Frank Furedi

Fees fuel campus consumer culture
By Sean Coughlan.

What do student newspapers complain about these days?

How about this headline in Swansea University’s student paper following the recent bad weather.

“Students lose £20 a lecture after snow sends university into lockdown.”

It pointed out that fee-paying students are not getting full value for money if lectures are cancelled.

Students were seeing their “money disappear quicker than the snow melted”.

It illustrates something about changed attitudes on campus when students are complaining that they are not getting enough lectures.

Paying fees means that students are customers as well as learners.

The student union president at Swansea University, James Houston, says that going to university is “still different from a shopping experience” - but that paying fees is pushing it in that direction.

‘Customer service’

“There is a strong argument that if you charge more, then people will want to know where their money is going,” he says.

Universities are more than a business, he says. But he fears that fees are driving a campus consumer ethic.

The students’ union already has complaints from students about not getting “value for money”.

This shift in attitude is also reflected in an increase in complaints by students to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education - which it attributes to fees.

“We believe that one reason for the increase is the rise in tuition fees. There is also more consumerist thinking amongst students. Students have become more assertive about their rights, and the services they are entitled to,” said chief executive, Rob Behrens.

While the debate about fees was once about whether it would be a social barrier to poorer students, in practice there have been other less expected changes.

The combination of fees and debts from student loans means that university courses are judged by their price tags as well as academic worth.

Frank Furedi, social commentator and academic at the University of Kent, says that the campus culture is “unrecognisable” from a generation ago.

Students now ring lecturers at home at the weekend, he says, seeing this as being part of the service they are buying with their fees.

“They feel they can make all kinds of demands,” says Prof Furedi.

“Fees give a clear and tangible form to the idea of students as consumers.

“The relationship with the student is no longer academic, it’s a service provider and customer. The academic relationship is an endangered species.”

There are still students who want to be inspired and intellectually challenged, he says.

Extended school

But the landscape is one in which many students expect to have everything done for them.

“School has extended into higher education. Students behave like schoolchildren.”

If tuition fees are hiked further, he says it will intensify the sense of consumerism among students.

There are other signs of how fees have changed life on campus.

Students are more careers-focused than ever before, the accumulation of large debts putting pressure on them to get a degree that will help them in the jobs market.

Beginning a university degree course is a serious financial undertaking and that now shapes the experience of student life.

There are other practical changes. More students than ever are living at home while at university - with surveys suggesting that perhaps a fifth of students continue to live with their parents.

This in turn means that more students, particularly from less well-off families, are choosing from universities close to where they live.

Helicopter parents

The role of parents, who pay towards student costs, has also been seen as becoming more prominent.

This has been caricatured as “helicopter parents” who hover over every decision taken by their student offspring, including contacting lecturers.

Parents can now act as agents for their children in university applications - and have even been allowed to sit in on admissions interviews.

Cary Cooper, pro-vice chancellor at Lancaster University, also points to the structural consequences of a further increase in fees.

At present, he says, the current level of student debt means that many more students have to take part-time jobs to pay their way.

Another hike in fees will mean even more students will need to work - including those who will only be able to study part-time.

This will mean universities will have to adapt, such as providing courses which can be passed in individual units, accumulating credits over a number of years.

Professor Cooper says this could mean a fundamental change for higher education, moving away from the traditional model of 18 to 21-year-olds taking a three-year degree course. 

First published by BBC News Online, 16 March 2009

Keeping mum: Julie Myerson on her contoversial new book
By Dani Garavelli.

IT’S AS if she’s broken the last taboo. Novelist Julie Myerson’s controversial decision to turn her teenage son’s troubles into a book – creating a clever generational twist on the misery-lit phenomenon – has seen her cast as the worst mother since Rosemary West.

Thanks to her, the world now knows every cough and splutter of Jake’s journey from star pupil to dishevelled cannabis user: how he stole from his parents to fund his habit; played his electric guitar at full volume in the garden; encouraged his younger siblings to share his joints (a claim he vehemently denies) and was finally kicked him out of the family’s £800,000 house in Tooting at the age of 17 when he hit his mother, perforating her eardrum.

Thanks to his father Jonathan – a playwright and magistrate – chipping in with his own version of events, they have a clear image of him stumbling out of the front door “looking scruffy and unkempt” and reliant on one of his friend’s parents for a roof over his head.

In all their public utterances on the subject, the Myersons have focused on the pain they have suffered at Jake’s hands. But if – by offering up her family’s ordeal up for public delectation – the Man Booker prize short-listed author hoped to elicit sympathy, she must be sorely disappointed. In the furore that erupted after news she had written it broke, Myerson has been lambasted as egotistical, manipulative and cynical, and accused of a gross betrayal of everything it means to be a parent.

Jake himself – now 20 – has branded his mother “slightly insane and naive” for being unable to tell the difference between “smoking a spliff and being a drug addict”, adding: “What she has done has taken the very worst years of my life and cleverly blended it into a work of art, and that to me is obscene.”

But many outside observers have been a good deal less charitable. “(She] is a totally self-obsessed, me-me-me individual, who has cynically used her son’s drug problems to further her own career,” said one of the hundreds of irate posters who have formed a virtual mob baying for her blood. Others dismissed her as a “moral pygmy” and implied her rampant self-absorption would be enough to drive any self-respecting teenager to drugs.

Myerson’s attempts to justify herself on Newsnight backfired when she came across as smug and sanctimonious as opposed to angst-ridden, while her insistence that she wrote the book to help other parents experiencing similar travails was undermined when it was rushed out two months earlier than planned to capitalise on all the unexpected publicity.

Setting the seal on Myerson’s image as an aberration of nature, was her eventual admission that she was the anonymous author of the now-defunct Guardian’s Living With Teenagers column, in which a mother charted every aspect of her children’s puberty, from their abusive hormonal outbursts to the growth of their first pubic hairs.

But there are two sides to every story. Drowned out by the outrage, are the voices of a handful of parents whose own families have been ripped apart by drugs, and who welcome the discussion this middle-class meltdown has provoked. Debra Bell, who got to know the Myersons because her son William was also using cannabis, said: “I know that it’s been a nightmare for Julie, but I firmly believe she made the right decision both in terms of the tough love and in writing about it.”

So was the Myersons’ decision to kick their son out of the house an act of altruism or an over-reaction born of bourgeois hysteria? And was turning a teenager’s trauma into copy a good way to raise awareness of the challenges of parenting or a cynical breach of trust?

The Myersons say Jake’s troubles started when he was 15. Up to then, he was the model pupil, easy-going, biddable and hard-working. But, in the year of his GCSEs, his behaviour started to degenerate – he became sullen and apathetic, began staying in bed for long stretches, and was prone to violent outbursts. Gradually – and this is where it starts to get contentious – his parents realised that what they had considered as the odd casual joint, was actually an addiction to skunk.

Soon Jake had given up any pretence of studying, money started disappearing from people’s purses, and the Myersons began to suspect he was “dealing” to his two younger siblings. “One morning I discover that he’s been giving his 13-year-old brother drugs,” his mother has written. “He and his friends – selling him cannabis. Teaching him to roll a joint when he still occasionally plays with Lego and listens to story tapes at night.”

The Myersons say they threatened their son, reasoned with him, tried to draw up contracts, but to no avail, so they felt they had no choice but to kick him out. Since then, there have been brief attempts at reconciliation; periods where they have relented and allowed him to come back home, only to send him packing again – but no real progress has been made. That’s the bare bones of the Myersons’ story, from their perspective.

As far as it goes, it’s not so very different from that experienced by middle-class parents across the country. Where it breaks the mould, is the way in which Myerson responded. Rather than retreating to her room to work through her maternal angst in private, or seeking solace from a parents’ support group, she turned the book she was writing about the life and early death of Victorian artist Mary Yelloly – into an examination of her own “lost child”.

Defending herself against claims she was making a fast buck at her son’s expense, the Newsnight Review panellist – whose semi-autobiographical first novel Sleepwalking drew on her own abused childhood – said she wanted to portray Jake as a “loveable, likeable boy”. She said: “It is a book about how much I love him, not a character assassination”. And some critics who have read The Lost Child have been moved by the deep sense of loss it evokes.

Others, however, remain unconvinced. They speak of Myerson’s lack of insight and suggest what she interprets as Jake’s consenting to the publication of her book, reads more like the sulky resignation of someone who knows there is nothing he can do to stop it happening. It is disconcerting too to find out that for all the soul searching Myerson claims she did before deciding to publish, she paid Jake £1,000 for the use of his teenage poems.

To sociologist Frank Furedi, author of Paranoid Parenting, Myerson’s book is less a self-help manual for the guardians of troubled teenagers than an abdication of parental responsibility.

