Is it being British to be afraid of children?

Obsessively treating all children as if they were vulnerable was having the contrary effect of destroying UK society's capacity to provide its younger generation with a caring extended family, the clinical psychologist and media pundit Tanya Byron [1] told a British radio audience at the weekend.

“We are a paranoid risk-averse culture, and we’re more at home with blame and judgment than with the harder task of compassion and understanding, particularly when it comes to our children and young people,” she said.

“If we can’t function as a family at the macro level, the level of society, how on earth can we expect to make it work at the level of the household.”

Her keynote lecture in BBC Radio 3's annual Free Thinking Festival [2] was a series of reflections on the "skewed attitudes" to children that have earned the UK the opprobrium of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

Britain had become the first westernized industrial nation to be criticized so fundamentally, she said, for "the general climate of intolerance, especially towards its adolescents".

She traced a vicious circle in which paranoia led to distrust, then to a loss of connection between communities and their offspring, and all too often to tragedies of neglect that fueled media outrage and generated yet more caution and paranoia.

“As a practitioner who has spent her entire career working with extremely vulnerable children, I am in no way suggesting that we must not focus on and cater to their needs.

“However we have become so fixated on the vulnerable child that we are now treating every child as if they are the most vulnerable child.

“We thereby do damage to the majority of children by denying them their necessary freedoms – freedoms to develop, freedoms to be children."

In damaging parallel was a fear of "improper" behavior on the part of otherwise responsible adults, typified, she said, by circumstances surrounding the death by drowning of two-year-old Abigail Rae in 2006. She had wandered from her nursery and fallen into a pond. A passing motorist had noticed her lost and on her own but had not stopped. He later told police he was afraid his behavior might have been misinterpreted.

“It was a chilling example of the fear that exists between adults and children and particularly the fear that exists between men over their contact with children," Tanya Byron said.

The response on the part of anxious governments to media-inflated social alarms was making matters worse.

“As a clinician, I experience dysfunctional family life on a daily basis, as the result of poor parental management or extreme marital discord, and also at the harder, more horrifying end when I work with children who are actively being abused.

“I see the bad often. I'm not being blasé about the bad. The damage that poor family functioning does is great but, even after seeing so many examples, I do not feel they represent families as a whole across the UK.

“We know that children do their best when they are surrounded by many loving adults – their extended family, teachers, neighbors, people within the local community. These loving and caring adults can be heterosexual or homosexual; they can come from any race, culture or religion. For children, family means a variety of adults who care for them in a way that traditional models have never described.

“But in this culture of increasing fear and distrust between generations, where we’re seeing a massively negative impact on inter-generational mixing, we see the breakdown of family in its widest sense.”

"Tell me this is what I am and I’ll be it"

Byron is professor in the Public Understanding of Science by Edge Hill University and is increasingly visible as a UK government adviser. Last year “The Byron Review” was a report to the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families on the use of videogames and the Internet (particularly social networking websites) by children, and the role of parenting in policing it.

She has lately been drawn into the argument over proposals that anyone who has contact with children more often than once a month should be required to register with a new Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA).

UK Children's Secretary Ed Balls has asked ISA chair Roger Singleton to carry out a review of the scheme. He called in Byron, who commented, "We disrespect children to such a degree that we have a fear of them. Policymakers will jump on stereotypes to appease people's fears."

Fear of children was another of the threads in her BBC lecture. Drawing on the language of the Washington State-based FreeChild Project [3], she said, “I believe we are both an ephebiphobic and a pediaphobic society. I think we have a fear of youth and I think we have a fear of children. We see them as generations out of control – feral, falling apart.

“Within young people themselves, it can generate a negative sense of self, especially amongst the most vulnerable. If you tell people enough times that they’re rubbish, they’re going to be rubbish, particularly the most vulnerable.

“I’ve seen that clinically time and time again. They say, ‘If this is what I am, if this what you tell me I am, then I’ll be it.'"