flexible and free of responsibility with a high disposable income, how could twentysomethings believe they could ever be anything else? It might be a good short-term business plan to create a generation or two whose lives revolve around consumption and few commitments. But it’s not really wise if we’re interested in a future where the children of today have been raised to address the challenges of tomorrow. A society is in good hands when its leaders are confident and capable of independently tackling the challenges of life; when they will jump at real experiences rather than virtual ones. When today’s children become adults they will be required to deal with significant environmental and social challenges. Climate change and the growing gap between rich and poor will be key issues they will tackle and pass on to their own children. The least we can do is adequately prepare them for emotional, intellectual and social responsibility.

From childhood to your twenties Our society romanticises childhood and youth, and this informs how we’re shaping our lives. Our decisions to be more youthful, to disregard old age and to be free and in touch with our inner

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child are based on a lie. In the previous chapter we saw how a wide range of ideas of childhood exist and impact on the world today. Childhood indeed has some wonderful moments, but it is a time of development and learning, mistakes and corrections. It is far tougher than we sometimes choose to represent it. And those representations make the transition from childhood to adulthood more difficult and less appealing. Our culture represents the adult world as the complete opposite of childhood and youth. Adulthood is oppressive, banal and destructive of creativity and imagination. Adults are tired, stressed and shoulder burdens like employment, taxes and mortgages. Adults are incompetent, uncool and in some instances, dangerous. While this image is presented to young people, adults are simultaneously told by advertisers that they too can be ‘cool’. It’s a clever play-off in the generational game. But given the images of adulthood presented to many of us, is it any wonder ever more young people are postponing the journey? In 2005, the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) Australian Social Trends indicated that only 16 per cent of people aged 20 29 were living with a partner and at least one child, compared to at least 40 per cent in 1976. It highlighted that the most common living arrangement for twentysomethings is with their parents. 6 As demographer Bob Birrell says, ‘there’s no doubt they are a postponed generation.’7 Young adults are embracing the idea of eternal youth. However, the misconception is that life is all about fun and little responsibility.

The art of adultescence It has been well documented by many market research surveys that a majority of young adults have no mortgage, no long-term partner, no children, few assets and a high disposable income. And according to the reports, they want it to stay that way.

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David Chalke asserts that ‘[t]hese people in their 20s are in the business of deferring commitment’. He estimates that 15 per cent of people aged 30–40 could also be classed as ‘adultescents’. However, Chalke doesn’t identify how many would like to be ‘adultescents’, or how many are trying to reject the tag. Advertisers are thriving on the moniker ‘adultescent’. They estimate that about 1.5 million Australians fit the description, and it is one with all the ‘right’ attributes: high spending capacity, low saving commitments, generally unattached individuals who are keen to follow trends, who are interested in becoming famous and don’t want to let go of their freedoms. They are all ‘individuals’, but don’t want to be seen as too different. Their individuality derives from mass culture. However, they don’t appear to realise (or care) that the new conservative consumerism they’re buying into is one where, by trying to stay ‘young’ and ‘different’, they end up looking the same as everyone else. Could it be that, despite the marketing hype, ‘adultescents’ are being sold a furphy? Does the picture change when we stop looking at ‘adultescents’ as simply a credit-happy demographic and look for a different take on their desires and dreams?

What do ‘adultescents’ want? In 2005, media heir Lachlan Murdoch caused a media sensation by passing up the opportunity of running his own empire and returning to work in the Australian arm of father Rupert’s business. On the same day, I received a phone call from a 27year-old friend. He told me he was leaving his emerging career (and substantial pay packet) in an established law firm to start a new one as a legal advisor in government. He also opted out of a guaranteed, highly regarded career path. Like Lachlan, my friend is in a committed relationship and father to a young child. Both Lachlan and my friend also faced question and scrutiny

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about the reasons behind their decisions. I think it represents the changing face of the latest warriors in the generational war who are refusing to exploit stereotypes and instead demonstrating the diversity and difference that exists within any demograhic. According to the last census there are over 140 000 parents under the age of 25 in Australia. As convenor of the NSW Young Parents Forums in 2006 I was able to talk to many of them. They demonstrated that young parents are capable of raising children while working and studying, just as many parents before them have. Some of them are paying off mortgages, some are single, others are married. But they all have taken on the responsibility of raising a child and are doing it well. As one parent noted, ‘young parents just want to be parents without criticism or judgment. We are all in different situations and everyone deserves a chance to have an input in society.’ Many young Australians aren’t really keen to buy into the stifling hype and mercenary analysis of market researchers’ statistics. They want something more. The problem, however, is society’s struggle to provide it. The Australian Institute of Family Studies’ (AIFS) 2004 report, It’s not for lack of wanting kids, examines Australian fertility decision-making. This comprehensive report identifies that over 60 per cent of Australian men and 80 per cent of Australian women aged 2029 years expected to have children. Indeed, even childless men aged 2029 years overwhelmingly aspired to have two or more children (approximately 90 per cent). 8 Yet, the total fertility rate in Australia was 1.73 to 1.75 from 200002. 9 Despite very small incremental rises in the birth rate, there is no indication that all ‘adultescents’ will achieve their fertility aspirations. It’s a case well documented in the Australian media, particularly by women whose fertility is waning or gone, without having the children they desperately wanted. The issues are diverse and our idolising of children affects and is influenced by our discussions about fertility decision-making, as we will discuss in more depth in the next chapter.

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While twentysomethings may aspire to parent their own offspring, the single and commitment-free messages aimed at them through the media promote a life without being ‘tied down’, without responsibility. But responsibility is one thing our children and young people desperately need.

Responsibility vacuum In December 2004, Florida parents Cat and Harlan Barnard made worldwide headlines. They claimed to have tried everything: smiley-face charts, withholding pocket money and even the advice of a psychologist. But try as they did, their kids wouldn’t lift a finger to help around the house. It was not really headline-grabbing stuff: the battlefield of household chores is a common one. But the headlines were made in the Barnards’ final solution. They went on strike. The Barnards refused to cook or clean for their children and moved into a tent on the front lawn, dismayed at their children’s inability to contribute to the running of the family home. Parents going on strike is a slightly comical concept, and even more so in this instance because it didn’t appear to have the desired effect. The Barnards’ 17-year-old daughter and 12-yearold son seemed to do fine with TV dinners. Perhaps the greatest threat was dying of embarrassment as the media converged as they came home from school: their parents were camped out with placards in the front yard. The children’s parents were scrutinised by police and protective services to make sure they were not harming their children in any way that may be deemed unlawful. And no prosecution was undertaken. Indeed, any damage that could have been done occurred well before the Barnards picketed their own home. While the Barnards may be an extreme example, their actions demonstrate that both they and their children are victims of a culture that through idolising children can create a responsibility vacuum. The parents clearly had spent their lives catering to their

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children’s needs, but like so many of us had forgotten that insisting children make their own beds and clean their own rooms is crucial for their developing autonomy. As they headed into their teenage years, the Barnard children had never been part of the domestic processes of feeding, clothing and looking after themselves, as part of a family and household. In households across many Western nations, children and young people are waited on. They are excused from contributing to the maintenance of both their household and communities. And in doing so, we continue to limit their development and produce another generation of adultescents. But what do we do? Sometimes it is easier to clean up after the children, rather than spend twice as long convincing them to do only half the job. Asking your children to help prepare dinner always sounds like a recipe for disaster, but this is part of the job of educating and resourcing our children. We don’t have to be strict about the process; we don’t need a parenting manual (though a skim through some ideas might not hurt). What we need is a general expectation of children, which increases as they become older, that they should contribute to the domestic chores of the home in which they live. A three or four year old can be asked to clean up their room; they might not be good at it but it is giving them an understanding that it is an expectation. The worst thing we can do is to suggest that a child is incapable of looking after themselves. If a preschool child can create a mess of milk, red food colouring and pasta in the kitchen while you are still asleep in bed, then that same child, with a bit of support, can probably learn to get their own cereal for breakfast. Central to the process of growing up is taking on greater levels of responsibility, as we develop the capacity and competence to undertake new tasks. The Barnards appear to have suffered the result of not having instilled in their children the responsibility of helping around the home from an early age. Our media reflects a community double standard: we’re shocked at the numbers of young adults deciding to remain at

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home with their parents instead of moving out, not knowing how to cook a meal or wash their own clothes. Yet, many of us haven’t taken responsibility for teaching them these skills, and insisting they practise them. In my own family, my grandmother taught all five of her daughters to cook from when they were young. In turn, my own mother passed these skills onto her sons. So in high school we were responsible for baking a cake or two on the weekends, to take in our school lunches. We didn’t do it every weekend, but certain expectations were set, and we knew we had a responsibility to meet them. Our cooking skills may not have been the stuff of Jamie Oliver. However, we were capable of fending for ourselves in the kitchen from a young age. Changes in attitudes towards parenting and childhood have been reflected in the significant changes seen in parent–child relationships. That parents are no longer the overtly physical disciplinarians they once were is a positive change, but we seem to also be neglecting to teach our children respect and important other social values. As our society has embraced individualism, our responsibility to the broader community around us has diminished. In this context, if Generation Y are more selfish and less considerate then we are all responsible. An example of the change in parentsibling relationships is the phenomenon called ‘helicopter parenting’. This term describes parents who drive to their child’s share house or student dorm to tidy up, and pick up their laundry to take home, wash and bring back the following week. These parents still cater to their children’s most basic of needs, even though they’ve left home and are out to establish an independent adult life. Those who solely blame helicopter parents don’t consider enough who else is responsible for supporting the development of our young people  where are the mentors and community to guide citizens to adulthood? If discipline and moral instruction is such a difficult job, why must it be the sole preserve of the parents? Somehow we’ve moved from the understanding that children and young people need to respect their elders to one

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where they show contempt for their elders. Isn’t it time we began respecting each other as human beings, regardless of age? Rather than placing children first, shouldn’t our society be one for all ages? The responsibility of teaching respect for everyone in our community has been declining for too long. When did the shift occur that made us less open to discussion about our families and children? We now bunker down and protect the nuclear family at all costs while new parents constantly talk about being sleep deprived and how difficult it all is. And indeed, it is challenging to raise a couple of children when there are only two adults who both have to work just to keep up with the costs of modern living. In Indigenous communities, both in Australia and overseas, there is generally a greater focus on the broader family’s role in raising a child. The significance and role of uncles and aunties is far greater than in our Western society. The lack of responsibility in young people is something we like to blame parents for, because parents are an easy scapegoat for the broader social problem of idolising children. The trend towards relying on parenting ‘experts’ has encouraged a generation of parents to waive the discipline and become their children’s ‘friend’, rather than their parent. It is something of an over-reaction to the unreasonable demands made of children in the past. And now we’re ready for a correction back in the other direction. This means reassessing theories such as ‘attachment parenting’ and ‘natural parenting’.

Dividing up our public space Sometime over the past 20 years, the idea of children as part of a family unit and a community has been diminished. No longer do adults confront young people misbehaving in public spaces. Instead, they write to papers or complain to local council. In response, we play classical music in places young people like

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to congregate, like shopping malls or car parks, in an attempt to repel them. Or some bright spark suggests building them a skate park somewhere out of the way, where we don’t have to deal with them. In fact, these ‘solutions’ further isolate young people from their communities, and should be considered even more unacceptable. Our idolising of children creates these forms of contradictions. We want to see children in public, but usually on our terms. We don’t want them screaming in the supermarket, we are not prepared to support a parent who is having a difficult time as their child learns to cope with the lures of chocolate bars placed well within their reach. We don’t challenge the supermarket chains or ask that supermarkets be more respectful of children. Instead, we turn away and wish the child and the parent were not there. This is a shirking of our responsibility and a result of idolising children. We are happy to worship children in terms of our own ideas and expectations of them, but we don’t want that idea shattered by a piercing cry or an adolescent sneer out in public. Is it right for other adults to chastise other people’s children in front of them in a public space? It depends on the situation and the manner in which it is done. If we are to engage with children in public spaces it should not be condescending or disciplinarian, but firm and constructive. Children and young people should be supported in their learning of what society expects in terms of behaviour and attitudes. Parents should not feel like they are being criticised. If this happened more often in a positive manner, parents would be embracing the support role the community can play in raising their children. The compartmentalising of children, young people and adults only alienates children from any sense of responsibility to their communities, and doesn’t hold children and young people to account for their actions. As our society has shifted its focus onto litigation to solve problems, we have become all too aware of the potential negative repercussions resulting from asking

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children and young people to show respect for others. We are also unlikely to confront a group of misbehaving teenagers because it is unlikely other adults will come to our defence. Anyone who has been stared down by a group of frustrated, offensive and angry teenagers will understand this. In many ways, it is no longer a man’s world: it is a child’s world. But much of this is to their detriment because it is a child’s world, but on complicated and contradictory adult terms. It is possible for people without children to go for many days without seeing a child in public. The structure of our society and its institutions means that we drop children off at childcare centres and schools during the hours most adults are at work. These institutions are usually located away from workplaces. Public space simply isn’t designed with children in mind. Consider the inaccessibility of public transport and its unfriendliness towards parents with the paraphernalia of young children, like prams; no wonder many parents use private cars. And, while public transport is picking up its game and improving access, this tends to be due to lobbying by disability advocates rather than those representing families. The lack of visibility of children in our communities contributes to our discomfort in our interactions with them. However, these attitudes do change over time. Where once the inner city was the domain of the hip and childless, the rising fashion phenomenon of the ‘yummy mummy’ is bringing a growing number of inner-city types with the ever-burgeoning suburban pram to the local cafe for Sunday brunch. Yet, in other private spaces such as restaurants, bringing a baby or young child to dinner can result in vociferous objections from other patrons  and in some cases, being asked to leave. The contradictions of our humanness are both frustrating and funny. The acceptance of children in the public domain also varies according to the country you’re in, as the experience of one mother travelling with her child suggests: In France, the attitude was, ‘What do you mean bringing a child into a restaurant? Eating is serious business!’ In Italy,

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Idolising children the waiters would take Rachel over completely, they’d get a high chair, put a bib on her and feed her so that we could relax and enjoy our meal. Everyone really seemed to enjoy her being there.10

Journalist Amanda Woodard has looked at the Australian context. In a piece for the Sydney Morning Herald she says: If I’m asked to recommend somewhere to eat out with children, my usual response is ‘try another country’. Unlike the warm hospitality received in Mediterranean countries, restaurants in Australia on the whole prefer that children are seen and not heard and, ideally, not seen at all.11

Her concern is the restaurants’ inability to meet the needs of children in terms of keeping them entertained, and providing appropriate menus for them. As nice as chicken nuggets, pizza and chips are, a bit more respect for the children’s palette may actually provide the industry with more discerning and food conscious future patrons. Woodard found several examples where spaces were designed for children, were suitably secure and provided food both parents and their children could enjoy. Enough that we could be seeing the beginning of a change where more of our restaurants are respectful and inclusive of the children’s dining experience  as much as the adults’. Communal eating for the family is probably trickier and a bit louder than we have come to expect, but should we succumb to the idea that there are places for children, places for young people and places where children should be completely excluded?

Being allowed to meet capacity We are raising children to live in the society of our own making. Gone are the days of saving our money for a rainy day. Few modern children put fifty cents a week in the bank to watch the amount

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accrue and dream of things they would buy. We are now a society that borrows money for what we want, and runs up large debts. Our need for instant gratification is indicated in the increasing numbers of ordinary people entering the stock market. If we’re wise and a little bit lucky, we get to spend the money we’ve earned, and the money we didn’t earn too. And this can only flow on to affect children’s concept of work ethic, and where and how they expect their money to come from. Privileged young men and women can focus on investment portfolios, careers and the cost of living, because these are the important values of our economically focused world. But are we really teaching economic independence and capacity? Can some young people really not afford to live out of home? Or is it that they can only afford their desired lifestyle if they depend on their parents’ wealth to accrue their own? In an interview with The Age, one 33-year-old man recently explained that living with his mother suits him because he will pay off his investment property sooner, giving him more freedom. Given the average life expectancy, he’ll have given away a fair proportion of valuable time to develop his own independence by the time his property is paid off. This is probably not the sort of freedom Peter Pan had in mind. Whether or not the new generation of young adults is developing in economic maturity, it could be at the cost of their emotional and domestic development. Development at the ‘almost adult’ end of the scale revolves around the economics of living and what young people believe they require to live outside of their childhood home. Obviously some feel they need quite a lot. However, while children and young people are still at school there are other ways we can support them to develop capacity. It is all about letting them do things for themselves. So, for the Barnard children in Florida it is about helping them develop domestic skills  not to stop their parents striking but to prepare them for their own independence. Adolescent psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg has some interesting thoughts on how we can develop the capacity of our

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children. He believes one key solution is to reduce the amount of homework done by children and young people.12 Carr-Gregg is a fan of setting other forms of homework, like washing the dishes with a parent, or volunteering to support some activity in the local community after school. This fosters a different kind of education. It supports the development of a holistic child: a child who is more than their family and their school; one who is a worker in a community and a supporter of their parents and household. This type of development would teach children that everybody has a set of responsibilities and all are interdependent. Those responsibilities are what are required to help give young people the confidence that they can live independently and provide and care for themselves. Our increasing focus on the cost of society and lack of willingness to teach children the basic skills of life could have some interesting effects on society. Consider houses without kitchens or laundries because in the future our adult children will be happy to outsource all their washing and food preparation. Think of disposable T-shirts  wear once and throw away. This world exists now: random essay generators on the Internet, TV dinners, vacuum robots. We are creating a world where responsibility is to be avoided, the basic jobs of feeding and clothing ourselves are a hassle and hard work is replaced by pressing a button. It might sound appealing, but what about the value of doing something completely by yourself? How does this impact on our self-esteem and sense of self? Our children might grow up in a world where the surface stuff is easy, but how will they cope with the stuff that creeps underneath our skin – feelings, emotions and spirit?

Youth is not eternal Outside my local shopping centre I watched two young men, most likely in their final year of high school. One carried a skateboard

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under his arm and the other was flying a small soft toy through the air. ‘Man, Super Grover is cool,’ said Grover’s pilot to the skater. ‘Yeah,’ the skater agreed. There was no shame in parading around with a toy meant for preschool children. In fact, just like Hilfiger’s hip-hop artists, Grover has ‘street cred’. Grover, Elmo and a host of other children’s TV characters provide a tangible connection to childhood for those young adults who don’t want to grow up. And there are many aspects of growing up in the modern world that young adults and their parents cling to. However, no matter how hard we try, we can’t stay young. We can have midlife crises and buy sports cars. We can submit ourselves to face-lifts, and tucks and smoothing in an attempt to convince others we are beating the ageing process. But why do we want to? Why does the adult world continually submit itself to false images of childhood that make it seem so desirable that we resist the natural ageing processes of time? None of us is immune to it; nor will any of us beat death. Putting it into perspective, joy, fun and happiness aren’t exclusively the domain of young people. And responsibility, anxiety and stress aren’t restricted to adults. We do ourselves a great disservice by allowing ourselves to believe such simplistic ideas about the limitations of any stage of human development. One outcome of our increased focus on youth and success is the so-called ‘quarterlife crisis’. Authors Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner describe this in their book of the same name. They describe young adults in their mid-twenties feeling like they don’t belong, or are not capable of meeting the needs of society  or that they have failed expectations.13 It is as if they are looking around for guidance on how to participate as an adult in our society and when they can’t find it, they begin to fall apart. Our society is forgetting that its key role is to foster the capacity of future generations. Our problem isn’t that the importance of the reaching

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adulthood has overtaken the importance of the journey to get there. It is more that for many young people, the purpose of reaching adulthood has disappeared. We tell our young people that adulthood isn’t worth it. We don’t adequately prepare them for it. So, when they get there they don’t know how to handle it and they don’t want to be there. But the reality is they do get there, and they have to handle it. It is our responsibility to make sure that they do. We need to shape a society that provides a clear pathway into the responsibilities and joys of adulthood so that younger generations can claim that space in their own right, to have their own ideas and pursue new dreams. Their dreams will be different from ours, and we might not agree with them. But we can be proud that those ideas have been brought into being because of the way we have supported their journey from child to adult.

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Chapter 3 In decline: Birth rates and fertility decisions

There are so few children we treat them like demi-gods. Sarah Bryden-Brown, author

The impact of fewer children The potential impact of our declining birth rate is widely discussed and dissected. It is talked about in terms of whether future taxes will cover health and aged care, in terms of workforce numbers and economic productivity. What isn’t discussed is the impact that fewer children will have on the social fabric, on our communities and, significantly in terms of this book, on our images and ideas of childhood. In this chapter we will look at two distinct issues that are both impacting on and impacted by our idolising of childhood and youth. The first of these is our birth rate, which despite recent fluctuations is still below the desired replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. The decline in the number of children playing cricket in the street and roaming the neighbourhoods on weekends means fewer of us have contact with children as part of our day-to-day lives. This child scarcity has allowed the ideas and images of childhood that we discussed in the opening chapter

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to thrive. Instead of taking our increasing knowledge base and new understandings of childhood and youth and creating a new, respectful image of childhood, we have clung to old ideas and further entrenched ideas of childhood that don’t respect or honour children and young people. Secondly, we will look at our decisions about whether or not to have children. Fertility decision-making is the action we take as individuals that can affect our nation’s birth rate. In recent years it has been talked about a lot, but very rarely in the context of our images of childhood. So, I want us to consider fertility decision-making in new ways: in the context of idolising children and in the context of a male perspective. This chapter is not about proving that our idolising of childhood means we are having fewer children. It is about exploring the relationship between our ideas and images of childhood and how it relates to birth-rate figures and our decisions about whether or not to have children.

Birth-rate decline It isn’t news that our birth rate is in decline. If it continues to drop, the challenge will be to consider how government and social policy can facilitate people’s relationships so that our society does not become one of lonely worker drones ploughing themselves into work at the expense of a rich life. Is it in our best interests to continue to have fewer and fewer children? Do we want to plateau at a birth rate of 1.5? Is it possible? We could find ourselves in a situation where the population goes into free-fall because our birth rate dips below one child per person. The significance of a declining birth rate can be demonstrated through simplistic modelling on a Fact Sheet produced by the then Australian Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs. This sheet, which includes variables such as net migration and life expectancy, indicates that a fertility

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rate of 1.8 babies per woman would result in a population of 37.7 million in 2101. A birth rate of 1.4 babies per woman would result in a population of 18.9 million in 2101.1 Across a wide range of issues, the difference is staggering. But most staggering of all is the limited impact even the most optimistic immigration policy could provide. Just as there are positive and negative aspects to being an onlychild, there are positive and negative effects on a society with a low birth rate. Our society operates in a very narrow range of birth rates. People are criticised for only having one child but also questioned if they have four or more. While our culture upholds choice as a crucial aspect of life, it is defined by individual and collective ideas of what the ‘right choice’ actually is. This means our choice regarding the number of children we have is limited to the socially accepted two or three. Outside this range we find ourselves defending our decisions. Consider the impact on women, whose ability to have children is already biologically limited. Through my research into young parents I have talked to many young mums; even those having children at 23 and 24 years of age remark that family or friends regard their decision as unwise, saying things like ‘you are throwing away a good career’. One women said to me, ‘[w]hat is the worst thing about being a young mum? I would have to say, for me, it is the way people react towards you. The way everyone gives dirty looks and makes smart arsed comments.’ So, if a woman has children before 25 she is ‘making a mistake’. But if she has a child after 35 she is considered to be taking a risk. As the age of first-time mothers continues to rise, intervention into the birth process increases. We give women a very specific ten-year period in which to have children. And for the good of the country we ask them to have at least three during that time. What possible effects does this have on society? Fewer babies mean fewer people to work in the future. Fewer people to support one another. Fewer people to maintain services, to organise community events. In Australia, small country towns are shrinking and disappearing; once described to me by a rural

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development worker as ‘being on palliative care’. This is due to a range of factors: young people leaving, change in agriculture, limited employment opportunities  but demography is also an influence. Once the population is too small, the town can no longer be maintained and residents must move away. Fewer children means it is unlikely any will stay, or return. Demographer Bernard Salt calls his theory on this phenomenon ‘The Big Shift’. He estimates that when 75 per cent of Australians are linked to a single entity (read ‘the city’), the values of the entire country will be completely dominated by city thinking. 2 For the last hundred years Australia has been becoming further dominated by urban culture. However, our mythology has still been dictated by a sense of ‘the bush’ and rural adventure; the poetry of Banjo Patterson, Waltzing Matildas and the romanticised adventures of Burke and Wills taught in high school history. With the Sydney Olympics, our growing cafe culture and state government planning focused on vibrant regional hubs linked to thriving capital cities, our stories and mythology  our thinking and beliefs  are beginning to change. Our birth-rate decline helps to accelerate this change and Salt’s identified shift to city thinking, to couple thinking and singles thinking  but is unlikely to increase our thinking about family, childhood and youth. In the last few years in Australia, the annual budget has been focused very much on delivering relief to families. This will most likely change as we head into the next decade and couples without children become the most common household type. Then, budgets will be directed at them.

The changing experience of childhood The average number of children per Australian family is less than two. We are faced with a decline in numbers of children through a birth rate that is below the rate of replacement.3 A lack of children

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only further exacerbates our heightened images of children as innocent, precious and requiring constant monitoring. By the time we become parents, if we do become parents, we are much less likely to have been involved in handling babies, or have extended contact with children through our own childhood or early adulthood. And today’s children are less likely to have as much contact with other kids, especially with fewer siblings, cousins and family friends. My mother is one of nine children. So my memories of Christmas gatherings are images of the extended family. They are memories of being surrounded by cousins and siblings who all mucked in together to keep ourselves entertained. Around 30 children would mill around, waiting for their one gift to be given after lunch. Because of their abundance, children didn’t stand out, and didn’t warrant any special attention or monitoring. We had to be patient. But the fact there were so many of us meant we were able to entertain each other, while at the Christmas dinner table the adult world conversed, drank and ate. However, while I am marginally one of the eldest of my 50 or so cousins, I’m the only one to have had children. At Christmas time, my two boys are lavished with attention. But there isn’t the same camaraderie for them as there was in my childhood. There is a great deal more than one gift under the tree for them, but there are no children their age to play with. Christmas for my boys is a very different experience. It has its advantages, and disadvantages, but most importantly it demonstrates a markedly different experience of childhood. And that change has an impact. This transition is part of 30 years of progress, which allows us to consider what questions we need to ask about having or not having children. Australian of the Year (2003) Fiona Stanley talks, along with colleagues, about these changes in the book Children of the lucky country. They ask: [H]ave aspects of the demographic changes, changes in the workplace, demands of a successful economy, more women in paid work, changes in family structure, and the dramatic

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Idolising children increase in consuming technologies all come together to impact on the levels of risk and protective factors for child and youth development …?4

Of course they have. And while I don’t disagree with the book’s overall conclusion, that our changing world has in some ways negatively affected the health and wellbeing of Australian children, I would be cautious limiting our focus to the negative impacts of obesity, depression and anxiety on children. In doing this, we create the undesirable effect of placing too much of our attention on children as having all the problems. Obesity, depression and anxiety are not solely an increasing problem for children, they are symptoms of a greater problem  a problem we haven’t fully grasped but we know is caught up in our affluence and rapid progress. However, our images of childhood make the symptoms more obvious in children. I am proposing that a key part of the solution to this problem is to change the way we perceive childhood and youth.

A million missing children? Demographers suggest that a birth rate between 1.0 and 1.1 is a ‘breaking point’.5 This is the figure at which a society becomes no longer capable of maintaining a population base and goes into demographic free-fall. While actual figures are debated, it is safe to assume that if the birth rate of any society drops to one child per person, it will most likely to go into decline. Entire nations could be underpopulated right out of existence. It is what academic Sue Richardson from the National Institute of Labour Studies calls ‘the missing million children’. 6 Richardson’s analysis of birth-rate data informs us that if we had maintained our 1982 birth rate, a million more children would have been added to our population in those years. But we didn’t, and they weren’t.

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Now Australia is beginning to prepare for the retirement of baby-boomers. The labour market is experiencing the implications of our birth-rate decline, evident in skills shortages. Our government has attempted to inspire another baby boom with its controversial baby bonus, and the ongoing remarks to ‘have one for your country’. Researchers and public thinkers are proposing more radical solutions and calling for significant changes to workforce culture, worklife balance and childcare. So far, their progress has been slow. At some point in the future our birth rate will leave us with fewer people than previous generations. We can bemoan this projection, embrace its possibilities or decide whether we want to encourage more children in this society. And the latter option requires far more than a cash-in-hand baby bonus payment. A low birth rate is simultaneously a luxury and an inconvenience, a product of improved lifestyles, technologies and the advances of the Western world. It is also problematic in labour market issues: who will work when the baby-boomers retire? These debates are the domain of politics and social policy. What about the personal? How do the consequences of idolising children, playing out in our ideas and decisions about parenthood, affect our own lives and emotions?

Australians and fertility decision-making According to the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) research report, It’s not for lack of wanting kids, a majority of adults aged 2039 want two or three children.7 However comprehensive the size and breadth of the AIFS report, discussions around fertility decision-making have stopped short of examining this fertility desire. According to the report, over 60 per cent of single men aged 20–29 definitely want children and only 20 per cent rule out ever

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having children. And almost 90 per cent of married but childless men of the same age indicate that they definitely wanted kids.8 So, men say they want to have children – but continue to put it off. What the report was able to do was distinguish two similar but differing aspects of fertility decision-making that give important information. The report separated participants’ desires from their expectations. One section questions respondents about their aspirations: how many children they would like to have, given the right situation. Another section questions respondents on their expectations: how many children they realistically expect they will have. These data sets show participants expecting to have fewer children than they would like. This indicates a set of social circumstances in which people believe they will be unable to fulfil their desires about the family size they would like to have. In this paradox, we idolise childhood and youth and desire to have families of a particular size. However, we can’t see that goal as a realistic possibility. What impact, then, does unfulfilled fertility have on our happiness and health? Author and ethicist Dr Leslie Cannold argues that for some women, the impact is significant. In researching her book, What, no baby?, she says she struggled to find women willing to talk about the effects of having aspired to motherhood but ultimately having to come to terms with their unfulfilled aspirations. She describes their experiences as ‘fragile’ and captures the emotional and psychological effects of failed fertility aspirations. Cannold is clear that despite the perception that many women are choosing not to have children, this is not the case. Many women (and men) are not childless by choice; the processes of society have conspired against them. Men and women are taking longer to hook up and commit to a life together; many women identify that men are unwilling to commit to children and that when push comes to shove, the men won’t have kids. As the average age of first-time mothers continues to rise, driven by the length of time taken to complete their education and establish

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their career, the capacity to become pregnant and stay pregnant becomes more difficult. The decisions are sometimes not made they just happen, and in many instances it hurts. On one level, fertility decision-making is a highly individual and emotional process. On another, it is a stark and public experience. Its public nature has emerged through fertility debates and the rise of technology incorporating ever-increasing complex layers into the mix. This allows, for example, the potential for single women to become mothers through IVF and contraceptive options not conceivable only decades ago. We have not yet had sufficient time to explore the impact of these technologies and options.

Can men help make decisions? My friend put his arm around my shoulder. He was getting into his car, about to head back to his share house in Melbourne. ‘We’re proud of you. You’re doing great,’ he said. He didn’t need to elaborate. The night before, we’d philosophised over a bottle of red wine. I attended to my children when they woke. He’d wink and duck out for a cigarette. We talked about the decision I’d made three years ago: to quit smoking, get a full-time job, and accept the responsibility of an unplanned pregnancy with a lively and intelligent young woman who is now my wife. We discussed fathers and fatherhood, ending relationships badly and the media’s promotion of unattainable model-like women. Our discussion led us to the current perception that Australian men lack an overall sense of what it is to be a man and how to make decisions. We mused on what commentators have called a crisis of masculinity. That night, my friend had told me about the day a woman he had slept with, but hardly knew, showed up at his door. She had a receipt and was asking him to pay for half of the abortion she’d had after becoming pregnant from their liaison. He didn’t know

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she’d become pregnant. He had paid his half, acknowledged it was his responsibility, but described a feeling of emptiness from a lack of involvement in the decision-making process. I got my ‘sliding doors’ moment. He didn’t. He says he doesn’t regret it, or wonder what feelings he would have shared with her. But he would have liked to have been asked, and maybe then he’d have found out what his opinion was. Overall, men are decidedly quiet about fertility decisionmaking. Unless they are academics or researchers with new research findings to share, we rarely get an insight into how men participate in these decisions. Given the number of single mothers and the average age of first-time fathers (34), we can make a few assumptions. And those assumptions would involve few decisions and little commitment. But if men were to have greater involvement, what would need to change for them? What if we opened up the discussion and let men fill some of the seats? Regardless of the circumstance or decision, our potential and realised parenthood has a permanent, irreversible effect on our own lives and the lives of our children. Our media regularly laments the lack of time fathers spend with their children. However, when it comes to public discussions over the very issues dictating procreation, the absence of men’s contributions to these public discussions is striking. And the impact this has on their involvement in private discussions and decision-making is relatively unknown. Surely this absence only further removes men from their parenting rights and responsibilities and sends a strong message about who is responsible for issues of children and childhood. It shouldn’t be like this. A recent paper, ‘I Think We Should Only Have Two: Men and Fertility Decision-making’, by Dr Andrew Singleton, highlights that many men do engage with decisions about whether or not to have children and how many to have. His research shows a majority of men want to have children, and that they spend time thinking about the issues associated with raising kids. 9 Just because men don’t have the same biological time

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constraints as women, their delaying of parenthood should not be taken any less seriously. Does our society really want the average age of first-time dads pushing forty? Older parents bring a valuable set of skills and experiences to parenting, but the men in Dr Singleton’s research indicated that ‘lifestyle’ and ‘the physical toll associated with caring for children’ were factors when considering having another child. If we created an image of childhood where fathers were as responsible as mothers for child raising right from the beginning, how differently would we see the world of work, parenting and domesticity? For this to happen, men would need to take an equal and active role in public discussions about procreation. Men certainly take an equal role in the process of procreation. And without being required to talk about it, we are simultaneously diminishing the responsibilities, and privileges, of raising children.

FDM: A statement about childhood The anxiety and stress inherent in fertility decision-making is a reflection of our public views and private feelings about children and childhood. It plays on fears about our environment, society, relationships and economic stability. It hits our deepest nerves about our own childhoods, and our ability to measure up as parents. It immobilises some of us, and tells others that in a list of priorities, childhood is somewhere down the line and we’re not even sure where. Some degree of fertility decision-making is helpful in allowing us to assess our capacity to parent. But our obsession with fertility decision-making has become another distraction. It would be far more productive to support people to work together through the process of considering and living parenthood, and debate what we want childhood and youth to look like in the

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future. If we didn’t view childhood as an imposition on our adult lives and instead developed better systems to integrate children into our society and give them a greater role in the running of households and communities, we may find the decision to have them becomes a whole lot easier. At the very least, it may become less of a battleground.

Not a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer The decision of whether or not to have children involves issues of labour markets, childcare, population, environment, education, economics and politics. Across the Western world, increasing education and affluence is partnered by decreasing birth rates. At a personal level, the most common answer for most people is ‘maybe’. However, the resounding shout from the masses is ‘no’. We are choosing to have fewer children and, increasingly, none at all. Statistics compiled by the AIFS project that in 2016 more couple families will be without children than with children, and that the trend will only continue to grow.10 Our politicians have started quipping that ‘demography is destiny’, and some have expressed concerns about labour markets and tax revenue. Some women are trying to get pregnant but can’t, others get pregnant and don’t want to be, and others still would like to but finding a potential father is becoming increasingly difficult. Our need to constantly discuss the pros and cons of having children stands in stark contrast to previous generations because historically, having children wasn’t such a big deal. Reproducing was just part of the continuum of life, something people just did. Now it is something people plan. The arrival of the pill and an increasing number of fertility technologies means women don’t have to be at the mercy of chance and couples can make definite choices about when they have children.

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This, in turn, impacts on our image of children and childhood. A pregnancy taken to term is much less likely to have been unexpected. Children are much more likely to have been scheduled or planned to fit somewhere between other major events of adulthood, such as a career change or taking on a mortgage. Today, children are born when we want, not always but more often than not  especially as access to abortion means an unwanted pregnancy can easily be terminated. I see a future where historians define our era by the term ‘non-fertility decision-making’, because these decisions have a very long-lasting demographic effect. In 40 years’ time, the number of babies that were born into this generation will roughly equal the same number of 40 year olds. Despite our obsession with childhood we are having fewer children. The fact that we have fewer children is further exacerbating the issue of idealised images of childhood. A lack of contact with real children and young people means that we rely on other representations. And, while in recent years the birth rate has risen slightly, this should not be touted as the turning point. We need to focus less on the figures and more on the children that we do have  treating them as they deserve to be treated. We are deciding to have children later, or not have as many, or none at all because we can. We can pop a dollar into the nightclub vending machine at any moment during a night of dancing and flirtation. We don’t have to worry about infant and childhood death rates. We are not necessarily limited by age: newspapers on occasion run articles of women in their fifties having children. Excessive amounts of time and energy are spent contemplating a process that has gone on, unremarkably, since human life began. It makes sense in a way; like the ever-present nature of reality TV shows, there is much more to discuss. However, while children are important, they’re also just another part of life. Our obsession with when, with whom and why we have them, and the impact they have on our lives, is a product of and

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contribution to the idolising of childhood. We spend too much time thinking, talking and debating fertility, and even then, we don’t include all the relevant voices. Mostly, men miss out on making their contribution to the public debates. And infertile men and women are expected to gratefully shuffle off to have IVF treatment. This is not about advocating the return to a time when there was no real choice. However, instead of playing out public debates that hurl guilt and personal opinion in every direction, towards parents and non-parents alike, we need to start examining ways of supporting every adult, in whatever their fertility decision may be. Then we may be better placed to collectively focus on our responsibilities to children in our communities: whether we gave birth to them or not. Only 50 years ago, making an active decision to not have a child was barely a concept. For many women, such decisions were hidden in the regrettable world of backyard abortion practitioners, fierce moral condemnation and hushed whispers. There were few reliable or safe antidotes. In many cases, pregnancy brought forth premature responsibility on young people who had, in the sweet breath of passion, let go of it for a while. In that time, the health of children improved dramatically, and every street was teeming with large, interconnected families and friends. Children roamed the neighbourhood under instructions to be home by dinnertime. Children had more independence. They could venture to the park or the creek with siblings and peers, not under surveillance from the adult world. They shared some childhood moments just with other children  not their music teachers, parents or coaches. While parents knew the private lives of children existed, they didn’t feel any great desire to be involved. Now we are involved, from the fertility decision-making debates onwards, and this is having an impact on the way childhood is experienced. Fewer children mean more only-children, fewer kids in the street to play with and greater attention from the adult world.