“I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t write about your children’s problems in a way which stimulated discussion, but I think this book is about self-promotion,” Furedi says. “It claims to have a message, but because of its intensely voyeuristic character all it does is satisfy people’s desire to pry. Arguing that it helps other parents deal with their own problems is a bit like arguing that books with pictures of naked ladies help people learn more about biology.”

Furedi says he believes in holding the line where teenagers are concerned, but objects to Myerson’s fatalism. “I have no problem with telling kids you can’t do this or that, but you do have a responsibility towards your children which extends to their destructive, antisocial behaviour. I feel at the root of this book is a need for self-justification and vindication.”

Relationship counsellor Suzie Hayman is someone accustomed to speaking to parents at the end of their tether. She is a trustee of Parentline, an organisation inundated with calls from mothers and fathers worried about their children’s drug use. They can be split into two groups, she says, those who are just engaging in teenage experimentation, and those who have a serious problem. Tellingly, Hayman believes the heaviest users are almost always using drugs to try to express anguish or escape trauma. “For many people, the first step in helping their child is to find out what is really going on and that may mean looking at their own lives,” she says. “Sometimes parents come to us seeking help with an ‘awful’ teenager but when they talk it through they realise they need help to change as well.”

Sadly – though Jake claims he turned to cannabis to block out his parents’ arguments – that element of introspection seems entirely lacking in Myerson’s account. As she watches her family self-combust, she seems to be asking not, “what did we do wrong?” but, “how could this happen to people like us?”

If the chattering classes were in need of their own Jade Goody, then the Myerson saga has given them plenty of gawp at. The conflicting accounts of the family’s estrangement which dominated last week’s newspapers were full of the kind of toe-curling domestic exchanges which make reality TV so compulsive.

All the flak has doubtless caused Myerson some embarrassment, but the publicity it has generated means The Lost Child is likely to fly off the shelves. But for Jake – now living in Camberwell and trying to forge a career in the music industry – its publication is likely to be the source of a humiliation far deeper than that experienced when his sneering friends told him he was the subject of the Living With Teenagers column.

“Dragging his troubles into a public arena has placed a terrible stain on (Jake’s] reputation,” says Hayman. “Even if he turns his life around he will always be that druggie kid whose mother wrote about him. It makes it extremely difficult for him ever to trust his mother again.”

The irony is that the book’s portrayal of fleeting moments of tenderness – such as when Jake moves Myerson to tears by singing a song he wrote for her – suggest that, despite his problems, he was not completely “lost” to his family. Yet the brutal way in which his parents have apparently exploited his pain may ensure its title is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

First published by Scotland On Sunday, 15 March 2009

Our fascination with Jade’s grim reality
Is it the public nature of her dying or is there something about Jade Goody that means we cannot look away? By Margarette Driscoll and Kevin Dowling.

In August 1776 crowds gathered outside the Edinburgh home of the philosopher David Hume. The author of A Treatise of Human Nature was a religious sceptic and people waited with a sense of suppressed excitement to see whether the “great infidel” would recant as he succumbed to cancer.

Yesterday, more than 300 miles, 200 years and a world away from the Georgian idea of celebrity, another crowd was gathered outside the doors of the Royal Marsden hospital in southwest London. This time a phalanx of paparazzi waited for any pictorial crumbs that might fall from the table as Jade Goody was accepted into the Christian faith.

Before she dies — also from cancer – the 27-year-old decided she would like to be christened alongside her two sons, Bobby, 5, and Freddy, 4. It was the reality TV star’s wish that the boys “get to know Jesus so they can keep in touch with me when I’m in heaven”.

Goody’s condition has deteriorated so much in the past few days that she was too ill to leave the Marsden, so the ceremony, originally planned to take place at a church near her home with a party for 50 to follow, was carried out in the hospital chapel.

Although a small affair, it will be another scoop for OK! magazine, which bought the rights to her wedding to Jack Tweed two weeks ago, part of a package of deals which have made Goody’s lingering death worth a total of £1.4m.

Like every other aspect of Goody’s approaching death, it is sure to give us the sort of ghoulish frisson that must have shivered through the people who awaited Hume’s demise – although on a much greater scale.

What these two very public deaths tell us about Britain – and how the concept of fame has morphed from reverence for a great thinker to a girl from Bermondsey celebrated for her ignorance – almost goes without saying.

Goody’s exposure of every detail of her treatment for cancer, from receiving her diagnosis on live television to pictures last week of her hooked up to an oxygen machine after an emergency operation to clear an obstruction in her bowel, is taking us into a realm that people in Hume’s day could not have imagined.

Goody, the daughter of a drug addict who was brought up in poverty, might seem the product of a very British underclass culture but her story – part soap opera, part car crash – has the world hooked. Her image has not only graced the front page of The Sun newspaper every day since February 14 but she has also been on the front page of the New York Times.

“Oprah Winfrey wants her on the show. Larry King wants her on the show. I’ve got his people ringing every day to see if she’s up to doing it – and that show goes to 200 countries,” said Max Clifford, Goody’s PR man who has been juggling visits to the Marsden with fielding requests for interviews and information from as far afield as Argentina.

“It’s been amazing. I had a film crew from France in the office yesterday and Italians the day before. Simon Cowell [the pop impresario] called me from Los Angeles and said everyone was talking about Jade. She’s the first person on reality TV to become world famous.”

What is it that we and now the rest of the world find so compelling? And what does it say about us?

Ever since Goody walked into the Big Brother house seven years ago we have been both appalled and fascinated by her. The then 21-year-old dental nurse from southeast London, who famously thought “East Angular” was abroad, quickly became an unlikely cover girl.

Mark Frith, who was editing Heat magazine, saw her popularity as a reaction to the “retouched photos and copy-approved interviews” that had become the celebrity staples of the 1990s. But even he was surprised at the bidding war that ensued when Jade came out of the Big Brother house. “Texts showed the increasing amounts being put forward: £10,000, then £20,000, then it just kept going,” he recalled.

Heat eventually did a deal in conjunction with the News of the World for a six-figure sum.

“We gave her a make-over and put her on the cover, accompanied by the words ‘Jade’s amazing new look’. That issue sold over 640,000 copies, Heat’s highest sale.”

She remains Britain’s leading cover girl for the simple reason that she is guaranteed to sell newspapers or magazines, ahead of the pop stars Cheryl Cole and Victoria Beckham.

Gigi Eligoloff, the senior producer of Big Brother who overruled sceptical colleagues to get Goody on screen, says the quality that makes her so heart-stopping now is what she spotted in the loudmouthed girl who electrified everyone in the Big Brother audition room.

“She’s got no filter,” she said. “Most people, at least when they become famous, have some part of themselves that they keep back, something that’s private. Not Jade. It’s her openness that’s so compelling.”

As a character she set a template for the mix that makes Big Brother so popular, which explains the interest from abroad. “People may not know her but they know Big Brother,” said Eligoloff. “I bet every country’s got its Jade.”

There was also something likeable about Goody, an “essential sweetness” with which people have always sympathised. Even as a dental nurse she had already risen above a rotten childhood: she later recalled rolling joints, aged five, for her mother Jackiey, who was a thief and a “clipper”, someone who pretends to organise a rendezvous with a prostitute but instead runs off with the money. Jade was left to do most of the cooking and cleaning. Her father, a heroin addict, had already left home.

Later there was something genuine about her tearful apologies for her racist remarks to Shilpa Shetty, the Indian actress. She knew her lucrative career was all but ruined. Her perfume, Shh, which had been a bestseller, was withdrawn from the shelves. She agreed to appear on Bigg Boss, the Indian version of Big Brother, as part of her atonement. It was while filming the show that she discovered she had cervical cancer.

Who could have scripted this last tragic chapter? “She’s young, she’s got lots of money, she’d got two young boys and she’s dying,” said Eligoloff. “I wouldn’t be surprised if her story’s turned into a movie.”

The “Jade effect” that has produced increasing requests for smear tests among young women has now extended to cancer charities and hospices. The St Clare hospice near Harlow, Essex, where Goody stayed last weekend, had 60,000 hits on its website in a day, as many as it would usually get in a month.

A spokesman said its teams collecting money on the streets last week had been unusually successful: “A lot more people were coming up to talk to them and putting a few extra quid in the tin.”

Calls to Macmillan Cancer Support helplines increased by 50% on the Monday after Goody’s wedding.

Carolan Davidge, brand director of Cancer Research UK, said: “Jade has done a huge amount to raise awareness of the importance of cervical screening. If Jade’s experience motivates people to contribute to our cervical cancer research, we hope more lives could be saved in the future.”

