For those of us who have been fans of the acclaimed BBC series, Child Of Our Time, which debuted in 2001, you would be relieved to know that they continued filming the 25 families after 2007. In 2008, when the children turned 8, the series was modified and only a few themed episodes were produced each year. Series 7 has just aired on Starhub cable's BIO channel and I watched the first two episodes last night at 9pm. It was akin to a family reunion with the much-loved kids like the twins, Charlie and Jamie!
I am reposting this Telegraph article written by series producer, Dr Tessa Livingstone, here. It was written in 2008 but echoes eerily for Singaporean society, which is one of the world's worst-faring states in terms of fertility. I can't speak for the quality of our children's lives in Singapore, since no valid research has been undertaken to investigate this, like the Child of Our Time response to UNICEF's report. Or at least nothing has been made public or discussed openly here. Yet there is no more crucial time than now to seriously ponder the real effects of our globalised world on our children's every day lives and how it is impacting their physical and emotional devopment.
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Child Of Our Time: Whatever happened to our children's playtime?
The BBC's latest 'Child of Our Time' investigation confirms worrying reports that Britain's young are overworked and underplayed, reveals Dr Tessa Livingstone.
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| From The Telegraph |
Last year, a Unicef report on the wellbeing of children shocked the nation.
Even though Britain is the fifth-wealthiest country in the world, out of 21
developed countries our children had the lowest level of wellbeing – a
statistic that horrified lawmakers and parents alike. It was the first in a
spate of damning descriptions about the state of Britain's children.
A few days later, I started a new project. I have run the BBC series Child
of Our Time for eight years, following the lives of 25 children born in
2000 from all over the UK and from all walks of life. But this year it was
special. The team filmed the children continuously for 48 hours, during one
school day and one home day, recording every movement, every emotion and
every word.
We then worked with academics to discover what our 21st-century children do
with their time and whether the quality of their lives is good enough – or,
as Unicef would have it, a cause of real concern.
We studied play, the use of technology, and the impact of the "me
generation", as well as communication between children, parents,
teachers and friends. The results were astonishing.
Our most surprising findings were about play. Play is vital; it makes children
happy, as we discovered when we counted the number of laughs. The more
children play, the more they laugh, especially when they are outside. In
fact, our greatest players laughed up to 20 times as much as the children
who played less.
And play does not just give children joy, it is also "work". Young
children need to explore the world; they are enthusiastic learners, they
need challenges and excitement, and even a frisson of danger. As one child
said in response to a survey on the children's website CBBC: "Adults
can be very stupid at times. Kids should be allowed to experiment and try
things. Otherwise when they grow up they'll make very stupid mistakes from
not getting enough experience in childhood."
Precisely! The great players from our series included an imaginative girl
called Rhianna, who messed around happily for almost eight hours, much of
the time with her friend in the garden. Playing sociably in a bigger space
is even better.
Lucky Jamie spent his weekend in a caravan park with his family and ran wild
for most of the day, coming back to base for meals. Others had less
opportunity or desire to play. Tyrese spent only 25 minutes on free play
and, when shoo'ed out of the house to go to the park with his elder sister,
he looked lonely and bored.
Indeed, parks are an indication of the greatest change in play. One Child
of Our Time parent recalled: "You'd go off for miles and it was all
right as long as you were back for tea." Nowadays, two-thirds of
children aged eight to 10 have never been to a shop or park by themselves,
while a third have never played outside without an adult. The distance
children can roam has been reduced by 90 per cent in just 20 years.
Robert Winston, professor of science and society at Imperial College London
and presenter of Child of Our Time, took himself four miles to school
when he was only seven and has a robust view: "Certainly there is a
risk about traffic, but we are over-concerned about risk."
The anxiety about stranger danger and accidents trickles down from society at
large to parent – and on to child. As another parent told us: "Whether
we like it or not, there is a climate of fear for children and you can't
sponge that out of your head if you've got a child." Seven-year-old
Parys reflected the same nervousness when asked if he would go to the shop
for milk: "I won't have anyone to keep me guarded," he replied.
So what do the experts think? Play expert Tim Gill is worried. He believes
that today's children are captive, no longer allowed the chance to meet the
people and explore the territory around them. "A few years ago, I was
involved in a campaign to make a street more child-friendly," he says. "So
the residents had a party and closed off the street, and the kids and all
the people were out talking together.
"At the end of the day an older lady, a resident, came up to me and said,
'What a lovely event! But I have just one question. Where did you get the
children from?' She had no idea that there were so many kids living on the
street. It's not that there aren't any children but that those children are
spending their lives indoors."
So what are our kids doing if they aren't visible in their neighbourhood? The
answer is obvious. They mitigate the boredom of being confined to home by
sitting in front of a screen. British children watch more television than
any others in Europe, and two-thirds have TV sets in their bedrooms. Sadly,
more children today are injured by TVs falling on them than from free play.
