Big Mother is watching
How did we come to the very recent idea that children must never be left at home alone?
John Gummer was on Radio 4's Any Questions last week. The Tory veteran who famously stuffed a burger into his daughter's maw at the height of the BSE crisis was predictably gung-ho both in his support for the embattled turkey industry and his criticism of the decision to close Birmingham's schools because it was snowing. It was a straightforward, populist one-two against the nanny state that, in his view, (a) tells us what to eat and (b) shuts everything down at the slightest risk that a child might come to some harm.
But then he said something odd: he raised the plight of "perfectly decent people who would have gone to work, who couldn't go to work because they had to stay back, because their children were not able to go to school." Gummer, it seems, was quite prepared to have a child crack her coccyx on an icy path: but the notion that said child might be left alone in her own home was simply unthinkable.
A few days before, work and pensions secretary John Hutton was criticised for floating the idea that lone parents on benefits might be required to seek work once their youngest children reach the age of 12, as opposed to 16. Most 15-year-olds, one infers from the reaction, need the supervision of an adult at all hours.
Children no longer play outdoors, we are constantly told, because a risk-averse society perceives danger in snowballs and conkers, or imagines a paedophile skulking under every lamp-post. We have the modern phenomenon of the school run, a deliciously perverse response to the risks posed by so many cars on the road. But where did we get this notion that children are not even safe at home unless a responsible adult is there to look out for them?
I certainly don't recall this being the case when I was growing up. Both my parents worked full-time, and from the age of about eight or nine, I was expected to make my way home after school, feed myself and my younger sister, and wait for my mother's return, maybe a couple of hours later.
If either of us was ill with anything that didn't seem life-threatening, we were left in bed. My mother would try to come home at lunchtime, when she'd usually find me sipping tomato soup on the sofa, watching Crown Court. (I should protect my parents' egalitarian, Guardian-reading credentials by clarifying that the responsibility only fell to the female parent because she worked closer to home.) By modern standards, we were latchkey kids, but nobody suggested we were abused or at risk.
Now, the half-term holidays are upon us, and thousands of parents will feel the need to arrange childcare, or take time off work to tend to their offspring - even if those offspring are nearly adults. Perhaps we need some modern equivalent of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, the structure that would enable a single prison guard to keep an eye on hundreds of felons. Big Mother is watching you.
There is clearly increasing disgruntlement over the notion that modern children are becoming fat and antisocial because they no longer scrump apples or fall into rivers. The success of the Iggulden brothers' Dangerous Book for Boys shows that there's a critical mass of parents who don't see a grazed knee as reason to be rushed into intensive care. But is there any point in spending half-term building a tree house if you have to do it in the kitchen, with your mum looking on?
John Gummer was on Radio 4's Any Questions last week. The Tory veteran who famously stuffed a burger into his daughter's maw at the height of the BSE crisis was predictably gung-ho both in his support for the embattled turkey industry and his criticism of the decision to close Birmingham's schools because it was snowing. It was a straightforward, populist one-two against the nanny state that, in his view, (a) tells us what to eat and (b) shuts everything down at the slightest risk that a child might come to some harm.
But then he said something odd: he raised the plight of "perfectly decent people who would have gone to work, who couldn't go to work because they had to stay back, because their children were not able to go to school." Gummer, it seems, was quite prepared to have a child crack her coccyx on an icy path: but the notion that said child might be left alone in her own home was simply unthinkable.
A few days before, work and pensions secretary John Hutton was criticised for floating the idea that lone parents on benefits might be required to seek work once their youngest children reach the age of 12, as opposed to 16. Most 15-year-olds, one infers from the reaction, need the supervision of an adult at all hours.
Children no longer play outdoors, we are constantly told, because a risk-averse society perceives danger in snowballs and conkers, or imagines a paedophile skulking under every lamp-post. We have the modern phenomenon of the school run, a deliciously perverse response to the risks posed by so many cars on the road. But where did we get this notion that children are not even safe at home unless a responsible adult is there to look out for them?
I certainly don't recall this being the case when I was growing up. Both my parents worked full-time, and from the age of about eight or nine, I was expected to make my way home after school, feed myself and my younger sister, and wait for my mother's return, maybe a couple of hours later.
If either of us was ill with anything that didn't seem life-threatening, we were left in bed. My mother would try to come home at lunchtime, when she'd usually find me sipping tomato soup on the sofa, watching Crown Court. (I should protect my parents' egalitarian, Guardian-reading credentials by clarifying that the responsibility only fell to the female parent because she worked closer to home.) By modern standards, we were latchkey kids, but nobody suggested we were abused or at risk.
Now, the half-term holidays are upon us, and thousands of parents will feel the need to arrange childcare, or take time off work to tend to their offspring - even if those offspring are nearly adults. Perhaps we need some modern equivalent of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, the structure that would enable a single prison guard to keep an eye on hundreds of felons. Big Mother is watching you.
There is clearly increasing disgruntlement over the notion that modern children are becoming fat and antisocial because they no longer scrump apples or fall into rivers. The success of the Iggulden brothers' Dangerous Book for Boys shows that there's a critical mass of parents who don't see a grazed knee as reason to be rushed into intensive care. But is there any point in spending half-term building a tree house if you have to do it in the kitchen, with your mum looking on?
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on Wednesday, February 14, 2007 at 10:04 AM.
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