Although Goody has been open about the fact that she is sharing her death throes with the world for money – to pay for her children’s education – some believe she is also performing a public service.

“We have already broken the taboo about cancer, but this is the first time that we’ve seen in such a public way the move from active care to palliative care and eventually to death,” said Karol Sikora, professor of cancer medicine at London’s Imperial College School of Medicine.

“Western society finds it very difficult to talk about death. The anxiety people have about the Jade Goody story, their sense that it is a bit mawkish, is really a cover for the fear they have of death and dying.”

The Goody story has certainly made the agony of dying from cervical cancer more than clear. The rawness of some of the pictures of her in distress have been difficult to look at. Her tender devotion to her two young boys – soon to be without a mother – could not fail to touch.

“It’s fantastic the way she is dealing with it,” said David Praill, chief executive of Help the Hospices. “But there’s a part of me that thinks: oh dear, is it really good for Jade to have all those cameras following her? Perhaps it is a way of escaping from the reality of her situation.”

Goody’s public deterioration is a spectacle that makes many uneasy: James Landale, BBC News’s chief political correspondent, who is suffering from cancer himself, encapsulated the feeling last week when he said that the “public circus” around Goody was “perilously close” to becoming a form of entertainment.

In Landale’s eyes, those who examine Goody’s picture every day to see if she has lost weight or speculated on how long she’s got are like spectators “eating a picnic at a public hanging”.

When Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University, wrote Therapy Culture, his scathing analysis of a post-Diana Britain in which people were seeing the problems of everyday life through a prism of emotion – where phrases like “emotional damage” and “scarred for life” evoked a sense of powerlessness – he noted that newspaper columns such as those by John Diamond and Ruth Picardie, who both wrote about having cancer, had become a form of entertainment for the middle class.

“This is the logical conclusion,” he said, “though Diamond and Picardie were self-revealing rather than confessional and their writing could be seen as a high point of journalism for very cultured people. This is a parallel development: pornography to their erotic art.

“It’s a strange phenomenon. You cannot take your eyes off it, though the idea that she is helping people is really an affectation – it’s like publishing pornography and arguing that it’s good because it teaches what people’s bodies look like.”

Furedi also believes that the blow-by-blow coverage of Goody’s demise – at her own instigation – is an extension of the urge to put personal details about yourself on websites such as Facebook and the line between public and private is dangerously blurred.

“Young people are increasingly socialised into a culture where they haven’t learnt to distinguish between what you do in the privacy of your own home with your loved ones and how you behave in a world of strangers,” Furedi said.

Goody has at least tried to ensure there will be no unseemly wrangle over the fortune she has amassed. She is leaving everything – her house and money – to her children, who will live with their father, the television presenter Jeff Brazier. Her new husband, Tweed – who added to the drama of last week when he was convicted of assaulting a taxi driver – will inherit nothing. “He wants everything to go to the boys,” she has said.

Her proudest boast is that she has put in trust enough money to pay her sons’ school fees until they are 16. “I’m ignorant,” she told Clifford, “but I don’t want them to be – I want my boys to have the chances and opportunities I never had.”

“Many of the celebrities I’ve worked with over the years are interested in one person at the end of the day – themselves,” said Clifford. “Jade has genuinely done all this for her kids. She’s not academic, but in her own way she’s very bright.

“It might seem a strange word to use about Jade Goody, but there’s something incredibly noble about the girl.”

Nobility: now there’s a concept Hume would have understood.

‘It’s very Victorian, this obsession with death’

Martin Amis, novelist

“I met her once in a TV studio and found her very sweet, articulate and warm. We are famously great deniers of death. Saul Bellow [the American author] once wrote that death is the dark backing a mirror needs before anything is clear to us and anything that makes us look more closely into that mirror puts us on better terms with death.”

Joan Bakewell, broadcaster and writer

“Her decision, which I thought she expressed rather poignantly, implied that the best things that had happened to her in her life had been acted out in public, so why should she not go ahead and stay with that. I find that terribly affecting. I mean it’s a terrible admission to make. She has a spontaneous knack of hitting all the right media buttons. She has a gift for it. People don’t want bureaucratic speak [about cancer] — they want it from a real person.”

AC Grayling, philosopher

“Absolutely anything which encourages people to donate money and take better care of their health is a very good thing. However, I have been a little appalled by this obsessive relationship we have seen between Jade Goody, the press and that section of the public which has an open-mouthed interest in this story. They all feed off one another. One does really have to raise a very big question mark over this form of avid voyeurism and reflect a little on that.”

Rosie Boycott, writer

“We have always been rather feeble about death. Our society is so obsessed with youth and pushing death away and not thinking about it. But with more and more people going to Dignitas [the Swiss assisted-suicide clinic] we are increasingly coming face to face with death, which is a good thing. Jade has brought death very close to us. In some ways it is the ultimate twist of the celebrity tale but she is also a human being. If I was in her shoes and could make a million quid to leave to my sons I would think to hell with what everybody else thinks and go for it.”

Jilly Cooper, novelist

“Half of me thinks ‘yuck’, quite frankly. John Diamond [the journalist] described dying of cancer, but the written word made it more private. With this it’s so very public – the hallucinations, the rows with cabbies – I can’t bear to watch it. Of course it’s very Victorian, this obsession with death. We are living again in a Victorian age where we are not allowed to misbehave. We’re not allowed to smoke, drink too much or pinch people’s bottoms in the office or do anything that’s much fun. This is a reaction to that.”

John Humphrys, writer and broadcaster

“Death was once a part of our lives. When I was growing up it would have been a rare month that there wasn’t drawn blinds at some house in the neighbourhood. I’m not sure that people have really been affected by Jade Goody’s approaching death, although the red tops have made a huge fuss about it. If I were in her position and had the opportunity to make some money for dependent kids, I might do the same thing, but I think what’s been going on says far more about our celebrity culture than it does about death.”

First published by Sunday Times, 8 March 2009

Get a Grip, You’re British
By Sarah Lyall.

LONDON— Britons are a chauvinistic bunch, proprietary about their place in the world and eager to see their talents recognized abroad. So they were gratified in January when Kate Winslet, one of their favorite home-team actors, snagged a Golden Globe Award, her second of the night, for her performance as a frustrated prisoner of suburbia in “Revolutionary Road.”

That is until, failing her own actorly advice to “gather,” she began hyperventilating and burst into convulsive sobs, right there on stage. Ms. Winslet then went on to pay tribute to people no one had ever heard of, like her agents and make-up artists; announced that she loved her co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio “with all my heart”; forgot Angelina Jolie’s name; and generally behaved as if she had just learned that a donor heart had finally been found, enabling her transplant operation to go ahead after all.

Oh my God, was the general reaction in Britain.

“Most people watching actually wanted, literally, to die,” wrote Caitlin Moran in The Times of London. Referring to Gwyneth Paltrow’s tear-stained speech after winning an Academy Award for “Shakespeare in Love” in 1999, Alexander Chancellor wrote in The Guardian that Ms. Winslet’s performance “was so weird that I felt it might have been intended as a joke — a deliberate parody of Gwyneth Paltrow to show up the vanity of Hollywood stars.”

Why were they so harsh?

Part of it was that, despite their increasingly American forays into public displays of feeling in the aftermath of the Diana, Princess of Wales, era, many English people still feel repelled by all that capital-E emoting. Instead, said Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, they stick to the old standbys: self-deprecation, false modesty and humor.

“While British actors are dying to get those awards as much as anyone else, they are supposed to pretend they don’t really care and that it doesn’t really matter,” he said in an interview.

At the same time, Mr. Furedi added, there is a sense that British actors are meant to be classy and dignified, reflecting the view in the entertainment world here that while Hollywood has the money, Britain has the real actors.

In 2005, Gil Cates, the longtime producer of the Oscars, said there was indeed a cultural difference, at least as far as acceptance speeches go. “They are really taught how to frame a sentence,” he said, speaking of English actors. “I love it when an English actor wins because their speeches are so classy and precise.”

The classic examples of that would be any speech by Judi Dench — her accent certainly helps — or Emma Thompson’s understated, wryly funny acceptance speech at the 1996 Oscars, when she won the award for best adapted screenplay for “Sense and Sensibility.”

“Before I came, I went to visit Jane Austen’s grave in Winchester Cathedral to pay my respects, you know, and tell her about the grosses,” she said. She also thanked Sidney Pollack “for asking the right questions, like, ‘Why couldn’t these women go out and get a job?’ ”

Ms. Thompson — who accepted another award, at the Golden Globes, with a speech in the style of Jane Austen herself — then did what cool British award winners do: she put the Oscar in her guest bathroom.

