The Comment Factory

An event in recent weeks promised to make a significant impact on the lives of the children of this country. The Good Childhood Inquiry has been three years in the making and has taken evidence from 30,000 sources. It has been seen as a landmark report and had it not been accompanied (and somewhat submerged) by that other big event for children in the same week, a nation-wide covering of snow, it might well have made a far greater impact on the country’s media.

The report highlighted the supposed rampant commercialism in our society and how it had affected children. The selfish striving for personal gain and material wealth, the report claimed, was the main reason why children were so unhappy in 21st century Britain. It seemed to call for a return to a (somewhat rose-tinted) more caring and communal culture, a perhaps now long-extinct era where cooperation and solidarity from individual to individual produced happy children.

The report had a wealth of evidence backing up its conclusions and recommendations, not least of those, testimonies from children themselves. The many thousands of children that had been interviewed and assessed had painted a picture of British childhood that was far removed from that experienced by the young perhaps only a generation ago.

It underlined the psychological damage inflicted on children by excessive individualism and the nature of the modern social environment. Indeed the mental health of children is something that the report highlighted as a major issue. Dysfunctional families, rampant advertising, too many exams, nowhere to play, were drawn-out as factors affecting their core psychological wellbeing. In its recommendations too it highlighted the mental health (or lack of it) of modern children, calling for ‘training at least 1,000 more highly qualified psychological therapists over the next five years’ to ‘automatically assessing the mental health of children entering local authority care or custody’.

This is my first big issue with the report. The focus on childhood psychological problems strikes me as dangerous because it labels children distressed or unhappy who are, in many cases, encouraged to feel that way by society. They are pushed to analyse themselves to an extent where they might generate negative conclusions about their surrounding reality. As John Stuart Mill famously said, as soon as you ask yourself whether you are happy, you cease to be so.

While of course I am not saying that children are encouraged to say something that they don’t mean, they are encouraged to say something rather than nothing.

Children especially may well be under greater pressure than most to feel like something is wrong. Society is certainly dominated by sentiments that proclaim to know the correct path for children to follow. Government panels, lobbyists, parent groups, teaching establishments all concoct what is basically a massive ‘do and don’t’ schema for children to adhere to. Consequently, deviance from this is seen as evidence of systemic failure of a child’s personality. Anxious parents waiting in the wings, seemingly clutching the latest expert view, are probably far too quick to identify ‘problems’ within their child’s character. This report is established on this culture of identifying and categorizing problems.

This might not have been my only problem with report, but it also insisted on making comparisons between past and present states of childhood. Its analysis was that the present is clearly a time of trouble and anxiety for children, while the past was a golden era of pressure-free, happy times.

It is difficult to resist the urge to make such a contrast. But equally difficult to accept is the notion that children fifty years ago suffered the same issues that a modern child suffers. This would be to ignore the modern existential childhood condition that the report finds so problematic and that we cannot ignore. But such a premise also ignores the fact that child psychology has come a long way in the last half century, and the way we understand and appreciate the mechanisms of a young, still-forming mind inhabits a different landscape to the one we saw fifty years ago. The energetic desire to diagnoze problems which perhaps had not been articulated before is also mixed with the volatility of psychoanalysis in general.

Ideas of mental health and what constitutes ‘good’ mental health are in a constant state of flux and change. We might only look over the Foucauldian history of madness and prevailing authoritarian definition of the term to see that abstract ideas such as mental health are not easily fixed phenomena. Such concepts are transitory, often defined by political or social context and while they might be new and radical one day, they may be established as orthodoxy or discredited as nonsense the next.

We may also look, for an example, at the severely detrimental impact of modern warfare on the individual soldier. First apparent in mass form after the industrial carnage of World War One, it was often seen by those in the military of the time as cowardice. After 1918 it became widely known as shellshock, but retained an element of instability in the way which it was defined and described. A 1947 a report entitled War, stress and neurotic illness suggested that the condition had been ‘submitted to a good deal of capriciousness in public interest and psychiatric whims’. In recent years it has become known as ‘combat stress reaction’.

Childhood issues are clearly far removed from pressures exerted by armed conflict and I hope no one will accuse me of cheapening the trauma of war. I am not denying the extreme nature of such conditions, nor attempting to explain or justify their description. I am merely hoping to highlight the evolving and often constantly shifting nature by which we define such concepts. Such instability we have to work and live with – of this I am sure; but we should be wary of such a report’s findings specifically because of this instability. Because of society’s zeal for assigning issues and problems to children’s behaviour is coupled with the fluidity of psychoanalytical diagnosis in general, such a report, I believe, remains deeply problematic.
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(I would like to thank Eleanor Long for her extremely insightful exchanges without which this article would not have reached its present finished state).