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Idolising the womb Just as our diminishing fertility rates alter the way we think about having children, the newfound importance of fertility decisionmaking creates new structures around fertility. Because we place such emphasis on the decision to have a baby, the months preceding its arrival have become more intense and somewhat ritualistic. We prepare ourselves, our baby’s bedroom and our life circumstances using rituals and affirmations particular to Western culture. Before they even arrive, our children are primed for idolisation. Our children are brought into a culture so overwhelmed with expectation and fear that parental anxiety seems almost a given. To help alleviate our stress and mediate our anxieties, we attempt to buy safety for our new addition. Many parents acquire technologies, such as sub-mattress cot monitors to alert us if our baby’s heart should stop beating. However, the presence of the monitor only seems to further instil fear, and reinforce the vulnerability of our children. Such preparation heightens the parental need for control. We want to be prepared to protect our child from every danger. As soon-to-be or new parents, we are indoctrinated into a culturally unique process of preparation that suggests that parents are totally active and responsible for the baby’s development, and the baby plays a completely passive role. This isn’t true. In the previous chapter we identified that while children are vulnerable, they are less vulnerable than we think.

The image of newborns Children do not fit the model of complete vulnerability. Even babies are well designed to cope without hygienic wipes, stimulating mobiles and monitoring devices. A newborn placed on its mother’s stomach can climb up, unaided, to the breast and attach for its first extra-uterine sustenance. A newborn baby

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is able to handle the barrage of many new faces in its first 24 hours. Babies are born with a uniquely attention-grabbing cry that ensures they attract attention and fulfil their needs. Even the most infant of the human race has been equipped with coping mechanisms and a level of resilience. Our need to create the ‘perfect’ environment for our new baby is driven by the need to foster the development of the ‘perfect’ child. Ultimately, the perfect environment for any child is the place they can be with you. It may not be perfect in your eyes, but if it is the best that can be provided at the time then it’s the best home for them. Despite this, our idolising of children grows through the multitude of baby-raising equipment deemed necessary today. Nurseries are filled with baby monitors. There are baby towels that come with hoods so baby can look like his/her favourite hip-hop artist. And there are thousands of different variations of mobiles and soft toys aimed at supporting a newborn’s development. Our consumer society embraces the baby industry because it makes us feel like we are doing all the right things. We allay our fears, protect our children and provide for their development with the swipe of a credit card. All the while early childhood practitioners tell us that in the early months of a child’s life it is a parent’s face, lots of cuddles and attention that are crucial. But as we will see in the upcoming chapter on marketing, the advertisers are adept at shaping images of childhood that play to parents’ greatest fears and leave us believing all the extra paraphernalia is essential. The needs of newborn children are not as complex as we believe. Theirs are the most basic of all human needs: to be sheltered, fed and loved, to sleep and simply experience their new world. In the meantime, science is finding its own solutions to challenge the very core of our understanding about fertility decision-making, conception and childbirth.

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Technology vs theology I am one year older than the first ‘test tube’ baby, Louise Brown. Her birth was an event that changed people’s lives, launched the births of over a million new babies and challenged the depths of theology. While fertile Australians have access to an array of contraceptive devices to prevent their parenthood, at the other end adoption is now a poor second-cousin to IVF and egg donors, and abortion. The domain annexed by science is increasing exponentially. We know more and more and have the capacity to ‘play God’ in many ways. It is a testament to human intelligence and our own development. Yet, these developments are being used in a way that contributes to a culture where children are idolised. As reproductive technologies continue to evolve, the choices offered in having children introduce a whole raft of new questions to consider. Personal choice and economic markets drive Western culture. In our current economic climate, the market provides millions of individual choices. Indeed, such is our idolising of childhood that we, in the eyes of civilisations past, are gods. We can choose when a life begins. We can create life in a laboratory. And it costs. We have the capacity to humanly decide when life ends; even if it continues to be a contentious political issue, euthanasia is carried out by the medical profession quietly and with great respect on a regular basis. The IVF industry focuses on delivering as much choice as possible, when and where they can. Donors aren’t always completely anonymous. A one-page vital statistics attached to the frozen sperm can become a platform from which prospective parents can imagine what their child may be like, even make choices based on a sense that they can have a say in their intelligence and talents. IVF recipients are afforded some idea of the education level, hair colour and even hobbies of their donor. But nothing is guaranteed. Internet sites are awash with offers. It becomes a

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case of would you like a Harvard scholar with that, or a champion athlete? Do we not believe that as the technology becomes available we will want to choose the colour of our child’s eyes, or their intellectual capacity? Advancements in gene technology are pointing us in this direction. Newspapers have reported parents giving birth to children to provide organs or cord blood used to save the life of their older child. Is it possible we could end up in a world not dissimilar to that of Gattaca? In the 1997 movie Gattaca, Ethan Hawke’s character Vincent subverts a system that has labelled him ‘in-valid’ by purchasing the identity of another ‘valid’ human being whose potential has been cut short by an accident that left him paraplegic. Vincent’s lack of validity in this utopian future society is due to the fact he was conceived naturally by his parents and not subject to the process of child ‘pre-ordering’ through genetic determination. This future world is divided into perfect and imperfect human beings. ‘Valids’ whose genetic make-up is predetermined are not subject to the same risks as ‘in-valids’ who have been conceived naturally. They are promoted above ‘in-valids’ and enjoy the benefits of a two-tiered society. Imperfect people like Vincent are left to act as cleaners and menial labourers. This society has evolved through a genetic engineering process that extinguishes a whole range of undesired genetic predispositions. It is one not necessarily aimed at creating the perfect human but at reducing the number of imperfect ones. In 1980, an American millionaire called Robert Graham set up the Repository for Germinal Choice. Its nickname was the ‘Nobel Prize Sperm Bank’. The history of this radical human breeding experiment has been recorded by author David Plotz in The genius factory: The curious history of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. He exposes to the world the Gattaca-like ideas of a man who believed America faced a genetic catastrophe. Graham’s solution was to artificially inseminate women with

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the sperm of geniuses. A brochure for the Repository selling its wares offered ‘through artificial insemination the genes of men whose genetic inheritance appears exceptionally favourable.’ It claimed that, ‘the heritability of intelligence is about 60% to 70%’ and sold sperm that they claimed increased the likelihood of producing intelligent offspring. As part of his research, David Plotz offered himself up as a sperm donor to try and understand the attraction of what is a rather uncomfortable proposition when you consider the process in its fine detail. Plotz concluded that, ‘actually doing it was seductive’. He writes that the beautiful women who were employed to guide you through the paperwork and the humanising conversation removed you from the fact you were there to deliver sperm. And sperm delivery isn’t the most glamorous affair when it comes down to it. Still, the process of providing samples and being regarded as worthy of being a donor appealed to his ego because it validated his worth. His 105-million sperm count was ‘well above average’. Not everyone gets to be a sperm donor. In the language of Gattaca, Plotz was a valid; closer to perfect than the 90 of every 100 men whose sperm are rejected in the application and testing stages. Through donation he could be part of the ongoing process of building on human perfection. In her book Defiant birth, writer and researcher Melinda Tankard Reist vividly presents the current pursuit of creating perfection. She charts decisions made by women to go ahead with their pregnancies, despite advice to the contrary, in the face of seemingly identified risks of disability with their child. Tankard Reist lays bare our society’s struggle to accept the idea of ‘imperfect’ children. And through the courageous stories in the book she demonstrates that imperfection can actually provide growth and development. It can provide positive experiences that give us a greater sense of who we are and what is really of value. Julia Anderson is one of those women; her son Andrew was diagnosed with Down’s syndrome and born with significant

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medical complications. Her husband, former deputy prime minister John Anderson, says: Andrew’s life saw us often wondering what we had done to deserve so much difficulty. His passing sees us wondering what we did to deserve so rich a blessing as his short six-month life was ultimately meant to be. He revealed much to us about our own feelings, weaknesses and inadequacies.11

Doctor and OzProspect fellow Sam Tormey doesn’t believe that the idea of selecting for enhancement of human beings will occur. As he told The Age newspaper in June 2005, ‘It’s not going to be about making perfect babies now, if ever, but the issue is about preventing imperfect ones.’12 However, as we further idolise the perfection of human beings, especially children, what will our future world regard as being imperfect? We must be aware that our scientific sophistication may be setting up complicated ethical precedents that our current ideas of childhood and human life are not yet capable of dealing with.

The capacity of our decision-making The capacity to ‘choose’ aspects of a child has the potential to generate a level of ‘hyper-perfection’ that only makes the fertility decision-making process more exhaustive than it already is. As Leslie Cannold argues, the level of choice women and men have in this area is actually quite limited. Will there be any real choice in a society that decides to choose genetically perfect children? The underlying questions our society must answer ask us how far we wish to take our capacity to make decisions about our future children. Will we be satisfied with a ‘point and click’ version of fertility decision-making? Or might we take the opportunity to reflect on the value of choice and perceived choice, and what is really in the best interests of children and society?

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In a world where we honour childhood, the respect for life would begin before a child is born. We would have greater regard and value for their difference, their individuality and the ability of every child, rather than idolising the perfection of a select few. Current fertility decision-making options are increasing the value of children in economic terms only. The costs of overseas adoption and IVF treatment puts having children into a new economic bracket, one that is limited to those with the finances to make that choice. It reflects the different social values we base around children. While some people choose not to have children because of the economic burden of supporting them through to adulthood, others spend more than an average annual Australian income to have a family. Obviously, the decision to have children is a very personal one. But when does society begin to play its role? If indeed the demographers are right and a too-low birth rate sends our society into a population free-fall, don’t we all play a role in creating a society that makes having children a more desirable option?

Decision-making: An ongoing process Our decision to have or not to have children isn’t as clear cut or pronounced as the statistics or analysts would have us think. We may rationalise that our economic or social situation means we are not capable of having children at a certain time in our lives, or we may believe we are not the best people to become parents. In fact, there are so many rational reasons to not have children  it is amazing that so many of us continue to procreate. However, that may be because the decision isn’t really a rational one. On many occasions something steps in and takes us to that irrational and emotionally driven space where decisions are made not with the head but with the heart. Author Anne Manne writes this about her friend:

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Idolising children A friend weighed motherhood up carefully in a cost-benefit analysis, assessing the pros and cons. There were a lot of cons; halting the smooth progress in her career, the decent income, the freedom to live as she pleased. She decided motherhood was irrational. That night, confident her decision was the right one, she waited in a supermarket queue. A toddler, somehow detached from her mother, got all those women’s legs mixed up. With that trusting unconsciousness of a small child, she slipped her little hand around my friend’s leg, and nestled into her. Suddenly the matter was not quite so clear. She decided she would have a baby.13

It is unwise to believe we can make a decision about whether or not to have children, and that that decision has some form of finality to it. ‘Fertility decision-making’ is such a clinical and inhumane term when in reality we constantly consider parenthood and childrearing throughout our adult lives. It is an ongoing consideration that has been enhanced by the introduction of fertility treatments, IVF and even overseas adoption. Yet we talk about the consideration of parenthood not as an ongoing process but as a definitive decision. Answering ‘maybe’ to that question is a fine solution. It’s a more realistic answer, and provides more scope to accommodate unexpected possibilities and swift changes in life circumstances. Ongoing consideration of parenthood has also led to more recent discussions around women who missed out on having children through circumstance. As I have mentioned, the ‘circumstance’ argument is well discussed in Leslie Cannold’s book, What, no baby? In it she argues that motherhood is a rational choice but, due to a range of competing factors, not a choice available to all women. 14 Parenthood may sometimes be a rational choice, but not always. The ongoing nature of the process means it is as much about emotion as any form of intellectual reasoning. As playwright Joanna Murray-Smith noted in a review of Cannold’s book, ‘[t]he full vigour and complexity of the emotional life of women is what is missing from these pages.’15 However, emotional enough or not, Cannold’s book has contributed to the complexity of considering

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parenthood, the need for men to be held to account and, in her interviews with women, demonstrated it is an evolving process rather than a final decision. We need an image of childhood that celebrates our capacity to have children and raise them at any point in the spectrum of adult life stages and situations. For example, rather than parenting in your early twenties being considered a ‘big mistake’, as is the current social viewpoint, it could be seen as a positive thing to do.

If we idolise children, why aren’t we having more? We are more infatuated by an idea of childhood than children themselves. This is why we quietly go about finding ways to produce more perfect babies. This is why we have designer labels producing infants’ and children’s clothes. This is why our media and advertising industries are very selective in the way they represent childhood and youth. It is all beaches, skateboards and soft drink or toilet paper and smooth rounded bottoms without a poo-filled nappy in sight. We don’t know whether our idolising of children contributes to making having children less desirable and therefore to the lower birth rates. In many ways it doesn’t matter. We must stop our idolising anyhow. In several cases our idolising makes raising children seem expensive and more difficult than it is, and while there is little mention of the rewards, there is plenty of discussion about the compromises. In essence, taking on the responsibility of parenthood in our world is a defining moment in letting go of our own childhood and youth. Until we have children, we can still cling to the behaviours of our youth. If childhood was respected but not obsessed over, and we embraced a simpler and more rewarding perception of childhood rather than a complex and limiting version, the birth rate

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would rise more quickly than through any number of economic incentives. The problem isn’t the cost of raising children; it is the cost of being exposed to the reality of childhood, to the risks, the fears and the lack of control that all parents feel. Having children, in time, teaches us that childhood (and life) can’t be perfect. It isn’t like on television. That said, it is hundreds of times better  especially if you find ways to honour rather than worship children and childhood.

The importance of celebrating choice: FDM and responsibility to children In 1978 a group of Boston parents published the book, Ourselves and our children. Through a focus on supporting parents, they devote a whole chapter to ‘considering parenthood’. They celebrate the decision-making process. They start in the middle of the decision-making continuum at ‘maybe’, because it is ‘an answer much closer to reality’16 . And the other reality they take on is that whether or not we have children, become a step-parent or adopt a child, it’s not a decision we will be able to completely explain. Nor should it be. Obviously, the decision to have children is not totally rational. There are elements of mystery and emotionality involved that go beyond the desire most of us have to keep everything well thought out and clearly planned.17 Still, why we have children is nowhere near as important as the fact that we do have them. And it’s not only parents that have them. Extended families and communities have them too. Not in a literal sense but in the sense of belonging, children are the assets of a whole family and community. Our governments and communities must heed the call to reform the structure of our society and improve our capacity to navigate the fertility decision-making process. However, we

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can only start this process if we begin to appreciate children in ways that respect and include, rather than exclude, them. This shift would change the discussions and debates on birth rate and fertility decision-making so that we won’t need to discuss them much at all.

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Chapter 4 Childcare: Parents, centres and community

Are we teaching children to stop thinking when they leave our care, because the only place we are engaging in learning with them is the early education centre? Rebecca Kidd, childcare professional

An off ice-centred society We are caught in the commute. We live in suburbs that circle the hubbub of our cities’ central business districts. We spend a lifetime paying off mortgages on houses we spend decreasing amounts of time in. The 40-hour working week exists no longer: some work fewer hours and find it inadequate, others work many more and find themselves collapsing under the strain. An officecentred society is at the core of our debates about childcare. The bubbling metropolis breathes us in each week morning and exhales us back out onto trams, trains and cars each weeknight. The world of children revolves around the needs of working adults. While we talk about the needs of our children and the importance of their development, our actions place greater value on work, money and materialism. We are not adequately addressing the systems we want to support our children while we do work. This is not about arguing for more stay-at-home parents, nor is it about undermining the importance and value of work. It

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is about putting things into perspective and making sure we have got the systems right. Children don’t belong in our places of work. We haven’t designed our society like that. In 18th century France, they implemented compulsory schooling to help children to learn and develop. This achieved three things. It further separated the worlds of adults and children. It also equipped children with a greater capacity to contribute to economic development at a time of significant economic change. And it meant children were being looked after while their parents worked. But as we slowly dissolve the concept of a 40-hour working week and work longer hours, we have had to find ways to slip children out of the continuum even younger. A century ago, the beginnings of the early childhood movement were driven by the desire to support children in their early development so that they might reach their potential through the next stages of life and beyond. Somewhere along the way, this important aim was watered down. The over-riding reason for our current childcare system is to look after children so parents can work, so that society is more productive. Our idolising of children means that we are not always focused on meeting their needs but meeting ours first. Greater consideration of children’s needs and a rethink of childcare should go hand in hand with a new image of childhood for the 21st century. Changes in childcare won’t happen unless we regard childhood with more respect. And we won’t regard childhood with more respect without reforming our early childhood services. We need a perspective that moves us away from our idolising of childhood, a perspective that considers the differences in children, the differing levels of capacity they have, and the need to be more flexible in the way we approach the issue of childcare – not only the services but also the debate itself. We must acknowledge that the need to work is much more complex than just earning a wage. It is about creating a sense of self, maintaining relationships and contributing to the functioning of

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society. This idea is a powerful one in reshaping not just childcare but how we choose to structure work in our society. For the moment, however, we live in a society where our contribution is measured in dollar terms. Stay-at-home parents and parents who work part-time contribute too, and not just by raising children. They are the volunteers who help with reading at schools, go on excursions, run community groups, maintain social networks in their local suburb or town and help keep the economy ticking over by doing the shopping, the banking and other crucial activities of modern living. The solutions this chapter will explore aren’t about how we can improve the current childcare system by tinkering at the edges. They suggest how we might begin to create new children’s service systems for a society that chooses to honour children rather than idolise them.

How the system works Formal childcare comes in many forms: centre-based care where children are cared for in purpose-built facilities, occasional care, before and after school care, family day care where children are cared for in the homes of registered carers, and nanny services. Most of these are partially funded by the federal government. Traditionally, community-based centres were funded directly while private providers struggled to compete because they received no government funding. This changed in the late 1990s. The proliferation of private childcare providers particularly ABC Learning Centres) has occurred through changes in funding. More recently, funding has been delivered directly to parents through a subsidy, the Child Care Benefit Scheme. This means the funding is attached to children, rather than centres, and private centres have flourished. Kindergarten (or preschool), however, is funded by state governments who usually focus on three and four year olds for specific times and are aligned in most states with the education

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system. But this is not always true and preschool systems vary from state to state in their focus and the way they are run. Many childcare centres deliver kindergarten streams through arrangements with state governments to make it easier for parents whose children are in childcare but also need to attend preschool. This line between kindergarten and childcare is a real point of contention. The separation of preschool and childcare is an aberration brought about by our government and bureaucratic systems and has not supported the evolution of early childhood theory. There is no difference between the type of developmental support required for children of all ages before they start school. Common sense suggests that the two systems should combine and begin the process of establishing a preschool model for children from birth to six years. Having visited many childcare centres in my various local and state government roles across the years, I am well aware that the experiences of children vary greatly. This is predominantly because the quality of childcare centres varies greatly, but also because children are all different and will respond to the experience differently. In good childcare centres children will spend the day participating in a range of activities, including time outside playing with their friends. They will likely have some one-on-one time with a staff member doing some creative play. They may pretend to be a cook or police officer in domestic role-play. Younger children may have a sleep, but won’t be forced to. Older children will have staff who are aware when they need some quiet time. They may be visited by a performer or local person who tells them about their job or hobby or leads an activity opening children up to the community in which they live. Quality childcare in action is a dynamic, engaging and entertaining thing to watch and be a part of. In poorly run centres, children may spend a lot of the day in front of the television. Staff will take turns ducking out the back for a cigarette, bringing children-to-staff ratios to below minimum standards. The outside play equipment will not be

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inspiring or organised in a way to encourage play. Children will receive little or no one-on-one attention, younger ones may be left in their cot most of the day and nappies may remain soiled and unchanged for some time. If meals or snacks are provided, they will be rudimentary rather than delicious and nutritious. A poor quality childcare centre can be a dangerous place for children. We can improve our monitoring and write more rules to try and get centres to meet minimum standards. But is this enough to give us the best childcare for our children?

Hijacking the debate Our childcare and children’s service systems desperately need reform. Yet in 2006, when federal female Liberal MPs raised the childcare reform issue, it was just another flash-in-the-pan newspaper story. Instead of examining broader social and structural issues, we seem to prefer arguing about the number of places in the childcare system. The real problem with childcare is the way we perceive it as a solution for other problems in our adult lives. We are time-poor. We struggle to find enough time to earn sufficient income to satisfy mortgage repayments and wealth expectations. We work to fulfil our own aspirations and meet new challenges. To help solve this situation, we use childcare so we can work. But from a child’s point of view, it can be a rough deal. Our childcare systems lack consistency. Children in centre-based care are exposed to drastic variations in quality and levels of staff expertise, and a constantly changing sea of faces due to poor staff retention levels. Working parents have to be satisfied with simply having found ‘a good one’, in their search for a childcare centre. Raising human beings is the most important job in the world. Yet, the debate about how our community raises children is constantly limited to childcare places and minimum standards. Few advocate the need to find new ways of caring for and supporting the development of our children. But this responsibility belongs to everyone.

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Insight Many childcare experts insist the central issues revolve around the development of appropriate planning and strategic government management. Indeed, during a childcare-focused edition of SBS’s TV current affairs forum, ‘Insight’, in 2006, the planning argument was central to panel members’ discussion. I had been invited to attend and was in an audience keen to see the big issues (as they saw them) on childcare addressed: affordibility, access and quality. Minister for Family and Community Services, Mal Brough, was representing the government. Opposition Shadow Minister, Tanya Plibersek, was there too. What transpired, however, was a disappointing politically charged debate about the quality of childcare centres, how the government monitored that quality and whether we’d be seeing more places anytime soon. As expected, private childcare providers were attacked: specifically, ABC Learning Centres, Australia’s biggest corporate childcare provider. Of course, these issues are pressing and relevant, but they are dominated by political speak and weighed down by bureaucracy and expert jargon. Towards the end of the discussion, audience members started talking more broadly about motherhood and fatherhood. They started to discuss the need for more complexity in the overall childcare system. Some parents wanted greater recognition as co-supporters of their children’s development and many women began to express their desire to only work part-time. They said that childcare was not always a preferred option, and asked what might happen if their husbands only worked part-time, too? Dr Elizabeth Hill took on the Minister Mal Brough about the issue of part-time work and the continued dominance of the male-breadwinner model. ‘You believe in only families that have 1.5 workers, Mal, not women participating at the level, at the capacity that they desire,’ she said. ‘The recent survey out by the Institute of Family Studies demonstrates that … 55% of women with children under 13 want between 14 and 34 hours of work a

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week … your policies do not meet the contemporary desires of women, of Australian women and Australian families. They are out of step.’1 Just as the debate began to get interesting it was stopped. And the program that went to air was a whole different matter. The last and most vital section of the debate was cut. References made by a woman about only wanting to work part-time were edited out in favour of the father who said he worked two jobs just to cover childcare costs. Obviously, not everything that transpires on a live forum program such as ‘Insight’ can be broadcast, and some portions must be cut to meet airtime and continuity. To me, however, this episode served as an indication of how a range of forces combines to limit our discussions on childcare. The general public can’t consider what they would really like, or how different their situation could be, because very little room is provided for those who want to discuss ideas beyond affordability, access and quality. But this doesn’t stop parents from talking about it when they get together.

The guilt-fest At the office lunch table, the discussion becomes a whisper. My colleagues, all women, share the stories of their morning. They tell of too-early starts, battles over breakfast cereals and one mother recounting her guilt at having to walk away from her screaming child as she left her in care. These experiences are typical. And while in themselves they are not reasons to abolish childcare, they do give a sense of the impact of the current system. Then there is the example of friends who withdrew their son from care because he became distressed and inconsolable every time they drove him near the childcare centre. Another group of women I met had established their own informal system of childcare. They did this so that each of them could return to work part-time, and use a combination of formal centre-based care,

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playgroup networks, neighbours and family members to meet the developmental and care needs of their young children. Despite the obvious challenges for parents within the system, childcare is still held up as providing real choice. Childcare is embroiled in the rhetoric of ‘choice’ that is dictated to us by free market values and to a lesser extent from feminist philosophy. Today, our economic ideology means everything is about choice and for women childcare is a crucial tool in providing the choice to work. In most instances, however, the child’s choice comes second to the choice of its parents. Modern society encourages women to work. In fact, in some social circles, staying home to take care of children is now seen as indulgent and boring. Certainly, if the workplace is where women want to be, they should be given every opportunity to be there. Quality childcare and women taking their place in the workforce can co-exist harmoniously. However, at the moment, quality childcare isn’t always what we get. I find it disappointing that the first option for women returning to the workforce is to find a childcare place, rather than discuss with their partner or husband the options that may be available in terms of working and childcare arrangements.

Men must respond Conspicuous in their absence from the work, family and childcare dilemma are fathers. What of their role in the choice to work and support the developmental needs of their children at the same time? Why are mothers so quickly held to account in discussions on childcare and fathers not? Similar to our discussions on fertility, why are men either not given the opportunity to participate, or let off the hook without taking responsibility? Governments too could be involved in establishing a system allowing mothers and fathers to both work part-time, support the development of their children, and have their children in care for some part of the week. Why not?

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Our inability to place value on staying at home and raising children is an example of the continued poor response from men to the challenges laid out by the feminist movement. Our capacity to better meet our children’s needs would come from men relinquishing their stranglehold over executive and governance powers. Men still hold an overwhelming majority of senior management and political positions. Men may find a better quality of life would come from spending more time working out how collectively they could work in partnership with women to achieve greater worklife balance. In reality, because men duck for cover, there is little choice at the moment. Our current dogma pits childcare and working mothers against stay-at-home mothers: it is a great guilt-fest where nobody wins. Stay-at-home parents feel unappreciated and unvalued because they exist in a society where paid work is held in much greater esteem. Some stay-at-home parents are criticised for ‘not wanting to work’ and face disbelief that they could possibly find reward in being full-time carers. At the same time, working parents feel guilty at leaving their child in care before 8 am so they can be in the office by 9 am. Working parents are confronted with reports of children accidentally left in childcare centres at night and ongoing critiques challenging the quality of the care in which they have left their children. Some working parents are criticised for not ‘taking responsibility’ for looking after their children. Both groups have reason to feel very angry. Family therapist and author Steve Biddulph hasn’t refrained from entering the fray. His comments, aimed at the current structures creating the drive for childcare, are well worth considering. Biddulph questions the value of protecting parents from exploring all the arguments around childcare. ‘[We] infantilise [parents] if we say we mustn’t make them feel guilty … [T]hey know that guilt is in their minds for a reason,’ he says. ‘Guilt is a reason we don’t drive at 100 miles an hour through a built up place.’2 All of us should feel dissatisfied with the current situation. In our culture where politics and catchy media grabs reduce complex

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issues to black-and-white paradoxes, parents are too often forced to pledge allegiance to one side only. If our childcare system had our children’s developmental interests at heart, there would be little value in taking them away from it. Why can’t we combine our desire to work fewer hours and our demand for a better children’s service system for our children and families? Why is a four-day working week such a challenge for government and workplaces? Despite our desire to live life, our society still dictates we work to live.

Meeting whose needs? In 2003, the early childhood revival reached a peak. Larry Anthony held the ministerial portfolio for children and youth. Early childhood advocate Dr Fiona Stanley was Australian of the Year. And after years in the political wilderness, the call to put children first was finally being heard, or so we thought. But the Howard government agenda now aims to keep mothers at home, and invest little in early childhood services. As Ross Gittens and other political commentators point out, the economic policy of the Howard government clearly favours a male-breadwinner household model with greater financial incentives for women who choose to stay home rather than work part-time.3 In the short space of two cabinet reshuffles, the ministerial portfolio for children and youth has disappeared. The arguments of early childhood experts for greater emphasis on better quality care still fight to be heard above the short-term economic gain of increasing employment figures and annual growth. Childcare should be about the learning and development of our children, but it isn’t. Despite the rhetoric, according to current government policy, Australian children should be seen but not heard. Childcare systems can look very different. We have some great examples of childcare centres in Australia that do what they can within the limits of regulations. We will look at the possibilities later in this chapter.

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No real choice One couple I know recently put their house on the market because of childcare. It may seem a radical approach, but after returning to full-time work, the mother found herself unhappy and unmotivated. She had spent a career working in children’s services in local government and knew exactly what she wanted from a childcare centre. She couldn’t find it. She finally enrolled her son in what she called ‘the best of a bad lot’ of centres. But she found she couldn’t face having to drop him off at a centre she believed was still inadequate. So she and her husband sold their house, downshifted, and will live off the equity in their house so she doesn’t have to work until her son starts school. ‘Choice’ is upheld as the greatest driver for improving the system. But if the stories above are anything to go by, there isn’t really that much choice. In a society as ‘advanced’ as ours, why can’t we provide a suite of children’s services options that meet the needs of all involved parties: working parents, children, childcare workers and the community alike? There is no doubt the childcare system must change. More than simply offering childcentred services, it must become one part of many options to support children and their families. To do this, we need to address a broad range of issues going beyond the simple community-vs.private centres or childcare places debates. The answers to these debates would be clear if we had our priorities right. Journalist Joanna Murray-Smith has a different perspective on the issue. She believes parents have been sold a furphy in regard to the choice of childcare. In response to the concept women can be both successful mother and successful professional, she writes, ‘The gift of choices is booby-trapped. The concept of choice is always laden with grief. Something is always lost.’4 A dissenting voice in the childcare and fertility decision-making debates, Murray-Smith has been accused of idealising motherhood and childhood. She asks women difficult questions: ‘But where in the public forum is the question that refuses to budge from the

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conscience of most middle-class working mothers: Is my working life good for my child?’5 Murray-Smith advocates strongly for the need for parents to not spend quality time but simply time with their children. She calls for a greater appreciation of motherhood. And she puts it on the line: I go to bed at night asking myself over and over again how much our working lives really benefit our children? How much do we want to believe this, desperate for an argument that will defeat our own doubt, that will articulate a truce for the war between our own split loyalties: wife, mother, lover, worker, artist, income earner, nurturer, guider of spirits, holder of small hands, cleaner of fridges, contributor to dialogues, interested party in a better world? I couldn’t be more of a mother, because I’m not prepared to be less of a writer.6

Choice is a compromise and one that we appear willing to make. Something may be lost, but something is usually gained too. We should ask what is being gained, for whom? How much control do we have? We should be asking governments why they’re not listening.

Early childhood: More than care Australian Bureau of Statistics data indicates that since 1980 the number of Australian children in care has not changed significantly. For the last 25 years, the percentage of children in care has hovered between 4550 per cent. However, what has changed is the type of care those children are in. When once children were cared for through informal arrangements with family, neighbours or friends, many more children are now cared for in childcare centres, or through other formal arrangements like family day care.7 In late 2005, demographer Peter MacDonald made a

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presentation to an inquiry into work and family balance, held by the House of Representatives’ Human Services Standing Committee. He argued that quality preschool should be appropriately funded for three- and four-year-old children. 8 This argument is one we increasingly hear as it is linked to the benefits of positive early childhood development and education during the first few years of a child’s life. Don Edgar, founder of the Australian Institute of Family Studies, is a long-time advocate of innovations such as children’s hubs and greater interconnectivity between services. One of his recent ideas, presented in the Victorian Premier’s Advisory Committee Report Joining the dots, has been the development of Children’s Resource Zones. These are concentrated communityoperated organisations within geographic areas that give a new focus to the health, wellbeing and development of children in the community. His concept places greater emphasis on community involvement in children’s lives and accepting that children of all ages need a diverse range of developmental supports. They need not be based around a centre, but based on community input and collaboration between government, business and the community, all of who have responsibility to our children. Both MacDonald and Edgar are advocating a new take on childcare: one where our focus is on early childhood development. Certainly, many childcare centres now refer to themselves as ‘learning centres’ and some have begun to place an educational slant on what they do. But the re-marketing and renaming of childcare is just the beginning. If we’re to get serious about early childhood development, we need to invest in the tertiary education of most early childhood staff, and instigate a culture of support for early childhood development across our society. A simple name change is not worth much at all to our children. Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission’s (HREOC) Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Pru Goward, is also interested in change. While her push isn’t specifically directed at changes in childcare centres, in HREOC’s Striking the balance

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report she argues for men to take a greater role in domestic life, to be more involved in maintaining the household and caring for the children. Others still are calling for legislation to allow new parents the right to return part-time to their jobs while their children are young. As President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions Sharon Burrows has said, ‘Childcare is an important part of the story, but it is little use if parents cannot find part-time work or secure jobs with flexible working hours.’ Indeed, research consistently shows that a majority of mothers would prefer to work part-time when their children are below school age. 9 Intelligent ideas such as these must be championed. Implementing them would challenge our perceptions of childhood and youth. In establishing respect for children’s development in their early years, we would create a precedent: one that would help us move towards significant reform in support of our children’s development during the early years. By combining formal and informal care, and supporting the people most integral to our children’s development, we can integrate children back into the continuum of society, rather than leaving them to sit outside it. While children don’t need 40 to 60 hours of childcare a week, they are not averse to care. And the developmental benefits of a quality early childhood learning environment are important for all children. Benefits include the support of structured play and being exposed to socialisation with their peers. In a society with an increasing number of one-child families, interaction with other children in a formal setting can introduce many important concepts and values like sharing, respecting others’ space and working together. There will always be debate around how early children should start childcare, how frequently they should attend and what sort of care should be delivered. But instead of focusing on this, we need to first develop a system that respects the holistic developmental needs of children. We can do a whole lot better.

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Beyond all-or-nothing Currently, the most hotly contested debate centres on whether children should be in centre-based care or at home with a parent. The polarised ‘all or nothing’ division in the debate is dictated by opposing images of childhood innocence and childhood perfection. Unfortunately, media representations of this debate play off two different ideas of children and childhood development. Children are presented as either totally vulnerable, needing constant attachment and care from their mothers, or as beings in pursuit of perfection with perfect parents who want to give them all the stimulation they can get. On the one hand, both Anne Manne’s Motherhood and Steve Biddulph’s Raising babies: Should under 3s go to nursery argue that childcare for young children can have negative impacts on their development. They assert that we should reconsider the age at which children start centre-based childcare. And on the other hand, a majority of early childhood experts strongly promote the developmental benefits of quality centre-based childcare. In continuing to polarise the debate about whether childcare is good or bad for children’s development we are playing pingpong with the issue. The data from Manne and Biddulph that presents solid evidence for the value of maternity and paternity leave should prompt us to demand that government fund these. Their work asks us to question whether only one type of care is suitable, or whether a range of care and developmental options is in a child’s best interest. Both Manne and Biddulph have been misrepresented in the media as saying that there should be no childcare for children under two years of age. This is incorrect. They acknowledge both the complexity of our society and the potential benefit of childcare for children of all ages, depending on their situation. Both authors should be respected for trying to counter the current dogma that is pushing blindly towards centre-based care as always the best option for children, no matter what their age.

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The idea of childhood innocence and vulnerability gives greater credence to the importance of maternal love and care. Anne Manne’s perspective comes from an angle of childhood innocence. The over-riding belief is that parental love during the early years is paramount, and that removing this love is dangerous. Certainly, removing a child from its parents’ love would be damaging. But is this what childcare actually does? And is childcare for children under two always going to be damaging? Only a brave person would agree. The argument that children deserve constant one-on-one attention is based on our idealised view of childhood. Only a couple of generations ago, the size of families meant that parents couldn’t give the same level of attachment and attention to all their children, purely because of the numbers. Even in a current context, how do twins and triplets fare with parental love and attention in their families? The opposing perspective of childhood and childcare is dictated by more contemporary images of the perfect child. This view supports the argument that children need formal learning environments and that childcare is valuable in terms of socialisation and childhood development in ways that benefit both children and society. Developing perfect children is not a job for parents. In fact, many parents happily defer the role to professionals who advocate that the best model for raising perfect children is based on their directing parents on how to do it. But was developing perfect children ever a parent’s job, anyway? Perfect children need Gymbaroo, music lessons and tutors as they hit school. Perfect children will play many sports, go to camp during school holidays and attend a whole host of activities that mean their parents must continue to work. No one can meet the developmental needs of these perfect children except professionals, who work in childcare centres and have all the developmental toys and programs at their fingertips. The image of the perfect child is heavily caught up in providing material wealth and an array of experiences that parents don’t have time to do, no

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matter how much we’d like to. So knowing that professionals are ‘picking up the slack’ makes us feel better. However, in some instances, childcare is not picking up the slack. Certainly, there are many childcare centres providing the quality of care that children deserve, and that parents want and expect. Still, centres providing a host of developmental experiences and value-building activities are not necessarily in the majority. It is not the fault of individual workers though; as in any occupation, some are fantastic and others lacklustre. It is not the fault of centre co-ordinators who, from the limited resources they have, stretch budgets and hassle parents to get the very best they can. The reason childcare needs an overhaul is because our society isn’t willing to pay for the quality of childcare our children deserve.