The other side of that coin is the British habit of making weird or gratuitously insulting remarks at awards ceremonies. Presenting an award at the Golden Globes last month, Sacha Baron Cohen, a k a Borat, provided a change from the usual parade of scripted banalities by going straight for the insult. In short order, he managed to offend Charlie Sheen, Victoria Beckham and — as the camera showed Salma Hayek’s disgusted face, and people started booing — Madonna and Madonna’s ex-husband, Guy Ritchie.

He has a past. Winning a Golden Globe for “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” in 2007, Mr. Baron Cohen went into a long, graphic spiel — complete with descriptions of the naughtiest of body parts — about the scene in the film when he and his co-star, the very large Ken Davitian, grappled naked together. Then he said, apropos of the movie: “Thank you to every American who has not sued me so far.”

British audiences like that kind of thing much better.

They liked it, for instance, when, winning the best supporting actress award for “Michael Clayton” last year, the Scottish actress Tilda Swinton compared her Oscar, a statue of a bald, shiny, naked man with a buff physique, to her agent.

“Truly, the same shaped head, and, it has to be said, the buttocks,” she announced appraisingly, examining the statue’s rear end. She provided further titillation when she said she got a thrill out of seeing her co-star George Clooney appear in his “rubber batsuit” — the “one from ‘Batman and Robin’ with the nipples.”

As for Ms. Winslet, British bookmakers have been taking bets on whether, should she win an Academy Award, she will cry then, too, and how dramatically.

Ms. Winslet has promised to compose herself. But she is bemused by all the fuss. “Some people apparently haven’t been very nice about it, but luckily, I’ve been in America, where they’ve said nice things,” she told reporters.

She took refuge in a different British ploy, the apology. “Look, I wasn’t prepared at all,” she said. “ I really didn’t think I was going to win and I was genuinely overwhelmed. I’m sorry.”

A version of this article appeared in print on February 22, 2009, on page WK4 of the New York edition.

First published by New York Times, 21 February 2009

Wonder Woman or traitor to her sex?
The battle lines are confused in the reaction to the five-day maternity leave of Rachida Dati, the French justice minister.

Dressed in a tight black velvet jacket, matching skirt and stiletto heels, Rachida Dati, the French minister of justice, looked her usual elegant self as she embarked on a busy working day last Wednesday.

Breakfast at the interior ministry was followed by the first cabinet meeting of the year with President Nicolas Sarkozy. In the afternoon she was with her boss again for a new year’s ceremony at the supreme court. That night she waved away, with impeccably manicured nails, a glass of champagne during a reception at the Spanish embassy.

If they had not known, few could have guessed that Dati, 43, had given birth, by caesarean section no less, to a daughter, Zohra, only five days before.

With the child cocooned in blankets at her breast, Dati had emerged only that morning from a private clinic to howls of outrage from French and British feminists who saw her as a traitor to her sex. Her early return to work, they said, was an example that could be used to undermine hard-won maternity rights, putting women back into the dark ages.

Or was she a wonder woman? Her decision to forgo the standard four-month French maternity leave was an example of the grit and determination that had propelled her from a childhood on the immigrant housing estates to one of the most important jobs in France.

Once considered the star of the “Sarko-zettes”, as the president’s female ministers are known, Dati is used to being the centre of attention. Nor is it the first time that her fame at home has resonated on the other side of the Channel. She is remembered in Britain for having appeared at a royal banquet at Windsor Castle last year in a daringly low-cut dress. Having been admonished then for exhibiting her femininity, she now finds herself the scourge of British feminists for suppressing her maternal side, a crime that one writer in The Guardian referred to as “machismo”.

Even so, the battle lines were curiously blurred in this debate about motherhood and maternity rights.

Some put her in the same bracket as Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and former Republican vice-presidential candidate, who boasted of having been back in the office just days after giving birth to her fifth child. Women like that, went the argument, were undermining rights that had taken centuries to achieve.

“Dati has no excuses,” wrote one commentator. “A woman of her standing should have the confidence to take leave and make it clear to other women that it is acceptable to take time off if they want to.”

Yet some saw her, and Palin, as having made an informed choice about what to do with their lives - exactly what the trailblazing feminists wanted for women. For others it was more a question of being a “bad mother”: Dati was missing out on the most important period of parent-child bonding, as well as depriving her daughter of the benefits of breastfeeding. She was also putting her own health at risk by returning to work just days after a serious operation.

So what are we to make of Dati? Is she a trailblazer to be lionised, or a traitor who is setting back the cause of women? By rights, Dati should be a feminist icon. On one level, at least, she was a symbol of emancipation, one of 12 children of Algeri-an-Moroccan parents who escaped from an impoverished childhood – and an arranged marriage - to become the star of the Sarkozy constellation, the so-called “Cinderella of the suburbs”.

Sarkozy called her appointment to the justice ministry “a message to all the children of France that with merit and effort everything becomes possible”; and Dati, whose father was a builder and whose mother died when she was young, seemed to blossom under the spotlight.

She fuelled the public’s fascination by posing for fashion shoots, once in fishnet stockings and high-heeled boots, but disgusted judges who complained of a “frivolous” act at a time when the minister was cutting jobs in her ministry. Many women saw this as the symptom of deep-rooted male chauvinism.

With the birth of Zohra, she also became a high-achieving single mother, a woman who was proving that you didn’t need a man to have a child and be happy. As her stomach has gently swollen in recent months, she has become the focus of a feverish guessing game about the father, whose identity she has steadfastly refused to reveal, saying only that “my private life is complicated and I am keeping it off limits to the media”.

And that she has done, resolutely refusing to comment on the succession of men - the latest of whom is François Sarkozy, the president’s brother - who have been alleged to be the father.

Yet for all her positive personal attributes, some women detected a sinister reason for her return to work. It has been widely rumoured that Sarkozy plans to replace her in a reshuffle this year.

“She didn’t have a choice,” said Marie-Pierre Martinez, head of the French movement for family planning. In a society, she added, in which “the norms remain very masculine” Dati had to return to work quickly to preserve her career.

Florence Montreynaud, president of a feminist group and mother of four children, said that Dati’s behaviour risked creating two classes of mothers: “super women and wimps”. Dati, she said, was “doped on the adrenaline of power” and compared her with women who gave birth in their factories in the 1920s. Behind all the outrage were French fears about how far Sarkozy, who has pledged widespread reforms, will go in trimming a generous welfare system. “Instead of developing the French model - or taking the example of the Nordic countries which have more just and equitable systems - Sarkozy is turning France into a violent, inhuman society, one that will fail just like the Anglo-Saxon countries,” wrote one internet blogger about Dati.

It sounded like a dig atles rosbifs. The irony is that Britain offers more generous maternity leave than France, with women able to take up to a year off work to care for their children. Indeed, according to the Department for Work and Pensions, Dati would have been breaking the law in Britain by returning so quickly. It is illegal for a woman to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth, or four weeks if she works in a factory.

The tide in Britain is also moving towards more, not less, generous parental leave, despite the opposition of business groups. Labour has steadily increased the amount of time off mothers can take after the birth of their children and Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader and an expectant father, proposed last week that men should be entitled to take a year off work when they become fathers.

Despite the protection by law of maternity rights, women fear that high-profile examples such as Dati will be used to pressure them back quickly into the male-domi-nated workplace. Even here the issue is clouded. “I’m a bit torn when I see those pictures of Dati,” admitted Amy Jenkins, the novelist. “On the one hand I want men to know that giving birth isn’t an illness or a disability. On the other hand I don’t want women to be so like men that one day they’ll find a way of giving birth at their desks.”

Of course, that will remain a choice for individuals. “There is this incredible desire to judge and criticise women who take these decisions,” said Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University and author of Paranoid Parenting. “Why should that call into question her capacity as a mother? In the last few years, a women’s right to choose has been redefined into a woman’s right to choose from a few narrow options.”

He added: “I admire women like Sarah Palin and Rachida Dati because they know they will be censored and criticised. But they have decided to carry on anyway and they are sufficiently confident in themselves to know what they are doing is right for them.”

Linda Hirshman, a lawyer and author of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, agreed. “[Dati] will know if she is in pain or falling asleep at her desk and she is obviously a very intelligent woman, able to assess that for herself. And she is the only one who is able to assess that. The experience of childbirth is not a disabling one,” she said.

The feminist author Natasha Walter agreed that “we shine the spotlight on women’s choices with their babies and their families. We are very quick to condemn them, very quick to judge them personally”. She added that the real problem was “the men who never have to think about why they can go on working all hours, all days, because their wives are at home looking after the family”.

Still confused? The truth is that large numbers of women have been in positions of power for a relatively short time so their actions will come under more scrutiny than their male counterparts, whether justified or not.

