Media Standards Trust

‘It is incontestable’, writes Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, ‘Britain is a rubbish country to bring up children’. Her verdict has been echoed by others within the media following a slew of reports about childhood stress, problems with social behaviour, declining health and obesity. Are things really that bad for children? Or is the growing idea that childhood is in grave danger a media myth?

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The view of childhood we get through the media

‘Through a succession of media snapshots,’ Jenny McCartney writes, ‘a gloomy picture of the family emerges, in which each member is navigating his or her troubled way through endless dangers and neuroses’.

Within this gloomy picture children are usually portrayed as the most at risk: ‘Family breakdown, exam pressure, celebrity culture and crime are robbing children of their innocence’ Laura Clark writes in the Daily Mail.

‘We seem’, Henry Porter suggests in the Observer, ‘to be dealing with an accelerated social dystrophy’, characterized in children by ‘acute anxiety about traffic, gangs of older children, robbery, graffiti and rubbish; a lack of respect for one another and for authority; and obsessions with new gadgetry and celebrity culture, derived from long periods watching television.’

If we are going to have any chance of changing this, Polly Toybee argues in the Guardian, ‘We need to start a social revolution by truly putting children first’.

 

Reflecting a series of frightening reports

Media pessimism about the state of childhood has been fuelled by recent research studies, including:

The Foresight Report on Obesity which reported that ‘The British are growing tubbier and excess weight is increasingly the norm in an ever more sedentary society’, such that ‘Dramatic and comprehensive action is required to prevent most of us becoming obese by 2050'

‘Community Soundings’, by the Cambridge University Primary Review Group, which expressed ‘deep anxiety about the condition of childhood today and the society and world in which children are growing up’

OFSTED’s recent report showing that half of all secondary schools are still under-performing.

A survey by the Howard League for Penal Reform which revealed that 95% of 10 to 15-year-olds in the country have experienced crime at least once.

In addition there were reports from the Learning Through Landscapes study about outdoor facilities for children, and criticisms of childcare in a major report by the childcare campaign group Daycare Trust.

All following Unicef’s report back in February which suggested, in the words of The Mirror that Britain is ‘The worst country in the West in which to grow up’.

 

Unnecessarily alarmist?

But has the coverage been gratuitously alarmist? Writing in the Daily Mail, John Macleod described some of the claims being made about obesity as ‘shrill’ and ‘apocalyptic’. ‘Once again,’ Macleod writes, ‘fat is back in the news, replete with words such as 'epidemic', 'crisis' and 'timebomb'.

Vivienne Parry, who participated in the two year study into levels of obesity, went even further, questioning whether claims made in the media were in fact ‘a big fat lie?’. ‘Much of what I saw in the papers’, Parry wrote in The Times, ‘didn't reflect what it [the study] had said at all… That this generation will die before their parents as a result of obesity is a myth. But it has become one of those statements taken up with gusto by the media, and assimilated into popular consciousness’.

Coverage of the Cambridge University ‘child stress’ report has also been criticised. The study, Helene Goldberg writes in Spiked.com, ‘doesn’t tell us anything concrete about the state of modern childhood’. It is not based on objective measures but attitudes within focus groups, Goldberg says. Moreover, these attitudes were expressed just after the Unicef report had been released (which claimed that British children’s well-being lagged behind the rest of the western world).

‘Bombarded by a daily diet of headlines about British children being too fat, too inactive, and under threat from criminals, bullies and strangers’ it is no surprise, Goldberg concludes, ‘that a survey of opinion found people expressing concern about kids being stressed and depressed’.

 

Or not alarmist enough?

Or is this exaggeration and alarmism necessary to gain the attention not just of the population but of the government?

‘The campaigners for change’ David Aaronovitch writes in The Times, ‘are always on the edge of exaggeration ("worse than climate change"), so fearful are they of inaction’.
But perhaps, Aaronovitch suggest, this exaggeration is the only way to get the message across: ‘the message about obesity and lifestyle has to be internalised, as it eventually was over cigarettes, in order to work. We are going to have to convince ourselves that overfeeding and underexercising the kids amounts to neglect’.