What children do A five-year-old friend of my son’s has a fascination with Greek music  he’ll listen to it for hours. The preschooler who lived next door to me when I was growing up would help his dad shovel sand and dirt and move it in his own preschool sized wheelbarrow for an entire afternoon. I myself was initially shocked when I watched my two year old follow his older brother halfway up a tree, but he has become an ambitious tree climber. These examples show us the real capacity of children. The older girls (six and ten years) across the road spend time teaching my boys to play sophisticated games like creating puppet shows and concerts. Through this interaction my boys are learning, but so are their older friends who must learn patience and develop skills in teaching others, organising and leading creative play. Parents observe the capacity of children every day. They see the depth at which they engage, but on the whole we are missing an understanding of what it is children actually do. If we had a different understanding of the work that children do, our children would benefit from a much greater flexibility and variety

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of early childhood development services. Don Edgar provides a valuable contemporary image of childhood, in his book The war over work: Children’s play is, at its most interesting, learning, and learning is work: being absorbed in the game, applying the rules, going with the flow, able to concentrate for long periods without tiring. Unfortunately, the philosophy of play adopted by the kindergarten movement and early childhood experts is misunderstood … Originally, it came from the sensible recognition that, in early childhood, play is central to the learning process … Unfortunately, in the popularised form, the meaning of play became too vague, too unstructured and non-evaluative for children’s benefit.10

Edgar asserts that our society has misinterpreted the idea of play, that adults have become confused and that education departments now in control of early childhood teaching are pushing literacy and numeracy before play and continue to do so for younger and younger children). Of course, this is a generalisation and the quality of teaching and support varies across the sector. Edgar is referring to an over-emphasis on the trend towards self-directed learning and a willingness to allow play without a purpose. This trend has parallels with our idolising of children. Our desire to see success and wonder in all children, our images of perfect and innocent children, mean that we are more comfortable promoting a curriculum and early childhood programs that provide continued success and ego-building. We are less comfortable telling a child they need to improve if they are to match the ability of their peers. We don’t let children know that they can and will fail in some things. As Edgar says, ‘The child became too precious, selfesteem was elevated to the level of dogma.’11 Our understanding of play is limited, and our obsession with not damaging a child’s self-esteem is restricting. So our children may go to childcare and play, but their developmental needs are not necessarily being met. Edgar suggests that in the current paradigm every child gets a gold star and reward is seen as more valuable than effort. We do our children a disservice if we develop

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early childhood education systems along these lines because the confidence we are giving our children is a false confidence. To feel competent and capable relies a lot on actually being confident and capable. And learning and mastering so much knowledge and skills requires supported and structured developmental opportunities. If we better understood play as being the work of children, we would be better placed to create ‘early childhood development centres’ instead of ‘childcare’ centres. We would also stop pushing children to read and write earlier. In turn, this understanding would support a system that reflected the name change. Instead of simply looking for a place to ‘mind the children’, these centres would be specifically and actively supporting the developmental needs of all young children. There is no doubt this is central to early childhood curriculum. The question is: How well is it being understood and implemented across the sector? Now is the time to implement the knowledge and expertise of the preschool sector across the early childhood sector. In doing so we could begin to change attitudes at both ends: children would be undertaking facilitated play and supported development at a very young age and preschool teachers would hopefully experience reduced pressure to teach children five years and under to read and do maths. The fact that they experience that pressure shows just how much more community education is needed around what should be expected of children during the early years. A young dad we know writes impromptu songs with his children and records them on the computer. If other people come over and join in, he records everyone, burns it onto a CD and sends it home. And there is nothing more delightful than getting a glimpse of a child who is playing when they think they are alone, absorbed in an imaginary world, perhaps talking to themselves. They are guiding their own development and working hard at it. What children do is as challenging and diverse as any adult life and all children’s services need to find ways of fostering and facilitating the things children do  not what we think they should do, or what the theory says they should do. Let the children guide

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the early childhood curriculum. There are many isolated examples where this model is being undertaken. Indeed, these ideas are not new. Across Australia preschools are adopting alternative models of supporting childhood development using philosophies like Reggio Emilia and Montessori. In the next chapter we will see examples of parents taking a very active role in their child’s development and education. Any childcare centre or preschool that is trying to support children’s development in a community-focused and holistic way must work hard because they are going against the tide. But the tide can change and they are the pioneers who will help slowly shift our understanding and improve our capacity to support the development of our children in community settings.

Who should be f irst? The early years are critical to all children. However, if we are serious about decreasing the gap between the haves and havenots then the focus of government funding should be less on the further enhancement of universal early childhood services and more on services and programs directed at children most in need. We can talk all we like about the needs of children in childcare, but in reality the more disadvantaged will benefit most. Current debates about childcare regularly examine economic analyses of the value of quality early childhood services when measured against those adults in later life. But many frequently ignore the fact that most positive results have come from researching the most disadvantaged children. Nobel Laureate economist James Heckman has said ‘On a purely economic basis, it makes a lot of sense to invest in the young.’12 He writes: A large body of scientific evidence shows a ‘persistent pattern of strong effects’ derived from early interventions. Significantly, these substantial, long-term benefits are not necessarily limited to intellectual gains, but are most clearly seen by measures

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My issue is that Heckman’s and many others’ discussions about early intervention are usually within the context of studies that focus on children from communities of significant social disadvantage. The basis on which they argue for greater investment into early childhood education services for all children is founded on research targeted at very specific groups of children. There is no doubt that well-run and resourced early childhood programs are good for all children in some way, but they may not be as crucial for a vast majority of children who come from less disadvantaged backgrounds. These children already have a much lower chance of requiring welfare benefits or participating in crime. Indeed, Heckman often references the Syracuse Family Development Research Program as an example of the benefits of quality early childhood programs and their success. This is a very successful program that demonstrated significantly better outcomes for children participating in quality early childhood development services. However, the participants all came from disadvantaged communities and backgrounds and were in no way a reflection of the general population. This means we should perhaps consider where our early childhood dollars are best going to be spent. If we want to take a purely economic perspective we need to be targeting it very specifically. This is a key public policy issue. Governments have learnt to talk the talk on early childhood, but they are still coming to grips with how to actually do it. The report on human capital reform approved in 2006 by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) indicates where investment should be directed. It states: ‘… children’s life chances, especially for those born into disadvantaged families, are strongly shaped before they begin school. Many children are left behind from the start. Confronting early disadvantage is often far more

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effective than seeking to remedy disadvantage later in life.’14 In 2006, early childhood advocate and paediatrician Graham Vimpani celebrated the link between human capital and early childhood. He said that it has ‘the potential to contribute more to the future wellbeing of Australia than anything else discussed at the COAG [meeting])’.15 Australian governments appear to realise that children with most to gain from quality early childhood services are those in lower socio-economic areas. If governments are smart, they’ll realise the best chance to improve outcomes is by starting in areas where results are worst. That is where the most significant gains can be made, and explains the ongoing call by advocates to address the health and wellbeing of Indigenous children: these children regularly appear in the lower percentiles of birth weight and immunisation, key indicators of future wellbeing. Those of us expressing concern about childcare live in the ‘relaxed and comfortable’ Australia where our children are, for the most part, thriving. It is those children on the edges of our bustling economy who need the most support. It is they who should be getting the best quality childcare: other children are afforded far more quality in all other aspects of their lives. Many child development advocates look to Scandinavian countries to provide examples of how quality children’s services work. They quote figures and facts about Scandinavian systems in their efforts to influence Australian government policy. We read that parents in Sweden are eligible for 18 months of governmentpaid maternity and paternity leave. And if both parents are working, their children are guaranteed a place in childcare from age one. In Norway, fathers must take four weeks of paternity leave after their child is born, or lose the entitlement. In Denmark, the majority of childcare workers are trained to a tertiary level. It all sounds good. But what impact is it having? Overall, these countries have recognised that childcare isn’t the only aspect of a children’s service system. They see the interconnectedness of quality parental support, and formal

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child development and support. By guaranteeing governmentfunded maternity leave and childcare places for children, they are changing the way children are viewed. Through their policy, these countries are role-modelling respect and this in turn delivers a very different model of childcare. Early childhood professional Rebecca Kidd, who works in the childcare sector in New South Wales, discovered this when she visited Denmark on a professional development scholarship to observe and learn about their children’s services system.

A different early childhood service experience Rebecca recalls that she went armed with paper and lots of it: the documentation of quality childcare, as Australia sees it. Observation notes, program plans and records that are meant to show very concrete thought and observation about the children being supported in care. But of her first visit to a childcare centre, she observed, ‘I did not see one piece of documentation, one routine, or one program’. The differences Rebecca noted were stark: ‘In Australia, I was led to believe that if this was to happen you would be classed as a teacher who disregarded children’s learning. What I did see were teachers genuinely talking to parents as teaching partners, not directing them to writing on a wall or in a book.’ Kidd’s own approach to childcare was radically changed by a system that respected children enough not to over-regulate or over risk-manage the experience of early childhood development. She saw children in a climbing room where they learnt to take risks with their bodies. She saw children younger than she expected doing amazingly physical things with their bodies, feats that our culture would not regard as ‘safe activities’. What most amazed her was staff ‘[t]aking children out of the centre spontaneously’. Of the six children she and another staff member supervised on an outdoors experience, she says:

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As I watched these children engage with their natural environment, I began to feel an overwhelming sense of sadness for the children with whom I co-learn. How I wished I could also provide them with opportunities to learn about their world by directly engaging with it … [W]e need to begin questioning the rules and regulations that control our teaching.16

Our debates are so stifling, so mired in the regulations and legislation of children’s services, we don’t even talk about early childhood development in these ways. We talk in facts and figures, in the number of places not available and whether or not centres have the 7 square metres of space per child that is meant to equal quality outdoor space. Seven square metres is quality? The ground doesn’t even have to have real grass! In fact, synthetic grass is now preferable in some centres because they don’t have to pay a gardener to mow it. This is not to say Australia isn’t without dynamic and comparable services in terms of meeting children’s developmental needs. The stark difference is found in the attitude. Australian children’s services regulation is strongly influenced by a risk management agenda, the focus is on preventing worst-case scenarios like injury or death. Consequently, there isn’t a childcare professional in the country that would risk taking children from their centre to play in a park down the road, so the children could interact with children from outside the centre. The disappointment Kidd is expressing is about the regulations that prevent her from taking the next step  a step that would take childcare into the community and really be a part of it. *

What should childcare look like? A dynamic system of early childhood development and support would look nothing like our current childcare system. We can talk about quality early childhood development until we are blue

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in the face, but real quality in the Australian context will only come from some dramatic reform. The system currently suits adults just fine. In a few aspects, it also suits children. But we can always improve our systems. We need to find ways of bringing the community into our early childhood development centres and services, and ways of taking our children out into their communities so they can experience them. These experiences should not just be for children over three years of age. Early childhood professionals know the importance of the first year and should find ways to introduce these children to as many new faces, new sounds and new smells as possible. Excursions for children under two could consist of simple trips to the local shopping strip to meet the shopkeepers and grab at the flowers in gardens along the way. The challenges facing the sector regarding quality, staffing and resources need to be addressed. They are important, but they also detract from the fact we are supposed to be supporting the development of children. If we keep children within one or two rooms and an outside play area for the whole year, we do our children a great disservice. There is a world out there to explore, and our children deserve the chance to explore it. Indeed, children’s services should be leading the expedition. Centres should work harder to support relationships between children of different ages. A centre I once visited took their kinder-aged children down to watch babies being fed and changed. Children would also benefit from more combined outside play, so younger children could watch and learn from older children. If we stick to textbook developmental theory and keep doing things the same way, how will we improve? The model of children’s hubs within communities is a good one. But it’s not enough to simply put a maternal and child health centre next to a kindergarten and childcare centre, offer some parenting programs and think the job is done. These centres need their own management: people who will explore ways of

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breaking down some regulations and providing opportunities for the community to meet the children supported by the hub. This is the reasoning behind the call for Children’s Resource Zones, where the responsibility of the community is recognised within a service system structure. This is essential if we’re to form new structures and new ideas about who is responsible for the development of our children, and what is in their best interests. So, is childcare good or bad? There isn’t a definitive answer. As our society evolves, so too should the systems we have established to support us: and early childhood development is no exception. Much depends on which research you choose to read, and how much it has been weighted for a desired result. My personal preference involves a community-owned, professionally run model where teachers and workers are tertiaryqualified early childhood professionals who would earn at least $60 000 a year. They could support children in custom-designed centres, or parents could pool their government subsidies to have them supported in their own homes: not just one family but also a few children from different families. It would welcome children from one year old to primary school age. It could provide the community with a platform to engage, support each other and work out how best to use their government child development funding. The barriers would be broken down between service operators, parents and the community. The responsibility for the development of children would be shared across all three groups. The problems with our models of childcare are systemic. If we move towards meeting children’s development with more respect for their needs than our own, we may develop a very different system from the one we have today. It would be more amenable to our working lives, and provide us with more time. We may have less money, but we may also find that housing prices plateau and society takes a breather from our current obsession with rampant growth. Economic growth is important. But the growth and development of our children is vital.

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Chapter 5 The community as classroom: Educating children to learn To educate, in its original sense, is to ‘lead out’, but although this may have some advantage over the more widespread interpretation, to ‘hammer in’, neither way is consistent with the child’s evolved expectations.1 Jean Liedloff, author, The Continuum Concept

Starting school One mid-year weekend Jess Saunders took her eldest boy Cohen down to one of the local primary schools. Cohen was in his final year of preschool and Jess wanted to introduce him to the fact that the next year he would be a ‘big school boy’. They played on the equipment and wandered the grounds, peeking in windows and getting a feel for the place. Towards the end of trip Jess explained that this might be Cohen’s school but that she and his dad would have to talk to the principal and meet the teachers of this school and other schools before they decided where he would go. Cohen thought about this and then asked his mum: ‘Why do you and dad get to choose? If I’m the one going to school, why don’t I get to choose?’ I think Cohen has a point. We all expect our children to learn, to attend school, go on to university or TAFE  but how

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involved are they in making decisions about their own education? How can we teach them to think for themselves, make decisions and understand their importance if we don’t give them a role in the discussions about their education?

Education or learning? Education is different from learning. Children are programmed to learn and develop: that is the work of childhood and youth. Education institutionalises that work. We spend many hours thinking about our children’s education, but little time actually thinking about our children’s learning. When I refer to education I am talking about the formal processes of learning, and the systems we’ve developed to facilitate what we think children need to learn to operate in our society. However, learning is a more intuitive process. We all participate in learning, formally and informally, in our day-to-day lives. Learning supports the ongoing development from infancy to adulthood; it is crucial. This is why education is the focus of so much contentious debate. The debates frequently operate within the narrow framework of the current education system. Instead of addressing broader systemic issues like how schools are structured and whether they fit the needs of modern students, we continue to argue over the type of history taught or which teaching style is best. Many education experts frequently debate how children should be taught to read, but spend little time asking children what they’d like to learn to read, or what stories interest them most and what those stories will teach them. Our education systems belong to adults. And our education system is shaped by the adult world: a world that is competitive, economically focused and achievement-driven. One parent gravely told me, ‘Education is a race where the highest mark wins.’ But what impact does that philosophy have on learning? What does

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that tell children about their role in the learning process? Instead of celebrating and experiencing the learning process, it prepares them for a world of winners and losers. And they know that if they don’t excel academically or athletically, they will likely exist in the latter category. We regularly fail to acknowledge that children’s learning is not limited to a classroom. In fact, academic or not, all children learn many things outside the education system. The danger in limiting the learning process to the classroom is that much of children’s learning actually takes place outside the education system. And when too much emphasis is placed on success within the education system, children’s enthusiasm and confidence for learning in all facets of life can be dampened or destroyed.

Winners and losers Of course, the solution isn’t to try to obliterate competition. This is just another aspect of life children must learn. They do need to know how to participate and accept that they will not always be the best in everything. Our idolisation of children as perfect and successful can place too much pressure on them to succeed, or create unrealistic expectations in adulthood where the world doesn’t hand out gold stars quite as freely. We don’t have a broad and diverse education system where all subjects have equal value, where children are encouraged to explore and uncover what they enjoy learning and where their natural skill sets lie. Instead, we reinforce the value of ‘hard’ sciences over ‘soft’ humanities. Maths has more value than drama and a low physics score can obtain a better result than a high home economics score. These science subjects are weighted to determine the places in the final race: Year 12 results that inform university course offers. Of course, among students’ peer groups they know there is a difference between the subjects chosen by ‘smart’ and ‘dumb’ kids. The blows to the ego start here. To date, our approach to this out-of-balance equation is to head in the opposite direction and create a classroom where everyone

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gets a gold star for effort. Don Edgar refers to this approach as ‘self-esteem … elevated to the level of dogma’2 . Just as with childcare, we think we are doing the right thing by children. It isn’t necessarily so. We have based our systems on ideas of childhood and youth that don’t fit the speed and complexity of our modern world. Rather than striving for perfection or success in children, we should be fostering flexibility and adaptability. We should give them the skills to keep learning throughout life. Instead, we jump between images of childhood that can only confuse developing minds. Our education system is based on expectations of children and young people. Each year, a new set of goals and required knowledge is placed before students. For those who have not been supported to meet these goals in previous years, it is even more challenging. We are left with students who progress with their peers but whose learning is stunted because they haven’t had the chance to learn everything required to progress to the next level of learning. How can you do algebra if you haven’t yet fully grasped multiplication? So rather than having their learning and development supported within the class, those students are singled out and grouped together, creating an understanding among them that they are different, or in the language of the playground, ‘dumb’. If we are really committed to helping young people thrive, we can approach learning very differently. We could positively reshape the systems governing education in ways that give children greater responsibility. Learning is so much more than what we do in the classroom. It is not just the teacher’s responsibility to teach  that too belongs to the community.

A community classroom In Castlemaine in central Victoria, a local government primary school, driven by a group of enthusiastic parents, has quietly gone about the process of introducing a new approach to education.

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They attempt to make learning more holistic, and introduce children not just to science, the humanities and arts, but also to humanity. Winter’s Flat Community Class is as focused on learning in and about your community as it is about the formal curriculum. In the Community Class, students learn to engage with issues with a range of different adults. These adults may be parents or local business people or a recognised local figure. They dedicate their time to coming in to the class and teaching the children for a period of time. They may talk about an area of work they do or it might be a practical demonstration like showing children how to plant vegetables. The class is within the state school system and children must learn the set curriculum, but their learning environment is less structured, and there is a greater focus on giving children the skills of learning, rather than sets of specific knowledge. The class has a vertical structure, which means it encompasses children aged from seven to 12 years. Instead of creating problems, this structure mirrors the experiences children have with other children in their communities. Older children develop skills like mentoring and supporting younger students, which gives older students more responsibility and the teacher a range of supports within her student body. To some degree, children direct their own learning and make suggestions about what the class could explore. The process of learning is more interactive and children are participants in their own learning. They gain responsibility and empowerment. Instead of needing gold stars, they build their self-esteem through involvement rather than perceived success. They are continually building competency and capacity as they learn to gain control and an understanding of their environment. The Community Class is a dynamic model of learning that demonstrates how flexible the education system can be beyond simple changes in curriculum. Even within the bureaucracy of the state school system, models can be developed to place greater

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emphasis on learning in different ways: ways that bring the community into the school and allow a broader range of people, besides just children, to take responsibility for their learning.

Holistic education The Community Classroom is a step towards a more holistic model of learning. It involves developing systems beyond the rigid model of education, supporting children to understand and experience a range of learning techniques from many different people in their community. Most importantly, children are given more control of their learning process. In helping to shape the experience of learning with their teachers, and sharing learning with parents and other community members, children are taking their learning beyond the school gate. The example of the Community Class demonstrates learning as an informal as well as formal process. This kind of learning fosters the development of the whole person, rather than just preparing them for the world of work. Preparation for work is still important, but many life skills, which are vital to our health and wellbeing, are neglected in conventional education systems. And in a time when health services focus on the value of human connectedness, when depression and isolation are common and we are realising the vital nature of human networks, how do we make our children’s learning more holistic? How do we counteract emerging issues faced by our young people by rethinking the way we support their development? In our culture, survival and success are frequently equated to having a ‘good job’. The definition of a ‘good job’ usually entails a high salary, or the potential of a high salary. However, as is evident in debates over worklife balance, we are realising the need for balance to achieve quality of life. Yet young people are still subject to a demanding and ultra-competitive education system that continues to perpetuate the myth of the ‘good job’. Why

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are the top-ranking university courses always medicine and law? Why did we recently witness a surge of interest in information technology courses? And why are entrance scores steadily rising for commerce and economics degrees? These trends indicate education and social systems that prime young people to work for the dollar, not for the love of their job. It also indicates a lack of holistic learning in our education systems. Holistic learning is more focused on learning a range of skills to prepare us for life  not just a working life. And this learning doesn’t all take place at school.

Family as teacher Real holistic learning takes place in the home, where parents, older children and extended family teach a diversity of subjects from morals to basic domestic skills. Holistic learning also takes place when children and young people are allowed to be alone, contemplating questions in a relaxed state and learning how to deal with boredom. Holistic learning is about making mistakes  several times if needed  and being supported to learn from them. Mother and community worker Sally Kendall believes the lack of holistic learning contributes to an image of the ‘omnipotent child’. It is an image we have not yet considered here, but it’s an image of childhood and youth she refers to as being with ‘no responsibility, no respect and no boundaries’3 . This childhood has evolved out of our desire to not do anything that might upset our children. We cover up their mistakes, cushion their falls and don’t let them work their way through the developmental process. As they grow we pick them up from parties at 2 am and choose to ignore their lack of respect for their family and the community as we continue trying to meet their every desire. Sally believes one aspect of holistic learning is allowing children and young people to experience the consequences and reality of their own actions, without being punitive but responding

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with love and compassion. When this is done in a respectful way, children are not shielded from consequences of their own actions and we help them to define their own responsibilities. She gives an example of when her teenage daughter forgot to take her school jumper on a particularly cold day. Sally didn’t jump in the car and drive it to her at school. She let her daughter experience the consequences of being cold, and let her learn that forgetting your jumper is not a good idea. Her daughter learned that being prepared for school is her own responsibility. Editor and mum, Kali Wendorf, agrees. She told me a very similar story. Her son forgot his school lunch one day, but she didn’t take it to him. She felt quite confident that, living in a very affluent society, missing lunch one day wouldn’t kill him. She hoped he would learn to communicate with others, to ask for some food from friends. Or if not, gain a small insight into what it must be like to have no food to eat for days. In this way, Kali did not protect her son from the consequences of not having fulfilled his responsibility to take his lunch to school, and he learned what those consequences were. We may experience a degree of discomfort in reading these anecdotes, because these concepts run contrary to many modern parenting ideas, and our images of children. They scare us because we are unaware of our children’s ability to cope with discomfort and stress. But how else will they learn these things, and where else will they get the capacity to learn them? Kali and Sally are both demonstrating the passive side of their role of parent as teacher. In not responding to one small and in many ways trivial need, they have supported their children to learn a lesson: one that delivers an understanding they will not find in a textbook. Parents are possibly the most important teachers children have; yet, too often, we defer this role to schools. Social researcher Hugh Mackay points out that schools are very focused on discipline. He believes parents abdicate their responsibility in the area of values and moral development to schools. Writing in The Age, he said: ‘The discipline and moral

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instruction of children makes for relentless, time-consuming work, tougher than most of the other responsibilities of parents. It’s easy to see why parents who can afford to pay to send their children to a private school might be hoping the school will relieve them of this burden.’4 We rely on our education systems to fill the gaps left by our confusion over childparent relationships. We have confused the call to abandon corporal punishment and establish more communicative relationships with our children as a directive to be less like a parent, and more like a friend. But that call wasn’t aimed at ending the role of parents to raise, nurture and guide children. It was aimed at using different methods that reflect the value and respect we should show for all people. Instead of meeting the challenge to develop new models of parenting, we have simply adopted the model of friendship, and deferred elsewhere our responsibilities for the trickier, more time-consuming aspects of parenting. While we agonise over which school to send our children to, it is one of the more minor contributions we make to our child’s education. Given our current education systems, it is more important to foster holistic learning both in and out of school hours, and to support and encourage our children to learn through their lived experience. For this reason, children need time outside the formal education system to undertake learning in a whole range of life experiences. And this is one of the problems with homework.

The problem with homework Our secondary schools are piling on the homework, ostensibly in preparation for the discipline of university and the rigours of work. Yet, as adults, we try to structure our workdays to avoid bringing work home, and many university students actively balance their semester fairly between cramming for exams, parttime work and time at the pub.

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Junior secondary school students do homework to prepare them for later secondary years, and primary school students must do a certain amount of homework each night to prepare them for secondary school. It won’t be long before preschoolers front up to their parents at dinnertime, saying, ‘Can you help me? I was supposed to make a necklace out of coloured pasta for homework. It has to be done for tomorrow.’ By the final years of secondary education, young people come home with three or four hours of homework a night, and a weekend’s worth of work. They are driven to complete it by the hope of success, and the threat of failure. Their lives mirror corporate CEOs and ladder-climbers who work at the office until late, and take work home with them. It is a lifestyle that many workers lament, and most deliberately avoid. Yet we seem to have little concern about the impact of this heavy workload on our young people. The case for homework is so strongly presented that children can escape any other activity because of the pressing need to do homework. Visits to extended family on the weekend, cleaning their room, playing with their siblings, even eating with the family at the dinner table is not as important in a young person’s life as the looming presence of homework. Because of the crucial nature of my final year of high school, my parents had to leave me at home for a week of my second-term holidays, while they went on a family holiday. How can we support the development of compassionate and capable adults if we need to exclude children from the breadth of human experiences for the sake of homework? And yet, despite the prevalence of homework, some children do not participate in it. In an Internet survey of 1178 primary school children, adolescent psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg found that 22 per cent of the children said their parents did their homework for them.5 More interesting still, the choice of homework isn’t even the choice of educators, according to CarrGregg, but that of parents. He says of homework, ‘[a]ll it has done is hijacked home life. It’s not the educationalists who are against

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the idea of reducing homework … you’ve got a clear group of parents who, I think, view homework as a babysitter.’ Much homework, in its current form, is the antithesis of holistic learning because it brings the constraints and limitations of the education system into children’s homes. Instead of asking parents to teach their children something they themselves know and are inspired by, we ask parents to fumble over calculus questions that they haven’t done for the past 20 years, or were never taught. If we respect children and support a holistic learning experience, we must realise that they need time to ‘learn’ to be part of a family and a community. They must learn their responsibilities in helping to maintain a household and participate in community life. Homework in turn limits parents’ own growth by putting a limitation on their role in guiding their children’s development. Homework actually impacts on the amount of time children and adults spend together. It means we all lose the skills of developing and maintaining our relationships. This is never more crucial than during the teenage years as children are moving rapidly through developmental stages and into adulthood. Yet, this is the time that the amount of homework increases the most. We can’t lament the lack of time fathers spend with their children if we are sending both dads and children home with extra work to do. While we all believe our family relationships are a very important part of our lives, the education system actively works to ensure young people spend more time at their desk or in front of the computer than learning to interact with their family and community. Real ‘homework’ should involve the work of the household. It should be participating in discussion and debate at the family dinner table. It involves helping to prepare a meal or visiting a neighbour who needs a hand with a couple of things. Schooldirected homework, especially in later secondary years, is the perfect excuse for young people to not learn other vital lessons of life. Holed up in their bedrooms or studies, young people are cut off from the stimulus of family interactions, discussions and

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opportunities to draw from a wider spectrum of subject matter. Of course, advocates for more traditional educational approaches, such as consultant Dr Kevin Donnelly, support the concept of homework, alongside rote learning, regular tests and failing students. His ideas are aligned with those of educational competition and academic achievement within the narrow spectrum of our current curriculum. In commenting on the Third International Maths and Science Study, he said, ‘The amount of homework, as recorded by students, that students did each day, was positively related to achievement.’6 This argument suggests that the more homework students do the better results they get. But Donnelly doesn’t ask what suffers as a consequence. Those supporting Donnelly’s opinion may regard housework and participating in family life as something children should be doing anyway. However, they fail to consider when, if ever, children get time to do it. The emergence of adultescents and young adults unable to undertake basic life skills such as washing clothes, managing a household budget or cooking dinner, are a result of children who never learnt how to do it simply because it wasn’t expected of them. Participating in family and community life shouldn’t be regarded as homework: it isn’t. It’s far more important. And it’s up to adults to make sure children have a choice about what they learn, and how.

Choice in education Public education advocate, Jane Caro, believes that the current public policy in education is being driven by an increase in ‘parental choice’. She says it is parents who choose primary schools and high schools for their children. It is the parents to whom the syllabus must appeal. Private schools promote various concepts to parents, such as safety, conformity and order, that appeal to their images of childhood. They focus on providing things that parents don’t feel capable of providing for their children.

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Caro’s ideas resonate strongly with the underlying concepts of idolising childhood. When we talk about choice in education, we’re referring to parental choice: the choice of school, the choice between public and private, the choices that more affluent parents have over low-income parents. However, while choice lies at the core of discussions about education, it seems that few are advocating for children to have more say in the matter. Debate mostly revolves around what parents and adults want for their children, not what the children may want for themselves. Former vice-chancellor, Don Aitken, has written extensively on why and how we must rethink our education system. He refers to Howard Gardner, an educational policy expert, and his philosophy that all children are born with a range of intelligences. Gardner has identified eight distinct intelligences: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Linguistic (‘word smart’) Logical–mathematical (‘number/reasoning smart’) Spatial (‘picture smart’) Bodily–kinesthetic (‘body smart’) Musical (‘music smart’) Interpersonal (‘people smart’) Intrapersonal (‘self smart’) Naturalist (‘nature smart’)

Gardner believes we succeed in various intelligences due to a range of influencing factors, like community support, opportunity and interest. By focusing specifically on mental ability and using IQ tests as a measuring tool, we may be failing to create environments that cater to the wide range of abilities our children need to develop on their journey to adulthood. In our growingly competitive world focused on success and productivity we push ourselves and our children to work harder, to achieve more within a very narrow and limited aspect of the human experience. We don’t stop to consider what we and our children may be missing out on. We don’t consider that there may be valuable lessons in boredom,

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reflection and failure or that we will all have levels of unfulfilled potential. Aitken says, ‘… our potential can never be completely fulfilled: we simply don’t live long enough.’7 This contribution is important to our understanding of our children’s education: we can’t achieve excellence in every area because there simply isn’t enough time. Aitken believes we have to focus on specific areas at different times. Because we are limited in what we can do, our educational choices should be governed by what we love to do. And the only person who knows what they really love doing is the student: not their teachers, parents or anyone else. Aitken agrees with this, although he qualifies it by asserting that we also need a suite of basic skills that allow us to be competent adults: ‘[W]e only have one life and need to build it around what we enjoy doing most, and second we need to have at least minimal competence in them all, so that some of the others at least will have to be strengthened.’8 So young people can have a range of choices around their education, but we still need to support children to achieve basic competence in a broad range of areas. This concurs with the need for holistic education, where education in the home and community is as valuable and worthwhile as the school setting. Gardner and his enthusiasts could argue that focusing on providing opportunities to develop our multiple intelligences is a way that the education system can support greater choice and meet a breadth of developmental needs. And this may begin to address one aspect of our idolising of childhood and youth: it could help us to see children and young people as having the same emotions and reactions as adults. Just because they are intellectually undeveloped, children still have emotional and spiritual intelligence that feels and believes and needs to be supported and developed as well. Real choice for children would involve schools appealing to them rather than to their parents. It would allow older primary school children to be involved in the decision of what secondary school they might attend. Developing real responsibility in

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children and young people at schools could incorporate school councils, and include prefects and school captains in the governance structures of the school. Instead of limiting these roles to mentoring and support, student leaders could be actively involved in the decision-making at school. This is especially true in secondary school where, as children head towards their final year, they should be being given far greater levels of responsibility to match the social responsibilities they will be expected to take when they reach eighteen. An education system that respected children would give them greater choice over their subjects, or it may acknowledge in some instances that there is too much choice already. Giving children greater choice doesn’t mean more subjects. It means empowering them and allowing them to make informed decisions about their own learning. Schools with regard for their students would support them to undertake more direction in their own learning. This process would be easier to instigate at a learning level if students were seen as participating in school decisions at an administrative level. Choosing their subjects is only part of the picture. Taking part in discussions about subjects or even being involved in consultation about curriculum at a government level are not beyond the realm of possibility. This does, however, mean moving beyond the simple idea of ‘youth advisory’ groups and instead incorporating children and young people into school governance models, as happened in the London Children’s Rights Commissioner model. While not a school, the Children’s Rights Commissioner was answerable to a committee of management all under 18 years of age. They were supported to effectively undertake the roles and responsibilities required in the administration of an effective organisation. When I propose that children and young people be involved in decision-making processes such as these, I’m not suggesting they be allowed to dictate terms. While the final decision may rest sometimes with adults, as in decision-making of any kind, those leading the process usually consult those whom their

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decisions will affect. Yet, we rarely consult or involve children in our discussions about education and learning. And they are the recipients of it, and subject to those decisions for a large portion of their early lives. How much more respect would we show our children if we supported them to be actively involved in their own education? If they were involved at a much higher level, it would be far easier to have them as active learners further down the chain because hierarchies tend to have a way of setting precedents.

A word on gifted children Without going too deeply into the divisive debates on gifted children, I’d like to explore one aspect of how, in our attempts to help gifted children to meet their potential, we approach and treat them. I don’t believe that gifted children should be taught in separate classes or schools, or that they should be treated like any other student. My interest is in the emphasis placed on a child’s intellectual development if they demonstrate advanced intellectual competence at an early age. Our culture’s current preoccupation with ‘giftedness’ is certainly part of the product of our focus on competition and academic success and the ongoing obsession with the perfect child. Meeting the specific needs of children who show high levels of academic intelligence may be an important role for the education system  supporting these children to meet their potential may provide untold benefits to society. These children are certainly likely to develop solutions to the many challenges we face as a society. However, by focusing purely on the academic aspect of these children’s lives, we may also do them  and all of society  a disservice because we have not incorporated them into a model promoting holistic learning. Indeed, many parents of gifted children talk about the

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difficulties they face in making relationships at school. ‘From the time he started school, he was being bashed up. He would cry going to school, he would cry in school and he would cry coming home,’ reports Rhonda Collins, mother of a gifted child. 9 While a high IQ means topping the class, a whole range of additional differences can also occur. The policy of separating children because of their differences is, however, not necessarily the best solution. Through its celebration of diversity and promotion of respect for fellow human beings, a focus on holistic learning for all children may help to deal with problems like peer pressure and bullying. It will help them grow into human beings who learn how to communicate and interact with their whole community and not just a select few with whom they spend most of their developmental years. Great leaders and thinkers do not necessarily have high IQs as measured by Stanford-Binet tests. And intelligence can only be enhanced with a much broader scope of learning, and an understanding of the world taught in other ways. Smart children are not automatically able to grasp emotional or spiritual concepts any quicker than others and, it could be argued, we need to focus even more specifically on these areas for children identified as gifted to give them a greater balance to their intellectual lives. Children who stand outside our typical expectations and generalisations deserve a range of educational and learning solutions. But whatever they are, those solutions should ensure that children are active participants in their development.

Rethinking the system In the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector, the ideas that challenge the notion of a learner as a passive recipient are most obvious. In the VET system it is acknowledged people learn at the workplace and at home, and there are systems put in place to acknowledge and formally recognise this informal learning.

