Our Children and Other People’s: Childhood in the Age of Distrust

Abstract

A unifying theme to emerge from all the audience research carried out for this book — from focus groups to textual analysis of newspaper discussion threads — was the creeping sense that Britain has become a less secure, more intimidating place than in times past. The consensus among both sets of focus group participants — the first drawn from Whitehawk, a working-class suburb of Brighton in one of the 5 per cent most deprived wards in England (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2012); the second from Hanover and Queen’s Park, a middle-class neighbourhood a mile to its west — was that today’s children are being reared in a more menacing, stressful environment than previous generations. By contrast, adults’ memories of their own childhoods — and grandmothers’ of parenthood — reflected a widespread view that the risks and threats faced by the children of yesteryear were less omnipresent than those of today. And it was not just adults who appeared sensitive to this uneasy atmosphere: a perception common to all focus groups, including those involving children themselves, was that the experience of being a child had become more pressurized and anxiety-inducing than ever.