I'm sure you'll have seen the damning report about the quality of life for British children. This is really worrying. It seems that British children's quality of life (compared the 21 other Western countries) is:
- 12th out of 21 for Health
- 17th out of 21 for Education
- 18th out of 21 for Poverty
- 21st out of 21 for Family relationships
- 21st out of 21 for Risky behaviour
This is not good. Now we need to demand that somethings is done to try to improve matters. Whilst millions of parents look after their children well, there must be something going wrong if we are last in the family relationships category. The Education result really annoys me. What is it that other countries are doing right that we appear to be doing so badly?
Unfortunately, although this is a terrible report, it is not completely surprising. The scally culture that exists amongst most of our teenagers is getting out of hand. You seem them all in huge gangs, walking around the town with their trackies, shoes and caps. It's impossible to drive through most towns without seeing a huge gang hanging around on some street corner. Children have got into their mindset that it's ok to look like a scally, it's ok to drink underage, it's ok to have sex underage and that it's ok to intimidate people. In my view, the Government have got a huge task on their hands to try to change the way many teenagers behave.
Whilst I'm ranting about teenagers, why is it that teenagers who do conform to society and are sensible are not rewarded properly. They all seem to get tarnished with the same brush, yet I know there is a huge number of teenagers who do the right thing. Can't children who do this be rewarded in some way. It all comes back to the positive discipline we all use - we praise the children who behave well in order to encourage the others to follow suit.
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Unicef
The Unicef report on child poverty in the twenty-one wealthiest countries was disturbing reading. Britain came bottom in the overall table, which measured forty different indicators. British children were most likely to feel left out, awkward and lonely. They were less likely to eat the main meal of the day with their parents. Only 40% of over-11s found their peers “kind and helpful”.
There were some fairly predictable knee-jerk reactions from the press; the ‘Daily Mail’ blamed one parent families and the breakdown of the family; ‘The Times’ used that time honoured tactic – shoot the messenger (Unicef). The best piece was by Steve Richards in ‘The Independent’, yes there were problems with the survey and it is possible to pick holes in it, but the Unicef report follows other critical investigations into the welfare of children in Britain.
Why are America (the world’s wealthiest country) and Britain (fourth wealthiest) at the bottom of the league table for child welfare? What do we have in common? In both countries the state has been absolved from responsibility for poverty, state providers have been replaced by cheaper voluntary organisations or charities, under pinning this was Thatcher’s infamous 1987 quote, “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” Lastly there’s the enormous wealth gap - company executives earned five times the wage of a shop floor worker in the 1970s, now it’s eighty times or more.
The Labour Government’s response was that the figures were ‘out of date’ and that 700,000 children have been taken out of poverty. As welcome as those figures are they must share the blame for the way that young people have been marginalised and demonised. The New Labour reaction is to reach for the Asbo and the CCTV, yet where is the investment in the youth service?
Another interesting fact was the poor self-image of children in Britain. Maybe that’s something to do with the ‘celebrity culture’ where the only role models on offer for young girls are intellectually challenged, surgically enhanced, stick-thin models. The whole modus operandi of the advertising industry is to peddle the myth that money = happiness. This point is developed by Oliver James in his book ‘Affluenza’, why are there such high levels of depression in the wealthiest countries?
In schools we have the testing culture that children find extremely stressful. As the TES pointed out in some classes friendships are made or broken according to ‘the Level’ pupils are allocated in tests.
We don’t teach in hermitically sealed classrooms, the influence of society is apparent all the time, children are the products of their environment. All we can do is promote the values of friendship, community and solidarity. As the hippies used to say, “It’s not what’s in your pocket, it’s what’s in your head that counts.”
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