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This idea could be better integrated into our primary and high school curriculum in a way that may actually change the entire nature of the system. What are these ideas? Idea 1: Lifelong learning

While human beings take in immense amounts of information while our brain develops, we also continue to learn throughout our whole lives. The education system does not spend enough time teaching children and young people how to learn. Through the work they undertake, they are introduced to specific strategies and techniques, but all this work is still heavily focused on the outcome rather than the process itself. How a student undertakes the task is given less significance than their final result. If our children are to become active participants in their life of learning, they need to be given the skills that allow them to gather knowledge. How we learn and what skills give us the best ability to learn are issues worthy of more exploration. And the answers are not simple. How do we teach someone to ask the right question, and get the answer they are after? How do we give someone the capacity to deal with change and incorporate new ideas more effectively? Of course, aspects of this are the foundation of curriculum. You need to be able to read, write and communicate in order to participate in further learning. But we need more than that. To learn, we need to be able to adapt, investigate and find the time to think about things. Finding the time, in our time-poor culture, may be one of the greatest challenges of all. If learning is a lifelong experience, why do we try to pack so much into the first 25 years? If we explore this question, we can challenge fundamental assumptions about education. What if, at 16, young people undertook a series of vocational learning projects for two years? How would it benefit them to be placed in the community and workplaces to be taught different practical skills, to be mentored and supported in other ways on their journey to

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adulthood? How would it affect their selection of career if, at 18, they could return for three years of a basic generalist tertiary degree, and after that, decide what further study they wished to pursue? Ideas like this need to be considered in a lifelong learning context that supports the active engagement of students. They challenge the whole structure of how we operate our education systems, but could also offer a better model for holistic learning. Mentoring is a powerful educational tool because it is based on relationships. It is something that writer and educator John Marsden believes is the most important aspect in the education of children. In a 2006 interview about the establishment of his own school, Candlebark, he said, ‘It’s not curriculum that matters, it’s the nature of the teacher, the atmosphere, tone, style and climate of what is being done.’10 Marsden has given several interviews about the importance of studentteacher relationships, about the mutual respect required, but also the need for teachers to motivate and mentor students. ‘He wants the kids to become more self-reliant and participatory in school community responsibilities. These will include cleaning the classrooms and chopping firewood, among other things,’11 says one article from Melbourne’s Age newspaper. Marsden wants to prepare children for life, to allow them to undertake the process of childhood that leads them to be competent and valuable adult community members. And Candlebark sounds like a candidate for the type of school where a model of holistic education may evolve. Idea 2: On-the-job learning

Many of us learn best by doing things. We can memorise every one of Stephanie Alexander’s cookbooks, but that doesn’t make us a master chef. We can understand the workings of the internal combustion engine, but it doesn’t necessarily make for a good mechanic. Similarly, we can be adept at solving mathematical equations, but struggle to find practical applications for those

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skills. We can know reams of legislation inside out, but not have the capacity to apply it in a system of law. Australia’s secondary school system has embraced the value of vocational education. Over 95 per cent of Australia’s secondary schools now offer Vocational Education and Training (VET) streams, and in 2003, over 200 000 students undertook programs at school that could lead to nationally recognised vocational certificates.12 This program, in general, appeals to students not regarded within the system as ‘academic’. Similarly, students who excel in maths and the sciences tend not to undertake any vocational education. We should be asking why they don’t. Eventually, all students will find themselves in the workplace, and they should be exposed to an experience of learning in a way that prepares them for the challenges they will face. However, on-the-job learning doesn’t fit well within an education system that requires all students to finish the year by sitting two- or three-hour exams across all subjects. It is a system that Dr Michael Carr-Gregg says is ‘ludicrous’, as it ‘tests young people who are all developing at different times at the same time and assesses them against each other to within two decimal points’.13 According to a study conducted of Year 12 students by psychologist Dr Karen McGraw, the pressure of secondary school’s final years creates significant levels of stress, anxiety and in some instances, the contemplation of suicide.14 The focus on exams, homework and comparative success in relation to students’ peers magnifies what Eltham College Principal, Dr David Warner, calls ‘a community-caused mental health issue’. He points the finger directly at the pressure to produce a ranking system to support entry into university. He says we must ‘break the relationship’ between final results and university entrance.15 Is this possible? One potential solution would involve examining ways that all students can participate in the workforce while continuing to participate in education. To break the cycle, the final years of secondary school could combine with on-the-job learning,

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contributing to a more rounded education and a base for work or further education at a tertiary level. This would require a reduction in exam-based assessment in conjunction with a reduced amount of traditional study time and an increase in on-the-job assessment of what students can do; how well they practically apply their classroom based learning. This need not apply only to traditional apprenticeship areas; with the growing skills gaps businesses like accountancy firms, government departments, telecommunications companies and transport providers could provide programs that benefit both their own business and productivity and contribute to students’ learning. Work placement is already a key feature of many TAFE courses and degrees and there is no reason why it could not extend more broadly into other fields of study. In Victoria the platform has already been established through the secondary school certificate – the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL). But it could be expanded. Why can’t all students undertake a form of work-based learning? Currently, this approach is seen as benefiting ‘non academic’ students; however, all students could benefit from spending time learning in the workplace.

Our responsibility to support learning The responsibility for supporting the development of our children and young people belongs to all of us. We can’t continue to hand over responsibility to schools and teachers if we want our children to become competent and capable adults. Children and young people are learning constantly, and that needs constant support by every member of the community. Respecting children and young people means giving them greater involvement in their own learning, and this will always be challenging and time-consuming. The process of supporting a child’s development is the process of continually making

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mistakes, and that is okay. We are all lifelong learners. We can’t expect to get it right all the time. The key is our attitude, our commitment and our preparedness to teach our children through our own actions. Learning is not always fun. Teaching is not always easy. However, whether we want to or not, we are doing it anyway. Perhaps the greatest challenge is for us to begin to see children and young people as our teachers, just as they see us as theirs.

The master teacher and his lesson Jennifer (not her real name) and her daughter attended a parent– student forum for Year 9 students, to discuss their subject choices for the coming three big years. These subjects would determine the future of the student, depending on the final results and the university courses they grant access to. The principal didn’t address the parents. He addressed the students, telling them that the subjects they wanted to take were their choice, not their parents’. He told them that the wisdom of their parents may bear some influence, and in some cases parents will try to choose their subjects, but the principal made his point clearly. It was they, the students, who should choose, and to help guide those choices, he gave them three criteria he had developed during his career as a teacher. The first criterion, he explained, was the most important. The second was somewhat important, but less important than the first. The third criterion was hardly to be considered, unless it came down to a choice between two subjects that both met the first two criteria. Those criteria were, in order: Do I enjoy that subject? Am I good at that subject? And lastly, Will it help me get into the course I think I want to do? For a principal to address his students directly and hand them the choice over their own education was a powerful exercise.

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In acknowledging that parents have influence, he deliberately subverted existing power structures and gave students a line to argue against parental intervention. And the criteria cut to the core of the way adults tend to make decisions. Instead of making decisions based on what they thought would provide for them in the future, the principal told the students that the best chance they had at success was to do what they love doing. In our lives, we all want to enjoy what we do, and be good at what we do. This was his lesson. It is one we all know, but too frequently forget. That day, even though the students were not in a formal educational transaction, the principal, as a master teacher and mentor, gave his students a fine lesson.

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Chapter 6 Media and children: Improving a poor relationship

If you read a lot of books you are considered well read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you’re not considered well viewed. Lily Tomlin, American actress

Knowing what’s behind the news In 2003, when the ABC cut its flagship children’s current affairs program, ‘Behind the News’, an important link between children and the news was threatened. ‘Behind the News’ is more than just a weekly news program for older primary school and secondary school children: it is a crucial tool in teaching children how to read and understand TV news and the media, and therefore what is going on in the world around them. As a child, I remember cold Tuesday mornings when one of our school’s few television sets would be rolled out onto the lino. Over 100 children would sit cross-legged and get 30 minutes of TV at school. TV at school! During the 1980s in my primary school, that felt quite decadent. Little did we realise how much we were learning, and how important that learning would be in our future media-saturated world. When ‘Behind the News’ was taken off the air, no remaining

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program reporting the current news events talked specifically to young people. However, daily news and current affairs programs aimed at an adult audience now start broadcasting at 4.30 pm, right in children’s prime-time viewing timeslot. Why any network is so keen to be ‘first with the news’ when increasing numbers of adults are likely to be still at work and unlikely to be watching TV before 6 pm is beyond me. If for no other reason, those programming decisions make it vital that TV programs teach young children how to read the news, and how to make sense of current affairs. This is why, in 2005, the relaunch of ‘Behind the News’ deserved more fanfare than it received. Perhaps it is an indication of how disinterested the newsmakers really are making news that is respectful of the needs of children and young people. Or, perhaps it is confirmation of the long held conspiracy of ‘bread and circuses’, that education and media institutions just want us to know enough to be entertained and well-fed but not give the general population the capacity to think, understand and engage. While institutionalised education was necessitated partly by the growing complexity of the world during the 1800s, the teaching ethic was one of ‘just enough’. This meant children were taught to be good workers but not great scholars. They were taught to do but not think. It was rote learning, discipline and basic skills like literacy, sewing and woodwork. Similarly, the news media in particular sees its role as the pure presentation of ‘factual’ information. And yet, its makers know that to its audience, absorbing that information is one thing; but critical interpretation and integration of that information requires a very specific skill set. In the previous chapter we explored the idea that new education theories and methods of holistic learning must respect the needs of individual children. Children do not just need to be taught facts and figures. They require respect for their capacity as freelance learners with the ability to work out what they want to know, and

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learn it. In that regard, we need comprehensive education that fully prepares a child for the speed and complexity of our world. This means children need to be equipped with the skills to critically interpret and integrate our news and general media. We do this relatively well at secondary school. Students undertake media studies, and our English classes now engage with a range of media as texts. While we teach older students how to ‘read’ film, newspapers and television, we shouldn’t be leaving it this late. Our inability to encourage young children to think about and engage with their media sources demonstrates our idolisation of them. Many of us use media as substitute babysitters, and yet we are aware that young children do not have the innate ability to tell apart TV program from advertisement. We don’t even pause to think that children can be educated to understand the difference between them. Or worse still, we don’t bother to find out if they already do. If we respect children, we will not simply ask them to engage with the media without teaching them to question and interpret it. In a respectful relationship with children we would support them through new experiences. And the ongoing development of children means they need support to grow in their understanding of world events, politics, and the range of issues set to confront them as they become adults. A recent study, Screenieboppers and extreme screenies: The place of screen time in the time budgets of 1013-year-old Australians, had children monitor their time spent in front of screens using a diary. It identified that the median ‘screen time’ for participants was 229 minutes per day 264 minutes for males, 196 minutes for females) – of this 73 per cent was television viewing and 19 per cent playing video games.1 Other researchers have noted that children’s viewing time is not monitored effectively, and advocates for less violence on television and tighter regulations claim young children can see thousands of depictions of violence before they reach school. Children watch a lot of television. The nightly news

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begins in children’s prime viewing time of 4.30 pm including news promos). Even if we try to implement programs to reduce children’s screen time, at an average of nearly four hours a day, we are not going to change the fact that watching television is a significant part of childhood. The lack of media engagement at a primary-school level urgently needs to be addressed. While most states do have some form of reference regarding the reading of media as text within its curriculum, it is not deemed as important as the basic English, maths and science focus of the curriculum. The report Benchmarking Australian Primary School Curricula, commissioned by the Department of Education and Training, was undertaken in 2005 by Kevin Donnelly. It compared each state’s curriculum to a benchmark system. Donnelly chose to use the Californian curriculum as his benchmark. This curriculum makes no reference to reading media as text, purely focusing on capacity to write and pronounce effectively. As an example, the Western Australian curriculum statement, ‘Students read a wide range of texts with purpose, understanding and critical awareness’, is a positive one in terms of supporting children’s engagement with media. However, this curriculum scored the lowest possible mark when compared to the benchmark. If we respect children we won’t leave them languishing in today’s evolving world. We will see that there is room to learn their ABCs and understand how to read a range of multimedia texts. In fact, starting to discuss with children the way they interact with their media when they start school may be starting too late. If our children are to be raised with a capacity to do things themselves rather than simply watching others do them on TV, we need to teach them how to engage with their media. And if an 18 month old is watching the Wiggles or Teletubbies, maybe we start there  the marketers already do. Consider the impact that Working Dog Productions’ TV show ‘Frontline’ had on many Australian viewers’ understanding of how their news was made. The program took us into the belly

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of the current affairs beast showing us manipulative producers, market-driven journalists and a good looking but not very smart host. It allowed us to reflect on the media in a new way. Through its rather stark satire it took us into the lives of the ‘talking heads’ and gave many Australians a new way of understanding and reading current affairs television. Many would argue that since ‘Frontline’, current affairs on commercial television networks has lost much of its punch. ‘Frontline’ should be a core text on every high school media studies viewing list. Media is an integral part of our lives. Print, TV or increasingly, online, children are exposed to a plethora of stories, images and ideas through short sound bytes and 200-word news reports. Yet, this media is designed for the adult world. With media headlines splashed across billboards and newspaper screamers, and broadcast during prime-time family viewing hours, our children become media consumers from a very young age. But who is teaching them how to consume it? Certainly, we worry about it no end. We ask one another what our children watch and when. We are troubled about how to explain tragic and sensational world events such as America’s September 11 attacks. We wonder how we will help our children feel positive about the world they are inheriting when the news that is reported is always bad. Our academics research our children’s reactions to media. TV violence is bad for them, we are told. Then soon after, we’re told that it has no effect. But then we are told that our children watch the thousands of acts of violence, cruelty and abuse displayed on TV every day, and we worry about that, too. However, we are not told what to say to our children. Like us, children can be capable consumers of media, and they can form and develop more sophisticated understandings of it over time. Indeed, young people tend to have a greater grasp of new and emerging media technologies than the adult world does. They are the leaders in manipulating new technology to meet their own needs. Young people are promoted as media savvy and less convinced by the messages of the media.

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So why does nobody report news to children? What role does the media play in explaining world events to kids? Right now the position is pretty much vacant, and desperately needs to be filled.

Treating children badly: The media’s dark side Children and young people get a bad rap from the mainstream press and television news. Simplistic images of childhood and youth are replayed over and over from reports on young graffiti gangs to strategically hyped current affairs segments on children who ‘roam the streets’ or won’t go to bed. Lecturer in media and communications, Jason Sternberg, takes issue with this demonising of youth and was prompted to write about it after current affairs broadcaster ‘Today Tonight’ undertook an experiment of placing ten children aged 1015 years in a house to live without parents for a week. The children were not informed they were being filmed by hidden cameras and in a ‘Big Brother’esque form of ‘news-tainment’ only the most shocking footage was shown each night for a week. The show argued it was teaching the children lessons about responsibility. Yet, the most irresponsible player in this media event were the producers of the program. As Sternberg writes, ‘Like an abusive parent “Today Tonight” placed the young people in a situation where they were doomed to failure and then punished them for failing.’2 There was little coverage of the psychologist who supervised the experiment and described the children as ‘amazingly competent’. This demonstrates that despite being of an age when they need boundaries, support and guidance in their development, in the view of a professional these young people still demonstrated high levels of competence in supporting themselves. But instead of jumping at the chance to report this image of childhood, the producers went for the negative stereotyping. Our media takes scant responsibility for the ongoing impact

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it has on the way children are regarded and treated in our culture. Yet simultaneously, it plays on images of children as vulnerable and innocent. In general, the media comes down hard on those responsible for the abuse and neglect of children, reinforcing the vulnerability and innocence of children while squarely targeting parents and the insidious adult world for destroying childhood through their terrible indiscretions. Our media organisations are as susceptible to the paradox of our images of children as we are. In fact, the media reinforces poor images of childhood and youth while championing themselves as children’s great protectors. It is a strange contradiction. Current affairs shows are masters of the paradox. They run stories on the impact of child abuse on the lives of children, while running stories on children on BMXs, roaming the streets and terrorising the neighbourhood. They run stories on infants in need of life-saving surgery, while targeting wayward secondary school students who act appallingly on public transport. Sternberg says, ‘[t]he media constantly flounder with the often bizarre contradictory and constantly changing world of youth.’ He believes that these representations of youth have an impact at a much higher level. ‘That some of Australia’s most influential media regularly portray young people as threats to the nation impacts significantly on youth culture, youth policy and law-making.’3 This is a confusing message for a culture in need of a better understanding of childhood. And the media’s role is crucial, because it is most often the messenger in our modern world. We engage strongly with the media. We take our lead from what the media says. Some of us even trust it.

Research in the media The way in which scientific research is presented in the media constantly provides problems for a culture already gripped by the idolisation of childhood. It is starkly captured in a recent article

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from Melbourne’s Age newspaper that began, ‘Excessive crying could be an early warning sign of future mental health problems in some babies, according to a Melbourne researcher’. 4 This is enough to send any parent into a tailspin. All babies cry  and many new parents believe, correctly or incorrectly, that their babies cry excessively. However, when we read on, within the article we are informed that the sample size of the study was only 75 babies, and that one in five of those babies was identified as having ‘a mental health disorder, such as anxiety or depression’ by the time they were five to eight years old. Some would question the capacity to diagnose ‘a mental health disorder, such as anxiety or depression’ in children so young  and linking it to crying is irresponsible. Who knows what other factors influenced these children’s lives? Scientists and paediatricians may understand this as a simple study to solicit further research and funding, but reporting such news in a widely circulated newspaper contributes to the hundreds of reports every year that heighten anxiety in parents. The article reports that the babies’ crying ‘lasted more than three hours a day for more than three days a week’.5 Many parents would read these results and scratch their heads. Three continuous hours? Three hours altogether? Does that include the crying my baby does because all the professionals are encouraging us to practise ‘controlled crying’ to establish a good sleeping pattern? Or does that contribute to it? Increasingly, some research bodies and academics are learning the art of the media release, and finding ways to appeal to the sensational and slightly offbeat leanings that journalists are forced to report in the interest of maintaining their publication’s circulation. This is problematic. It means that the important messages and complex ideas of the researcher are cut to fit the space available, and left wide open for misinterpretation by the reading public. It is easy to see how this contributes to parents’ anxiety, and further reinforces their perception of their children as precious

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and vulnerable. One mother I spoke to about these issues, while our children ran circles around the kitchen table, expressed frustration with the way society judged her mothering. ‘They [friends and acquaintances] see the latest report on the news, or read something in the paper and all of a sudden they feel free to tell me what my child should be eating or whether I should be letting them watch a particular show on television,’ she said. Her comments are an example of how sometimes the message of the importance of the early years is misinterpreted and misrepresented by the broader public. This is how populist television shows like ‘Honey, We’re Killing the Kids’ develop. We must learn to support children and parents. Instead of criticising parents, we should lead by example and take some of the responsibility on ourselves, rather than acting as armchair critics.

Diversity within childhood and youth While society’s concern for children’s vulnerability continues to rise along with increased legislation to protect children from the variety of perceived dangers also enhanced by the media, there is little understanding of the competency and resilience of children. The media constantly asserts the concept that ‘a child is a child is a child’; that childhood is some kind of uniform experience and all children react and respond in the same way. This is incorrect. A child is an individual, like any of us, with a varying range of rights and responsibilities, strengths and weaknesses, experiences and environments. The age, environment and context of children all affect their rights and responsibilities. In generalising childhood and youth, the media doesn’t give enough credence to the development of independence and individuality that each and every human being goes through. Melbourne University academics Johanna Wyn and Rob

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White argue that this is exactly how it is with youth, and that we need to understand youth in a different way: ‘Youth is seen as a separate ‘stage’ of life because the time of youth is about preparation for future (real) life – adulthood.’6 Wyn and White see our notion of youth as static, as being defined by the fact that young people are not adults. And because young people are not adults they are treated differently and usually with less respect than adults. I agree that youth and childhood are more complex in our modern culture, and they need a rethink. We need to change our understanding and images of childhood and youth. The media plays a role in this.

The subjects or creators of news? If the decision were left to them, children wouldn’t stop watching TV, reading the news or surfing the Internet. In fact, they’d continue to do more of this than adults do because it is increasingly a greater part of their world. Technological advancement is exponential: the development of new media technology is only getting faster. The developing brains of children are far better at keeping up with it than adults are, and yet we buy Internet monitoring programs called ‘Net Nanny’ and think that it will protect our children from the billions of pages on the Web. It won’t. We have a greater capacity to support children and young people’s development if we’re aware of their level of understanding of media. So if we know children will watch TV and they want to learn, instead of shielding them from media shouldn’t we take another approach and deliver media tailored specifically to them? The delivery of news and current affairs to Australian children is still a largely untapped market. One reason may be that young people under 18 don’t have a say in the political process because they can’t vote. Maybe we assume they don’t need to know what’s

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going on because they don’t have anywhere practical to apply that knowledge. The lack of voting rights for children is one of the greatest legislated restrictions on our capacity to honour them as human beings. But children do have a right to know what is going on. If one Australian commercial TV channel begins its first news bulletin at 4.30 pm and another at 5 pm, most children are being exposed to it anyway. It may be time to invest energy into thinking how a news program for children could be aired at this time. Of course, children are also a valuable demographic for marketers: their influence over the family budget is widely recognised. Beyond ‘Behind the News’, quite a few media makers are interested in news programming for children and young people: but not in a way that is all that respectful. North America is home to Channel One, a 12-minute news program viewed daily in over 12 000 middle and high schools. It is part of a deal: the school’s students watch the show, and their school receives the TVs and video equipment from the producers of Channel One.7 Those opposed to Channel One argue that this is clearly done to get 12-minute ‘infomercials’ onto the school curriculum. Those even more cynical suggest the children don’t bother to watch them anyway and even if they do, they have little effect as an advertising tool. Whether the shows are infomercials are debatable; they definitely cover significant news stories, from the Iraq War to pressure of teenage ‘cliques’, but their website is well-branded with Nintendo products, has lists of the latest movies and targets young people’s interests  not that dissimilar to the way adult news operates, really. If used effectively in the classroom, these kinds of programs could be excellent forums for learning to deconstruct television news. In Australia, Channel Ten and the Murdoch Press have combined to produce a weekly news program in Australia called ‘TTN’. The show runs for 30 minutes (including advertisements) and on the day the program is aired, a supplement is included in the key News Limited papers in each Australian capital city. Is there a significant problem with this type of activity?

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With our world becoming increasingly privatised, a very good or well-supported teacher may use such a program to discuss with students the relationship between news and advertising, and our feelings and reactions to both. Of course, a not-so-good or undersupported teacher might just turn on the TV, grateful for a 30minute break. Some may see these sorts of programs as subversive and corrupting developing minds. I tend to think this is an overreaction, and another product of the innocent child image that doesn’t give our children enough credit as media consumers. Consider what Felicity, a young student, wrote in the guest-book on the ‘Behind the News’ (‘BTN’) website: [H]ello BTN, I think that your show is better than TTN because TTN has more ads than your show … your show [does] not have any ads. So that is why I like your show better.8

Hang on? Young people don’t like ads either? Rather than being helpless consumers of media, could it be that children also develop their own understanding of how advertising works? Do children have emotive responses to advertising that plays on their insecurities, making them feel uncomfortable and affecting their self-esteem? If so, it also appears they don’t like the way they respond to it. This is a far more realistic image of children and young people than the current image as passive consumers of media and advertising. And if they can develop their own understanding of these influential parts of their lives, how do we support them to improve their capacity to engage with news media? ‘BTN’ have produced an excellent resource that is potentially as useful for adults as it is for its target audience. ‘How the News is Made’ is a 34-minute DVD aimed at children aged 1015 that details the news process. It is a step in the right direction, but its high cost (around $200) does limit its use to the school market rather than opening it up to be used by parents as an educational resource in the home.

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Screen time As a child, one of my favourite places to be after school was on the couch watching TV. A few biscuits, a glass of milk and ‘veggingout’ was a part of my childhood. Similarly, in front of a screen is a common place to find children in Western society: watching TV, playing console games, surfing the Internet and engaging in the wide range of new media technologies the World Wide Web offers. An increased amount of TV time is blamed for many things: childhood obesity, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), increased crime, bullying and child violence. The list is long. Without doubt, children and adults in the West could probably spend much less time watching TV. But to blame it for all the modern woes of childhood is a simple and unsophisticated answer. It’s a get-out clause, so typical of our idolising, where one particular thing is to blame and the more important questions are left untouched. This type of answer means we don’t have to spend the time thinking more deeply about how we engage with children, how we regard them and how we go about teaching them to live in the society we have created. Childhood obesity isn’t due solely to TV viewing. And the issues of children and TV violence are far more complex than many researchers would have us believe. Dr Patricia Edgar, founder of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation, makes a cogent and sophisticated argument: The single question that has occupied researchers in relation to children and the media since the introduction of television is: what is the impact of media, particularly media violence on children? Despite the many millions of dollars spent on research, the findings are spurious. Two large studies in the 1960s, one in the US by Wilbur Schramm and his colleagues, and one by Hilde Himmelweit in Britain, got it right when they reported: for some children, under some conditions, some television is harmful; for other children under the same conditions, or for the same children under other conditions, it may be beneficial; for most children, under most conditions, most television is probably neither particularly harmful nor particularly beneficial.9

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Patricia Edgar argues that we’re asking the wrong questions. I agree. Television is part of our world. So instead of asking how the media affects children, we should be asking how we can shape media for our children, and how we can better assist them to engage with media in a positive and intelligent way. I will deal with the second question a little later. First, let’s consider how we can make TV more palatable for children. It is with trepidation that I repeat myself, but repeat myself I will. Children understand more than we give them credit for. They have a capacity to do and understand many things that we have forgotten that they do. Researchers such as those at the Centre for a New American Dream want us to believe that media, advertisers and marketers pillory our children’s innocence. Authors of Tips for parenting in a commercial culture, a brochure produced by the Centre, write: ‘Our children are a blessing. They remind us that the world is full of wonder and possibility.’ They create an image of childhood innocence and then lament that the media, driving our children towards what they call ‘hyper-consumerism’, is taking that innocence from us. They are right; and they are also wrong. The media wields great power, and we are all susceptible to it. It is where we get much of our information. We use it to feed our sense of identity and understanding of our society. But so do many other things. This doesn’t mean we should burn the TV, or shield our children from the realities of our consumer culture. Instead, we can turn our focus towards respecting that children buy into the world presented by the media, because it is the world that drives us all.

The impact of the media on children Our idolising of childhood innocence has provoked a harsh reaction to our media. Family and child support agencies, church groups and even single-purpose lobby groups continually explore and argue about the damage that unchecked media has on our

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children. But this energy and money seems to be fighting a losing battle. Watch any of the early morning TV music programs on the weekend, and you’ll see more gyrating flesh and poor images of youth culture than you could imagine. And TV news starts promoting itself right in the middle of children’s prime-time viewing hours. Talking heads pop up to announce that soon they’ll tell us about war, murder and horrific car accidents. What is the point of rating movies when war, death and racism are showing on nightly news bulletins? This is the stuff of life, our contemporary world, whether we like it or not it is a reality  and yes it should be reported and we have a right to know about it. However, what is reported on the news is only a small part of what goes on in the world. Television news has evolved its own unique style. It is information. It is also entertainment. This means that what we see on the news, while it is real, is a form of hyper-reality. The television news is sensationalised. We see world events at their most dramatic. News is when the bombs go off, not what has happened before or after. News is the accident, the media conference, the drama. This representation has an impact on children and young people, just as it affects adults. However, television media is not about to disappear or change dramatically, so it isn’t enough to shield children from watching it. But when should we protect our children from the sensationalism of news? How do we support them to understand that what they see on television is only a fragment of what the world is really about, especially in our media-saturated world? We need a different approach, one that empowers adults and children to deal with the stress and violence on a nightly newsreel. Children have the capacity to do it from a very young age. Even childcare and preschool teachers can work with children through role-play to develop their own understandings of these issues. One early childhood teacher told me: In my experience preschoolers want to understand what they see on TV; they ask questions, especially about

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Idolising children high-profile stories such as the death of Steve Irwin. I worked in a Jewish preschool at the time of 9/11 and those children clearly needed to explore this terrible event, for several weeks after it happened. Off their own backs, some children made a TV out of a cardboard box and re-enacted the news item being delivered. It was quite something to witness.10

Certainly, as children enter the primary school years they are more than ready to develop the skills and competence to learn more about television news and media in general. The website of Young Media Australia offers a range of ideas about how to support children and young people as they watch the television news. While their interpretation tends to be framed within the context of the innocent child, their suggestions on the different ways children view television using an ages and stages approach is excellent.11 They promote the need to validate the feelings children may have when they watch the news and witness a tragic personal event or global catastrophe. They encourage us to view children as competent and capable of understanding different aspects of the media, depending on their developmental stage. It is not just the responsibility of schools to teach children about the media’s representations of our world. We need a holistic learning approach that involves all adults who sit in front of a television with children supporting their viewing and training them to read the media, just as we read books to children and teach them to read English. This means we can’t turn to a book that will tell us that eight year olds can watch this type of news. Children develop in different ways and at different times and the best way to support them is to be aware of their individual development. We should also remember that children are not completely vulnerable and if they happen to see a horrific event on television we can talk to them about it and about how their reactions are quite normal and reasonable. Explaining this to children is a respectful way to support their development into adulthood. The media’s impact on children doesn’t always have to be negative, but it won’t always be positive either. Just like a

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continuum of vulnerability where children have varying levels of resilience and vulnerability, the effects of media can be understood as existing on a continuum.

Youth-driven media: Relationship building Despite the lack of interest in media for children by the adult world, children and young people realise its importance as a form of communication. So many of them are going about the process of developing communication using their own skills, forging their own media networks and creating media for themselves. A stand-out example of media creation by young people for young people is the Independent Children’s Media Centre based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Denis Stepura and his peers established it in 2001, when Denis was 15 years old. Denis says, ‘The only way for us to receive serious treatment was through doing our job better than adults would ever dream.’12 The organisation now has a team of around 15 young people who co-ordinate the media activities of children aged 1018 years. The media centre is entirely run by children who take on the roles of journalists, video and comic makers, web designers, animators and radio producers. The Centre has received attention and won awards and recognition from the United Nations and World Bank. According to Denis, this helped to expand the reach of media made for children, by children. A great number of regional and national radio stations have translated our radio shows since then … TV stations have paid us less attention, but we managed to overcome this obstacle. Socially oriented video reels that we have [produced] were broadcasted by Novy Channel, UT 1 and regional TV channels. And as well, our works on HIV/AIDS prevention were translated on Kyiv metro stations.13

Australia has its own version of the Independent Children’s Media Centre: the youth media organisation, Express Media. This

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Melbourne-based nationwide organisation, established in 1983, is directed primarily at young people aged 1625 years. Express Media publishes a quarterly magazine, Voiceworks, is managed predominantly by young people and runs a range of programs to support young people to develop their own media. Express Media is also very funding focused and, like most organisations, they can only do as much as possible with the government funding they receive. It is unfortunate that the lack of regard for children and youth as media producers and consumers is dictated by adult society. However, other young people are finding a way around that obstacle. Tom Dawkins is CEO of Vibewire, an Internet-based media community with thousands of members. It is media made ‘by young people, for young people’ and is presented as an alternative to mainstream media’s lack of diversity and its stereotyping of young people. Established in 2002 in response to the rise in Internet ‘youth-portal’ websites, Vibewire survived the dotcom crash and has developed initiatives to support serious youth reportage, while equipping a new generation with the skills to create media. One such program was Election Tracker. Election Tracker involved four young Australians who covered the 2004 Australian Federal election for Vibewire, and involved some positive crossovers into mainstream media. The ‘trackers’ reported directly to a website, but also contributed to eight radio stations, Melbourne’s Age newspaper and New Matilda website. In its own small way, this activity has begun to bridge the vast expanse existing between young people, media and politics. Like the Independent Children’s Media Centre, Vibewire must implement succession planning if they are to be successful: and both have. Denis Stepura says, ‘Our next step will be to pass our experience over to the younger generation, we are 1819 at present and think that it is time for us to translate our knowledge … in a peer-to-peer fashion.’ Particularly since it won an award at the World Summit Youth Awards, Vibewire will also continue to promote itself as a unique voice for young people.

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Ultimately, we should strive for news that can be pitched to all ages. Parents often applaud ‘BTN’ because they get as much from the broadcast as children do. Media that had some child-centeredness about it would be much more engaging and interesting than the current fare. It would provide clearer explanations, choose stories with broad appeal and be required to provide appropriate background information rather than 30second stories and snappy sound bytes.

Switched on, rather than off To empower and support our children and young people’s relationship with the media, we need to make sure they’re switched on, rather than switching the TV off. We should encourage, and be encouraged by the recent steps taken in secondary schools to support our young people in their relationship with the media. However, it is important we encourage our children to form a relationship with media well before that. We need to hand them our camcorder in the park and get them to start capturing their own images. Instead of always being observed, even preschool children can be taught to be the observer and reporter. We can sit with them as they watch TV and talk about what they are watching, what they think about it and how it makes them feel. Ultimately, we need to trust that they have an ability to understand media. But that ability is not intuitive. It is important that we spend the time fostering their ability to learn how to be clever and discerning consumers of media, in whatever form that may take. It is also important to remain aware of our children’s development and adjust our approach accordingly. Idolising children means we too often skip over the detail. There is no problem letting kids watch a few hours of TV on a busy morning and when it is raining outside. However, there is a problem with allowing children unchecked access to media

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and new technologies without supporting their development and ability to integrate it. If the TV is switched on, we need switched-on children and adults who actively engage with their viewing from time to time. Many of us enjoy a ‘vegg-out’ in front of the TV every now and again, and we don’t need to deny our children this outlet entirely. It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. It is about providing children and young people with the ability to watch, engage and develop. They can improve their relationship and develop in their own maturity if we stay engaged, trust their capacity to learn, and give them a few tips along the way.

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Chapter 7 Marketing children: Pre-teen supermodels and brand imprinting

Meet you at the mall (There’s no time to waste) I’m so glad you’re calm Meet you at the mall An unconditional wonderful spectacle Meet you at the mall Olsen twins, tweenage superstars, lyrics from ‘Meet You at the Mall’

Corporate paedophilia At my desk, I flick open the Spring/Summer issue of a mainstream children’s lifestyle magazine. My colleague shakes his head as he looks at a stylised photo of a young girl who looks less than ten years old but is every bit the twentysomething Kate Moss. Wearing a pout of red lipstick and a blank stare, blushed cheeks and panda eye make-up, her arms are crossed as she sits in a pale pink singlet and underwear. ‘Well, it’s just so blatantly sexual,’ he says. ‘It is exploitation.’ Advertising is all about exploitation. In its pursuit of separating us from our hard-earned dollars, it is respectful to neither adults nor children. But how far are we willing to let this exploitation go? And how do we best deal with the way advertisers use and abuse children in the pursuit of profit?

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Editor of Byronchild magazine, Kali Wendorf, is more explicit than my work colleague was. She says there is a name for it: ‘corporate paedophilia’. And unlike its terrible namesake, this version isn’t taboo: it’s widely accepted by a commercial culture that is caught up in the exploitative images of childhood and youth. Corporate paedophilia is splashed all over our media with abandon, because youth sells. And the younger, the better. The lexicographic origins of ‘corporate paedophilia’ have been ascribed to Australian broadcaster and former advertising executive, Phillip Adams. It is a suitably sensationalist term sparking a less-than-desirable image about the way the corporate world views children. I imagine it’s exactly what Adams was aiming for. But in doing so, does he perhaps excuse the rest of us a little bit too much? What part do we play in letting Western culture roll on in this way? We have not pursued legislation to limit advertising to children, as they have in Sweden. And our laws surrounding the use and targeting of children in marketing and advertising are rarely discussed. As another colleague did as he leaned over my shoulder to look at the magazine photo, many of us try to dismiss the sexualisation and exploitation of children. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen worse.’ If that makes it okay, I wonder at what point he would draw the line. Perhaps many of us prefer to put our head in the sand, or suggest that it isn’t too bad because we are not the image-makers. We are the voyeurs: whether we like it or not. But like it or not, through our voyeurism we are implicated in this fetishisation of childhood. We may be forced to look, but if we’re unsure of whether it is exploitative or not, we are excused from acting. This attitude of compliance only contributes to a society willing to ignore the fine lines between the exploitation and abuse of childhood, though one could argue they are one and the same. Marketers use these images of children for only one purpose: they sell. On the one hand, we feel sick at media reports of child pornography. Yet, on the other, we purchase magazines that print sexualised images of children and young people.

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Today, when confronted with images of children dressed like adults or adults trying to look like teenagers, we find it difficult to express our feelings of unease. At worst, we accept it as the way things must be. We don’t discuss the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable. We’re more comfortable debating issues at the extreme ends of the spectrum. Child sexual abuse and child pornography are subjects eliciting scorn and disgust and repulsion. But what about the fuzzy areas? In the evolving world of ‘tweenage’ markets, where baby actors can’t give their consent or advertisements directly target our children’s self-esteem, we fall mute. By refusing to thrash out the finer details of exploitative behaviour and outdated images of childhood, and refusing to explore its impact on children and adults alike, we are leaving ourselves open to further abuse and disrespect. Just like child sexual abuse only one generation ago, we dare not speak corporate paedophilia’s name. Marketers and advertisers aren’t interested in changing these images. If anything, they will continue to use them and find ways to help them grow because they seem to be working. If anything is to change, it must come from people concerned about the everblurring lines between exploitation of childhood for commercial gain, and outright abuse. However, we must be careful about how we pursue a solution to this problem. We must resist the temptation of falling back on ideas of vulnerable children who lack the capacity to understand and fend for themselves. This chapter will spend less time attacking the corporate world and more time focusing on children, their experience of commercial culture and how we can strengthen their position within it.

A word about Geddes In our modern world where everything is subject to use in commercial culture, children are the advertisers’ objects of choice. From Anne Geddes greeting cards to pre-teen models, children of all ages are used to sell anything and everything.

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In the documentary Myths of Childhood, Anne Geddes talks about the way she sees children. She idolises their innocence, purity and beauty. She rocks them gently to sleep, gently strokes them and cajoles them. She places them in oversized flowers, or dresses them as bees and takes photos of them.1 But do these images respect them? The popularity of Geddes’ images represents how susceptible we are to the fetishisation of infancy, and indicates that many of us see nothing wrong with them. After all, many people find the photos cute. The children are not sexualised. Few would think anything of it and fewer still would think it’s a big deal. My problem, however, is with the inability of children to give their informed consent to have their photos taken, or widely distributed around the globe. They are not in a position to understand the context of the photos, or consent to their fetishisation. If children under five years of age had the choice to be dressed up as a bee or a gumnut and have their photo taken, would they choose to? If you don’t know the answer to that, consider whether an eight or ten year old would refuse to be photographed in that way. Or what if Geddes asked us to dress up as a sunflower and pose for a photo, what would we say? In allowing Geddes-style photos of newborns, we become less likely to consider the harm in turning five and six year olds into fashion models. The culture of exploitation is established from such a young age that we become powerless to argue for a greater respect for children. This is especially so because of the grading of vulnerability: when a newborn baby is considered much more vulnerable than a school-age child, little is asked about the appropriateness of using children to sell products. After all, if we allow babies to be photographed and marketed, where’s the harm in doing the same to a primary-school child? And when million-dollar modelling contracts are offered to newly pubescent girls, and they are styled to look like any hip-swivelling model on the catwalks of Europe, we can’t say it is wrong. We’ve set ourselves up in a world where

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from the moment they are born, children are exploited and their images are used to sell and evoke desire. Much has been done to identify and protect the rights of children, yet so strong are our outdated images of childhood that we often disregard them. We are caught in the power structures happily used and abused by marketers and advertisers. And in this dysfunctional framework, we can question very little about the way the media and commercial culture present images of children.