One of our children spent the best part of nine hours looking at one screen or
another; a second clocked up seven hours playing video games. Television and
the internet enable children who are stuck at home to experience adventures
vicariously. Still, parents worried about new technology should take
comfort; their kids are having fun, and evidence from many sources tells us
that most children benefit.
The problem, then, is not that children shouldn't be watching screens but that
they are watching so much, there isn't room for anything else.
Tanya Byron, a clinical psychologist and author of the recent Government
report on children's use of computer games and the internet, told me that
children have more chance of meeting paedophiles online than in the park or
on the streets, and offered some good advice.
"If your children were in the real world," she says, "going to
a youth group or a scout group, you would check it out and make sure they
got there safely. But in the online world we check nothing. We should tell
them they can't go places, we should put filters in place like locks on
doors, and make sure sites are moderated, just as when we send them to a
pool, there are lifeguards."
But while new technology is vilified by many – and not always justly – there
is one thing about British children's lives that most people ignore. Our
lives are shaped by the way we communicate with each other. A good
conversation, however short, can make us happy; a bad one, sad. So how do we
chat with our children?
We asked a random selection of people in different British towns a simple
question: "What do you talk about with your children?" The
answers? "Everything, we talk about everything"; "All sorts";
"I talk to my children all the time."
The reality, though, is very different. Two-thirds of the parent-child
conversations from Child of Our Time were purely functional and only
three of our families had long and discursive chats with their children
during filming. This is in line with other finding: one survey, for
instance, found that only a quarter of children say they talk with a parent
more than once a week about something that matters.
British children, it seems, are still seen but not heard. Edward Waller,
Unicef's representative in London, told me that while southern Europeans are
credited with an innate love of children, northern Europeans are chillier.
To counteract this, many of our near-neighbours have legislation: parents
take long maternity and paternity leave and work less in Scandinavian
countries, for instance. Yet British adults have the longest working hours
in Europe, are more stressed, and therefore have less time to talk with
their children.
Teresa Cremin, professor of education at the Open University, thinks it is a
problem. "If all we're saying is 'Do this, do that', 'Hurry out of
here, it's time for tea', and so on, then we do have to be concerned that
it's not a dialogue, it's a one-way monologic piece to put pressure on
children. I think there is a huge value in shared social interaction with
youngsters – parents can extend a child's understanding of an issue and help
youngsters to think and understand."
But if children do not communicate with adults very well, they do at least
talk among themselves. The child-child conversations we recorded were
energetic, inclusive and often very funny. Young children play with language
as if it is a game, so perhaps it's not surprising that children's strongest
relationships are often with their peers. This matters. Several researchers
have told me that too much can fracture parent-child relationships and, in
the long term, contribute to a "gang" mentality and a society
broken along age lines.
None of which helps children, who are already under the most tremendous
pressure. Our children are the most tested in the world, facing around 100
exams by the time they are 18. Pressure to succeed has generated a stress
epidemic where one in 10 children risks developing a mental health problem.
This has not gone unnoticed. The Open University is surveying attitudes to
childhood in the UK, and their latest results show that three-quarters of us
think there are too many pressures on children today and worry that they
grow up too quickly.
Jay Belsky, professor of psychology at Birkbeck University, is also concerned. "We've
lost sight of the fact that one can have fun and not worry about future
consequences but stay in the moment. We don't value the moment, especially
in childhood – we think more about whether an experience will pay off down
the road in economic terms. Nowadays we're not even thinking in emotional or
relationship terms."
It has become impossible to ignore the Unicef research or feel comfortable at
the bottom of the developed countries league table of childhood happiness.
Most people who work for children and families in Britain know this. Can
anything be done, or have we left it too late?
For my follow-up BBC programme, A Revolution in Childhood, I asked an
expert panel, what do they feel are the most important changes the UK must
put into practice to make our children happier? Here are their answers.
Prof Robert Winston: "We must be careful about our aspirations for
children. Happiness, contentment and wisdom are not achieved by fame, and
that's a real issue for our society, where we put our children through
hoops. It's something the government needs to think about."
Prof Teresa Cremin, professor of education at Canterbury Christ Church
University and president elect of the United Kingdom Literacy Association: "There
needs to be a radical change to the assessment system, particularly in
primary schools, since it generates overly high expectations. We should
shift it to a less narrow frameset and fewer early exams. That would make a
difference."
Tim Gill, one of the UK's leading thinkers, writers and consultants on
childhood, and adviser to the Conservative Party on its childhood review: "Children
live in overly captive environments, but if we improve the real world offers
that we make to children and put some real energy in, open up front doors,
give them things to do, then the issue of spending time in front of screens
will dissolve. And they'll be happier."