Last year there was uproar in Spain when Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the prime minister, appointed a heavily pregnant Car-me Chacon defence minister. After he insisted that she take six weeks’ maternity leave, the debate has moved on. Last week the generals were outraged that the black Yves Saint Laurent jacket and trousers Chacon wore at a military ceremony last week were in breach of protocol - she was supposed to have worn a long dress.

As for Dati, on Friday night, in her capacity as mayor of the seventh arrondissement of Paris, she presided over a new year’s party for workers and thanked them for their gifts. “You’ve dressed Zohra not just for the winter but for spring and the summer as well - and next winter,” she said. “She’s a girl. She’ll love it.”

She seemed to respond to accusations that she had rushed back to work when she said: “I am dedicating a lot of time to what is dear to me - my daughter . . . I’ve adapted my timetable.” She apologised that she could not stay longer: “I am really in a hurry to get back to my daughter.”

First published by Sunday Times, 11 January 2009

‘Ignore expert advice, parents - it’s best for your child’
By Chris Price.

Ignoring government advice and parenting experts could improve your ability to look after your children, according to a university professor based in Kent.

Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, is calling on parents to take back control because the mothball approach to bringing up your children could be affecting their wellbeing.

In his book - Paranoid parenting: Why ignoring the experts may be best for your child - Prof Furedi urges parents to understand their role has been turned into a minefield by current society.

He said bringing up a family is just as safe as it ever has been.

“Almost every year in the last decade parents have been put under more and more pressure about looking after their children and their authority has been questioned.

“The assumption is that parents are not up to the task of looking after their children. One of the unfortunate affects of these pressures is to affect parents’ confidence in their own ability to get on with the job.

“The experience of children is continually inflated into a major problem. Every childhood experience comes with a health warning.

“We are led to believe their lives have never been so bad or as dangerous as now and all these things make it very difficult to be a good mother and a good father.”

First published by Kent Online, 9 January 2009

Paranoid parenting
The University of Kent's Professor of Sociology Frank Furedi is calling for parents to ignore the policymakers and 'parenting experts', and to regain a viewpoint that advances children's wellbeing.

In his book, Paranoid Parenting: Why Ignoring the Experts May be Best for Your Child, Professor Furedi turned the spotlight on a society where children are deemed at risk from an ever expanding range of dangers, such as cots, babysitters, school, the supermarket and the park. He is motivated by the conviction that, in an era when parenting has become more paranoid than ever, if parents can grasp why their role has been turned into such a minefield, then they can do something about regaining their self-confidence.

He says: “Despite public recognition of the problem, today’s parenting culture systematically de-skills mothers and fathers. It places enormous pressures on parents to turn away from what only they can do.

“The good news is that if parents understand the pressures that bear down upon them, they can insulate themselves from it. They may still be anxious about their children’s well-being, but at least it will be possible to put those fears into a more balanced perspective.”

First published by GMTV, 8 January 2009

Baby P: how does society best protect its children?
The issue of how we best protect our children and the vulnerable is one of the most important and sensitive we face.

The notion of checking the criminal backgrounds of individuals who come in to contact with them and the risk they pose plays a critical role in that, which no one should dispute.

But the scale of just how many errors are committed in an ever expanding world of vetting, as revealed today, raises very grave questions over whether it is effective enough.

It also delivers another body blow to the Government’s battered reputation on handling sensitive and personal information.

It was bad enough when the Home Office had us believe that several hundred people a year were wrongly accused of being a criminal or a threat but the fact it is four times that level and runs in to thousands is a devastating admission.

Not only can it hamper or prevent an innocent member of the public from getting a job they may well deserve, it can leave them with a terrible reputation they will not find easy to throw off.

And if there is inaccurate information passed on about the innocent, what assurances can there be that accurate checks are always carried out on those who are a genuine risk?

There are already some, sociologist Frank Furedi for one, who have warned the scale of vetting and it’s connotations have reached such a point that individuals are even put off volunteering or applying for positions if it means they will have to checked and open themselves up to being misrepresented.

More significantly, he warned the growing culture surrounding the need for vetting runs the risk of people putting all their faith in such a check and therefore someone who has been cleared is absolutely safe.

It is that potential false sense of security in the CRB, that people believe it is a guarantee children will be safe from an individual, that is left in serious doubt by today’s revelations.

Almost 13,000 errors since it was created in 2002 is vast number in anyone’s book, even if it’s a fraction of the millions of disclosures that are carried out each year.

The CRB is a well-meaning and worthy notion and will no doubt have prevented hundreds if not thousands of crimes against the most vulnerable.

Next year the Independent Safeguarding Authority will be launched, encompassing the CRB, and will see another large expansion in the number of people who must be vetted.

It is estimated one in four of the adult population will be affected.

It vital the Government addresses the issue of errors now because if you are the individual denies a job or accused of being a paedophile by your neighbours, then one error is one too many. 

First published by Daily Telegraph, 12 November 2008

Why are teachers scared of learning to give pupils First Aid?
By Alexandra Frean, Education Editor.

Two items of news in the last few days brought me up sharp. First, The Times Educational Supplement reported that teachers are reluctant to apply first aid to pupils in an emergency because they are scared of being sued by parents.

Many are adopting strict “no touching” policies because of “unfounded” concerns over compensation claims, according to a study by Thames Valley University.

Around 400,000 children suffer accidents or injuries at school each year. Even though no teacher has ever been taken to court as a result of helping a pupil in a medical emergency, teachers are reluctant to learn emergency first aid for children for fear of actually being asked to put their training into action.

This was followed by a report on Monday’s Radio 4’s Today programme that the Musicians’ Union is advising its members not to touch children during lessons to protect them from allegations of abuse.

The advice has infuriated many teachers who wonder how they can properly teach a child to hold a violin or play a keyboard without touching them. The cellist, Julian Lloyd Webber was appalled, suggesting that children’s progress at learning an instrument would be much slower as a result of such policies and adding that they might never learn to play properly.

These items brought to mind a recent pamphlet from the thinktank Civitas, Licensed to Hug, which suggests that the kind of over-protectiveness seen in both these news items is “poisoning” the relationship between adults and children.

The report, by Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, and Jennie Bristow, who writes the monthly Guide to Subversive Parenting for the online publication spiked-online.com as well as running the website parentswithattitude.com, notes that a staggering 11.3m people in this country will need to be vetted by the Criminal Records Bureau if they intend to work with children in any way. They expressed sadness that relationships between children and adults were becoming increasingly formal and founded on a basis of mistrust.

But perhaps the most worrying aspect of this “safety first” approach to child protection is that it is unlikely to be very effective. As Furedi and Bristow point out, it “provides a ritual of security rather than effective protection.” I suspect that many parents would agree.

Read School Gate on:

Do our children need more male primary school teachers?

Don’t scratch that itch - headlice and schools

First published by Times Online (London), 10 November 2008

The phrase Old Masters is sexist, authors and students are told
Students and academics are being banned from using the term "Old Masters" and "seminal" because of claims they are sexist. By Martin Beckford, Social Affairs Correspondent.

Publishers and universities are outlawing dozens of seemingly innocuous words in case they cause offence.

Banned phrases on the list, which was originally drawn up by sociologists, include Old Masters, which has been used for centuries to refer to great painters - almost all of whom were in fact male.

It is claimed that the term discriminates against women and should be replaced by “classic artists”.

The list of banned words was written by the British Sociological Association, whose members include dozens of professors, lecturers and researchers.

The list of allegedly racist words includes immigrants, developing nations and black, while so-called “disablist” terms include patient, the elderly and special needs.

It comes after one council outlawed the allegedly sexist phrase “man on the street”, and another banned staff from saying “brainstorm” in case it offended people with epilepsy.

However the list of “sensitive” language is said by critics to amount to unwarranted censorship and wrongly assume that people are offended by words that have been in use for years.

Prof Frank Furedi, a sociologist at the University of Kent, said he was shocked when he saw the extent of the list and how readily academics had accepted it.

“I was genuinely taken aback when I discovered that the term ‘Chinese Whisper’ was offensive because of its apparently racist connotations. I was moved to despair when I found out that one of my favourite words, ‘civilised’, ought not be used by a culturally sensitive author because of its alleged racist implications.”

Prof Furedi said that censorship is about the “policing of moral behaviour” by an army of campaign groups, teachers and media organisations who are on a “crusade” to ban certain words and promote their own politically correct alternatives.

He said people should see the efforts to ban certain words as the “coercive regulation” of everyday language and the “closing down of discussions” rather than positive attempts to protect vulnerable groups from offence.

The list of banned words is now sent out to prospective authors by Policy Press, a publisher of social science books and journals based at the University of Bristol, but is also used in many academic institutions.