Childhood and youth: Lifestyle choices Major companies don’t just sell to our children. They use our children to sell to the adult world. And as adults, we buy childhood and youth because we idolise it. We might not understand why, but we do understand that longing to be young again. We also understand the longing for the energy and enthusiasm in a time in our lives when we knew less, and perhaps had less responsibility. Marketers and advertisers don’t sell us products so much any more: they sell us an idea of ourselves that we then purchase by consuming their products. And one of the strongest ideas of ourselves is that of childhood and youth, not as a time lost but as a time we can have again. We just have to buy this brand of deodorant, or this type of car, or clothing from this store and we’ll re-experience the youthful exuberance we long for. Childhood and youth are no longer life stages; they are lifestyle choices. Lecturer in popular culture, Karen Brooks, says, ‘[C]hildhood is omitted or transformed into “youthfulness” – a marketing device, not a legitimate stage of life.’2 Childhood is no longer the domain of just children. Through the power of consumerism and the idealisation of childhood, everyone has access to it. Advertisements tell us we are only as young as we feel, to tap into our poorly directed longings for the false offerings of childhood: innocence, freedom and pervasive happiness.

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But childhood isn’t all roses, and we know it. We know that many children suffer greatly because of their socio-economic situation. We know that children experience the death of loved ones and the divorce of their parents. We know that children live in war zones, in poverty, in abusive families. We know that even in the best possible circumstances in an affluent society such as ours, children experience the many ups and downs of life. They are bullied or excluded, they are ignored and misunderstood. Still we ignore all this and strive for a time in our lives that never was. In a time when we need a new image of childhood that respects and honours children and young people, we’re seeing instead a growth in the representation of fetishised images of the child  and none more powerful than the sexualised child.

Sexualisation of childhood Karen Brooks notes that the message in Vladimir Nabokov’s contentious novel, Lolita, has been missed entirely. Lolita, the story of one man’s lust for a pre-pubescent girl, is, despite its subject matter, anything but a celebration of sexualised childhood. She argues that the story makes us uncomfortable because many adult readers, at some level, understand ‘the terrain of pre-adolescent sexuality and desire … [it is] at once familiar and distant’. Lolitia, argues Brooks, demands that we take a better look at our representations of children and young people. While we shudder at the thought of a pre-pubescent child being turned into a sexual being, we are blurring that distinction in our popular culture every day. Despite our abhorrence of child pornography, Brooks asserts that our society creates a range of spaces and environments where soft-porn representations of children can be ‘gazed upon with ignorance and/or guilt-free ease’3 . More often than not, these spaces belong to the commercial world where children are represented in ways that show little honour or respect. We usually buy into the belief that it is little

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more than a depiction of children’s beauty. We assume that our idea of the innocent child means it doesn’t matter. But it does matter. It matters in the same way feminism fights against the exploitation of women’s bodies. Children deserve as much respect for their humanity as either gender or any stage of the human life. Children deserve the right to have control over their own bodies, just like anyone else. The images themselves betray the innocence. Newborn babies in Anne Geddes works have not personally consented to their use. Many children tramped into child talent and modelling agencies are not there because of their own desire to pursue a career in modelling. Of course, children must be engaged in ‘work’. But the work of modelling is not work for children, no matter what people say. And they will say. They will present indignant arguments and, because of the power of the images of children, we may find it difficult to argue. We may be told that children’s bodies are simply beautiful and there is no harm in using them to advertise things. However, depending on where they are and whom they are with, many children feel awkward or uneasy with their bodies. Children may reach an age at which they can give informed consent, and then feel deeply uncomfortable about their image being used to sell consumer goods. We must stop making assumptions about the way children and young people feel and what they are comfortable with and what they are not. We must remember that children and young people feel emotions just as we do and we should respect that. As adults we are in a position of significant power and we need to be aware of how easily that can be abused. There’s nothing new about little girls trying on their mother’s shoes or scarves or even painting on some lipstick and pouting at themselves in the mirror. However, just because they enjoy trying on adult roles as part of their play, we should not exploit their willingness to role-play as part of their development to sell not only an image of premature adulthood but all manner of consumer goods.

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My four year old still runs around naked on hot days. But he also likes to go to the toilet alone and close the door. Even for those midnight toilet sessions we take him on so he doesn’t wet the bed, from his limp sleepy body come the words, ‘Leave me Dad, I’m okay.’ And I do because no matter what people say, he feels more comfortable going to the toilet in privacy. And just as with anyone else, I must respect that.

The marketing of childhood and youth Indeed, there is a dark edge to the way we represent youth; an underside that seems to prey on Lolita themes, echoing unspoken desires either manufactured or hard-wired into men’s psyches. In an article about women’s hair removal in The Weekend Australian in 2006, writer Ruth Ostrow touched on it. Ostrow interviewed Australian sex therapist and author Jo Anne Baker, who said: ‘Personally, I think it’s unfortunate that many men equate beauty with what a girl of 14 looks like rather than the true beauty of a ripe woman who has natural body hair.’4 The marketing of childhood and youth is inextricably linked to the sexualisation of childhood and youth. Think of Brazilian wax jobs or the petite, narrow-hipped figures of contemporary models. Flick through fashion magazines: they are not selling clothes, but the whole idea of youth as desirable  and attainable  for adults. The belief in childhood and youth as a choice explains why men and women subject themselves to plastic surgery, or hot wax in the most sensitive of areas to fight the ageing process. But it is a fight that no one can win. There is no fountain of youth. No matter how much we want to start counting our birthdays backwards or say that 40 is the new 30, we are all on the same path that ends with our death. Gravity takes every bit of our bodies down. And the celebration of youthful looks and beauty are simply cultural constructs.

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However, the world that we have constructed is a powerful one. So much so that advertisers believe they can get us to buy anything. And we buy bottled water when it is freely available at the tap  so maybe they are right. Does branding work?

Brand-imprinting Branding is more than simple advertising. As activist and author of No logo, Naomi Klein, explains: ‘Think of the brand as the core meaning of the modern corporation, and the advertisement as one vehicle used to convey that meaning to the world.’5 Brandimprinting, then, is the transfer of the core meaning of the corporation into the core meaning of the consumer’s life. The corporate world strongly holds the theory that if it can imprint its brand onto a child, that child will be a customer for life. If, from a young age, a person’s core meaning is identified as the same as the corporation’s, then the consumer will purchase that corporation’s products and services to add meaning to their life. It’s easy to see why marketers and corporations are so keen on the idea. The management and construction of a brand can make or break future profits. Thanks to theories of child development, branding has become strongly linked to children. According to marketers, because children’s brains are absorbing information and formulating their understanding of the world with such rapidity, that age is the optimum time to develop brand loyalty. This idea has captured the imagination of marketers and anti-corporate types alike, but for very different reasons. The advertising industry flaunts its capacity to use colours, sounds and strategies to ‘capture’ a child for life. They believe that if a child’s parents bought a specific brand of canned tomatoes, the child is more likely to buy that brand when they get older. This, of course, causes anti-consumerist campaigners to seethe in anger. Consequently, billions of dollars are invested in strategies and brand development to appeal to young children. It’s not just about

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selling things to children: it’s about preparing them for their future consumerist lives. The whole practice, while subversive and underhanded, is the reality of the world in which we live. A society with greater respect for children would not subject them to the brand theories of advertisers who are so convinced of their ability to ‘program’ young children to buy a particular type of beer or brand of cigarettes before they are legally old enough to buy them. But this is no reason to despair. We have the ability to equip children at a very young age with the capacity to exist in our consumer society. And children have the capacity to understand more about advertising than we give them credit for. When we do, we may find them more able than us to combat the strategies of corporate giants hungry for their money and loyalty.

Developing consumers: Marketing to kids Our society is a consumer society and children are a very big part of that. Mother and editor, Tania Andrusiak, wrote about it after an experience with her nephew. Recently I called my seven-year-old nephew, to ask him what he wanted for Christmas. In minutes, he spontaneously listed the brand names of 24 popular, heavily advertised children’s toys. While the incident might make for a funny 21st birthday anecdote in the future, right now it’s a serious illustration of how susceptible children are to advertising.6

There is no doubt that children are susceptible to advertising: if it works on us, it’s likely to work on them, too. Current psychological thought asserts that because of their stage of development, children under eight years old are unable to distinguish TV program from commercial and, because of their vulnerability, are more likely than adults to fall for subtle and not-so-subtle messages in advertising. The argument then develops that as advertisers exploit the ability of children to pester parents for

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what they want, both children and parents are vulnerable to pressures to purchase those products. Many people are now asserting that children should be protected from advertisers and marketers. But I am not sure it is that simple. As adults, we spend great amounts of time and money selecting specific consumer goods – clothes, accessories, cars, appliances  to construct our self-image and identity. Clive Hamilton of The Australia Institute has charted this obsession in his book Affluenza. He describes our excessive consumption as a sickness. We have greater access to ‘disposable’ income, and increasing avenues for spending it. In focusing on children’s vulnerability to advertising messages, however, we overlook the issue of our own consumption. We fail to explore our own desire to consume to satisfy our self-image, our search for meaning and belonging. And in maintaining images of children as more vulnerable than adults to advertisers’ messages, we overlook the capacity of children and adults alike to understand advertisers’ messages, and stand up to them. Of course, this is not to say that limiting children’s exposure to TV or advertising is not a worthwhile goal: it is. However, if we are to develop informed, empowered and responsible consumer behaviour in children  something that is becoming increasingly important in the face of current environmental concerns  maybe a different approach is necessary. Typically, those battling ‘hyper-consumerism’ use the following logic and argument. When children are six months old, they are forming mental images of corporate logos and mascots.7 They refer to the marketers’ own promotional material, which asserts that ‘brand loyalty’ can begin as early as two years of age. 8 They then argue that before children can read, at around age three, they can make specific requests for brand-name products. 9 However, these facts don’t help us to take a comprehensive approach to children. Those interested in protecting our children from advertising use these statistics to assert that children should not watch TV and should be sheltered from our commercial

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culture. They campaign for advertising regulation during children’s TV viewing time, but there’s more to advertising than just TV ads. Advertising is all-pervasive: on public and private transport, backpacks and clothes, billboards and buildings, shopping bags and food wrappers. A simple ban on TV advertising would not equip children with the resources to deconstruct advertising messages and understand the selling techniques that underlie advertising in all its forms. While there is value in holding advertisers to account over their targeting of children and shielding children from some advertising, these ideas are still predicated on old images of childhood innocence. From a very young age, and at increasing levels of sophistication, children have the capacity to understand or deal appropriately with the explosion of advertising they face. In the previous chapter we read the quote of a young person and her preference for ‘Behind the News’ over ‘TTN’ on the basis of the former having no advertisements. Even if they don’t understand the techniques being used, many young people feel the manipulation behind advertisements. Teenagers also are very astute in what brands they buy, and why they buy them. Of course, it has everything to do with belonging and acceptance. But it’s no different to most adults’ processes for developing their own actualised self in our consumer world. When we break the brand-imprinting arguments down they become hollow. If six-month-old infants are forming mental images of everything they see  faces, logos, colours  it is because they are programmed to absorb to make sense of their world. If we shield them from corporate logos and images, they fail to develop a framework of the consumer society they are living in. The arguments of marketers that children as young as two can develop brand loyalty deserve to be questioned. Clients, of course, want to hear that very young children will develop loyalty to their product; and marketers are happy to concur. But even if these assertions are true, it means children have a greater capacity to engage with advertising than we give them credit for.

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If preschool children can ask for specific brands, they are ready for age-appropriate discussions about marketing and advertising, its purpose, how it works and how they can understand it. Ultimately, childhood commentators can express concern about the nagging power of children giving companies access to the parental purse strings. However, parents and the broader community are responsible also for setting the boundaries. It is our responsibility to tell our children that they can’t have everything they want. From an early age, our children need to understand that nagging is a direct result of advertisers trying to make children cause a fuss to buy their products. If we can’t educate our children to understand the purpose and tactics of advertising, it sends them a strong message of helplessness in the face of our commercial culture.

Teaching children to understand advertising The greatest shock and biggest laugh I have had on my own parenting journey was in the local supermarket. I had taken my two boys aged three years and 18 months on a grocery shopping expedition. We’d been shopping before many times, and like most parents I dreaded the lolly aisle. More significantly, however, I dreaded the strategically placed rack of chocolates, plastic-encased confectionery and child-attracting tidbits near the checkout. As my sons and I stood waiting in the Express Lane, my elder son pointed his finger at the tempting display and exclaimed loudly, ‘That’s just junk, isn’t it, Dad!’ A few adults around me chortled, and I just had to agree: ‘Yes, it’s junk.’ I was not aware that on previous shopping excursions, my wife had been teaching the boys simple things they could understand about marketing and advertising tactics. She had decided that, instead of not taking them shopping because the pestering was an ordeal, she would use the shopping excursions

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as learning opportunities. When they pointed at a box of cereal using Bob the Builder to attract their attention, she would use simple explanations: If there’s only cereal in the box, why did they use a picture of Bob the Builder? And if there was no Bob the Builder in the box, why would we want it? She could get them all the pictures of Bob the Builder they liked without buying the cereal! Our boys soon realised that advertising relied very heavily on ‘tricking’ them and manipulating them. And once they figured out they were being tricked and manipulated, they went out of their way to avoid it  hence my elder son’s loud proclamation of ‘junk’ at the Express Lane. No child likes to know that someone is trying to pull the wool over their eyes. When the boys demanded chocolate biscuits my wife would ask if they’d help her to make them at home, suggesting that it would be even more fun than just buying them. And at the checkout, she explained that the people who ran the supermarket deliberately put ‘junk’ there so that children would cry and make a fuss to make their parents buy the ‘junk’. Our boys agreed this was not a very nice thing to do. A year after the initial Express Lane exclamation, they still don’t ask for anything from the supermarket. Both boys are still very heartily enjoying supermarket games of identifying advertising, and figuring out where they’re being manipulated and tricked. Indeed, it is also a game they play when confronted with commercial television. Our four year old even identifies that movie previews on videos he watches are advertising. The process of explaining marketing and advertising to children, and giving them a language and framework they can use to understand it, is far more respectful and beneficial to their development than simply trying to shield them. If indeed we succeeded in sheltering children from commercial culture until they were 12 years old, we may simply introduce them into an overwhelming clamour of advertising messages without having equipped them with any practical understanding of how the system works or how to interpret it. It is far better to prepare them.

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This approach, however, relies on a society that is prepared to educate and empower children to understand the commercial culture in which they live. It requires not just parents but all adults to take a more active role in supporting children to develop the knowledge and skills required to be empowered citizens  not mindless consumers. If we did this, the resulting changes would be significant over a couple of generations. If we all understood the strategies used to manipulate us into attempting to define ourselves by what we buy, the advertising industry would have to show more respect to the consuming public. And the perfect place to start this approach is by rejecting images of a perfect childhood.

Buying the perfect childhood We are beginning to see that childhood isn’t the utopian start to life we like to pretend it is, and that we’re all suffering under the weight of this misconception. Marketers strive to represent the mythical ‘perfect childhood’ to parents. They create a world where parents can never do enough for their children, where parents are solely responsible for every minute of entertainment, the meeting of every conceivable childhood need, and protecting their children from every possible danger and fear, real or imagined. Today’s childhood is saturated with Gymbaroo, early music classes, nursery renovations, designer clothes and birthday party extravaganzas. And it doesn’t come cheap. Our excessive adoration of childhood hits hard at the hip-pocket. It’s no surprise that in our consumption-based society parents spend up big to cater to their children’s needs. Pressure to be a ‘good’ parent is further exacerbated by parenting literature that, while claiming to support parents, instead undermines their confidence and understanding of children’s resilience.

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While this may be unintentional, in a world that is increasingly time-poor the combined forces of marketing and anxiety grant big advantages to companies selling children’s products. While we don’t have the time, we all seem to have the money to make up for our growing guilt. And who can blame us? The act of giving is fundamentally enjoyable for the giver and receiver alike. And in itself, it isn’t such a bad thing. In a society as driven by consumerism as ours it is realistic to expect that we will all continue to make these choices. And that’s okay. The challenge is to resist using consumer goods to replace the valuable time our children need us to spend with them. Children need guidance to be supported in their development into discerning, educated and responsible conscientious adult consumers. Again, it can’t be left just to parents. However, it does require a concerted effort from parents, friends and extended family, and the systems that support childhood development.

Tweenagers: Creating demographic brands Marketing is becoming more and more sophisticated. Some of our best demographers and psychologists are employed by advertisers specifically to provide data and information that create targeted campaigns. However, recently marketers have gone one step further: demographics, they have realised, are not simply something they can observe and respond to; demographics are something they can create and manipulate. Hence the rise of the ‘tweenager’. Tweenagers didn’t arrive by themselves; they were defined. ‘Tweenager’ is a label that was created not by a subculture or children themselves but by those interested in selling to them. The moniker has spawned the creation of new products and magazines aimed at pre-pubescent girls aged 812 years old. With titles like Vogue Girl and Total Girl, the magazines are decidedly

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uncool for anyone much older. Through the creation of magazines, carefully planned launches and targeted distribution, a whole new demographic has been created and opened up to advertisers. The results are startling. ‘Tween’ fashion companies, ‘tween’ rock idols and ‘tween’ beauty salons are all on the rise, accompanied by low self-esteem and poor body image in girls at ever younger ages. A recent interview in Melbourne’s Age newspaper quoted one nine year old’s mother as saying, ‘We try to get her to think about things – although she is probably too young to really understand concepts like commercialism.’10 There is a danger in this attitude. If a nineyear-old child buys a magazine, they buy it for a reason: it is a symbol of status, to pull out of the school bag in front of others. It gives them an opportunity to belong to a particular group of children and share cultural capital. If nine year olds are capable of being manipulated by marketing and advertising, they are capable of developing an understanding of how that happens. These children are missing out on the opportunity to be taught how to actively and discerningly engage in their own consumption. Our culture and current education systems are not preparing children adequately to interact with their consumerist society. And that makes them all the more susceptible. In a recent study conducted by RMIT lecturer Christine Craik, up to 80 per cent of young women aged 12 to 25 would consider having plastic surgery in the future.11 Another study by Flinders University researcher Hayley Dohnt identified that 47 per cent of girls aged five to eight years old wanted to be thinner. She identified children in their early primary school years who talked about diets and considered going on diets to manage their weight.12 Findings such as these are startling. When very young primary school children are displaying concern and discontent about their weight and body image, we can assume that messages of physical perfection are reaching them very young. At an age where their bodies are still many years off full development, children are

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being sold the importance of attaining the perfect body. And at a time when the negative impact of long-term dieting is becoming clear, it is alarming that very young children are keen on taking it up. At the very least, it is wildly irresponsible for a society to fail to equip children with the tools to deconstruct these advertising messages and replace them with healthier and more realistic messages about weight and body image. This is a clear indication of media, marketing and advertising messages going unchecked. Children’s desire to control and manage their weight and body image is the result of a combination of reportage on childhood obesity and media images of ‘perfection’ presented to our children – children whom we are not empowering to read and understand the messages they are receiving.

Children and young people: Empowering future consumers Author and journalist Mitch Albom knows we are living in a youth-obsessed culture. ‘[N]owhere is it more evident than on the decisions being made on what we watch and hear,’ he says. 13 He recounts how his 55-year-old friend lamented his latest birthday, as it placed him beyond the reach of TV and radio networks who, in the US, only measure ratings of people aged 2554 years. Albom believes this is worth celebrating because there is nothing worse than being a targeted market. But why do advertisers focus more on young people? Albom suggests it’s because ‘[y]oung people, advertisers believe, are willing to change their beer, their soft drinks, their blue jeans or their shampoo if they see a convincing enough commercial.’14 In Albom’s statement, the key word is ‘believe’. The corporate world wants us to think that advertising indeed does convince us. Countless studies explain how advertising can affect young

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children. Neuroscience and early childhood experts back this up by warning of the dangers of excessive media exposure. This makes it increasingly difficult for parents and communities because we live in a media-saturated society. All of us consume excesses of media: Western society is one big ad. But the more densely covered in advertising and new media our world becomes, the better we should become at deciphering it and dealing with it. I’m not advocating that a society plastered in advertisements is desirable  far from it. However, the fact is children and young people do not need to be as vulnerable to advertisers’ messages as we think they are. With our help and our own unwillingness to allow advertisers and marketers to manipulate us, we can develop an ability to find our sense of belonging and self-image in a variety of places outside the realms of consumerism. Marketing is not a science: it is a pseudoscience. It isn’t enough to trust that without guidance children will become capable adults. But it is important to trust that they are capable of learning. If they are to behave as capable adults who act responsibly with our world in the future, they need to be supported to develop the skills and ability to traverse our modern consumer society. This means learning the value of money, the dangers of credit and the modus operandi of all those interested in manipulating our self-esteem and getting a hand in our pockets. The manipulation of young people by marketers and advertisers must be addressed. However, forcing industry to take more responsibility for its tactics and monitoring advertising directed at children is only part of the solution. The most important weapon children have in advertisers’ push to take down their self-esteem and sell them things they don’t need is to teach them about how it works, and why. We might not be able to stop the barrage of messages, but we can give our children the ability to address the deeper issues of living in a consumer society and how to stand up to it, by starting their journey as capable consumers today.

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Chapter 8 Keeping children safe: Walking to school in a society of strangers

[Parents are] scared. Of ‘stranger danger.’ Child abductions. That fear is changing our lives. The irony is, when you look at the statistics on abductions, almost all are by family members, and the number of abductions has been going down for about a decade. Richard Louv, author, Last child in the woods

Is it safe to walk to school? Pearl knocked on our friends’ door. Emma and James live across the road from us, and Pearl is their nextdoor neighbour. She has lived forever in the pale blue weatherboard house with the red tin roof and green manicured lawn. In her hand she had a list of the names and occupations of everyone who lived between Emma and James’ house and the local primary school. When our friends answered the door, she gave it to them. The walk to the primary school for Emma and James’ children would be less than a kilometre. However, as is not unusual these days, they had been trying to decide whether it was safe for their young girls in Grades 3 and 4 to walk to school. Pearl got wind of the agonising and came over to make the decision easier.

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‘Of course they can walk to school,’ she said. ‘There isn’t anything to be afraid of.’ Pearl watches her community. She sees people come and go and observes that the nightly news and the headlines in the papers don’t match what she sees from her seat on the balcony of her weatherboard house. But it is hard for parents to listen to the wise and level-headed voices of people like Pearl. There is an ever-increasing amount of media reportage of crimes against children. The media and political culture of building on our fears and anxieties is becoming more refined, more styled. Our society is getting a lot better at scaring itself. Our infotainment-driven media is like an episodic thriller and horror show all in one. Australians are well aware of names like Jaidyn Leskie and Daniel Morcombe. Jaidyn was an infant boy who was found dead in a dam in 1997, in rural Victoria. His death and three subsequent coronial inquiries have dominated the Australian media. Daniel Morcombe went missing after school one day in December 2003 and has not been seen since. There is still a poster of Daniel in the window of the plumbing supplies store near our house in rural Victoria. Daniel went missing in Queensland. Both accounts are full of the misery and despair that is deserving of such family tragedy. The boys and all associated with them have received significant media coverage that has helped to stir the fears we all have about the wellbeing of our children, just as the Azaria Chamberlain episode in Australia’s history did in the 1980s. The real-life narratives resonate more with us than the fictions of books or screen ever can. In the USA, the Columbine High School massacre and other school shootings resonate widely. Schools there now protect their students with metal detectors at the front gate. But how real are these dangers? Have the dangers to our children actually increased? Are children really more vulnerable than ever before? Or has our social conditioning and idolising of children caused us to become over-obsessed with protecting them from harm? While rising concerns over the safety and protection

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of children occurred before the fear-raising events of 9/11 and subsequent bombings in Madrid and London, the fervour that surrounds them has contributed to a heightened sense of danger for our children. But what are the real risks? Our politicians talk about the reality of suicide bombers and the new age of terror, and actively craft their media sound bytes to suggest that the risks are real, probably higher than we’d like to believe, and that we should remain alert but not alarmed. But what effect does this anxiety have on our children? In this chapter I am suggesting that in becoming a society that overstates risks and places limits on the contemporary experience of childhood, we pose a greater immediate threat to our children’s development and mental wellbeing than any others we face. I am asking whether we are responsible for restricting our children’s naturally inquisitive and exploratory nature because we ourselves are afraid. Or is this just the reality of being a child in the new millennium? There is no right or wrong answer. The truth is different for each child, and somewhere in between the extremes. But we must begin to acknowledge that our perceptions of childhood need to be altered if we are going to allow our kids access to the breadth of human experience. Idolising children to the point of not allowing them to learn about danger and risk is just another way we are impacting on the rights of children and the responsibilities we have to them.

Buying the v ulnerable argument The ‘stranger danger’ campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s played a significant role in accentuating the myth of child vulnerability in Australian society. As our historical knowledge of childhood shows, there has always been an understanding of childhood innocence, imagination and vulnerability. But what should be a respectful appreciation of some degree of danger has evolved into

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fearful desperation. Since the bold images of hands reaching from cars when a generation of children was urged not to accept lollies from strangers, we have further enforced the idea that vulnerability is the over-riding condition of childhood: that children, above all else, need to be kept safe; not played with or taught or supported to develop a holistic life experience but protected from the growing number of dangers in the modern world. Our language helps reinforce our belief that children need our protection and utmost vigilance. Our government authorities entrusted with the wellbeing of children are called ‘Child Protection Units’ instead of ‘Child Support Units’. We talk about ‘children at risk’ and in our desire to give Australian children the best start in life, we over-emphasise the ‘importance of the early years’. Early childhood professionals use a vocabulary that makes parents feel that every minute of their child’s first six years is an opportunity to make a mistake and risk their child’s future development. These and other professionals such as paediatricians often find they must use a certain vocabulary in order to play the system and obtain essential support services for children in their care. Children are ‘scarred by abuse’, and ‘under threat’ from TV violence, dangerous playground equipment and even food allergies. Author and sociologist Frank Furedi argues that a large percentage of the literature and books claiming to support parents actually undermines their confidence and by ‘grossly underestimating the resilience of children, they [childhood professionals] intensify parental anxiety and encourage excessive interference in children’s lives.’1 This fear-mongering begins with the pre-natal child. In the birthing bible, What to expect when you’re expecting, pregnant women are advised on every aspect of being pregnant. Complete pages list in dot-point form what they should and should not do to ensure they have a healthy baby. The sequel, What to eat when you’re expecting is an inch-thick manual on food that ‘takes a closer look at the problems of eating safely in pregnancy’. Eating, instead of a natural process, has become something of a ‘problem’. 2 Pregnant

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women can no longer just eat what they feel like. Instead, they are encouraged to throw their instincts out the window for the sake of their child’s development, and adhere to the rigid guidelines of the diet. The issue is twofold. The general population is more educated. We know more about birth and we even take blank videotapes to record our unborn child during an ultrasound. We are rich in knowledge and in knowing more we also know more about what can go wrong. However, over the fold is the way that knowledge is communicated. The dangers are spelt out clearly and highlighted more readily. The reality of the risks around birth and childhood are now communicated well. We hear all about the danger, but not how unlikely it actually is that something will go wrong. Consider the story one mother told me about the disease that really ‘freaks parents out’ – meningococcal. During a time when schools were sending notes home to parents about the disease and there were news stories of children having their limbs amputated and the devastating impacts of the disease, she happened to be in a casualty ward of a large metropolitan hospital with her daughter. In conversation a nurse said to her, ‘Do you know how many cases of meningococcal we’ve had this year? None.’ Before our children are even in our arms, authors and professionals spell out quite clearly that even the food we eat can be a risk to our children. The advice from respected texts about pregnancy is not even questioned. It is simply handed out among friends, priming us for the anxiety of parenthood and all of society’s impending dangers. When we turn on the TV or open a newspaper, our news agencies lead with stories of child abductions, murder or sexual abuse. Watching and reading the news, you would be excused for thinking that every second person you meet is a threat to your child. Indeed, the report released in 2005 by The Alannah and Madeline Foundation, Childhood abused: The pandemic nature and effects of abuse and domestic violence on children in Australia, ran with the quote ‘a child is reported abused or neglected every two

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minutes’3 . This quote now sits on the homepage of their website, a constant reminder of how unsafe the world is for our children. Such quotations are designed to strike us with alarm and fear. They contribute to the issue of identifying the abuse of children as a problem rather than the current underlying social, economic and health issues: child abuse is frequently underscored by poverty, mental health problems and lack of support systems in an increasingly socially isolated world. We don’t consider where the data comes from, or what figures are behind the ‘every two minutes’ claim. We simply accept that experts know what they are talking about, and move forward, watching our child’s every move, every interaction. As Frank Furedi says, ‘When reporters allude to a child at risk, we rarely ask the obvious question: at risk of what? We don’t ask because we already suspect the reply would be: at risk of everything’. 4 The Alannah and Madeline Foundation report received significant attention in the Australian press. But very little of it scrutinised the results and factors leading to the final conclusions. From the government data used for this project, the researchers actually found ‘40,416 substantiated child abuse reports in 2002– 2003’. However, they used the more alarming phrase ‘in 2002– 2003 one child every 13 minutes was confirmed by child protection services as being harmed’.5 The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that roughly 20 per cent of the Australian population are aged from 014 years old, which translates to approximately four million Australian children. This figure does not include the 15–17 year olds who are also included in the numbers mentioned in the report. Using these figures, we can make the generous estimate that one per cent of children aged 0–14 years old were identified as being abused or neglected in 20022003. ‘One per cent’ sounds a lot less alarming than ‘one child every two minutes’. And one per cent of anything is hardly a ‘pandemic’, as the report suggests. But we must remember that the report was commissioned by an organisation with a strong interest in supporting

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and improving the conditions of children who are from ‘disadvantaged situations where they suffer abuse, neglect or poverty’. Rather than inciting the media into another frenzy that projects the image of a world of dangerous people who are out to abuse children, it may be more reasoned and helpful to examine the causes of child neglect like poverty, drug abuse and mental illness. If we did this, we would have a platform to allow the majority of Australians to feel empowered about their support and treatment of children. And when people are empowered, they are more likely to extend a hand and support those who are struggling to support their children, for whatever reason. Frank Furedi says that it is ‘the exaggerated sense of children’s vulnerability that justifies contemporary obsessions about their safety’.6 He identifies that today we are on ‘high alert’ from the moment our child is born. We idolise our children so much we suffocate them in our desire to keep them safe. We willingly allow the facts to be distorted and the data to be spun without questioning the broader impact it has on all children and society. We are fearful of the destruction of our images of childhood, rather than accepting that childhood is more robust than we acknowledge. In reality, it may be more dangerous for us to continue to perpetuate the myth of childhood fragility and vulnerability. Certainly, there are risks out there for children as there are for us all. However, while some risks are real and need to be managed, many others are fabricated or over-exaggerated by a society that obsesses over children far too much.

The real dangers to our children By perpetuating the image of a dark and threatening world looming above a helpless and innocent child, we lose sight of the very real dangers much closer to home. These dangers are themselves brought about by our perception that we must always be acting to keep our children safe and protect them.

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Some authors and public commentators are beginning to argue that it is our role to teach our children to manage their freedoms responsibly, to cultivate diversity of experiences and trust that they are capable human beings. Futurist and journalist Richard Louv’s book, Last child in the woods: Saving our children from Nature Deficit Disorder, charts the impact of parental fears on children’s outdoor play. In it he states: ‘Never before in history have kids been so separated from nature.’ And while ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ is the author’s attempt at creating a buzzword, not a real diagnosis, Louv attempts to expose some of the costs of our hyper-vigilance of childhood.7 Louv helps us distinguish what we should really be fearful about. We need to begin to consider the greater risk: Is it safer to allow children the freedom to play unsupervised outside, to roam the neighbourhood on their bikes and trust they’ll manage traffic carefully; or is it safer to limit their exposure to the outdoor world and happily let the TV or computer games supervise them for us while we go about our tasks in the adult world? Of course, it isn’t as simple as one or the other, and risks need to be managed at an age-appropriate level. But when we begin to break down the perceptions created by our idolising of children, it makes our role as supervisors of childhood a lot simpler and less stressful. Despite ‘stranger danger’ and the media obsession with child kidnapping, the message echoed regularly both in Australia and overseas is that not only do unknown people in our community pose a threat to our children, so do our friends and family. David Finkelhor, Director of the Crimes Against Children research centre at the University of New Hampshire, claims that the ‘biggest perils are close at hand’. ‘Between 50 to 100 kids are killed a year by strangers,’ says Finkelhor, ‘whereas there are 1000 killed by parents.’8 Of course, the circumstances and reactions of parents are not recorded in this report to highlight the distress, often-accidental nature and diversity of reasons for these statistics. The report does, however, indicate that our preoccupation with ‘stranger danger’ is obsessive.

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These types of reports help to create the 200 000-plus reports to child protection agencies as exposed by The Alannah and Madeleine Foundation in their research. Every maternal and child health nurse, health professional and childcare worker is entrusted with a duty of care to protect children. These workers, even more than the parents, have become guardians of children’s wellbeing. Children are not even safe from their parents. I have worked with a wide range of early childhood professionals. They now live in their own heightened state of alertness. Each new bruise a child has, or any unfamiliar drawings the child produces, they are trained to identify and question. The real danger to our children may just be the lack of trust they see between adults. They are raised in a society where parents’ motives and their ability to raise children effectively are questioned. We must perform police checks on every childcare worker. Even the actions of a friendly football coach are looked at with suspicion and concern. Of course, we must have some vigilance. There is nothing trivial about child abuse. But our anxiety about the extremes of children’s experiences has caused our society to change the way it raises children: and that may be the greatest danger of all. This anxiety causes us to feel that we must supervise our children at all times. Gone are the days when children were told to find a lift home with a school friend, or allowed to wander the streets on a Saturday afternoon. Children are sheltered and guided through every activity. So how do we assist them to develop a sense of independence and allow them to learn from their mistakes? Child and family psychologist and filmmaker, Rebecca Albeck, captures this danger beautifully in her short film Saturday, Sunday, Monday. She tracks the life of one primary school girl whose life mirrors that of so many Australian children. We watch the timetabling of a child’s weekend through supervised music lessons, sporting activities and homework. The film depicts strongly that the young girl has little time to herself, to play and

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indulge in ‘frivolous’ activity. She is allowed very little time to just be a young girl; all her time is spent being productive and learning in formal, adult-constructed ways. Free play is now at a minimum in our society. Parents regularly sigh at the fact their children do so much, yet forget that they can say no to excessive structure in their child’s lives and limit the amount of formalised play. The core of early childhood development theory is that play is development; not supervised activities but free-flowing play that might involve the adaptability of cardboard boxes, playing superheros in the backyard trees or discovering a whole different world down by the local creek. More children would be the better for it. A child raised within a very limited sphere, who is not exposed to the breadth and depth of community, will become a sheltered and ill-informed adult.

The decline in risk to our children When we weigh up the risks to children, we need to be aware that much of society is facing increased challenges and risks, simply because we are further becoming a more risk-aware and risk-averse society. It is unfair and unwarranted to focus solely on the risks to children on a variety of issues. The Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs regularly collates a range of facts and figures about Australian children and families. As part of the National Agenda for Early Childhood, its report Australia’s children: Current state of play for children and families, identifies that there are only ‘a small number of areas where the health and well being status of the general population of children is … failing to improve, or is declining’. 9 Certainly sections of children in the broader community, such as Indigenous Australian children, experience poorer health than Australian children in general.

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However, the report identifies that overall, the lives of our children are at less risk than in any other time in history. In fact, they are healthier and more robust than we imagine. Some of the facts outlined include: •

•

In line with other developed OECD countries, infant mortality rates have decreased in Australia since 1990, from 8.2 deaths per 1000 live births in 1990 to 5.2 deaths per 1000 live births in 2000. As at 30 June 2002, 91.2 per cent of children aged 1215 months were fully immunised and 88.8 per cent of children aged 2427 months were fully immunised for their age. These figures contrast with a rate of only 53 per cent of Australian children who were fully immunised in 1995.

In 1995, almost 20 per cent of school-age children were reported to have asthma as a long-term condition. Hospitalisations for asthma among children aged 014 years decreased by 35 per cent between 199394 and 19992000. Once, a cold or tummy bug meant a day or two in bed; today many parents in our hypersensitive world are encouraged to take children to the doctor at the first sign of a sniffle. It is something the medical profession identifies as a problem that takes up precious time and resources. We seem to be losing the confidence in our ability to identify when our children will be okay, and just ride through a minor illness. Of course, fear-mongering around serious diseases that share symptoms with illnesses like influenza have contributed to our over-alertness. In itself, it is not bad to be cautious. But we need to acknowledge that when it comes to children, we tend to err on the over-cautious side. Perhaps we need to reassess the dangers to our children and not be so strongly influenced by perceived threats and media hype about the experience of childhood. If we do this we can try to prevent fear being the dominating influence over our children’s lives.

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Children learn through the lived experience At a kindergarten in Vienna, staff have taken away all the toys and introduced playthings from nature: sticks, stones and leaves. The psychologists who inspired the action say it deepens children’s connection with imagination, and supports their development by asking more of them.10 Rather than providing the car and saying, ‘play cars’, children are given a variety of objects and asked to simply ‘play’. The children then develop their own understanding and ideas about what the objects represent, and how they themselves can guide their play. Parents and other adults are often aware of their role as teachers. But we misunderstand this role, and in undertaking it, revert to discipline instead of teaching. Supporting a child to learn has very little to do with making them do their homework. Children learn through observation and mimicry: not just as young children but right into adulthood. Most parents have had the experience of realising the words we just spoke to our children came straight from our own parents’ mouths. This is a small example of the impact our childhood observations have throughout our lives. Children learn simply through existing. There is value in not sheltering children but instead exposing our children to risk and some age-appropriate danger. Without this exposure, they do not learn what it feels like to take risks, or appraise their own levels of competency in situations where there is an element of danger. Taking this idea into account, perhaps it is not so unusual that an increasing number of children are being prescribed antidepressants or medication to treat Attention Deficit Disorders. Perhaps some of these children are learning the anxiety of a world that is deeper in debt, experiences lower levels of stability and is fast-paced and frantic, all the while having few outlets to debrief or let off steam. Our children have the capacity to model aspects of our adult world back to us. While we are

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observing these phenomena, we are not responding appropriately. The solution is not to hide children away from a world we perceive as a threat. Instead we need to expose them to that world and actively demonstrate how we can change it. In the book When will the children play? author Angela Rossmanith identifies the problem of adults shielding their children from the world’s dangers. ‘Ironically,’ she writes, ‘the very practices that adults put into place to protect the young can serve to violate the spirit of innocence that is at the heart of childhood’.11 Rossmanith’s book explains how we can support and nurture our child in a way that counters the growing fears and anxieties of a society that idolises children. It reflects on providing a deep experience of childhood and urges parents to trust their instincts: to practise letting go, and sometimes let your child just be.