 

Are the media being unnecessarily gloomy about the state of British childhood today?

Are they consciously avoiding ‘good news stories’ about childhood?

Will the fears about childhood expressed in the media become self-fulfilling?

 

Recommended

'A crisis in the family', Jenny McCartney, The Telegraph, 15-10-07

'Turn off the TV. Forget Facebook. Just give your kids some time', Henry Porter, The Observer, 15-10-07

'Obesity: the big fat lie?', Vivienne Parry, The Times, 20-10-07

There is one urgent area of concern for children where the media has been far from alarmist and has been much too quiet: the shocking level of child poverty in Britain. The UK has one of the worst rates of child poverty of all wealthy countries with nearly one in three children below the poverty line. Millions of children are going without basic necessities such as adequate clothing, a healthy diet, or a warm home and are excluded from important social and learning activities that other children take for granted.

The life chances of these children are very poor, with much worse health and education outcomes than other children and very high chances of remaining in poverty in their adult lives. Problems such as stress, poor social interaction and declining health are frequently related to poverty and can only be fully understood in the context of the tremendous inequality that exists in Britian compared with other wealthy countries.

The media myth in this case is that poverty only exists in developing countries, but the 3.8 million British children below the poverty line know that this is not so. The media also plays a powerful role in creating and perpetuating public myths about children and families from disadvantaged communities and dependent on benefits. By focussing on, and sensationalising, a minority of negative stories they promote unrepresentative public perceptions and generalised negative attitudes towards families affected by deprivation.

Absolutely disagree. It is typical of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to come up with such a sensationalist headline. I am afraid I don't represent a group or working committee or something like that, just a mother of two. So I can be dismissed as naive but I truly believe kids today are exposed to more opportunities than their previous generation, and as promising as any other generation before them. It is just matter of “Older” generation to catch up with the young peoples life style. That is a challenge for grown ups. Leave kids alone!.

As a regular reader of the Independent, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's consistently muddled thinking and illogical views are amongst the most infuriating/entertaining things in the paper for me. Her recent appeal to faith on the basis of personal ignorance was good a example.

Like many others, she jumped on a single study of questionable methodology to invoke the age-old argument of 'things ain't what they used to be'. Whilst I'm not in a position to professionally question issues such as stress in schools, or the issue of the 'rise' in obesity (again in the Independent, only the other day, was an article from a healthcare specialist raising reasonable doubts about this, such as the reclassification of what is obese in terms of BMI which made thousands of people obese overnight when they weren't the day before), I am in a position to question the assertion made by many that somehow the media are a key causal factor in how miserable children's lives are today.

Let's take the simple example of fear of things like crime or global warming amongst children, which many people blame on the media being irresponsibly full of scare stories. There is an implicit argument in such views that children somehow shouldn't know anything about the outside world, they should be 'protected' from the harsh realities, not allowed to watch/read the news, not told about real world issues in children's televison etc. etc. I can't see any basis for this kind of restriction of access to knowledge, it just wraps kids up in cotton wool and makes them arguably more vulnerable to exploitation when they're older. Besides when I was a kid in the late 70s/early 80s we may not have had global warming to worry about, but we did have the cold war and the risk of mutually assured destruction, not just in news, but in the whole of popular culture.

There's also the presumption of media effects in some illnesses in young people- size zero models= eating disorders, whilst somehow at exactly the same time junk food ads=obesity, which whilst it's a common refrain amongst many politicians, and some researchers, they are really baseless claims (big issues of methodology and starting assumptions that there's not space here to get into). Again the only solution if they were right would be all sorts of stringent types of censorship. And of course, that's exactly the kind of thing that happens- as in OfCom banning junk food ads to appear to be pro-social (whilst allowing gambling ads which apparently is OK- aimed at adults who know better than kids, adults like Alibhai-Brown perhaps?).

I believe Yasmin is correct in her declaration that the UK is seriously failing its children. We work with children and families who the Government deem to live in the 'affluent' South but for whom life is one long struggle against poverty and poor education with obesity rising rapidly.