Morning Star:
Modern childhood a vital class issue for the left
10 January 2017
A nasty mix of neoliberalism and the Tories’ austerity policies are having appalling effects on our children’s health and welfare
And so we come to the present day, with a 10-year anniversary press letter appearing in the Guardian on Boxing Day, co-organised with Dr Sharie Coombes and signed by a host of cultural luminaries — including Rowan Williams, the NUT’s Kevin Courtney, (Sirs) Jonathon Porritt, Anthony Seldon and Richard Bowlby; writer Philip Pullman; psychologists Oliver James, Susie Orbach and Sue Gerhardt; educationalists Robin Alexander, Penelope Leach, Sir Christopher Ball, Guy Claxton and Sir Tim Brighouse and a host of eminent professors — including Baroness Susan Greenfield, Lord Richard Layard, Andrew Samuels and Sami Timimi. If all these eminent people, with stellar professional and academic reputations to protect, are prepared to sign a public letter as outspoken as ours about children’s wellbeing, then something surely is rotten to the core in neoliberal Britain and we must urgently do something about it.
Related article
Guardian
Letter: Screen-based lifestyle harms children’s health
A decade ago our first multiple-signatory “toxic childhood” press letter described how children’s health and wellbeing were being undermined by the decline of outdoor play, increasingly screen-based lifestyles, a hyper-competitive schooling system and the unremitting commercialisation of childhood.
Despite widespread public concern, subsequent policymaking has been half-hearted, short-termist and disjointedly ineffective. The above factors continue to affect children adversely, with “school and cool” displacing active, self-directed play at an ever-earlier age. Physical health problems like obesity continue to escalate, and mental health problems among children and young people are approaching crisis levels. As well as the intense distress caused to families, there are obviously longer-term social and economic consequences for society as a whole.