Conclusion of Miserable Children
I’ve just read (in the transcript online – I’d got home long before this point) Andrew Brown’s conclusion to the programme:
But what can we change? What should our arrangements be? We can’t disentangle the problems of children from those of adults. The government, too, sends families mixed messages. They are to be, in Gordon Brown’s great phrase, “hard working families”. But do the hardest-working families have the happiest children? The evidence suggests that they don’t and that it’s the family which plays together that stays together. In fact it’s hard to resist a rather heretical conclusion. Most of what we have seen as the peculiar horrors of modern childhood seem to arise from a lack of authority: they can, in shorthand, be blamed on the Sixties. But that was a complicated decade, with good as well as bad; and one of the distinctive attitudes of the Sixties was a distrust of money, and a belief that material success should not be the measure of everything. We’re never going to get away from a society that cares about status. But one in which status is measured only by material success makes us, and our children, needlessly miserable.
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