The University of Bristol’s School for Policy Studies recommends the guidelines to help students “challenge heterosexist assumptions”, and they are included in a “toolkit” to combat institutional racism included on the University of Leeds’ website.

King’s College London says they “may provide a good starting point” and Liverpool John Moores University provides a link to them in its students’ guide. The Open University said they are an “appropriate source of reference and advice” for students.

Napier University in Edinburgh says the list is “well worth looking at” while the University of East London advises its students they should “attempt to incorporate” it.

Even a secondary school in Norwich includes a link to the list on its website, with the statement: “Students may care to consider how far we inadvertently reproduce inaccurate sexist assumptions in the language we use, both written and spoken.”

The list of racist terms features black, which “can be used in a racist sense” and should be changed to “black peoples” or “black communities”.

Immigrants is said to have “racist overtones” because of its association with “immigration legislation”, while developing nations - intended as a more sensitive replacement for Third World - is “prejudical” because it implies a comparison with developed countries.

Although not included on the Policy Press list, the BSA warns authors against using civilisation because of its “racist overtones that derive from a colonialist perception of the world”.

Among the “sexist” terms to be avoided are “seminal” and “disseminate” because they are derived from the word semen and supposedly imply a male-dominated view of the world.

Authors are also told to “avoid using medical labels” when writing about disabled people as this “may promote a view of them as patients”.

In addition, the list says “special needs” should be changed to “additional needs”, “patient” to “person” and “the elderly” to “older people”.

“Able-bodied person” should be replaced with “non-disabled person”, it is claimed.

First published by Daily Telegraph, 20 September 2008

Podcast: Saving the Enlightenment
From the Sydney Opera House: a 54-minute podcast in the Radio Australia Big Ideas series.

We are children of the Enlightenment, that fruitful period of the 17th and 18th centuries that gave birth to our modern ways.

Surely now we have come this far there is no turning back? Not according to the five distinguished speakers on this forum. The ideas of the Enlightenment need to be protected, they say, lest they be dismantled bit-by-bit in a new climate of fear.

Speakers

Frank Furedi
Professor of Sociology, University of Kent, UK

James Spigelman
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of NSW

Dr Arthur Herman
Writer and former Professor of History

Dr Jonathan Le Cocq
School of Music, University of Canterbury, UK

Ayaan Hirshi Ali
Writer and cultural commentator

Listen Now

First published by Canterbury Heritage, 11 September 2008

Redefining feminism
Have activists morphed into female chauvinist piglets?

Thirty years after second-wave feminism, some of its relics are pursuing a witch-hunt against Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin that would do the “male chauvinist pigs” of yesteryear proud. As Frank Furedi writes in The Australian today, Ms Palin is copping flak for everything from being a working mother of a child with special needs to “living the life of a caricature of the feminist who ‘wants it all’.” Such is the hypocrisy that some of them will soon be telling her to go home and darn her husband’s socks.

Far from celebrating a significant milestone for women, the sisterhood appears incandescent with rage that it is a conservative woman and not one of them who has reached such a position. As Furedi, who is pro-choice himself, points out, many of the feminists who advocate choice on abortion are dismissive of the choices other women make about the issue. In the case of Ms Palin, their reactions have been nothing short of undisguised hatred.

Yet she is, as Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan says, a feminist “not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way.” Most contemptible of all are the personal internet attacks on Ms Palin’s daughter Bristol, who is 17, unmarried and who has chosen to have her baby, and the false claim that Ms Palin faked her last pregnancy. Yesterday’s speech to the Republican convention defused the issue well, admitting “Our family has the same ups and downs as any other.”

Miranda Devine’s analysis in The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday was correct. The attacks “expose the elitism, condescension and moral rootlessness of the feminist establishment. It will serve to shore up support for Palin among those who are not so intolerant.” It is early days in her campaign, but Ms Palin’s speech was highly effective. Time will tell whether she, like Democrat candidate Barack Obama, who also remains a largely unknown quantity, has the policy gravitas and political nous to be elected.

Like senators John McCain, Obama and Joseph Biden, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate deserves to be assessed on her suitability for office, not her family life.

Unlike the professional feminists who love to wallow in victimhood in their purple ghettos, Ms Palin exuded strength in her first major speech of the campaign. Like Margaret Thatcher a generation earlier, she showed an admirable immunity to liberal-left ridicule: “Here’s a little news flash ... I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion - I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country.”

While many sophisticated, big-city commentators sneered, Ms Palin presented a set of values and attitudes to the convention that will appeal to “small-town America” - lower taxes, smaller government and service to the country and American ideals. She was unflinching and unapologetic, and her call for greater US energy independence should also strike a chord with the electorate: “Take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska: We’ve got lots of both (oil and gas),” she said as the audience rose, shouting “drill, baby, drill”.

The value of her candidacy could be that she motivates working-class, predominantly white “Reagan Democrats” who do not support Barack Obama to come out and vote Republican, even if they are not keen on John McCain. This is why the American Left has recognised that she is a real danger.

First published by The Australian, 5 September 2008

Pushy parents can act as agents
So many parents have been chasing university places for their children that the admissions system is now letting parents act as their agents.

Pushy parents can act as agents
By Sean Coughlan
BBC News education reporter

Students entering university this autumn will be the first whose admissions decisions and negotiations can be handled by their parents.

In the past, the admissions service had to deal directly with applicants.

Parents have also been expecting to sit in on their children’s university interviews, says academic Frank Furedi.

Universities are facing the growing phenomenon of “helicopter parents” - the over-involved parents who want to continue interfering in the lives of their children at university.

‘Infantilism’

The university admissions service, Ucas, says that in response to the number of calls from parents that it has decided to allow parents to act as their children’s representatives in handling applications.

As such, young people making applications this year have been allowed to nominate a proxy to speak for them and make decisions.

“This is usually because the parent feels they haven’t got all the information they need from their son or daughter and so phone back to double check and clarify points,” says a Ucas spokesman.

About one in 10 students this year are estimated to have used this option of nominating their parents to make calls on their behalf.

Frank Furedi, social commentator and professor of sociology at the University of Kent, says that controlling parents are “destroying the distinction between school and higher education”.

“All universities now have to take the parent factor into account. On university open days you can see more parents attending than children,” says Professor Furedi.

He says there have been cases of parents who arrive expecting to attend their children’s university interviews.

Professor Furedi says that he tells parents that they have to leave, but there are other academics who “accept that this will be a family discussion”.

“There is a powerful sense of infantilism, where parents can’t let go.”

Consumerism

This extends to universities having to handle complaints from parents over grades awarded to students, he says, and a constant over-involvement during term time.

“We have to remind parents that there is a professional relationship between academics and students,” he says.

Professor Furedi expects this parental pressure to grow - with the risk of turning universities into “schools for biologically mature children”.

He warns that it will follow the trend in the United States for universities to pitch their marketing at parents rather than students.

Rob Evans, head of admissions at Sussex University, says that universities are seeing an increasing amount of involvement from parents when students are making applications.

He links it to the increased cost of university and also to a more over-protective form of parenting. Safety fears mean that children can grow up with less independence, such as not being allowed to walk to school, and this attitude filters through to when young people apply to university.

The high-pressure parent is a reflection of consumerist values hitting higher education, says Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at Lancaster University Management School.

“These parents are paying more, so they think they can demand more,” says Professor Cooper. Parents want to retain control of their “psychological and financial investment in their children”.

Parents are also using their children as surrogates for their own ambitions, he says, getting them to chase the success that they might feel eluded them in their own careers.

“Parents derive status from their children’s success,” says Professor Cooper.

First published by BBC News Online, 19 August 2008

Enlightened spirit of inquiry
By Janet Albrechtsen.

SITTING on a stage at the Sydney Opera House on Monday evening, her hair swept up, a cream scarf wrapped around her shoulders, a beautiful young black woman tells the audience she is often accused of being a puppet of white middle-aged men. With a twinkle in her eye, Somalian-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali flashes a wry smile as she looks down the table at the four older white men who have been brought together by the Centre for Independent Studies to discuss why the ideas of the Enlightenment need a 21st-century revival. Puppet? Not a chance.

Anyone who knows Hirsi Ali’s story knows she is no one’s pawn. As a girl she suffered genital mutilation; then, as a young woman, escaped an arranged marriage, incurring the wrath of Islam by rejecting her faith. Last time she was in Sydney, huge crowds listened to her journey, where she crossed back and forth between the superstitions, tribal taboos and conspiracy theories of her people to the world of inquiry and measured, rational discourse in the West. It was evident to her that one system was better than the other. People are equal but ideas and values are not. The crowds have come again on another wintry Sydney night. But this time Hirsi Ali is more interested in our story. She says we in the West, who have inherited the values of the Enlightenment, have developed contempt for values that drive progress and freedom.