Finding the line in risk-taking behaviour Author Wendy Mogul shares similar sentiments to Rossmanith in her own book The blessing of the skinned knee. She writes, ‘[w]hen horticulturalists want to prepare hothouse plants for replanting outdoors, they subject them to stress to strengthen them’. 12 By trying to protect our children from every danger, we are mostly likely not preparing them for the failures, emotions and tragedies of life. The best way to keep our children safe is to provide them with the space to make mistakes because they will make them, and to trust them more than we currently do. Once there were aspects of growing up that were unavoidable: bee-stings, broken limbs and gravel-rash. Now school grounds have become another battleground for litigation. Rather than accepting their child may not have an aptitude for mathematics, parents jump at their children’s poor grades or comparative statewide ranking and demand to know what the teacher is doing wrong.

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Sarah Bryden-Brown, author of The lost art of childhood, told me, ‘You have to show children you are not capable of everything. Trust them, they will try new things themselves.’ She is well aware of the links between our trying to keep children safe, controlling their every movement and expecting the world from them. The adult world makes unfair demands on children: demands we don’t think of making of ourselves. ‘If you set up a perpetual sense of achievement,’ Sarah says, ‘then children believe they must be successful.’13 Her approach to raising children is matter-of-fact, and full of love and compassion. But she also demonstrates an understanding that it is her role to teach these children to be capable adults. She is not from the school of wrapping children in cotton wool. ‘Children are bloody far more resilient than adults are,’ she says.14 Part of finding the line between keeping our children safe and giving them the right amount of freedom and responsibility has to do with how we view children. In his essay, ‘On Feeling Superior’, author John Marsden highlights the Australian inclination towards naive and stupid comedy characters  like Dad and Dave or Kath and Kim. He goes on to explain, ‘It’s very similar to the way we regard our children, and helps explain why we like children so much: we feel superior to them.’15 In feeling superior to children, we feel we have the capacity to control them. Parents feel it is their responsibility to raise and foster every aspect of their child’s development. But it is, in fact, a community’s responsibility to help a child, a fellow member of the community, to develop. It is in their interests to support, encourage and protect them. Our problem is that the role of protecting children is confused. We lack an understanding of how we are to protect children and why. We want to keep them safe, but as Frank Furedi points out, we don’t ask from what. We assume it is everything. There are hundreds of things we feel we need to protect our children from. Here’s just a sample: TV, childhood obesity,

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paedophiles and other strangers, lack of or too much discipline, not enough or too much freedom, traffic, pollution, heavy metal music, Internet porn, food allergies, disappointment, drugs, poor school results, not enough or too much knowledge about sex, violent video games, eating disorders, peer pressure, smoking, pressure to succeed, depression, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), drunk drivers, vicious dogs, new childhood diseases, Marilyn Manson, and countless others yet to be identified. Feeling anxious yet? What are the real risks of these things to our children? We should stop and remember we were also children once. Looking at the list, even with its modern context, we might well wonder how it is we managed to survive. But we did  and many others survived along with us. Children are not at risk from everything. There are different threats for different children at different stages of their lives. They need to be supported and navigated through those risks, not shielded from them.

A lesson from Cookie Monster The thirty-sixth season of ‘Sesame Street’ screened in the United States in 2005. This program has remained at the forefront of quality early childhood TV for decades. So it shouldn’t be surprising they decided to address the issue of obesity. Consequently, columnists across the globe took delight in feigning horror that Cookie Monster was singing a different tune: ‘A Cookie is a Sometimes Food’. He now eats some ‘healthier cookies’, and is part of a new education line that ‘Sesame Street’ is taking to support the mental, emotional and physical health of children. But the producers have not fallen for sensationalism about obesity. If anything, they are showing the importance of moderation. And it is the moderate line that should be our guiding principle when we talk about risks and dangers to our children.

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That is what we do for ourselves. If we respect children, we need to do the same. Rosemarie Truglio, Vice President of Research and Education for ‘Sesame Street’, was quoted as saying: ‘We are not putting him on a diet. And we would never take the position of no sugar. We’re teaching him moderation.’16 Cookie Monster still scoffs his food, and is the same blue and furry biscuit-lover he always has been. And ‘Sesame Street’ is teaching him and all the children watching that this is fine: just not all the time, for every meal. As adults we enjoy the extra glass of wine or helping of dessert, we take calculated risks and sometimes place ourselves in uncomfortable or dangerous situations  sometimes without even realising it. We must support our children to be prepared for this in adult life. Children also deserve a little risk.

The real risk What is most at risk is childhood itself. It is at risk from the over-regulation and institutionalisation that is trying to protect children from the great unknown. Childhood is at risk of becoming a series of programs, a list of dot points that chart a safe trajectory from birth through to adulthood. It should be the bumpy first stage of a life full of challenges, successes and disappointments. Childhood must be full of scratches and sores, running noses and being knocked over in the school playground. Children must be allowed to sweat at their own imperfections as they face detention at school, or realise halfway down that jumping off the garage roof wasn’t the best idea. It might not be the way we’d like it to happen, but that is how we learn. George Bernard Shaw said: ‘Youth is wasted on the young.’ But maybe it isn’t. Maybe there is something in the mistakes we make that give us our humility and a much greater sense of our humanity. Youth belongs to the young. And as risky as that might seem to us adults, that’s the way it is.

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Chapter 9 The imperfect child: The hypocrisy of our obsession

It was something I hadn’t even thought of. This was our child … Why would the world not accept our child? Leisa Whitaker, mother

Like any child Debby Conlon knows her children are not perfect. Of course, they are perfect in her eyes, full of a whole range of abilities and frailties that make human beings wonderfully imperfect. She has known this since the birth of her son. Almost every day since his birth, she has faced the challenges presented by government funding systems and limited community service providers just to meet his basic needs. Debby has two delightful children and faces the daily battles we all face to balance work, family and personal life. She wears the smile of a mother: exhaustion, happiness and slight insanity all rolled into one. A strong advocate for children, particularly those with a disability, Debby works for the Association for Children with a Disability. Debby’s son Michael is seven years old, and has cerebral palsy.

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He loves reading books, playing computer games, watching DVDs, painting and drawing. However, lacking fine motor skills in his hands, Michael requires assistance with almost every aspect of his life. In an issue of the magazine for the Association for Children with a Disability, Debby introduces her son. She writes, ‘I’ve heard it said that a child with a disability is “like any child” and that families with a child (or children) with a disability are “like any family”. This is both true and nonsense at the same time.’1 What Debby means is that her child has significant needs that require major support, unlike most children. But he also has the same desires and interests as any boy his age, and Debby’s family has the same experiences and similar interests as any other family. They share the love and bond that all families understand. They laugh and despair together at the many challenging events and moments occurring within the life of their family. Both Debby’s story and this chapter are not a lament for children who don’t fit our narrow concept of what a perfect childhood should be. It is the opposite. This is a celebration of what we can learn from ‘imperfect’ children and their experience.

Imperfect? Those with a preference for politically correct language may object to the use of the term ‘imperfect child’. However, I consider it useful in helping us understand why we came to desire perfection in our children, and why we fail to recognise the many aspects of childhood that are not always easy. I do not wish to further isolate or demean children with a disability, children in detention or children in the care of the state. Of course, there are many other terms we could use: ‘children with a disability’, ‘children with special needs’ (almost idolising language) and the now defunct ‘handicapped children’. We could talk about ‘wards of the state’, ‘abused children’ or ‘delinquents’. These terms all categorise; they may offend or not. Essentially I am comfortable

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using the term ‘imperfect’ because it can and should be worn by us all. It is a direct challenge to our society’s obsession with perfection  perfect children, perfect education, perfect bodies. Imperfect children are affected by the idolising childhood phenomena in a different way to other children. Confronted with the difference and challenges of imperfect children, many of us turn away. Their inability to feed the adult world’s fantasy of childhood means they have been significantly excluded and ignored through our popular, social, environmental and political culture. But in being ignored, they have not carried as much weight of our expectations. The imperfect child is one who does not meet the fantasy of the images and ideas of childhood that we have created. The imperfect child has autism or Down’s syndrome. The imperfect child is rebellious and rude. The imperfect child is one that nobody wants; but is one that we all have. What this can teach us about how to support and encourage children through their development will help lead us away from our obsession with childhood. Children with a disability, children from disadvantaged backgrounds and children who, for whatever reason, don’t conform to our ideas of what a child should be, live outside a framework where children are marketed, manipulated and subject to the desires of our contemporary society.

Invisible children I first spoke to Debby Conlon in December 2004. We were discussing the launch of the Victorian Government’s latest early childhood policy. Two documents had been produced: one was a report from an advisory panel of experts who had undertaken consultation; 2 the other was a response from the government, explaining their intentions in relation to that response.3 Neither document once mentioned children with a disability. This is not to say that Victoria does not invest strongly in

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children with a disability: indeed, the budget following its 2004 reports more than doubled the funding to early childhood intervention services. 4 However, in the most significant government early childhood document to appear in several years, not being mentioned even once made them invisible. Imperfect children are just as invisible in our society. Popular culture continues to treat children who don’t fit the idolised model as objects of curiosity, who are more likely to be exploited by moviemakers, advertisers and soap opera scriptwriters. In its careful construction of our desire for perfection, our advertising industry dares not sell to us the idea that childhood is anything but an innocent, perfect start to a life. Our magazines, newspapers and cultural organisations too infrequently acknowledge the presence not just of imperfect children but of the reality that no child (and no adult, for that matter) is actually perfect. Our obsession with childhood is not a yearning for the reality of childhood and its imperfections. Our desire to recapture our own youth and our yearning for the simplicity of childhood is a key element in the way modern childhood has been manufactured. We choose to re-imagine childhood as some perfect form of existence where there were no decisions to be made, no work to be done and everything we desired was provided. When asked, most of us are willing to acknowledge that childhood is not a perfect experience. But our actions reflect an unwillingness to fully integrate this concept. This extends to the modern parent who is unable to acknowledge their own child’s imperfections.

Perfectly gifted children As we saw in chapters 6 and 7, the media play a significant role in shaping how we view childhood and children. The industry of childhood exploits our instinctive love and adoration for our own children to distort our overall image of childhood. And this

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reflects profoundly the way in which our society views children it regards as imperfect. We are sold images of the perfect pregnancy, the perfect child and how we will foster their perfect upbringing. However, it is only when faced with the imperfection of a child on a regular basis that this facade of childhood is readily unravelled. Childhood can be seen as a constant battle for children. They are continually trying to understand the world around them, to overcome their ignorance. Childhood is the learning ground for a life full of mistakes, challenges and troubles  along with the successes and triumphs. But we’d prefer not to see the less than happy side. We don’t want to acknowledge the fact that every child is imperfect. Instead we focus on ironing out the imperfection and making our children work hard to improve. We say we want them ‘to reach their full potential’. But what does that really mean? Have we thought it through? Does achieving equate to happiness? Does success (especially academic success) really provide what we want for our children? Considering the obsession with success and its link to good jobs, good pay and economic comfort, is it any wonder that the number of ‘gifted’ children seems to be increasing? Not when we consider that the opposite of the imperfect child is the hyperperfect child: a child who studies in advanced maths class and needs extra curricular activities to pursue. Our culture of idolising has supported the strengthening of lobby groups who advocate for more attention for gifted students, to help them achieve their potential. The culture of developing children’s ‘gifts’ has led to debates in education circles about whether gifted children should be taught separately or kept within mainstream schools. As one teacher told me, ‘It isn’t enough to be an ordinary kid, going to school and enjoying friends and developing relationships. For some reason we’ve turned childhood into a competition.’5 There has always been an edge of competition in the classroom. We all have been graded. There have always been smart kids, always been the friends who took off as soon as they could to

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pursue life outside a system that sucked their self-esteem with continually poor grades. The change has been that childhood has in some ways become a real-life ‘Australian Idol’ contest. As we discussed in the education chapter, childhood is broken up into narrow streams and, rather than pursuing the development of the whole child, we focus on what they are good at and where they will achieve. But what good is it being a really good at one or two things? How does that help you achieve your ‘full’ potential? Surely, if we sacrifice some aspects of a child’s development so they may pursue another, their potential is already being limited. The idea of ‘potential’ is a flawed one because it is viewed as a singular point, almost a place of destiny that adults must guide children towards. The reality is that ‘potential’ is infinite and to pursue one direction means letting go of the potential you had if you’d headed in another direction. Adults have potential, sometimes we choose not to pursue it because we may value other things beyond achieving the best we can in a particular area. Consider parents who forgo promotion or extra study because they want to have more time with their kids  do we care that they are not ‘meeting their full potential’ or are they simply letting the potential of their career go to pursue the potential they have as a parent? While it is a very limited argument, ‘achieving full potential’ is regularly used to justify pushing children who are excelling in sport or show great ability at science. It is fine to encourage children’s interests and help them explore what they are good at, but there are so many experiences to explore in life that by narrowing a child’s focus and asking them to excel in one area we are limiting a wide range of other experiences. Which potential is more important? The one where you become a great scientist or the one where you have a full and rewarding life as a good scientist? According to some parents, gifted children are being treated in the same way as imperfect children. In a recent article in the Melbourne Age newspaper’s Good Weekend magazine, Rachael Sowden, mother of two gifted children, told an interviewer:

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‘Sometimes with gifted kids, they’re kind of put in a corner.’ While researcher Gail Byrne says, ‘Gifted children often use grammar and vocabulary that is so far beyond the children in their grade that the other kids think they’re freaks.’6 To other children, gifted children are just as different as children with a disability. And among their peers, they can be treated as such. But the idea of ‘teacher’s pets’ or the class ‘smartypants’ is nothing new. The competitive nature of education means intelligent children must deal with the peer pressure and derision associated with their success. In the eyes of an adult world mesmerised by the idea of child brilliance, however, gifted children are not freaks. Our culture is studded with the legend of the child prodigy; be it discussions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his early musical genius, or the popular US drama, ‘Doogie Howser MD’. The hyper-perfect child is one worth attention. Perhaps gifted children are, in their own ways, imperfect because they do not fit the mainstream system either. In 2001, an Australian Senate inquiry found that gifted children did need special help at school, just as children with an intellectual or physical disability did.7 The notion of hyper-perfect children and the desire to support them, even to the level of a Senate inquiry, demonstrate the challenge facing the imperfect child and their family. How do children have their needs met in a world that is more interested in children who are nothing less than perfect?

Imperfect children: More than capable Sam Carpenter made the under-18 state football squad, chosen from hundreds of aspiring professional Australia Rules footballers into the final cut of 49 players. It is a fine achievement, and would be no different from that of his 48 teammates, except that at age six, Sam lost half of his left arm in an accident. Sam started playing football in the under-10s. He has

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excelled ever since. His father, Leigh Carpenter, spoke to The Age newspaper about his son’s success. Even he was among the doubters about his son’s potential. People used to say when he was very young: ‘When tackling is introduced, he’ll struggle.’ When he didn’t, I often heard people then say, ‘At under-14s or under-15s, when the game gets a bit more physical, he’s going to struggle.’ But he didn’t. At every level he continued to be one of the better players.8

What Leigh Carpenter now recognises is that it was the determination and resilience of his son throughout his childhood that helped the family to cope. While the rest of the world may have been saying, ‘He could have been’, Sam was busy out there just being, playing football and kicking goals. ‘The way he has handled his life has made it a lot easier for us, and me in particular,’ Leigh said. 9 Sam’s football career continues into adulthood and he is now playing in the Victorian Football League. Children are capable human beings. The adult perception of children as weak and less-prepared than adults is based less on the real world and more on a desire to place childhood at a lower level in the hierarchy of humanity. Like Sam, children with a disability further challenge our misconceptions by proving that, despite their perceived imperfections, they have a wide range of abilities and knowledge that doesn’t limit them. Through Sam’s unwillingness to accept people’s suggestions he would not be capable of competing with boys his own age, he proved that childhood gave him the greater capacity to achieve. In many ways, because children lack an adult’s perceptions of what is and isn’t possible, they have an enthusiasm, energy and understanding that helps them overcome the obstacles they may face. Often it is children who are far less concerned about disabilities. Certainly, on the field Sam Carpenter isn’t given any concessions. A friend of ours whose disability severely limits his speech and capacity to be understood loves visiting us because

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our preschool aged children appear to have a far greater ability to play and communicate with him than most adults. While we struggle to understand his verbal language, our children can pick up on cues and non-verbal subtleties that we seem to have lost in our further mastery of language. Children with a disability are far from incapable. However, as Debby Conlon points out, because their imperfections are more obvious than others they require extra support and are different from children without a disability. But as Sam Carpenter has shown his dad  and the Victorian football community  children with a disability are teaching people every day. They deliver the message that childhood is less vulnerable than we think. Children with a disability and other ‘imperfect’ children constantly expose our obsession with childhood and its dysfunction: just like my brother-in-law, Daniel Andrusiak.

Raising children: A lesson on imperfection Daniel Andrusiak is 18 years old. At age three he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) that affects the way he understands, processes and interacts with the world. His interactions are different, but no less valuable. And in many cases they are heightened, more aware and more insightful. Most significant in our discussion about idolising children is the way Daniel has been raised. Like many parents whose child has a disability, Daniel’s parents struggled with his diagnosis. However, in coming to terms with the reality of Daniel’s different needs, his mother and father came to an agreement. His mother, Marion, wanted to make sure she listened to the advice of those making the diagnosis. Her intention was to ensure that Daniel received the relevant therapies and other specialist

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services they were told would support his development. Daniel’s father, Boris, continued to assert that Daniel would benefit most by being treated as if he didn’t have Asperger’s syndrome. They agreed to disagree and managed to raise Daniel in their own ways: Marion accessed funding and specialist services for Daniel’s extra developmental support, and Boris hassled Daniel about school work, took him to football and cricket training and supported a host of co-curricular activities. It is my view that Daniel, through this agreement, was in an optimal situation. As a child with a disability he was given the extra supports that ensured he developed his speech and an understanding of his limitations, abilities and differences. At the same time Daniel was constantly challenged by his father, and was not given any ‘outs’ because of his disability. This model has much to contribute to a discussion of raising children, of any ability, in a way that respects them but does not idolise them. Daniel knew he was special, but not precious. His difference was respected and he received the appropriate support to allow him to pursue interests and ideas. He was challenged, but not excessively. And his interests, fostered without the heavy weight of expectation of success, have become driving passions. We need to honour all children in this way. Not that long ago, however, we locked our ‘imperfect’ children away with an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality. Clem Baade is a 32-year-old actor with disabilities. Born in the early 1970s, doctors indicated that because of his disability he would be best supported by specialist services rather than in his own home. ‘Evidently, I felt like a puppet because I didn’t have any use of my hands or legs for a while,’ Clem says. ‘So the doctor told mum to send me to a home and forget about me.’10 Clem’s parents, however, decided to challenge the professionals and contradict the advice of the times, giving him all the energy they could muster. Clem speaks with pride and a deep love of his family. In a world striving for perfection where many of us feel uncomfortable about our own inabilities, let alone others’, he

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feels that family is often a sanctuary for people with a disability. Despite numerous personal challenges, including serious illness and a recent kidney transplant, Clem has been performing for five years with the theatre company RAWCUS at international conferences and festivals, but has acted professionally for more than ten years. Also an engaging writer of poetry, Clem belongs to an extensive network of people with and without disabilities who continue to shape and challenge the representation of people with a disability in our art and culture. In doing this, mainstream society’s understanding of people with a disability is greatly enriched. This would have been an unlikely scenario if Clem had been institutionalised. The deinstitutionalisation of children with a disability continues to evolve. A greater emphasis on inclusion has marked a point where children with a disability do not have only ‘special schools’ as a choice, but can learn within the mainstream education system. This is worth considering in the context of the push for further ‘specialisation’ for gifted children. At the other end of the spectrum we have learnt that by removing children from the diversity of community, we are limiting their capacity to experience the breadth of community and socialisation. Institutionalisation is not in the best interests of developing children. And yet, institutionalising ‘imperfect’ children is an issue that has dominated Australia’s immigration debate for several years.

Detention and disobedience In 2001 the five Bakhtiyari children, along with their mother, arrived in Australia by boat. Belonging to the Hazara ethnic minority, the Bakhtiyaris had fled Afghanistan because they were being persecuted by the Taliban regime. The five children, aged from three to 12 years old, were held in Australia’s Woomera detention centre with their mother; while

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the father, who arrived in 1999, was held at a separate centre. It was two years before the family was reunited. In August 2003, the Family Court ordered the children’s release, and they were placed in an Adelaide foster home. Meanwhile, another Bakhtiyari child was born in detention. Not long after, in April 2004, the five children in foster care were relocated to a house in Adelaide with their mother and newborn brother. Despite their father’s refugee status, however, the rest of the Bakhtiyari family was refused refugee status. They were deported around Christmas 2004. These children, despite having two loving parents who wanted to be together with them, found themselves being moved between detention centres and separated at times from their mother and father. During the entire case, every side of the argument that pulled at these children claimed to be acting in their best interests. But there was often little respect shown for them by both the Howard government and the media. According to the government, they didn’t belong in Australia, anyway. They were seen simply as generic examples of the refugee experience. Indeed, Diane Hiles, spokesperson for Children out of Detention (ChilOut) asserted, ‘It is to our great shame that the whole case has been politicised to the detriment of six children.’11 Imperfect children often suffer under the weight of government policy, which is capable of identifying imperfect citizens. Children in detention do not have their basic needs met for liberty, dignity and autonomy. As we saw with the Bakhtiyaris, children are kept in detention under the pretences of ‘keeping the family together’. However, if the experiences of children with a disability are capable of teaching us the stifling nature of institutionalisation, then surely we must be implored to show basic respect and humanity to children (and all people) who are seeking asylum. Indeed, the summary to the 2004 HREOC National Inquiry into Children in Detention, stated: The irony is that the long-term impact of Australia’s immigration detention system on these children will, in the

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main, be borne by Australian society, since almost all children in detention eventually become members of the Australian community. They will carry the scars of their detention experience throughout their lives.12

The example of children in detention illustrates how we pass judgment on imperfect children. By claiming children are precious and valuable only to their parents, and so keep them locked alongside them in detention centres, we subvert the dominant paradigm of children being precious and valuable entities in and of themselves. And as we have become more and more aware that detention centres barely treat adults in humane ways, why would they treat children any differently? The only children we treat as adults are those who threaten us because they do not represent the child ideal promoted by our society. With the exception of children in detention, in Australia no child under 18 is subject to the same laws and punishments as adults. While children are not adults, they are people with their own rights and deserve to be treated as such.

Depressed Our perceptions and expectations of children and childhood surely contribute to the extraordinary figures regarding children and antidepressants. Child advocate and former administrator of the United States’ National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NIH), Dr James W Prescott, has said: Clearly something is wrong in our culture when our children and teens are driven into suicide, despair, and [legal] drug addiction. The NIH and America are not asking the important question: ‘Where is all of this coming from and what can we do to prevent it?’ … Some 1.5 million prescriptions of the anti-depressant class of drugs called the serotonin re-uptake inhibitors SRIs, Prozac) are given annually to children and youth and some three million prescriptions of Ritalin are prescribed annually.13

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We may agonise over our children’s prospective school choices, but as a society we pay scant attention to the fundamental decisions we make about the way we perceive children and childhood. So fearful of our children being less than perfect we’re learning to quickly turn to medicine, rather than our underlying social assumptions about human development, for a solution. At the very hint of depression, increasing numbers of parents are popping antidepressants in their children’s mouths with little available information on the short-term effects or longer-term difficulties created by these drugs. Likewise, the numbers of children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or associated disorders are increasing at alarming rates. These observations are not meant to minimise the very real problems faced by some children and their parents. For some people, intervention using medication is important and, in some cases, vital. However, the fact remains that depending on prescription drugs to address problems that may in fact have a social cause is unhelpful and, at worst, dangerous and counterproductive. It also gives parents a ‘reason’ for why their child’s behaviour doesn’t match our socially constructed expectations.

Blaming the fat kids During the D-Generation’s ABC TV series ‘The Late Show’, aired in the 1980s, there was an ongoing joke about ‘the fat kid from “Hey Dad” ’, ‘Hey Dad’ being a well-loved Australian comedy series. ‘The fat kid’ they spoke of was a regular character in the show who was subject to the ridicule of D-Generation’s satire long before the sensationalism of the ‘childhood obesity epidemic’. The D-Generation’s ‘fat kid’ jokes, and indeed the use of the ‘fat kid’ as an object of ridicule in the ‘Hey Dad’ series, are but two examples among many other anxiety-inducing cultural messages sent to children about the importance of appearance and weight in Western culture.

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Not long before this manuscript was completed, Channel Ten introduced a new television series based on a British show called ‘Honey, We’re Killing the Kids’. It is another reality television show, but this time focusing on children and parental anxieties. A cross between ‘Supernanny’ and ‘The Biggest Loser’, this program is again being applauded in the press for helping the modern family cope with the modern world. Only, once again the families it chooses to participate are extreme and are treated with little respect; the children’s faces are computer-manipulated to show what they will look like when they are 40 years old, if they continue their current lifestyle. The show is 99 per cent entertainment and one per cent science. And it achieves results through bullying and imposing guilt and power structures on the participants. Once again popular culture is holding parents and children up as the problem, rather than the victims of Western culture’s prosperity: a culture that promotes consumption over production, encourages us to be less active, makes it more difficult to eat unprocessed food and delivers anxiety through media and popular culture. This anxiety can only be intensified for young people by the recent development of a magazine culture for ‘tweens’; a new demographic group discussed in chapter 7 who are identified and branded by marketers, most particularly girls between the ages of nine and fourteen. The tween versions of Cosmopolitan and Vogue magazines are cashing in on what international brand manager Cathy van der Meulen refers to as ‘… a market with a high disposable income, who love to shop, hang out with friends and who spend more time online and flicking through mags than they do on school work.’14 Custom-made for advertisers to target children early, these magazines attain a seamless blend of perfection and insecurity for children who are forming their self-concept. It is a fine line: on one hand, the ‘freedom’ and ‘carefree’ nature of childhood perfection is marketed as something adults and children alike want to attain. However, the degree of ‘perfection’ is kept always

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beyond the reach of reality through airbrushed, professionally styled and constructed images that emphasise the reader’s own imperfections. Young children, girls in particular, are constantly bombarded with images and messages telling them they will only achieve the ‘perfect’ look or ‘perfect’ friends by consuming in a certain way. Our society’s messages about ‘perfect’ children and ‘perfect’ bodies, coupled with a lack of appropriate education about these issues, show that children more often regard themselves as ‘imperfect’ rather than as the normal and capable growing human beings they actually are. When confronted with these images of childhood, it’s not surprising that children as young as five years old are already conscious and concerned about their body image, as researcher Hayley Dohnt identified (see chapter 7). Of course, childhood obesity is currently a hot topic. We are all concerned about the health of future generations. However, the debates surrounding the topic are too frequently underpinned by factors such as parental shame and childhood guilt, poor comprehension of children’s development and a lack of understanding about social and psychological factors underlying the consumption of food. We also lack sympathy for the pressures children face in feeling that if they don’t fit the image of excellent sportspeople then they shouldn’t participate at all. The American Obesity Association identifies that 30 per cent of American adults and 15 per cent of American children are obese.15 This means in the United States, obesity is a more significant issue for adults than children. The statistics are similar in Australia where figures suggest that 5–7 per cent of children and adolescents are obese16 and 21 per cent of adults are obese17. Of course, those arguing for greater funding and support to address the issue of obesity usually combine the overweight and obese figures to present a more alarming case. This means instead of hearing that less than 8 per cent of Australian children are obese we hear that almost 25 per cent of Australian children are overweight or obese.

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I am suggesting two things here. Firstly that the issue of childhood obesity, like child abuse, is being manipulated and distorted by advocacy-driven research  this is at times positive, and other times negative. And, secondly, that childhood obesity is as much of an issue as adult obesity and we should perhaps be taking a far more serious look at adult lifestyles and the way they impact on children rather than pointing the finger at children and suggesting the problem lies with them. The obesity issue is actually affecting all of society, not just children in particular. Obesity isn’t even the problem, obesity is a symptom of far greater problems in our society. It isn’t just children who are doing less physical activity, it is all of us. It isn’t only children who are consuming excessive amounts of processed and sugar-laden foods; it is all of us. Why are we all doing this? Because our choices are being dictated in that direction. Our affluence teaches us to look for the easiest way, to reheat precooked supermarket meals in the microwave and pretend it is a ‘healthy choice’. A genuine healthy choice is taking greater control over the production and consumption of our food. We spend more time watching gardening and cooking on the television than we actually physically do ourselves. Our government likes to highlight the fact that 40 per cent of school children don’t participate in organised sporting activities, but doesn’t quote statistics on how much physical activity adults do.18 It is definitely less than children. This is not just a health issue; we live in an obese culture. How can children learn the importance of physical activity if they are not introduced to it by the adults in their community. This is an issue for all of us, so why then is the prevalence of childhood obesity reported with greater concern and coverage than obesity in general? Earlier onset of obesity is more likely to have long-term implications on children’s health because they are still physically developing. So a focus on children is indeed important. But in the realm of popular culture you’d be excused for thinking the

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problem of adult obesity is much smaller. Our propensity to idolise childhood seems to lead the adult world into identifying problems in precious future generations rather than accepting that the broader problem requires a more comprehensive raft of societal changes. It is a clear example of one rule for children and another for adults. While overweight adults are celebrated on reality TV shows with makeovers and large amounts of prize money, children are left to begin dieting in primary school, thinking that the fault lies with them, all the while being primary targets for excessive amounts of junk food advertising. For some children, the very fear of becoming overweight or obese, whether it comes from their parents or peers or simply from living in a society where physical perfection is mandatory for social acceptance, is itself enough to cause great problems in their ability to develop healthy eating patterns. And certainly, children growing up in families where excessive attention to dieting, weight loss and body image has the potential to skew a child’s relationship with body and food face a great challenge. While we develop solutions like healthier school lunches, walking school buses and children’s ‘weight’ report cards (which can serve to further stigmatise and shame overweight children), we neglect to address other social factors that greatly influence children’s weight and health. To name but a few, the factors seldom addressed in our considerations of obesity include: overwhelming cultural emphasis on ‘perfect’ bodies, increasing acceptance of ‘body shaping’ plastic surgery, unhealthy lifestyles, consumption of fast or processed, pre-prepared food in preference to meals prepared with fresh produce, fears around letting children walk anywhere alone, and car-dependent communities. And these factors all contribute greatly to the problem of obesity. Our willingness to place the problem of obesity squarely in the realm of childhood means that the positive messages delivered by childhood health professionals are not adequately getting through. The problem is articulated in media sound bytes and

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simplified statistics that refuse to acknowledge the complexity of the problem, which in fact has less to do with weight and more to do with our consumer culture and tendency towards doing things in a way that requires as little energy expenditure as possible. We want remote-controlled everything so we don’t have to move two steps. The information on living a healthy lifestyle is out there, but we really aren’t that interested in hearing it because it means more work for adults. We’d have to go and exercise with our children, we’d have to cook healthy meals rather than call for takeaway. Parents are not supported to do these things. The New South Wales Department of Health has some great messages on their website19: •

• • • •

Plan for healthy snacks and provide healthy options such as fresh fruit and vegetables instead of snacks that are high in fat, sugars, and low in essential nutrients. Avoid the use of food as either a reward, or withholding as a punishment. Plan to eat home-cooked meals together as a family as often as possible. Discourage eating meals or snacks while watching TV. Encourage children to eat a healthy breakfast as a good way to start the day.

These suggestions do not stigmatise, and are good health messages for all people. Yet these messages fall through the gaps of a society that refuses to challenge the ideas of perfection and imperfection in childhood. All children are imperfect and fallible. During their crucial developmental years, children suffer under the weight of a hyperattentive focus on everything they do. They do not need the scrutiny of a culture that wants them to refrain from throwing tantrums, wetting their pants or eating when their body tells them to eat. Children deserve the chance to develop in their own way: not subject to the social pressures of a society that wants them to be Shirley Temple-perfect.

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Imperfect children? There are no imperfect children, and there are no perfect ones either. There are children; and if they are ours, we love them to bits. An analysis of the imperfect childhood helps to highlight the many myths we have created in our idolising of children. The more we have culturally imposed the idea that parents are blindly besotted and unaware of their children’s faults, the more parents have accepted the myth and worked to make it a reality. Our hype around childhood has seen the development of industries to support the ‘special gifts’ that each child has: babies attend special swimming classes and listen to classical music to stimulate their brain connections. Toddlers can choose anything from their local play centre to early reading classes or musically focused playgroups. As children grow, there is any number of advanced maths, language, sporting or artistic activities that can make them that extra bit more perfect than the next child. We impose on our kids extraordinary demands that do not make childhood any more enjoyable, simply because we believe it will prepare them for the cutthroat world of achieve-at-all-costs. We want children to be perfect, because that is what childhood is supposed to be. But the idealised years of innocence and simplicity are rose-coloured, and simply not useful for adults who need to support the development of our children through all their mistakes and failures, as well as their successes and achievements. This leaves those children who don’t meet the expectations set out by society in a state of non-recognition. The ‘imperfects’ are invisible. Children with a disability, children in detention, children who rebel or cry too much are not valued because they challenge our notions of childhood perfection. Yet these imperfect children are a reminder that our fantasies of childhood are just that: fantasies. Their presence reminds us that all of our children are ‘gifted’ and ‘limited’, and very few will be geniuses, sporting heroes or world-famous artists.

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We may marvel at the achievements of footballer Sam Carpenter, but he just goes out and plays the game simply because that is what he wants and enjoys. In not subjecting them to our stifling levels of idolatry, children are free to develop without the expectations of perfection. And consequently, they are the better for it.

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Chapter 10 When I’m 64: Neglecting the wisdom of age

No matter how old we live to be To be old is not a sin but just another part of life To live in full hope and truth Mr Mike Hancock, UK Liberal Democratic and Reformer’s Group

So much to learn My grandfather is a farmer. Despite finishing his working life in the city because the physical work took its toll on his back, he will always be a farmer. He is descended from a long line that turned soil in rural Victoria’s Alexandra region for nearly a century. In suburban Reservoir, he practised his trade in a vegetable patch that I recall was as big as a football ground: of course, my childhood memory magnified its actual size. The vegie patch didn’t lend itself to ball sports. I remember the secrecy with which we had to retrieve cricket balls and footballs that landed in rows of carrots. Our footprints in the disturbed soil gave us away every time. My grandfather would explain that disturbing the roots would mean the carrots would not grow. He tried to impart his love of the soil, the sun and growing fresh

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produce to eat. Depending on his mood, he sometimes grumbled or yelled at us too. His love of growing things must have appeared lost on a bunch of boys and girls who ran back to their fielding positions with only the thought of when it was their turn to bat. Yet, something in his words continues to resonate within me. Five years ago, I started growing basil on the windowsill of an inner city flat. Early last spring, my wife and I nursed over 70 tomato seedlings. But I am yet to master the art of growing carrots. I muse with my grandfather over vegetable gardening. I can admire his fine crops with a new appreciation, the way he instinctively knows when and how to prune his lemon tree. I admire his stories about the scepticism that his farming community had of superphosphate, of his small experiments and the sheer astonishment and joy when the damn stuff worked wonders. My relationship with him is one among many in our family: he has nine children and over 30 grandchildren besides me. Still, it is important. We see each other infrequently, but from him I have learnt about respect and dignity. Sitting alongside him, editing the Honour Roll of his World War II unit has taught me humility. He read the names of those who had died in the past year, and I typed them in. It has taken me a step closer to appreciating his mortality, even if still denying my own. As I grow older, I am learning to treasure these moments. I watch my own children engage with my parents or grandparents and understand how little I know, and how much they have to teach us. It is a personal realisation and one that a society obsessed with childhood and youth doesn’t celebrate anywhere near often enough. In life’s continuum, we start with birth and childhood and end with old age and death. It is a linear progression, but not a race. It is a journey I am not even halfway through. I can’t claim to have the benefit of experience, the wisdom of hindsight or an appreciation of what it means to have a better view of the finish line, with the echo of the starter’s gun long gone.

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Still, in a book that aims to address in some small way the problems of idolising childhood and youth, I can’t ignore the importance of our elders. In fact, if we really valued our children, we would spend much more time fostering our images of older generations. Because in respecting and honouring older people, children can learn how they too should be treated. In this final chapter, I hope to launch a discussion about how we should value every age and stage. In no way am I saying that childhood is unimportant. But we need to consider that if childhood is so important, maybe we need to place greater value on those who support children. Maybe we need to invest greater support and understanding in those who have the capacity to foster our children’s sense of history, and help them understand their part in the continuum of human life. Grandparents help to place us in our context. They are our connection to the past that, amid the acceleration of our modern world, can help to ground us. Generational opiners talk about the emerging generation of adults who don’t understand what it is to suffer hardship, and that may indeed be true. Yet there are people around us who can give them a sense of that. Our oral history still remains, and the collective memory of a generation can impart more than history books about depression and war, and surviving it. Our society does value older people. But too often it is linked only into ANZAC Day parades and obituaries. While ANZAC parades rightly concentrate our focus on the particular event of war  the sense of honour and tragedy  the commentary invariably discusses the fragile physical state and dwindling numbers of World War veterans. While the effect is unintentional, it reinforces an image of ageing that contrasts negatively with images of childhood and youth. But as Mike Hancock’s quote asserts, age is not a sin. It is another stage of life in the continuum, and one well worth celebrating. Rather than just continuing to focus on the images of these servicemen and women as a fading part of our collective history, why isn’t there more reflection on where

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they have been and what they have done since then? How else have they contributed to their communities? What else did they learn? How fascinating has their journey been?

