Suffer the Children
Nobody likes to be told that it's their child who's proving to be a 'disruptive element' in the classroom or who has turned out to be the ringleader in a recent spate of playground lunch-money heists. So, how do we react when we hear that not only do British teenagers drink more, fight more and have casual sex more than any others in Europe (as the Institute for Public Policy Research concluded last November) but - according to a Unicef report published last week - our children are also the unhappiest in the industrialised world?
Naturally, Tony Blair and Beverley Hughes, the Minister of State for Children, Young People and Families, were quick to rebut Unicef's claims. Some of the data the agency has used, they insist, dates back to the turn of the century, and there have been some big improvements since then. For example, in the last eight years the number of British children living in 'relative' poverty has fallen by over 700,000.
It's hardly surprising if Labour is keen to polish up its record on children and families, given that David Cameron has made a dedication to 'family values' a centrepiece of his 'new' Tory policy. Last week, in response to the shooting of three teenage boys in south London, he described our society as 'badly broken'.
Was this just political rhetoric, intended merely to sound the right note or to score a point? That remains to be seen. Nonetheless, it's certainly encouraging to hear a leading politician acknowledging that material prosperity does not equate with happiness and is not the measure of a country's state of health. 'If it comes to a collision between our wealth as a nation and the wellbeing of families,' Cameron has said, 'I choose families.'
If we truly want to find a cure for the unhappiness of British children, this must be right. As one newspaper summarised Cameron's view, we have to 'put family life ahead of economic prosperity' - though in a consumerist culture, that's always going to be easier said than done.
After all, it was Jesus who told his disciples that we should not neglect our kids or shut them out of our society, because they are the rightful possessors of the greatest treasure on earth. 'Let the little children come to me,' he is quoted as saying in Luke 18.16, 'and do not hinder them, for the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these.'
Jason Gardner
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