There is no doubt the West is suffering from a dangerous moral disorientation. It is not clear that we value the very idea of the West any more. Enlightenment values such as genuine inquiry and reason, which ought to flow like blood delivering a vibrant pulse to the Western project, have been dislodged by the noxious intruders of unreason and fear. If talk about the Enlightenment sounds like some quaint historical curiosity debated by poseurs in the ethereal world of academe, think again. The determination to quash inquiry and reason infiltrates just about every aspect of our lives.

Hirsi Ali knows something about this. Shadowed by a security detail, she lives with death threats because she has chosen to debate Islam. Sweet-sounding words such as multiculturalism and tolerance are used to repress open debate. She has no problem with people who worship the prophet Mohammed. “But I want to be able to say that Mohammed had some reprehensible qualities without being thrown in jail, without being demonised,” she says. This must be allowed in a society committed to Enlightenment values of inquiry and reason because people progress by using reason to challenge ideas.

Panel member Frank Furedi also knows something about our pusillanimous surrender of Enlightenment values. Debate is closed down by claiming that words, ideas and arguments cause offence to people, sometimes censored by the strong arm of the state or, more often, regulated by informal gatekeepers and our own timidity. Furedi, a professor of sociology from Britain and a prolific author of books about modern culture, was advised by a publisher recently that the term mentally ill was inappropriate. Instead, he should say “mental health service user”. He was warned against the word civilisation because it presupposes that there are uncivilised people. His young son was told recently not to use the word retard because it had offensive connotations. His son knew that, which is why he used the term. “But words are now viewed as psychological weapons,” Furedi said.

And it is the modern world’s notion of human beings that explains why we have become so fearful of words. The conception of freedom that fuelled the Enlightenment was based on a radical view of humans as autonomous, resilient beings with the capacity to exercise their power in a rational, reasoned manner. Rational, reasoned human beings deserved the widest freedoms.

This very positive rendition of human beings has been replaced in the 21st century with a notion that people are weak (the buzzword is vulnerable) or destructive. Hence, freedoms that underpinned the Enlightenment period have been curtailed. Furedi notes that the phrase “human impact” would have been celebrated during the Enlightenment. Today, it is a negative term because humans are viewed as destructive; so destructive, we obsess about our carbon footprint to the point where, he says, “the best thing people can do is stay at home and never get out of bed”. A modern world has lost confidence in what it means to be human and therefore lost confidence in basic values of freedom, such as free speech.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the embrace of global warming, where anyone who questions the orthodoxy is labelled a denier, a heretic who should not be heard. Genuine inquiry is not encouraged; it is jettisoned. Arthur Herman, another panel member, predicts that in five years there will be a spate of books and articles wondering how politicians, the media and the people were all so comprehensively conned by global warming alarmism.

But Herman, a historian, is not surprised. History tells us there will always be fanatics who peddle invisible fears and doomsday scenarios and, equally, there will always be people drawn to a priestly class - think Al Gore - who claim to know the answers.

And so springs up a modern-day theology given over to supplications and modern sacrifices such as banning the innocuous plastic bag.

The debate over global warming stopped being a scientific debate long ago, Herman says. Scientific consensus, not dispassionate inquiry, is the name of the game. And governments and politicians have long since stopped bothering with the evolving science. Here again, Herman says, we need to revive the Enlightenment values of scepticism, inquiry and reason. He quotes pre-eminent English scientist and experimentalist Michael Faraday, who said that one should hold theories in one’s fingertips so that the least breeze of fact might blow them away.

Yet, in so many areas, inquiry and reason have been abandoned, drowned out by group-think orthodoxies. I see the lack of inquiry in a Year 8 geography curriculum that tells students that globalisation is a bogyman to be feared. It is in the mindset of many indigenous leaders still wedded to policies that produced 30 years of dysfunction. As Hirsi Ali told the audience on Monday evening, we ought to be confident enough about the values of the Enlightenment to defend them and use them. After all, we sharpen our minds and bring clarity to ideas through open, reasoned debate.

A man in the audience asks her how she responds to accusations by some of her critics that she is an Enlightenment fundamentalist. “I think it’s cute,” she says with a laugh. “It’s just so absurd to put the two words together. The Enlightenment is all about asking questions.” Her departing advice is that we confront, through robust debate, those who would threaten our most cherished values, whether the threat comes from our own complacency, or the malevolent anti-Westernism of moral relativists or the Islamic fanatics.

First published by The Australian, 6 August 2008

Neglect the kids … it will stop them getting bored
Modern parents over-organise children's playtime. Just let them get on with it, urges Joan McFadden.

Just days into the long holiday and the summer soundtrack isn’t so much the sleepy drone of busy bees as the whine of listless children. The thrills of liberty and long lie-ins have worn thin, everyone else seems to have fled the country to enjoy holidays abroad and the “I’m bored...” mantra is driving parents to breaking point.

The reaction of many well-meaning adults is to swiftly organise weeks of activity aimed at keeping every minute of every hour so crammed with events that their offspring’s ennui will be eased before it gets a chance to set in. But should we bother? Isn’t it time we recognised the benefits of boredom and gave children the chance to use their own initiative and learn how to entertain themselves?

Guilt simply comes with the territory for most parents, especially as so many people now work full-time and perform amazing juggling acts to ferry their children around, with timetables crammed not just with education but also with huge amounts of extracurricular activities. Holidays too are now packed with sports/art/drama camps, every minute timetabled.

Paddy O’Donnell, professor of social psychology at the University of Glasgow, has been studying the long-term effects of structured play and the way it has impacted at university level over the past ten to 15 years. “Children have a natural inclination to play and explore and until they reach around the age of 3 this is directed by the parents, hopefully helping them to deepen their curiosity and learn to use language to explore the world.

“Once they reach 3 they are interested in social play, which becomes a major feature of their activities. Boredom shouldn’t last long if children are in the right environment where they’re dragged off either by curiosity or the desire to socialise. It continues only if there’s no one to play with or the environment’s too restrictive.”

The age of 5 or 6 has always been a crucial stage at which youngsters naturally tend to stop spending so much time with their parents and seek the company of their peers. Children like playing with their own age group and find siblings less interesting, though they’ll make do with them when there’s no alternative, such as during family holidays.

Adults who feel morally obliged to spend every waking hour entertaining their children and doing everything “as a family” might want to take stock at this point, especially as O’Donnell also points out that “parents should not be pals. Their role is as a parent, not as a friend, and children need to make their own friends.”

According to O’Donnell, the shift in play over the past couple of decades is reflected in the attitudes of today’s students. “Schools, clubs and other activities are now very much leader-related,” he says. “Unstructured play is becoming rarer with no moving as a pack or just getting on with activities - children always expect and want to relate individually to whomever is in charge and we now have 18, 19, 20-year-olds who can only function effectively like that. Students are far less confident than they were 15 years ago, far less likely to make a decision by themselves and with little aspiration to get things moving without someone else being in charge and directing them.”

What are parents so scared of when it comes to leaving their children to get on with it? Desiring nothing more than freedom to do nothing is incomprehensible to modern parents, who steadfastly believe that structuring supervised activities is the best they can do for their ofspring. Escape and creativity are vital for development, but supervision now tempers a vast amount of activity.

Dr Richard Ralley, a senior psychology lecturer at Edge Hill College in Lancashire, is now quantifying a research project he carried out with 300 participants to assess the wider implications and benefits of boredom: “People often report that when they are bored they do nothing. Seen this way, boredom is useful - we conserve energy, but do not find this pleasant, so are ready to engage with the next useful activity that comes along.

“The brain sucks up a fifth of our energy and our children are the most heavily assessed in Europe. Some genuine downtime seems due.”

One of the hardest parts of parenting is letting children develop independence to learn to think for themselves, but if sent off cheerfully to try something different few children will demur. However, add a nervous or weepy parent, over-the-top exhortations to take care and a terrifying list of what can go wrong - and failure seems the most likely outcome. We would all like our children to grow into well-rounded and capable human beings in the safety of our own living rooms, but it doesn’t work like that.

Ralley says that parents should leave their children to feel fed-up, rather than keeping them constantly occupied, as boredom could also allow children to get sufficient rest. “One of the features that has arisen in people’s reports so far is a loneliness that comes with boredom, as well as the inadequacy of grasping on to any kind of activity to relieve it. I’m starting to believe that being bored is a signal to stop doing other things and to re-engage socially. I’ve always suggested that social activity is best: a family beach trip, playing football, having a picnic.” Once you’ve embraced the idea of benign neglect having a valid position in parenting, you’re still left with the problem of actually finding the places where children can entertain themselves safely. Aim for physical activity, especially as that will ensure real sleep at the end of the day and remove the time constraints, irrespective of whether you’re at a beach, country park or in a forest. Give children basic safety instructions, make sure they know where to find you and then tell them that you’ll see them when they’re hungry or bored with messing around.