Children f irst? If we’re talking about where the journey of all our lives begins, then children certainly come first. But this isn’t what people talk about when they use the phrase ‘children first’. They are talking about where we need to invest our resources, and how we need to structure our society. It is becoming the key message of this millennium. It can be found in UNICEF’s document, A world fit for children. It is the message of all early childhood advocacy organisations. It is what the Victorian government calls its ‘early childhood policy’. We are called to ‘put children first’, in order to give them the ‘best start’. But in doing this, we may be subtly isolating children and childhood from its place within our communities. Through misinterpretations of the importance of childhood development, children are finding themselves spending more and more time with their peers in childcare, school and extra-curricular activities, and less time occupying their own space alongside their companions in the adult world. The ‘best start’ isn’t just about spending time in good quality childcare. It means a balance in learning to spend time alone, developing relationships with neighbours or extended families, and spending time building intergenerational relationships. This is why I prefer the United Nations’ 1999 message during the Year for Older Persons: ‘Towards a society for all ages’. Children and young people are important. They are in a crucial stage of their development. But we have lost important perspectives on the continuum of human life. We’re not putting children first: we are putting them on a pedestal. They are standing on the gold medal dais and everyone else has finished joint-last.

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In her recent book Motherhood, author and social commentator Anne Manne contemplates this in terms of maternal feminism. She argues that if we want to support early childhood development, we also need to support those most crucial to children’s development at that time: their mothers. I would further this argument to extend our concern to all of those who make a contribution to a child’s development. So rather than just mothers, we could include fathers, aunts, cousins, grandparents, neighbours and more. And children would be far better off. Rather than whisking children off to dancing, swimming and music lessons, we need to appreciate that children may learn just as much spending an afternoon pottering around with their grandparents; just spending time in the house of someone else who loves them a lot, watching and observing different dynamics and interactions, and gaining further confidence about the way they can relate to the world they inhabit. A society that really valued childhood would be a society of all ages, where generations supported each other, and interacted far more frequently across generational boundaries. Its citizens would identify and support generational strengths and weaknesses, and a more diverse variety of roles would emerge to support intergenerational relationships. But in Western culture, this is not the case.

Extending families According to demographer Peter MacDonald, Australians have never really embraced the idea of extended family members living in a shared household. ‘Australian studies tend to confirm that 19th century households were nuclear,’ he says, and there is ‘[an] almost total absence of extended family households among Australians born in Australia’.1 The extended family, however, has always existed in the coming together for reunions and celebration. In Australia, the extended family might not have a history of shacking up in the

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same house, but they certainly have a history of being part of a closely linked network. However, because of our focus on the nuclear family and the rise of individualism, MacDonald asserts that in Australia we have a lot of control over how we define our own families. Still, in many ways, the extended family household is more resilient and versatile than the nuclear family household. True, it is probably more complex to manage and requires greater levels of compromise than the nuclear family or the increasing numbers of single-person households. However, the versatility of extended families stems from increased numbers in the household, from a greater capacity to share the load. Of course, the alternative living movement continues to experiment with different communal living arrangements, with varying degrees of success. But extended family households have in no way touched the mainstream. In fact, we are heading in the other direction. Figures from the Property Council of Australia indicate that single-person households are on the rise: by 2031 they will be the dominant household type. Since 1991, the percentage of extended families remains at one per cent of the total of household types. The same data projects that nuclear family households are on the decline, most likely due to declining birthrate. 2 However, predicting future trends is difficult, and varies according to the source. Commentator Bernard Salt points out that most of these single-person households will be comprised of an older widow. However, if this prediction holds true, as does MacDonald’s assertion that we have greater control on how we define our families, single households may not be as dominant in our culture because in the future more parents may return to live with their children and grandchildren. The likelihood of this happening is yet to be revealed. So entrenched is our individualism in Western culture that there is often great resistance and scepticism towards the idea of living in more communal arrangements. Indeed, our governing

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systems support such resistance. Consider the banking sector’s capacity to offer loans to those wanting to buy into a co-housing arrangement. Think of the impacts on social security payments if extended families were honest about their financial arrangements. Even tickets to the zoo or football match limit our definition of family to a very narrow band. However, consider the changes that have occurred with young Australians remaining at home with their parents for longer. If we consider levels of home ownership across generations, the future capacity of our tax base to provide adequate services to older people, and ongoing debates about development in metropolitan Australia, possibilities do exist for a rise in the number of extended family households. An increase in extended family households could help to recognise the valuable contributions made by all household and community members right across the age spectrum. As the operators of Rosneath Farm in Western Australia identify, an extended family living arrangement could hold many benefits: The family needs some income, and multiple sources of income within an extended family can share the financial load, so particular members don’t have to spend so much time away at work, which limits their time together. Work at home is needed to maintain the family and its productive and protective systems. Many can be involved in different aspects of this work, from very young to very old.3

This sentiment reflects a return to psychotherapist E James Anthony’s idea of the ‘continuum of vulnerability’. No matter our age, we all have a certain level of vulnerability, and a certain capacity to cope. 4 Coping by ourselves will always be more difficult than coping with a broad support network around us. And in this model, we must not assume it will always be an older person supporting a younger person to cope. Children and young people, too, have the capacity to provide support. The invention of a less isolated family structure is one way to begin changing our systems to give us greater access to the benefits

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of each age group. Rather than just letting grandparents act as a form of free childcare, we can enjoy greater benefits in giving more time to let relationships develop and strengthen between all generations. And in doing so, we allow children and young people to find a broader sense of their place, and the value of mutual respect and support across the generational divide. This is vital if we are to give greater emphasis to the value and challenges of ageing. However, in our current societal environment, rather than working with it we are spending increasing amounts of energy in trying to battle it.

Our aversion to ageing Ageing appears to have become optional in Western society. With all the apparent solutions provided by ‘skincare’ companies and cosmetic surgery, you can keep yourself looking young and fresh if you’re appropriately cashed up and don’t like the idea of sagging. And, some say, once you start, you can’t stop. For those who can afford it, cosmetic surgery is just a new form of make-up. And for those who can’t, a growing number of reality TV shows are prepared to show you what it could do for you, and document your ‘journey’ in the process. However, ‘Extreme Makeover’ and similar programs only further instil in our culture a desire to defeat the ageing process, and a fear of looking anything but perfect. While the programs aren’t specifically about identifying older people and making them look younger, the beauty they promote is clearly aimed at looking more youthful. Only, the surgery isn’t just a ‘nip and tuck’. The language we associate with cosmetic surgery is specifically constructed to minimise fear. The words ‘nip and tuck’ make a face-lift, which in reality involves the slicing and pulling of skin, sound like it’s simply making a bed. But along with the cutting of skin, the increase in acceptability of cosmetic

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surgery is actually cutting way below the surface, and into the self-esteem and ego of people as they begin to show the natural  and sometimes unnatural  processes of ageing. In continuing to bombard ourselves with seductive and celebratory images of youth, we are eliminating any appreciation of the beauty of ageing bodies. Magazines show us the smooth and pucker-free skin of celebrities Cher or Sharon Stone and we talk about ‘how well they look after themselves’. If we accepted the truth, without surgical intervention, they’d look very different. They would look older. They’d have wrinkles. And, unfortunately, they’d also struggle to maintain careers in our current youthobsessed culture. Our aversion to the ageing process is an overt example of our obsession with the cultural construction of youthful beauty. It can be called the ‘wrinkle effect’. It is played out on the cover of every women’s magazine, in the make-up chair of every TV newsreader and in the expansive floors and immaculate counters of cosmetics and ‘skin care’ in major department stores. Every day we receive a myriad of messages conveying the value of a youthful body and youthful beauty which, in turn, influence the way we perceive ageing. Public perceptions of growing older are trivial and condescending. Stereotypes of older citizens are prevalent. The wisdom and experience of age is trivialised by dusty images of blue rinse grandmothers, lawn bowls, cups of tea and gardening. And those stereotypes further paint the positive aspects of ageing with a brush of invisibility. Instead of celebrating the beauty of wrinkles, the value of wisdom gained through experience and the capacity to teach and share, older people are defined by the absence of youthfulness. Our simple images of age focus on loss of physical strength, the limitations on access, and changes in external features. An exception, instigated for its novelty and potential to raise money, is the spate of nude fundraising calendars featuring naked older men and women as the monthly subjects. It is certainly a

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new take on the beauty of ageing, inspired in part by the movie The Full Monty. Small as it may be, the increased presence and general acceptance of images of naked older men and women across Australia and Britain proves that a shift can indeed occur in our cultural views of what is beautiful. In any case, it certainly serves as a return shot at useless dichotomies that reinforce our idolising of youth, and our rejection of ageing. Youth is beautiful; ageing is ugly. Youth is full of energy; ageing is about being tired and wasted. Youth is radical; ageing is conservative. We use these established cultural ideas to form judgments about each other based on our age. And ultimately, it means we don’t look forward to the challenges of each new year as we grow older because each birthday is one year further away from the age we revere as most important.

Thinking about the ageing process An older workmate once explained to me that his fear of ageing is also about mourning. He feels a sense of loss at the passing of the energy of his youth, and all the things it allowed him to do. His feelings are real and true. However, they are also a result of how we construct our culture. We all feel a sense of loss as we age, and this is reasonable. What is unreasonable is the dominating effect this sense of loss has in our culture of youth obsession. Just as we lose, we also gain: the older we get, the more we learn and experience. Older citizens have much wisdom to share; wisdom gained from experience and reflection. Yet our society chooses not to celebrate this. There is no marketing strategy that upholds the gains we achieve in old age. Government-funded advertising to Australia’s elders is focused on keeping good health, exercising and doing everything we can to help stave off a mad rush for hospital beds. As we head towards an age where we need more regular servicing

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from our GP, our better health is in the interests of government. But even this type of health promotion continues to place greater value on youthful activity: on the physical and active rather than the intellectual and contemplative. Yet those are the things we gain as we age. Those are things our culture needs to celebrate. The phrase ‘youth is wasted on the young’ is wrong on two counts. It is wrong in the sense that nothing is wasted on anyone. Young people are learning and going through their own life journey. It is also wrong because it flies in the face of the reality that we can’t be both old and young. Ageing is wasted on older people if all they want is to relive their youth. If we had a powerful industry to promote positive ageing, one that upheld the virtues of wisdom, understanding and reflection, we may have a greater chance of valuing all generations. These comments are not intended to undervalue the enjoyment many older people will gain from being fit and active, nor to criticise those who prefer to enjoy a life of leisure in retirement or who will not be interested in sharing their experiences. Despite the complex nature of any generation, if we spent as much energy on thinking about how we value older people as we do childhood, we would find that instead of placing greater emphasis on particular human life stages, we would focus more on the relationships that exist between them. Intergenerational studies, while only now emerging as an important area of academic thought, need far greater attention. If relationships between generations held greater esteem than childhood and youth, imagine how our support systems would look.

Out with ageing stereotypes Demographer Bernard Salt suggests that as the baby-boomers enter their next stage, the stereotypes of older people will be thrown out. ‘[B]oomers will also outlaw terms like “retired”, “old” and the downright offensive “senior citizen”.’5

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However, the rejection of stereotypes is unlikely to be replaced by positive and valuable images of age. Instead, we are more likely to continue the adoption of youth images, and apply them to people in even older age brackets. Just as the concept of ‘mid-life crisis’ attempted to reinvent youth with sports cars, younger partners and responsibility-free lifestyles, we shall see that the re-creation of images of energised and youthful elders will fail to thwart the ageing process. Salt recognises that baby-boomers will be the healthiest and wealthiest people in the history of Western society to enter their sixties. They will continue to swim, run and ride. The images of age will be that ‘age is no barrier’, and that youth as a lifestyle choice can continue until you die. However, more positive and less pressured images could be generated if older generations chose to adopt a greater mentoring role; if they reflected on their lives and the changes they have seen, and used their wisdom and experience to guide new generations in their decisions. This would help us to see our lives as an ongoing process of development. This is a role many of us should take very seriously, as we grow older. Many people seek ways to support and foster new generations in trade-apprenticeship relationships, within family relationships and community organisations.

The future of the wise In the publication Ageing Australia, authors Foster and Thomas make the assertion that ‘[c]urrent projections reveal that by 2025 there will be fewer Australians aged under 20 than there will be aged 60 to 80 years. By 2050, there is expected to be only 2.1 workers for every person over 65.’6 This statistic is in line with most projections. Australia’s current Treasurer, Peter Costello, has been quoted as saying ‘demography is destiny’. And our destiny is an ageing society. Older people will only become a more significant demographic.

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Don Edgar, has announced that ‘[o]lderagers are here to stay’.7 Edgar, along with many others, discusses the need for Australians to work longer and stop thinking about an end-point to their working life. Instead, we should accept that there is value in continuing to make a commitment to the workforce. On the surface, this idea strikes many of us with dread. It cuts at one of the core beliefs promoted by our social systems: we work hard for 40 or 50 years, and then get to relax and enjoy life in our retirement. Except, as the average life expectancy increases, this mode of social operation is becoming more difficult to depend upon. When life expectancy was averaging less than 70 years, enjoying life was like a short and blissful coda. However, as we head towards an average life expectancy of 80 years of age, we are confronted with a whole new social grouping. The concept of work that Edgar has in mind is very different from what our initial assumptions may be. And these may not be as off-putting as we first think. Our existing concept of work is very much shaped by remaining ideas that the energy of youth makes for more vibrant and productive workers. The fact that work continues to become a more sedentary affair, requiring more brain time than brawn time, means this idea of work is further becoming irrelevant. Edgar identifies that we devalue the work of older employees because of Western cultural assumptions. Those assumptions have to do with our idolising of youth, and lack of positive images of ageing. He says we assume that ‘only younger workers are productive and only they drive the economy’, and that ‘older people will become dependent and thus a drain on national resources’.8 However, older workers can be adaptable, and fit within the new roles that could be created to improve the capacity of companies and government. Edgar’s assertion, that this role should be an educational and mentoring one, makes sense.9 Roles that foster intergenerational relationships allow people at both ends of the spectrum to share their ideas, and grow from challenging each other. This is one way we can provide older people with a positive view of the attributes they have developed. Some aspects of their

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youth may have diminished, such as their physical capacity and endurance, but they still have much to offer. This is exactly what British think-tank Demos has promoted in its document analysing baby-boomers in the United Kingdom. It, too, has identified the idolisation of youth, and argues that a shift in our perception of ageing is required. It is a paradox of our ageing society that many of us seem increasingly obsessed with the idea of youth. If baby boomers are to be at ease with themselves, we conclude, they need to fortify themselves with a story about the benefits of ageing. Rather than regressing to its youth, our ageing society might do well to reclaim some of the benefits of growing older: wisdom, finesse and accumulated experience.10

It’s not just about the old notion of respecting your elders. It’s a notion of respecting everyone. This is about not valuing childhood at the expense of valuing the process of ageing.

Endangered intergenerational relationships Grandfather Team Henderson loves to take his grandchildren on adventures: trips on the train, walks in the bush, a day at the zoo. On these adventures he tells stories, shares his understanding of the world and together the children and their grandfather build on their relationships. Team captures these events in photographs and uses the pictures, with accompanying short stories, to make books from excursions he takes with his grandchildren. In doing this, he isn’t just capturing the event but also the relationship they share. He gives it a life beyond a time when he will no longer be around. I have no doubt these storybooks will form a strong part of that family’s history. It is an aspect of the family history that in future may be

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rare. If we look back to the statistics on birth rates and fertility decision-making, we can see a picture unfold of future society. If birth rates continue to shrink, and parenthood remains delayed, we will endanger our intergenerational relationships. It is happening now, and it won’t be easy to reverse. The average age of first-time parents is now over 30 for both men and women. If this is maintained or continues to rise, a majority of us won’t become grandparents until our sixties or seventies. Indeed, this trend is already exposing itself. My own parents became grandparents before they turned fifty. And just as I was an anomaly among my peers as a 24-yearold first-time father, so my parents were out of the box as young grandparents. They are both from large Catholic families, from a part of society and an era when this was not unusual. Yet of all their friends and siblings from those days, they remain the only grandparents. Of course, our life expectancy is also increasing, and most of us can look forward to living into our eighties, which provides ample time for grandchildren to be born and relationships to develop. However, the nature of those relationships, and the form and function of our intergenerational relationships will be changed. It is also more than likely that with fewer children born and parenting delayed, fewer people will become grandparents. It follows that as children become scarcer, so do parents and grandparents. A child born to a 35-year-old mother, who then doesn’t have a child until she herself is 35 years old, will experience decreased opportunities of developing strong intergenerational relationships. Being a first-time grandparent at 70 will certainly be a different experience from becoming a grandparent at fifty. What is the significance of this delay on the concept of the extended family? What would a generation look like with fewer intergenerational contacts? We have not even commented on the role of great-grandparent: yet they are the most endangered members of the intergenerational line. Our society has shifted to a more individualised and isolated

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one. As we further embrace this culture of individualism, we become more disconnected. This may not always be reflected in the ‘alternative family’, as there are many fine examples of strengthened peer relationships in the face of delayed or unexercised parenthood. In many instances, friendships have become the core model of connection and emotional dependence. The connections we lose, however, are those connections between generations. In removing the possibility for intergenerational relationships with grandparents and great-grandparents, we are losing deeper understandings of our life cycle and humanity. For a child to miss the experience of an active and interested grandparent is more than a sad event. It is a social disaster. Grandparents are the historians of families. They pass on knowledge to younger generations, and in doing so help form the identity of the succeeding generations. Grandparents are mentors and role models. They provide a family with cohesion and provide us with a perspective of what is to come in the journey of our lives. An Indian writer for the Bharat Times has been observing changes in her society. Where once grandparents lived with their children and grandchildren, as India develops, this cultural practice is changing. She believes many people see spending time with grandparents as ‘a dent in [a child’s] precious time – precious time to add more skills to one’s kitty while preparing oneself for the career orientated and immensely competitive world.’11 She identifies that intergenerational relationships are fundamental to human development. Indeed, she argues that if a child is to develop holistically, then connection with older members of their family and community is vital. She puts it squarely in the realm of cohabitation; something most of us would never consider: It is necessary for parents and their children to cohabit with the elderly in the family. Such a family falls into a natural age hierarchy that nurtures and teaches all of us. It is an equation, which not only saves the old from loneliness but also does a world of good to our own social and mental health.12

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If we can set aside the thought of continuing to put up with our parents on a daily basis, the idea of cohabitation with an extended family makes a lot of sense: more hands on deck to help prepare meals, support children to develop and bring a wide variety of perspectives to any situation. We may argue we have moved on from this model in our pursuit of a more individualised society, but what do those promoting individualism think? Executive Director of the Institute of Public Affairs, John Roskam, recently gave an address where he questioned whether this may not be a model to use as we look to the future. Roskam asked about the capacity of our aged care services, and how we might react to future demographic issues. His case-in-point was a local council’s refusal to grant planning permits for houses with two-car garages. Roskam suggested that in the future, with the potential of extended families increasing, households may indeed require more than two cars. While the data suggests that more of us will be living alone, data doesn’t shape society. It only gives us a glimpse of narrow possibilities. In the future, it may become more economically practical to live in bigger extended-family households. In doing so, we would be introducing our children to the daily love and wisdom of their grandparents, along with new sources of discipline and a range of differing expectations. We underestimate the impact that limiting our contact with grandparents may have on our society. In a society obsessed with youth culture, we almost completely ignore the significant role played by older generations.

A society for all ages The overarching challenge for us in these complex times, it seems, is finding balance. In a world moving so rapidly, we struggle to find answers in debates about work and life balance, let alone generational balance. But that is what we need.

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The future of our children doesn’t rest in the hands of governments, or politicians making decisions about what programs require funding. It doesn’t lie with the people who run our children’s services or what values they think should be imparted to our children. The future of our children won’t be found in hospital birthing suites or paediatric wards, though all of these things contribute to the shaping of the society we live in. Healthy, happy and capable human beings evolve through their relationships with significant others. And if we want to promote a better society for children, we need to help foster those relationships. This means creating an image of childhood and images of every age and stage of life that support and nurture their relationships with one another. It is not enough for us all to ensure we care for children; we need to all care for and support each other. We must move towards a society for all ages. To do so would help take the heat off overburdened and overstressed parents, and become a basis from which we can begin to talk about the responsibility we all have to children: not just our own but all children in our communities. Looking at how we live together and how we regard the relationships in our extended families will help us to support the development of our children in new and different ways. A society for all ages would not put all the pressure and most of the blame on parents for their children’s upbringing. Instead, it would put us all in the picture of children’s lives. And it is in that way we can begin to look at children not just as children but also as fellow human beings who deserve to be treated just as we would like to be treated.

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Conclusion Honouring, not idolising?

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. Kahlil Gibran

Child honouring Raffi Cavoukian is a children’s troubadour, author and ecology advocate. In the 1970s, the aspiring musician found his calling writing a few songs on guitar for children at a kindergarten. He has dedicated his life to entertaining, enjoying life with and advocating for the rights of children. His relationship with his audience is based on respect, which he calls ‘child honouring’. It is a powerful new image of childhood and youth for our times: one that suggests a new way of regarding childhood that could also serve as an antidote for the issues of today. He says: Child Honouring is a corrective lens that, once we look through it, allows us to question everything from the way

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Idolising children we measure economic progress to our stewardship of the planet; from our physical treatment of children to the corporate impact on their minds and bodies; from unthinking consumerism to factory schooling. It offers a proactive developmental approach to creating sustainable societies. As a creed that crosses all faiths and cultures, Child Honouring can become a potent remedy for the most challenging issues of our time.1

Raffi argues that if we honoured children, we would give all children the best opportunity to become adults in a world that was itself honoured by us. In doing this, we would find our approaches to poverty, environment and affluence changed radically. If we truly valued the importance of each child, we would be more proactive in eliminating children’s exposure to deprived circumstances. If we valued the development of children, we would not be leaving them with a world so environmentally degraded. I like the term child honouring. It is the exact opposite of child idolising. To honour somebody is to respect the core of a human being, to treat him or her with dignity and respect. To idolise is to worship the superficial exterior of a person, to expose someone to expectations they can’t meet, and lead them into being perceived as perfect when they are not. Idolising children refers to the way we falsely put children in a place where they don’t belong, a place they can’t handle and don’t deserve to be. Honouring children is about respect and dignity. It places neither adult nor child in a situation of power over the other. Instead, it asks that we all acknowledge everyone’s stage of development and place in the human continuum. A society that honoured children would respect all children’s, and in fact, all people’s human rights. The importance of looking after and supporting each other’s growth and development would be paramount. And this would not comprise the focus on productivity that pervades today’s society. The growth would be holistic: about the emotional and spiritual, alongside the material and physical.

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Advocating for and with children Australia hasn’t turned its back on children. I think the ongoing development of government programs and continued debates over childcare and parenting indicate we are all interested in supporting children as best we can. But we do seem to have lost sight of why children matter. It is not fair to say that we don’t care about children: we clearly do. However, what we are losing in our rapidly changing world is the ability to nurture very core parts of our humanity. In the ever-quickening pace and anxietydriven nature of our society, we are at a loss to foster that in our children. We have not lost sight of the importance of childhood and youth. But we have distorted what is really important. We have evolved into a market-driven society where work and income are dominant, and this has hamstrung our ability to cater to the needs of children that we are told must be met. There is a significant problem faced by those advocating the best interests of children: the message that childhood advocates deliver is often drowned out by their justifications for improving the lives of children. Author Anne Manne refers to this as ‘groupthink’. She details an experience in a workshop she attended, held by the federal government, called ‘Closed Workshop on Non Parental Childcare’. In a two-day discussion, despite some participants questioning the complex nature of supporting early childhood development, the ‘mob mentality’ of intellectuals drowned out any detailed debate about what was really in the best interests of children. ‘One early childhood professor went ballistic even at the suggestion of paid parental leave  since it implied that not all childcare was ideal. Others were outraged at the admission of negative evidence because “it made parents feel guilty”,’2 she writes. Advocacy organisations like Australian Childhood Foundation present an image of representing the best interests of children.

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And while they do have strong opinions and ideas that we should regard highly, they also come from a strong welfare and child protection advocacy model. Their primary interest is child abuse and neglect, and supporting changes for the most vulnerable children in our society. This means they also have the capacity to perpetuate our fears about the dangers to children, and reinforce old images of childhood innocence and vulnerability. They create a clear power structure where they are advocating for, but not with, children. Their work is clearly dominated by the idea that children are threatened by a predatory adult world and it is their role to protect them. Another aspect of the problem is that services and funding for children’s services are driven by this fear: parental fear, but also political fear. Government departments responsible for children, and their ministers, are forced through media representations of children who have been kidnapped, abused or murdered to allocate most of their funding to a risk management approach. There is value in this for children at risk, but it means that the broader, positive family support and community building activities are not adequately provided for financially, and for all the rhetoric are not being given the chance to succeed. This approach does not fit comfortably within a childhonouring framework. It still removes the voices of children and doesn’t give them enough capacity to advocate for their own rights, or equip them with the skills and networks to speak out about the abuse they suffer. A world where we honoured children would deliver a message to children telling them adults are here to listen to your concerns and issues. Instead, children see the adult world as simultaneously protecting them and abusing them, while they remain silent. Our society still regards children as vulnerable. Anne Manne calls it the ‘myth of the resilient child’. And, many of us prefer to believe it is a myth and we don’t recognise that beyond extreme examples of abuse and trauma, the average child is capable of supporting its own development and dealing with

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certain amounts of stress, especially with adequate supports. If children couldn’t do this, we’d be seeing far greater numbers of dysfunctional adults than we already do. On the whole, our communities still function quite well. We may fall for ideas of children as innocent and precious, but we do so urged on by hundreds of parenting books telling us how to raise our children because of the indelible fear that we will make some kind of mistake. The truth is, every day we make mistakes raising our children or caring for others’ children. And in the main, it has minimal  if any  impact on their lives and the people they become. Those advocating for childhood and youth must continue to do so. The core of their argument is right: we need a childcentred society, but it must be a certain type of child-centred society. Instead of idolising children, we must honour them. This means advocating with children, rather than just for children. It means listening to them and responding appropriately. Adults will always have more power than children, so it is up to adults to work hard at getting it right. This isn’t easy, especially for welfare organisations working with groups of the most disadvantaged and marginalised in our society. The shift we require is a large one, but we are gradually making it, and placing more power in the hands of those who are disempowered by the systems that control our lives. Focusing on those children in our society who need the most support is crucial. The edges of our communities are where most gains can be made. And bridging social and economic inequalities is an important way to build a society that honours children. However, as we go about this work we need to be aware of the broader impact it can have on our general ideas and images about children and young people. We must create and sustain positive images of the way society supports children’s development. We need to uphold and champion not just those who protect children but also those who respect them and support them to thrive.

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Championing the honourers of childhood In his essay ‘In Search of a Civilised Life’, writer John Armstrong suggests that chef and celebrity Jamie Oliver champions the concept of treating people with respect. ‘His [Oliver’s] success was founded on his obvious regard and respect for children,’ Armstrong claims.3 Rather than harp on about growing concerns for childhood obesity, Oliver targeted the problem’s origins: that in fact childhood obesity might be the symptom of the problem, and the cause lay in the systems that feed children. Armstrong says that Oliver’s aim was to ‘entice’ children to eat healthy food, and this may be part of the solution. The greater effort and success, however, was in the way Oliver held government and adults to account. He asked them to question why they were allowing their children’s health to be compromised by corporations pedalling cheap junk food. A stark example was Oliver’s desire to replace processed food like ‘chicken twists’ and ‘powdered mash potato’ with real chicken drumsticks and fresh vegetables. He showed respect for children: he honoured their health and wellbeing not by pointing his finger at their collective weight but by fighting for and gradually with them to create better food systems to serve them. The problem, as I have argued throughout this book, wasn’t children or parents  but the systems that govern and influence their lives. Oliver is an example of shifting the focus from idolising to honouring. He wasn’t seeking perfectly slim children. He was simply trying to excite them about food, pass on his own wisdom and in doing so, asking children and all of us to question what we put in our mouths and how much we enjoy it. For Oliver, the problem isn’t childhood obesity; it is our society’s lack of connection with its food systems, and the preparation of healthy and sustaining meals. Plan Australia, part of an international aid and development organisation, was a key partner in the Melbourne 2006

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Commonwealth Games. It has adopted a child-centred approach when it works with communities. This approach encompasses Raffi’s concept of child honouring, and stands as an example of how organisations can operate in a way that respects children and young people. In February 2005, on Australian radio network Radio National, Plan Australia’s Chair Wendy McCarthy talked about a rebuilding project her organisation was completing in Sri Lanka, after the 2004 Asian tsunamis. The rebuilding project had incorporated Plan Australia’s philosophy by asking children what they would like to see in their newly constructed villages, and incorporating those ideas. The results of consultation with children were stark. Adults in the community wanted their new houses built out of asbestos sheeting created in a factory where many locals were employed. But the children had a preference for more traditional brick houses. This is an active example of how children’s intuition, as yet untainted by the power and influence of economics, can act in the interests of not just their own health but that of their communities and the environment. Children also expressed an interest in chimneys, because they didn’t like living in smokefilled houses. They also wanted a separate space for themselves, where they could study and exist out of the constant supervision of adults: a small few square metres of the world they could call their own. 4 These requests are by no means extravagant. But they indicate just how important it is to honour children by listening to them, and actually thinking about and acting on what they say. Age is insignificant when human beings talk about what their needs are. International aid organisations are far better at consulting and working with children than governments and organisations in countries like Australia. We are not very good at respecting and incorporating the opinions of children into the development of legislation and projects. The Sydney Morning Herald uncovered a similar situation in

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education in the 2005 ‘The School I’d Like’ competition in which students were invited to have a say in how they’d like to see their school. According to the newspaper the project ‘revealed hundreds of students had little or no say in their schools, including subjects studied, learning styles and uniforms.’5 I think ‘hundreds’ is generous; I’d say ‘almost all’ students don’t get a say in those things. Most students who were involved identified the toilets as a major issue the conditions and design of toilets gave them little respect or dignity. They called for less formalised testing, in preference for team-driven problem solving, a more diverse and flexible curriculum and to get rid of those hard plastic school chairs and make classrooms more comfortable and inviting for learning. Closer to my home in central Victoria is the Maldon Coffee Shop. This delightful space has followed the route of many similar establishments and branched out beyond selling just coffee and cakes into a range of other items. Most notably at this shop is a range of unique, colourful and tactile toys, some of them handstitched. Mothers and fathers feel more than comfortable bringing their children here. Even though they still keep an eye on their children, they have a more relaxed opportunity to enjoy a coffee and talk, while their children can wander through the store, climb over old couches and play in small spaces with baskets of old toys. There are crayons and other things to keep children entertained. The vendors, themselves parents, encourage an environment where both staff and customers look out for children and work around them, rather than becoming annoyed and telling them to move. The toy shelves are at children’s eye-level, and if children pick up toys and play as if they were in their own house, no one tells them to put the toys down, scowls at them or treats them as a nuisance. The vendors respect that the work of children is play. They have identified that in itself, simply providing a ‘bubbacino’ isn’t enough to allow children to integrate into the coffee-shop experience. Their needs, too, must be catered for. And while the vendors of the Maldon Coffee Shop are unsure how long they

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can balance the demands of running a coffee shop and an active, growing family, they intend to ensure the environment they have created and its philosophy are passed on to new owners, whenever that may be. When people like the vendors of the Maldon Coffee Shop take their philosophy of honouring children into public spaces, both adults and children have a uniquely enjoyable experience. When we honour children, the benefits and positive ramifications are not just experienced by children. Whether it’s Western adults needing some extra time to talk over a coffee, or a whole Sri Lankan community whose long-term health benefits from children’s ideas on housing, when we listen and act on the needs of children, adults themselves are often the beneficiaries too.

Empowering ourselves to empower children In her book The continuum concept, author Jean Liedloff speaks eloquently of the capacity of babies to gradually unfold their systems in order to survive in the world: The shock [of birth] is absorbed … by mechanisms like high gamma globulin as protection against infection which decreases slowly enough for him to have begun to develop immunities, partial blindness … gives way gradually to full vision well after the birthday shock is past, and a general program of development which keys-in many aspects of his make up, such as reflexes, circulatory systems and hearing, before birth, and others, days, weeks or months afterwards including the stageby-stage coming into play of the parts of the brain.6

Historically, this in-built capacity combined with the intuition and understanding of parents, extended family and community has served us well in supporting children in their development to adulthood. So why have we begun to ignore our capacity as human networks to support one another? Instead of identifying that there are problems we are more than capable of addressing,

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why have we developed guilty, fearful and anxious responses about how poorly we are catering for our children’s needs? At a personal level, we are most often doing the very best we can. However, we have simply found ourselves at a point where the structure of our institutions is beginning to limit our ability to support our children and young people into intuitive, balanced and contented adulthood. Certainly, we can always do better. But there is no point feeling guilty or constantly fearing the worst for our children. We need to empower ourselves. In empowering ourselves, we will be better equipped to empower our children, to deliver them messages and experiences that will build their self-esteem and give them greater capacity to pursue their own development. Childhood and youth is still supposed to be fun, and so is adulthood. We are made to enjoy life. And we need to work towards thriving together, rather than just surviving. We can empower ourselves by placing greater value on relationships and less on material wealth. We can adjust our lifestyles in ways that will allow us to stop worrying about the mortgage and start thinking about spending more time in the park watching our children play. Watching children is very important. But we currently do it in the wrong context. We can observe our children with delight and gentle guidance instead of making it a chore of fearful, constant surveillance. We can watch children with deep interest and wonder at their development. We can value their development and feed it by applying the wisdom of our own observations. We can foster our children’s relationships with us, with each other and their community.

A f inal word The adult world needs to start showing some humility. For over a century, feminism has asked men to consider the impacts of male female power structures, and urged them to realise the mutual

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benefits to be gained from breaking them down. The concept of child honouring asks us to do the same with children. We must find ways of supporting children, setting boundaries and teaching them responsibility and the skills of life that are inclusive of their own opinions. We must respect that they possess emotional, spiritual and intellectual capacity, just as we do. And we must realise that every member of the community is charged with the role of raising our children. Childhood and youth is as challenging and testing a time as any other in a human life. But it is a process we have all been through, and survived. We should honour childhood, as we should honour every life stage. We should show a greater regard for our humanity and what it means to live a fulfilling life: from the very beginning, to the very end.

