Children Webmag - Editorial

There was a time when some local councils prided themselves upon avoiding party politics when dealing with matters of childcare. They meant that they did not use the debates about children’s needs - whether as individuals or as groups of children - to score points off the opposition, or to suggest that the other side did not care about them. The emptying of dustbins, planning applications and council housing were all fair game, but not children. Most of the real decision-making was left to be handled confidentially by professional staff away from the political arena.

Closely linked was a perception of children as a vulnerable group who needed protection and who deserved special attention. Pleading for their welfare was the best way of getting resources to meet their needs - the sympathy vote. That strand in the perceptions of the wider community remains and underpins the ability of children’s charities such as the NSPCC and Barnardo’s to attract substantial charitable giving. It may not be as strong as it was, but it is still there.

The argument for children’s rights is quite different. It is demanding, challenging and assertive, rather than pleading and assuming weakness and vulnerability. One of the problems if a group puts itself forward as having rights is that it risks losing the sympathy vote and may be seen as an adversary, perhaps deserving respect rather than patronisation. Without the sympathy vote, a group has to argue its case cogently and be able to press the right points home in the right circles. It is a tougher game, and players can come unstuck.

Children are now standing at centre stage in the political arena in the United Kingdom for another quite different reason - economics. If the country is to be successful in the twenty-first century and beyond, its children need to be brought up and educated very carefully, so that they have the skills to maintain and develop technology further, to manage the complex relationships found in all aspects of running a highly-tuned society. The country cannot afford for its children to fail, but must invest in their care as little children and in their education.

It may be thought that this approach will see them only as cogs in the economic machine, to be trained mechanistically in subject matter decreed by the Government. However, anyone with any sense can see that children cannot simply be conditioned; they accept some things they are told but they reject others, and succeeding generations move on in ways which their predecessors could not predict. If the approach is purely mechanistic, it will fail.

It may be that the philosophy of investing in children will provide a more solid basis for addressing their long-term needs than either patronising sympathy or demands for rights. It respects their needs both as children and as potential adults. It wants to get the best out of everybody as individuals, whether they are children with special needs, children with special abilities or not. It has to develop them to be creative, to take initiatives and to act and think for themselves. It will want them to contribute and bear responsibility, avoiding the self-centred imbalances sometimes seen in the rights movement.

Keith White’s In Residence piece this month focuses on the need to think hard about the role of children in wider society. There is plenty of thinking going on at the moment, often inconsistent and tending in different directions, but that is the nature of creative thought about current issues, as arguments are tested out. Children are at present central to politics, and the ways in which they are brought up and educated are sources of controversy.

In classical Greece, where politics were invented, the term simply meant the affairs of the or city state. Every citizen was expected to take an interest in them and bear his share of the responsibility for the community’s governance. Issues ceased to be political only if they were uncontentious. Anything of concern was meat for political discussion. The current Government has given a high degree of priority to children in its expenditure plans and legislation, and the centrality of children to politics is laudable. It means that their needs are being actively considered and addressed.

We only wish they’d ban smacking. Can you imagine any other subject in society where a profession is united in recommending the appropriate action to take in its area of expertise, and the Government insists that its experience (as parents) means that it knows better? But it is in the nature of the give-and-take of politics that you don’t get everything you want, and that if you carry on, you often get what you want eventually.

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