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Notes

Chapter 1 Childhood histories: Images, ideas and myths 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Aries, P (1962) part 1, conclusion Hendrick, H (1992) p. 4 Hendrick, H (1992) p. 1 Taylor, K (1988) Taylor, K (1988) p. 2 Acocella, J (2003) p. 7 Ochiltree, G (1990) p. 38 Furedi, F (2002) p. 58 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (2004) p. 35 Available at Available at Furedi, F (2002) p. 19 Furedi, F (2002) p. 36 Furedi, F (2002) p. 58 Zelizer, V (1985) p. 28 Gibson, S (director) (1998) Anthony & Cohler (eds) (1987) p. xi Manne, A (2005) pp. 166–67 Anthony, EJ (1987) p. 27 Anthony, EJ (1987) p. 23 Murphy, L (1987) p. 101

Chapter 2 The Peter Pan syndrome: Struggling to grow up 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Edgar, D (2005) pp. 8–9 Mackay, H (2006) p. 17 Klein, N (2000) pp. 74–76 See Heath, R (2006) pp. 168–69 Australian Bureau of Statistics (2005) Cat. No. 4102.0 Birrell, B cited in Faroque, F (2005), accessed online Weston et al. (2004) pp. 82–83 Australian Bureau of Statistics (2002) Cat. No. 4102.0 Boston Women’s Health Collective (1978) p. 187

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Notes to pages 62127 11 12 13

247

Woodard, A (2005), accessed online Carr-Gregg, M cited in Dapin, M (2006) p. 32 Robbins, A & Wilner, A (2001) p. 5

Chapter 3 In decline: Birth rates and fertility decisions 1

Fact Sheet 15. Produced by the Public Affairs Section, Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs. Revised on 22 January 2004 2 Salt, B (2005) p. 128 3 Australian Bureau of Statistics (2004) Cat. No. 3301.0 4 Stanley, Richardson & Prior (2005) p. 8 5 Longman, P (2006) p. 29 6 Richardson, S (2006), presentation 7 Weston et al. (2004) p. 85 8 Weston et al. (2004) p. 85 9 Singleton, A (2005) pp. 31–32 10 Available at 11 Tankard Reist, M (2005) 12 Tormey, S cited in Dunn & Noble (2005) p. 13 13 Manne, A (2003), accessed online 14 Cannold, L (2005) pp. 312–19 15 Murray-Smith, J (2005) p. 5 16 Boston Women’s Health Collective (1978) pp. 17–32 17 Boston Women’s Health Collective (1978) pp. 17–32 Chapter 4 Childcare: Parents, centres and community 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Hill, Dr E (2006) Biddulph, S cited in Albrechtsen, J (2006) p. 15 Gittens, R (2006) p. 19 Murray-Smith, J (2004) p. 18 Murray-Smith, J (2004) p. 18 Murray-Smith, J (2004) p. 18 Australian Bureau of Statistics (2003) Cat. No. 4402.0 MacDonald, P (2005) Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union (2005), press release Edgar, D (2005) p. 71 Edgar, D (2005) p. 71 Heckman, J (2004) p. 2 Heckman, J (2004) p. 4 Council of Australian Governments (2006) Vimpani, G (2006) Kidd, R (2005) p. 9

Chapter 5 The community as classroom: Educating children to learn 1 2 3 4 5

Liedloff, J (1975) p. 73 Edgar, D (2005) p. 71 Personal interview Mackay, H (2004), accessed online Carr-Gregg, M cited in Dapin, M (2006) p. 33

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248 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Notes to pages 129185

Donnelly, K cited in Dapin, M (2006) p. 38 Aitken, D (2005a) p. 2, available at Aitken, D (2005b) p. 2, available at Collins, R cited in Cadzow, J (2005) p. 26 Marsden, J cited in Bantick, C (2006), accessed online Bantick, C (2006), accessed online MCEETYA Taskforce on Transition from School (2003) Carr-Gregg, M cited in Edwards, H & Gough, D (2006), accessed online McGraw, K cited in Edwards, H & Gough, D (2006), accessed online Warner, D (2006), letters page

Chapter 6 Media and children: Improving a poor relationship 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Olds, T, Ridley, K & Dollman, J (2006) viewed 17 May Sternberg, J (2005) p. 25 Sternberg, J (2005) p. 25 Gooch, L (2005a) p. 9 Gooch, L (2005a) p. 9 Wyn, J & White, R (1997) p. 13 Centre for a New American Dream (2006) p. 8 Available at Edgar, P (2005), accessed online Personal interview See Young Media Australia Fact Sheets at Stepura, D cited in Kuzmenko, O (2004) Stepura, D cited in Kuzmenko, O (2004)

Chapter 7 Marketing children: Pre-teen supermodels and brand imprinting 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Gibson, S (director) (1998) Brooks, K (2005) p. 16 Brooks, K (2005) p. 16 Ostrow, R (2006) p. 31 Klein, N (2000) p. 5 Andrusiak, T (2005) p. 52 McNeal J & Yeh, C (1993) pp. 34–39 Centre for a New American Dream (2006) Centre for a New American Dream (1999) Holroyd, J (2005), accessed online Craik, C cited in Gooch, L (2005b), accessed online Dohnt, H cited in Dunn, A (2005), accessed online Albom, M (2001) Albom, M (2001)

Chapter 8 Keeping children safe: Walking to school in a society of strangers 1 2 3

Furedi, F (2002) p. 53 Eisenberg, A, Murkoff, H & Hathaway, S (1986) Brown, D & Endekov, Z (2005) p. 7

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Notes to pages 185 229

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4 5 6 7 8 9

Furedi, F (2002) p. 45 Brown, D & Endekov, Z (2005) p. 7 Furedi, F (2002) p. 46 Louv, R (2005) Finkelhor, D cited in Furedi, F (2002) p. 36 Department of Families and Community Services (nd), information brochure related to the National Agenda for Early Childhood 10 Hall, A (2005), accessed online 11 Rossmanith, A (1997) p. 171 12 Mogul, W (2001) 13 Personal interview 14 Personal interview 15 Marsden, J (2005) p. 77 16 Truglio, R cited in Carter, C (2005), accessed online

Chapter 9 The imperfect child: The hypocrisy of our obsession 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Conlon, D (2004) p. 11 Premier’s Children’s Advisory Committee (2004) Government Response to the Report of the Premier’s Children’s Advisory Committee (2004) Victorian Government (2005) Personal interview Byrne, G cited in Cadzow, J (2005) pp. 22–29 Senate Employment, Workplace Relations, Small Business and Education Committee (2001) Carpenter, S cited in Rielly, S (2005) p. 1 Carpenter, S cited in Rielly, S (2005) p. 2 Baade, C cited in Andrusiak, T & Donahoo, D (2004) Children Out of Detention, Press Release 21/2004 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (2004) p. 3 Prescott, J (2002) van der Meulen, C cited in Breen Burns, J (2005) p. 5 American Obesity Association (2005) Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, accessed online Heart Foundation (2004), accessed online See See

Chapter 10 When I’m 64: Neglecting the wisdom of age 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

MacDonald, P (1992) p. 5 Salt, B (2005) p. 33 See Anthony, EJ (1987) p. 18 Salt, B (2005) p. 25 Foster, K & Thomas, R (2004) Edgar, D (2005) p. 104 Edgar, D (2005) p. 108 Edgar, D (2005) p. 116

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Notes to pages 230 243

10 Harkin, J & Huber, J (2004) 11 R DM (2003), accessed online 12 R DM (2003), accessed online Conclusion Honouring, not idolising? 1 2 3 4 5 6

Cavoukian, R (2004) Manne, A (2005) p. 213 Armstrong, J (2006) p. 12 McCarthy, W (2005) Doherty, L (2005) Liedloff, J (1975) p. 24

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Hall, A (2005) Children fight toy addiction, The Age, 27 June. Harkin, J & Huber, J (2004) Eternal youths: How the baby boomers are having their time again, Demos, London. Heart Foundation (2004) Overweight and obesity in Australia Fact Sheet, May. Available at: Heath, R (2006) Please just f* off it’s our turn now, Pluto Press, Melbourne. Heckman, J (2004) Invest in the very young, University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy Studies, Chicago. Hendrick, H (1992) Children and childhood, ReFresh, Autumn 15. Hill, Dr E (2006) Minding the kids, ‘Insight’ – SBS Broadcast: 4 April. Transcript at: Holroyd, J (2005) The tweens are in vogue, The Age, 10 April. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (2004) A last Resort? A summary to the National Inquiry into Children in Detention. James, AE (1987) Risk, vulnerability, and resilience, In EJ Anthony & BJ Cohler, The invulnerable child, The Guildford Press, New York. Kidd, R (2005) In my place, Rattler, 74, Armedia, Sydney. Klein, N (2000) No logo, Flamingo, London. Kuzmenko, O (2004) Interview with Denis Stepura, TakingITGlobal Available at: Liedloff, J (1975) The continuum concept, Futura, New York. Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union (2005) Childcare places not enough  working parents need right to part time work. Available at: Longman, P (2006) Big daddy’s great society, The Australian, 25 March. Louv, R (2005) Last child in the woods: Saving our children from Nature Deficit Disorder, Algonquin Books, New York. McCarthy, W (2005) Plan: Rebuilding in Sri Lanka, ‘Life Matters’, Radio National, 14 February. MacDonald, P (2005) Submission No. 134 to House of Representatives’, Standing Committee on Family and Human Services, Inquiry into Balancing Work and Family. Available at: MacDonald, P (1992) Extended family in Australia: The family beyond the household, Family Matters, Australian Institute of Family Studies, 32. Mackay, H (2006) Few takers for true adulthood, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 April. Mackay, H (2004) When school is a parent substitute, The Age, 10 August. McNeal J & Yeh, C (1993) Born to shop, American Demographics, June. Manne, A (2005) Motherhood: How should we care for our children? Allen & Unwin, Melbourne. Manne, A (2003) A time to reflect on children’s gifts, The Age, Melbourne, 10 May. Marsden, J (2005) On feeling superior, Griffith Review, ABC Books, Winter. MCEETYA Taskforce on Transition from School (2003) National data on participation in VET in schools programs and school-based new apprenticeships for the 2003 school year. Available at: Mogul, W (2001) The blessing of the skinned knee, Penguin, New York. Murphy, L (1987) Further reflections on resilience, In EJ Anthony & BJ Cohler,

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The invulnerable child, The Guildford Press, New York. Murray-Smith, J (2005) Making motherhood work, The Age, Review Section, 12 February. Murray-Smith, J (2004) Feminism’s booby trap, The Age, 22 November. Ochiltree, G (1990) Children in Australian families, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne. Olds, T, Ridley, K & Dollman, J (2006) Screenieboppers and extreme screenies: The place of screen time in the time budgets of 1013-year-old Australians, abstract, Public Health Association of Australia, viewed 17 May. Ostrow, R (2006) The bald and the beautiful, Weekend Australian, 25 February. Premier’s Children’s Advisory Committee (2004) Joining the dots: A new vision for Victoria’s children, Victorian Government, September. Prescott, J (2002) America’s lost dream: Current research and historical background on the origins of love & violence, The Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health 10th International Congress Birth  The Genesis of Health, updated August 2002. R DM (2003) Reconnect with the old, Bharat Times, 3 March. Richardson, S (2006) Losers in the labour market, National Institute of Labour Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide, presentation. Rielly, S (2005) Sam marks his mark, with mettle and medals to prove it, The Age, 10 May. Robbins, A & Wilner, A (2001) Quarterlife crisis, Tabler, New York. Rossmanith, A (1997) When will the children play? Reed Books, Australia. Rousseau, J-J (2004) Emile, Kessinger Publishing, Montana, USA. Salt, B (2005) The big picture, Hardie Grant, Melbourne. Senate Employment, Workplace Relations, Small Business and Education Committee (2001) The education of gifted and talented children, Parliament of Australia, 2 October. Singleton, A (2005) I think we should only have two: Men and fertility decision-making, Just Policy, 36, June. Stanley, Richardson & Prior (2005) Children of the lucky country, Pan MacMillan, Sydney. Sternberg, J (2005) A current affair: Demonising youth of today tonight, The Age, April 13. Tankard Reist, M (2005) Defiant birth: Women who resist medical eugenics, Spinifex Press, Sydney. Taylor, K (1988) Disciplining the history of childhood, The Journal of Psychohistory, 16. Victorian Government (2005) Victorian state budget 2005/2006, May. Vimpani, G (2006) Why we need to get the early years right, New Matilda, 29 March. Warner, D (2006) Year 12 stress: Let’s change for the sake of our students, The Sunday Age, 23 April. Weston et al. (2004) It’s not for lack of wanting kids ..., a report on the Fertility Decision Making Project, Australian Institute of Family Studies, Melbourne. Woodard, A (2005) Children welcome, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 May. Wyn, J & White, R (1997) Rethinking youth, Allen & Unwin, Melbourne. Zelizer, V (1985) Pricing the priceless child, Basic Books, New York.

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Index

ABC Learning Centres 97 Adams, Phillip 162 adultescence 49, 5354, 129 adulthood avoiding 66 images of 53 journey to 130, 244 representations of 47 responsibility 165 adults as voyeurs 162 expectations of 215 humility and 244 living with parents 63 power structures and 193, 239 advertisers 210 advertising 152, 161, 165, 169 banning 20, 172 children and 19 empowering children against 179 junk food 213 language of 174 pressure of 171 strategies 174 teaching children about 172175 advocacy, children and 30, 220, 237, 238, 239 Affluenza 171 aged care 233 ageing 168, 224 aversion to 225 celebration of 227 defying 168 images of 22, 219, 228 process 65, 178, 224225 stereotypes 228

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valuing 230 work and 229 Aitken, Don 130131 Albeck, Rebecca 188 Albom, Mitch 178 Alexander, Stephanie 136 Anderson, John 85 Anderson, Julia 85 Andrusiak, Daniel 204 Andrusiak, Tania 170 Anthony, E James 44, 223 Anthony, Larry 101 anti-depressants, children and 191, 208209 anxiety childhood 182, 184 parental 210 ANZAC Day 219 apprenticeships 138 Aries, Phillipe 2728, 31 Armstrong, John 240 asthma 190 attention deficit disorder 191 Australian Childhood Foundation 237 Australian Children’s Television Foundation 153 Australian Institute of Family Studies 73 autism spectrum disorder 204 Baade, Clem 205 babies capacity of 8182 consumerism and 82 crying and 149 needs of 82

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perfection and 86, 89 baby bonus 73 baby boomers 227228, 230 Barker, Jo Anne 168 Barnard, Cat and Harlen 56 Bec Cartwright 34 Behind The News 141 Biddulph, Steve 100, 106 Birrell, Bob 53 birth idolising children and 81 need for control of 81 stress of 81 birthrate 72, 231 population and 69 birthrate decline 6770, 231 impact of 6970 attempts to increase 73 economic impact 6768 impact on population 72 Bob the Builder 174 bodies, perfect 213 body image 211 children and 177178 healthy 178 Bolger, James 27 books, parenting 239 brand loyalty 169171 brand-imprinting 172 branding 169 Brooks, Karen 165166 Brough, Mal 97 Brown, Louise 83 Bryden-Brown, Sarah 193 Burke and Wills 70 Burrow, Sharan 105 Byrne, Gail 202 Byronchild magazine 35 cafes, children and 242 Candlebark School 136 Cannold, Leslie 74, 86, 88 Caro, Jane 129 Carpenter, Leigh 203 Carpenter, Sam 202, 216 Carrey, Jim 21 Carr-Gregg, Michael 64, 127, 137 Cartwright, Bec 34 Cavoukian, Raffi 235, 241 celebrities, and their children 34 Centuries of Childhood 27, 31 cerebral palsy 196 Chalke, David 50, 54 Chamberlain, Azaria 181

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Channel One 151 child abuse 29, 3637, 162, 163, 183, 188 media response to 186 pandemic of 185 research into 30 sensationalism over 40 child beauty pageants 16 child behaviour 209 child honouring 235236, 241, 245 child labour 31 child prodigy 202 child protection 238 child scarcity 22, 67, 7071 childcare centres, community involvement in 116 childcare 38, 121, 237 as a solution 96 changes to 93 choice and 99 debate 9798, 105, 106, 115 developmental value of 105 disadvantaged backgrounds and 111 documentation 114 early childhood development and 95 fathers and 99 focus on development 104 funding 111 honouring children and 94 informal 103 parental guilt and 100 percentage of children in 103 quality of 95, 9596, 117 radical approach to 102 reform and 96 situation of 100 socialisation and 105 staff 96, 104, 113, 116 starting age of children in 106 types of 9496 vision for 116117 child-centred approach 241 child-centred services 102 childhood dangers 181 childhood data 185 childhood development 37, 124, 156, 169, 172, 191 holistic approach 105, 236 importance of 214 respect for 105 responsibility for 138 supporting 176, 239, 244

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Index childhood activity in 188189 changing experiences of 7172 Christian view of 38 domestic responsibilities and 57 economic development and 93 economic policy and 63 expectations of 198 experience of 150 fantasies of 215 idealised view of 107 images of 2629, 124, 129, 148, 152, 235 importance of 237 innocence 27, 106107, 148, 154, 167 medicalised 191 mythology of 29 negative ideas of 238 obsession with 199, 218 over-regulation of 114115 perceptions of 2945 perfection and 82, 175 regulation and 43, 195 resilience 4445 respecting 68 risks to 187189, 194 romanticised 5253 selling of 165 sexualised 163, 166 valuing 221 vulnerability and 44, 81 child-raising 171, 239 children and adults, separation of 61 children with a disability, expectations of 205 children academic pursuits and 19 achievement and 109, 201 adults supporting 188 advertising and self-esteem 163 as consumers 145, 170, 179 as evil or bad 3841 as media consumers 156, 159 as status symbols 34 as teachers 139 as vulnerable 182, 214 best interests of 207, 241 boundary setting and 173 capacity of 6364, 108, 114, 125, 146, 152, 154, 172, 203, 243 change and 22 choice and 131 community-raised 59

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confidence and 110 consultation and 133, 241 crimes against 181 decision-making 132 disadvantage and 112, 198 engaging with 177 expectations of 193 experience of death 166 flexibility and 108, 121 independence and 80 judgement of 208 life skills and 64 multiple intelligences in 131 over-protection of 21, 188 protection and 183 public visibility of 61 regarded as adults 31 risk aversion and 21 risks to 189, 195 self-reliance and 136 September 11 and 145 sheltering 191 support systems and 101, 240 supporting 192, 194, 237, 245 teaching responsibility to 5759 trusting 159 validating experiences of 156 values and 234 children’s rights 46, 165, 167, 208, 236 children’s services consistency of 96 interconnectivity of 104, 113114 limitations of 102 overseas examples of 114 choice 86, 99, 102103, 118, 129, 139 Christmas, childhood experience 71 classroom, learning beyond the 120 co-habitation 233 co-housing 223 Collins, Rhonda 134 commercial culture 174 communal living 222 communication, children and 204 community building 238 community classroom 121123 community responsibility, children and 58-59, 176 community child-raising 243, 245 involvement with children 104 reinvestment in 24 commuting 92 competence, children and 122, 131, 146

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Conlon, Debby 196, 198, 204 consent, informed 167 consultation children and 241 school children and 242 consumerism, positive aspects of 176 consumption children and 154 culture of 210 excessive 171 controlling children 193 corporal punishment 30 corporate paedophilia 162 corporations 169 cosmetic surgery 224 Costello, Peter 29, 228 Costello, Tim 29 Craik, Christine 177 credit, dangers of 179 cultural capital 177 danger, children and 192 Dawkins, Tom 158 death, child 187 decision-making processes 90, 132, 140 de-institutionalisation 206 demographic, creation of 176 demographics 228, 233 Demos 230 depression 208209 detention, children in 197 developmental needs, meeting 131 Dickens, Charles 37 dieting, children and 177178 difference, children and 202 disabilities, children with 85, 197, 204205 disability 203 media and 199200 representation of 206 visibility of 199 disadvantage 239 discipline 60, 125126 Disney 25, 37 diversity 134 Dohnt, Hayley 177, 211 domestic role-play 167 domestic violence 36 Donnelly, Kevin 129, 144 early childhood agenda 101 curriculum 110

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investment in 111, 112 movement 93 rhetoric of 183 theory 189 early childhood development 104, 109, 221 centres 110 media and 155 early childhood movement 93 early childhood professionals 107 108, 111115, 188, 237 early childhood sector, reform of 115116 economic costs of childhood 87 Edgar, Don 48, 104, 108109, 121, 229 Edgar, Patricia 153154 education 119, 229 system 126 children and 38, 131, 175 children with a disability and 206 children’s choice in 118119 choice and 131 competition and 200, 202 competitiveness and 123124 diversity and 120 employment and 123 expectations and 121 governance structures 132 holistic 134, 136 institutionalisation of 142 media and 144, 155, 156 parental choice in 129130 parents and 119, 122 private 129 respecting children in 132 rethinking 130 self-esteem and 201 success and 120 vocational 134, 137 elders, importance of 218 Election Tracker 158 Elmo 65 Eminem 20 entertainment 142 exams, stress and 137 excursions, children and 230 exploitation, children and 161, 163165 Express Media 157 extended family, value of 223 extended family, households 233 extra-curricular activities 107 families, childcare and 98

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Index family 197, 206, 210 history 230 size, Australian average 70 definition of 222, 223 disconnected 232 extended 221223 impact of homework on 127128 impact of separation on 207 male breadwinner model of 97, 101 media representation of 210 nuclear 222 participating in 129 time with 128 fashion, children’s 177 fatherhood 76 child-rearing 77 media and 76 fathers involvement with children 43 older 77 responsibility and 43 young fathers 54 fear childhood advocates and 238 children and 190 culture of 181, 183 media-driven 181 politically-driven 182 feminism 167, 244 fertility limitations on 69 unfulfilled 74 fertility decision-making 55, 7375, 83 aspirations 74 child honouring and 87 complexity of 78, 8889 disability and 85 economic terms 87 ethics of 83, 86 expectations 74 images of childhood and 79 lack of 7475 male perspectives in 68 men and 7577 obsession with 77, 7980 our capacity for 86 rationality and 87 responsibility and 80 role of government in 90 role of idolising children in 89 technologies 75, 78, 8386 too much choice 80

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Finkelhor, David 187 first-time parents, average age 231 food healthy 240 relationship with 213 football, Australian Rules 202203 foster care 207 friendship 232 funding, government 196, 238 Furedi, Frank 35, 40, 183, 185186, 193 gardening 217 Gardner, Howard 130 Gattaca 8485 Geddes, Anne 163164, 167 Generation X 49 Generation Y 50 generational divide 224 gifted children 133-134, 201202 Gittens, Ross 101 government 240, 241 children and 237 Goward, Pru 104 Graham, Robert 84 grandparenting, experience of 231 grandparents age of 231 as mentors 232 value of 219 Great Depression, The 41 groupthink 237 growing up, difficulties of 48 Hamilton, Clive 171 Hancock, Mike 219 Hawke, Ethan 84 health, children’s 194, 240 Heath, Ryan 51 Heckman, James 111112 helicopter parenting 58 Henderson, Team 230 Hendrick, Harry 28 Hewitt, Lleyton 34 Hill, Elizabeth 97 history, of childhood 46, 219 home loans 223 home, learning at 124 homework 33, 64, 126128, 191 as babysitter 128 consequences of 129 excessive amounts of 127 parents doing 128 household chores 57, 128 human capital 112113

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human connectedness 123 human life, continuum of 220 human rights 236

junk food banning 20 children and 173174

identity, sense of 154 idolising children 120, 153, 236 as economic force 22 consequences of 73 contradictions in 60 impact of 198 opposite of 236 idolising youth 225226 illness, childhood 190 images of childhood exploitative 162 fathers and 77 impact of 4546 positive 239 respectful 164 role of corporations 5051 images, construction of 171 immigration, experience of 206208 immunisation 190 imperfect children 85, 197198, 208, 215216 inclusion 206 Independent Children’s Media Centre 157 Indigenous children 113, 189 individualism 222, 231233 individuality 150 infancy, fetishisation of 164 infomercials 151 infotainment 155 innocence, idealised view of 215 innocent child, the 3638 Insight 9798 Institute of Public Affairs 233 intelligence, academic 134 intelligence, multiple 130 intergenerational relationships, losing 232 intergenerational studies 227 international aid, children and 241 internet 20, 151 internet community 158 investment, childhood and 63 Invulnerable Child, The 44 IQ tests 130, 134 issues, manipulation of 212 IVF 8385

Kendall, Sally 124 Kidd, Rebecca 114 Klein, Naomi 50, 169

Jesus, images of 27 Jolie, Angelina 34

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learner, active 134135 learning at home 128 children and 138,191 different types of 138 flexibility and 135 holistic 123, 124, 134, 142 institutionalised 119 life-long 135, 139 media and 144 on-the-job 137138 responsibility for 121 role of 129 self-paced 122 Leskie, Jaidyn 181 Liedloff, Jean 243 life expectancy 229, 231 Little Mermaid, The 37 Lion King, The 25 literacy 109110 living arrangements 234 Logies, The 34 Lolita 166, 168 London Children’s Rights Commissioner 132 London 27 loss, aging and 226 Louv, Richard 25, 187 MacDonald, Peter 103 Mackay, Hugh 48, 125 Maldon Coffee Shop 242 Manne, Anne 87, 106, 221, 237238 marketing 165, 168169 to children 170173 anxiety and 176 attitudes towards 170 Marsden, John 136, 193 maternal feminism 221 maternity leave 106 Sweden 113 McCarthy, Wendy 241 McDonald, Peter 221 McGraw, Karen 137 media sensationalism 144 media 153-156

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Index as a text 151 children and 143, 151, 152, 159, 210 critical engagement with 143 holistic learning and 156 idolising children and 21, 154155 images of childhood 27, 39, 106, 148 misrepresentation by 150 positive impact of 156157 power of 154 scientific research and 148 teaching children about 151, 152 understanding 179 youth reportage and 158 men caring for children 105 domestic role of 104105 meningococcal 184 mentoring 136, 228229, 232 Middle Ages life in the 31 children and medieval society 2728, 30, 32, 38 midlife crisis 228 miniature adult, image of children as 3033 models, child 163164, 167 moderation, teaching 195 Mogul, Wendy 192 Morcombe, Daniel 181 Moriarty, Alice 44 mortality 218 mortality rates, child 190 Moss, Kate 161 motherhood, rational choice of 88 mothers, working preferences of 105 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 202 Murdoch, Lachlan 54 Murphy, Lois 44, 45 Murray-Smith, Joanna 88, 102 Myths of Childhood 164 myths, childhood 43, 238 Nabokov, Vladimir 166 National Agenda for Early Childhood 189 National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children 40 nature deficit disorder 187 networks, human 243 New South Wales Young Parents Forum 55 news for all ages 159

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programming 142, 151 reporting to children 142, 146, 149 understanding 141 Nintendo 31 No Logo 169 Nobel Prize Sperm Bank 84 obesity 194195, 211214 adult 211 childhood 178, 209, 211, 240 children’s understanding of 209 debate 213214 social context 212 social factors 213 office-centred society 92 older generations, role of 233 older people, capacity of 229 Oliver Twist 37 Oliver, Jamie 58, 240 omnipotent child 124 only children 22, 69 opinions, children’s 241 organisations, child-centred 241 Ostrow, Ruth 168 OzProspect 86 pandemic 185 paranoid parenting 40 parental anxiety 35 parenthood considerations of 88 responsibilities of 89 parenting 193 books 29 changing attitudes towards 58 children with a disability 205206 enjoyment and 244 experience of 191 privatisation of 42 quality time and 103 trust and 160 undermining 183 parents as gods 35 advice and 150 as teachers 191 becoming 8788 being over cautious 190 blaming 5859 changing role of 42 criticism and 6061 developing capacity in children 6364, 153

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empowerment and 244 guilt and 186, 239, 244 problems for 210 protecting children and 125 role of 126 supporting 150 working 100 young 55 paternity leave 113 Patterson, Banjo 70 peer support 158 perfect child, the 3435, 199, 200, 202, 211 perfection human 85 idea of 199 images of 210211 Peter Pan 63 Peter Pan Syndrome 47 photography, children’s consent and 164 physical activity 212 Pitt, Brad 34 Plan Australia 240 play 18, 109, 204 children and 191 importance of 189 outdoor 187 Plibersek, Tanya 97 Plotz, David 84 policy early childhood 220 government 198, 207 pornography, child 162163, 166 positive aging 200 potential children and 92, 200 idea of 201 power, men and 100 pregnancy literature 184 pregnancy experience of 183184 planned 78 pre-school 110 funding for 104 Prescott, James W 208 primary school, media and 156 privacy 80, 168 protecting children 192193 impact of 192 public space, children and 60 62, 166167, 243 quarterlife crisis 65

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raising children 59, 189 mistakes and 239 Ramsey, JonBenet 1516, 27 RAWCUS Theatre Company 206 refugees 207 relationships 234 building of 220 grandparents and 217 intergenerational 220221, 230231 nature of 167, 232 reproductive technologies, impact of 83 research, advocacy driven 149, 212 childhood 149, 184186 parent anxiety and 149 resilience, childhood and 193, 203, 238 resources, investing 220 respecting childhood, impact on birthrate 8990 respecting children 126, 138, 156, 164, 195, 236, 238, 240 responsibility 244245 children and 57, 64, 125 restaurants, children and 6162, 62 retirement 229 Richardson, Sue 72 risk awareness 189, 195 risk management, childhood and 182, 186 risk children and 182, 190 overstating 185 Robbins, Alexandra 65 Roskam, John 233 Rosneath Farm 223 Rossmanith, Angela 192 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 36, 37 Salt, Bernard 50, 70, 222, 227, 228 Saunders, Cohen 118 Saunders, Jess 118 school systems 242 schools media presence in 151 separating classes at 134 secondary system 137 screen-time and children 143144, 153 Sears, William 59 self-esteem 109, 122 separation, children and 207

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Index services aged care 233 child protection 183 Sesame Street 194 sex education 36 Shaw, George Bernard 195 Sheahan, Peter 51 shopping, experience of 60, 173 shops, integrating children’s needs into 242 show and tell 33 SIDS Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) 21 Singleton, Andrew 76 skills basic life 129 domestic 124 smacking, debates about 30 societal changes 229 society all ages involved in 23, 234 child-centred 239 future of 233 Sowden, Rachael 201202 specialist services 205 Sperm donation 85 Sri Lanka 241 Stanley, Fiona 71, 101 Starlight Foundation 25 stay-at-home parents 94 valuing 100 Stepura, Denis 157, 158 Sternberg, Jason 146 stranger danger 182183, 187 suicide, youth 208 support networks 223 surgery, plastic 168 surviving childhood 194 swaddling infants, practice of 32 Tankard Reist, Melinda 85 target marketing 178, 210 Taylor, Karen 2930 teachers, parents as 125 teaching media and 159 media resources and 152 teenagers, advertising and 172 Teletubbies 144 television 150, 171172 current affairs 144–145, 146 programming 155 production, for children 154 reality 210, 213

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263

viewing habits 152 violence 143, 145, 153, 155 time, spending with children 1819 time-poor society 96 toilets, children’s opinions of 242 Tormey, Sam 86 toys, children and 242 traineeships 137138 Truglio, Rosemary 195 Truman Show, The 21 tsumani, Asian 241 tweenagers 176178, 210 magazines for 177 marketing to 163 van der Meulen, Cathy 210 veterans 218 Vibewire Youth Services 158 Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning 138 Vietnam War 27 Vimpani, Graham 113 vocational learning projects 135136 Voiceworks 158 voting 151 voyeurism 162 vulnerability children and 150, 164 continuum of 157, 223 Warner, David 137 wealth, generational 63 welfare model 238 wellbeing, honouring children’s 240 Wendorf, Kali 35, 125, 162 wet-nursing 32 White, Rob 150151 Wiggles, The 144 wisdom, aging and 226 women, without children 74 Woodward, Amanda 62 Woomera Detention Centre 206 207 work 229 changes to 101 childcare and 99 complexity of 93 new systems of 99 part-time 9798, 105 women and 99 young people and 229 workforce 5152 work-life balance 123 World Summit Youth Awards 158

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Wyn, Johanna 150151 Young Media Australia 156 youth 151, 195 advertising and 178 as consumers 51 as future leaders 52 as lifestyle choice 47 as media producers 157 branding of 50 desire for 168 development of 158 disposable incomes and 51

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energy of 229 eternal 53 homogenous 54 images of 225 importance of 237 individualism and 54 longing for 165 media and 48, 157 media representation of 146 responsibility 56, 66, 57 youth culture 151, 155 development of 42 yummy mummy 61

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Also published by UNSW Press

Transitions to School Perceptions, Expectations and Experiences Sue Dockett and Bob Perry The transition to school is an important and topical issue in both educational and political arenas. Educationally, the transition to school is linked to later academic and social success. Politically, the issue of children’s preparedness for school and the ability of schools and school systems to support their youngest students have become a focus of attempts to promote equality of educational opportunity and educational outcomes. This book examines the complex range of issues that relate to positive transitions to school, focusing on the perceptions, expectations and experiences of all involved. It draws on the ongoing findings of the Australian Starting School Research Project and presents these in a comprehensive way. The book also compares and contrasts these findings with those of other researchers in Australia, USA, Europe and Asia. The result is a comprehensive research-based book which should be of great value to researchers in early childhood education, practitioners in this field and early childhood teacher education students. SUE DOCKETT is Associate Professor in early childhood education at the University of Western Sydney, where, since 1988, she has been involved in the early childhood teacher education program. BOB PERRY is currently Associate Professor of Education at the University of Western Sydney where he teaches mathematics education, research methods in education and transition to school units.

ISBN 0 86840 801 8

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Also published by UNSW Press

Being Normal is the Only Way to Be Adolescent Perspectives on Gender and School Wayne Martino and Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli Being Normal is the Only Way to Be is a book for teachers and parents of adolescents. It is colourful, absorbing, illuminating, and  critically  practical. Each chapter draws on the perceptions and writings of teenage boys and girls, and uses these to build a specific knowledge about what it means to be an adolescent at school, what it means to be ‘cool’ and ‘normal’, and the effects of these social constructions on learning and relationships. The book grew out of the authors’ concern that welfare or pastoral-care policies in schools are silent about the effects of certain forms of power relations on both learning and the social cultures of masculinity and femininity. In writing this book, they sought to make student voices and perspectives on gender and power relationships more accessible to teachers. Being Normal is the Only Way to Be will be an important resource for teachers and for all schools. It will help to expose the gaps and silences in current school-based policies and approaches, and makes a significant contribution to addressing social justice, difference and diversity issues in schools. The book culminates with a chapter devoted to providing guidelines for schools on how to recast or reformulate their student-welfare policies in the light of our new understandings of gender and power issues in schools. WAYNE MARTINO is a senior lecturer in Education at Murdoch University, Perth, and before that he was a high-school English teacher for ten years. MARIA PALLOTTA-CHIAROLLI is Senior Lecturer in Social Diversity, Health and Education in the School of Health and Social Development, Deakin University, Melbourne. ISBN 0 86840 687 2

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Also published by UNSW Press

The Illusion of Choice How Australia is dismantling its public schools Chris Bonner and Jane Caro This important and confronting book hypothesises that within five to ten years the hardest schools for kids to get into will be public schools. The Illusion of Choice examines demographic trends, funding arrangements, enrolments and general trends in society to make its compelling case. Chris Bonnor and Jane Caro show that Australia has embarked on a radical and unique education policy. If current policies and trends do not change, it will become the first western democracy to dismantle its public education system. The Illusion of Choice is an essential book for all parents concerned about the education of their children. CHRIS BONNOR AM is a respected educator and a prominent commentator on issues in education. He was, until recently, president of the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council and has been principal of many schools including Davidson High School and Asquith Boys High School. One of his geography texts Australia in Focus (1988) was, at the time, the biggest selling senior school geography text in Australia. JANE CARO was the Convenor of Priority Public and is the parent of two children educated in public schools. She is an award-winning advertising copywriter and an experienced and well-known writer and broadcaster who comments frequently on education, marketing and many other issues in the media. A New South book ISBN 978 0 86840 806 4

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Also published by UNSW Press

The Hearts of Men Tales of Happiness and Despair Chris Barker This powerful book explores the emotional lives of men in contemporary Australia. In particular it seeks to understand the circumstances and strategies that give rise to happiness or depression. Drawing on more than one hundred conversations with sportsmen, executives, homeless drug users, returned soldiers and Buddhists, Chris Barker unlocks key factors that can lead to depression on the one hand or well-being on the other. Personal reflections, including many from the author himself, are interwoven with contemporary writings on emotion. This insightful book will be of interest to general readers interested in men, women and happiness. CHRIS BARKER teaches in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wollongong. He has published many books on television, media and cultural studies. He is the father of three children. ISBN 978 0 86840 949 9

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Also published by UNSW Press

The Little Red Writing Book Mark Tredinnick ‘This is a book for every writer’s backpack.’  Nicholas Jose ‘Good writing says something very honest, very clearly. It’s partly a matter of technique, but mostly a matter of courage. Mark Tredinnick’s book is great on sentences, paragraphs, and practice  but its brilliance is in its ability to inspire, and its exhortation to be brave.’  Anna Funder The Little Red Writing Book is a workbook on technique, style, craft and manners for everyone who writes and wants to do it better. It is a manual of good diction, composition, sentence craft, paragraph design, structure and planning. It is a guide to the poetic disciplines of creative writing and the functional disciplines of a professional prose. It is a reflection on the moral obligations and creative agonies of the writing life. And it is an argument for, and a short course in, grace on the page. Enriched by examples of fine prose from great writers; flush with exercises; informed by the author’s expertise in both creative writing and functional prose; and written with flair, The Little Red Writing Book is a lively and readable guide to lively and readable writing. It’s a writing book for people who write because they love to and for people who write because they have to. MARK TREDINNICK is a poet, essayist and writing teacher. He is a former book editor, publisher and lawyer and having lived in Katoomba for many years, now lives in Sydney with his family. ISBN 0 86840 867 0

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Also published by UNSW Press

The Great Mistakes of Australian History Edited by Martin Crotty and David Roberts ‘This book is a welcome addition to any bookshelf that has a section devoted to national history … the multiple authors provide fascinating insights.’  The Daily Telegraph ‘Great Mistakes makes a solid and timely contribution to an important debate.’  The Courier Mail Blunders, stuff-ups and misjudgements are a part of any country’s history. Dwelling on what might have been isn’t always helpful, but recognising our mistakes and learning from them is important. In this highly original and provocative book leading Australian historians attempt to do just that. Eschewing the smugness and arrogance that hindsight can bring, and celebrating the many smart choices that have been made, these writers look at key moments where one bad decision led to a hundred more, where false assumptions remained in place for too long and where we were blinkered to the reality around us. What if the English colonists hadn’t thought the country had very few indigenous inhabitants with no attachment to the land? What if they hadn’t assumed the land was as fertile as England and made for grazing? What if introducing species like foxes and cane toads had seemed like a bad idea? What if we had thought about the likely consequences of sending thousands of young men off to fight in overseas wars? What if dividing the nation into states at Federation was abandoned for another system? Or if Gough Whitlam had acted differently? Or if giving our cities over to cars had seemed like a foolish thing to do? This is a lively and provocative account of where we might have got it wrong, written so that next time we can get it right. ISBN 0 86840 995 2

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13/2/07 1:02:44 PM

IDOLISING CHILDREN

Donahoo argues that idolising is a form of worship that adversely affects our children’s development in their early years, and creates citizens who no longer understand their roles and responsibilities. It makes parents feel unnecessarily guilty and anxious. Without blame or finger-pointing, Idolising Children examines how we arrived here and looks at what needs to change so that communities as a whole are responsible for raising children.

Donahoo

Obsessed with our own youth and wanting perfect, genius children who live in a world of designer clothes and toys, it’s time for us to find new ways of parenting and a new kind of childhood. With humour, insight and emotion, Daniel Donahoo reflects on the place of children in our society by looking at everything from fertility rates, childcare, the role of the media and the day-to-day joys and challenges of being a parent.

Daniel Donahoo

IDOLISING CHILDREN ‘Broadranging, lively and sharp. Something has gone badly wrong with childhood in this corporatised world, and Daniel Donahoo is willing to lift the lid on the whole third-rate deal offered to young families today.’ STEVE BIDDULPH author of Raising Babies