The real test then will actually be for the parents, as very few of us can sit peacefully for two or three hours and not leap fretfully towards every sound, or lack of sound.

Build up the time if you lack confidence in yourself or your children, watch over them unseen if you really cannot bear to let them out of your sight and then let them get on with it - the Lord of the Flies-style confrontations excepted.

Letting kids run screaming into the wind on an empty beach, leaving them to get filthy building a den in the woods, or just spending a whole day slouching in their pyjamas without one parental exhortation to get dressed, might be hard for parents who are used to driving their children everywhere - in every sense. But when it comes to journeying into their own imagination, children are best left to travel solo.

Child’s play

Let your children go to the park - country parks in particular, where they have access to woods, streams and nature.

Seek out beaches with rockpools.

Camping in the back garden: leave them to get on with it.

Sleepovers that they organise themselves: let them take over the living room and kitchen and do everything themselves, including clearing.

On holiday, let them stay in pyjamas all day, eat at odd times, go out and look at the stars. If you can’t bear it all the time, then agree that half the holiday is for loafing around.

Try an adventure centre where you know that the activities are relevant to age and let them get on with it, returning only when they’ve had enough.

Wherever you are, don’t organise them!

Read on:

Are you an over-protective parent?

Are you constantly fretting about your kids? Controversial sociologist Frank Furedi asks parents to stop worrying so much

First published by The Times (London), 5 August 2008

Parents warned on gymnastic photos
Fear of paedophiles on the internet has prompted Scots sports chiefs to warn parents and coaches not to photograph young athletes in their gym gear.

Controversial new advice from governing body Scottish Gymnastics says photographs of youngsters should only be taken if they are wearing tracksuits.

The child protection guidelines – drawn up to prevent “unsuitable images” appearing on the internet – also suggest parents should destroy existing photographs showing children in a “potentially provocative” pose.

The organisation, which has 8,500 members in Scotland, says the move is a commonsense alternative to having an outright ban on filming or photography at competitions. But others claim it is a needless overreaction that will do little more than help spread fear.

The new policy, for five to 16-year-olds at Scottish Gymnastics clubs, states: “Sport websites and publications provide excellent opportunities to broadcast achievements of individuals to the world and to provide a showcase for the activities of gymnasts. In some cases, however, displaying certain information or pictures of children could put them at risk. We must all take the time to ensure these photographs are actually suitable for publication.”

The guidelines, which are being handed out in leaflets to parents before they attend children’s gymnastic events state: “The content of photographs or videos must not depict a child or vulnerable adult in a provocative pose or in a state of partial undress other than when depicting a sporting activity.

“Where relevant, a tracksuit may be more appropriate attire. Children must never be portrayed in a demeaning or tasteless manner. Common sense should be used when deciding which photographs to print. Do not use images that can appear staged and potentially provocative. Do not use images that appear to focus on the groin or in movements when the legs are in a split position.”

Lorna Whyte, the body’s ethics and welfare manager, said the guidelines had been drawn up in consultation with parents, coaches and clubs.

She said: “We are certainly not stopping people from taking pictures of their children.

“We are saying: ‘Yes, you can, but you have got to beware about the type of photograph you are taking’.

“Everybody loves to see an action shot of gymnastics. It is not a problem, just as long as the action shot is appropriate.”

Whyte confirmed the guidelines were pro-active and that Scottish Gymnastics has never encountered any problems with photographs or films being misused in any way.

Previously parents were requested to fill in a form if they wanted to take photos, but this has now been replaced by handing out specific guidance to all mothers and fathers.

Maire McCormack, head of policy for Scotland’s Commissioner for Children & Young People, backed the policy. She said: “It’s essential that parents are given clear guidance on the making and use of video and photographic material of all children taking part in activities such as gymnastics. These commonsense guidelines should help protect children and provide reassurance to all relevant adults.”

Anne Houston, chief executive of Children 1st, which helps to run the national child protection in sport service, agreed it was a delicate issue.

“The internet had added another dimension to fears about inappropriate images appearing of children, but it is important that common sense prevails and that parents, relatives and children are not robbed of the photographic reminders of special moments in their lives.”

But Professor Frank Furedi, a sociologist with the University of Kent, believes the growing trend of restricting photographs of children at public events is unnecessary and counter-productive.

The author of Paranoid Parenting said: “The assumption that pictures represent a significant threat to children has acquired a fantasy-like grotesque character. We rarely dare ask the question: what possible harm can come from taking pictures of children? Dark hints about the threat of evil networks of paedophiles are sufficient to corrode common sense.

“Tragically, what the dramatisation and criminalisation of the act of photographing children reveals is a culture that regards virtually every childhood experience from the standpoint of a paedophile. The default position is to always expect the worst.”

In New Zealand all spectators at the national athletics championships must have cameras and mobile phones registered and labelled on entry because of fears that “unsavoury” images could emerge.

In 2002, Edinburgh City Council was forced to retract a ban on parents taking photographs at their children’s Nativity plays after parents threatened to take legal action.

First published by Scotland on Sunday, 3 August 2008

Are you an over-protective parent?
Controversial sociologist and author Frank Furedi asks parents to stop worrying so much and give children their freedom. Interview by Simon Crompton.

The summer holidays stretch before many parents like a problem to be solved. How much freedom should we give the children? Will they be safe? Will they be able to cope on their own? The small, gap-toothed and quietly spoken man in front of me has been yelling at you not to worry for years. Frank Furedi, 61, the most quoted sociologist in the media (there’s a research study to prove it), thinks we live in a society in which we’re all encouraged to worry too much. And whether it be for the sake or our own health or the safety of our children, very little of it is productive.

Last month, in a well-publicised report for the think-tank Civitas, Furedi was decrying the rise in police checks for adults working with children because they have “succeeded in poisoning the relationship between the generations”. Later this year an updated edition of his best-known book, Paranoid Parenting (Allen Lane), will be published. It’s a demolition of daily campaigns that convince us that children are in danger from disease, obesity, paedophiles and lurking safety hazards.

Furedi is sitting in his double-fronted Victorian house in Faversham, Kent, sipping a Pepsi Max in obvious defiance of all those alarmist fizzy-drink warnings. Yet he is not altogether in tune with his teachings. He’s clock-watching so that he’s not late to pick up his son Jacob, 12, from cricket. He’s telling me how he goes to see the doctor too often; that he has been worried about his prostate since listening to a recent radio programme. And though he and his wife (Ann Furedi, the chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service) have tried to be as paranoia-free as possible - Jacob was allowed to go to the park and shops by himself from the age of 7 - he confides that he’s not immune to worry. “Occasionally my wife tells me to practise what I preach when I react like a typical paranoid father,” he says. “Our lives and emotions are so heavily invested in our children, we all find it difficult to be practical.”

The State makes parents feel vulnerable

Such self-confessed fallibility is endearing, and surprising too, given Furedi’s reputation as an academic rottweiler. A Hungarian émigré and founder of the British Revolutionary Communist Party in the 1970s (disbanded in 1998), he has been accused by environmentalist George Monbiot of heading a group of neo-conservative ex-Trotskyites systematically infiltrating parts of the British Establishment with free-market libertarianism, a claim that Furedi denies. His politics now seem a long way from communism as we know it. He says he’s always been deeply suspicious of the State and resents the way it makes everyone, particularly parents, feel more vulnerable than they should.

“Back in my childhood, the expression over-protective parent was used as a criticism, but today it’s seen as a responsibility,” says Furedi, Professor of Sociology at Kent University since 1975. He wrote Paranoid Parenting in 2001, prompted by the countless warnings of risk he received from health and local authorities as soon as Jacob, his only child, was born. But the risk of abduction or harm is tiny, he says,certainly less than that of taking a child on a car trip.

He says he has updated Paranoid Parenting because, since he first wrote the book, the “idiotic” (one of his favourite words) has become the norm: safety measures preventing parents from taking photographs of their children at school, or stopping them playing conkers, or from going anywhere near a public bonfire on November 5, are common.

“All these things that are important aspects of kids’ lives are being gradually undermined. There’s also an increasing mistrust of adults, where they are no longer allies but potential enemies.” Furedi points to our automatic assumption that adult interest in children is suspicious or sexually motivated, something that research has indicated does not exist to the same extent in other countries. It’s so pervasive that sometimes he can’t help feeling it too.

Furedi says we need a cultural change

“I remember going to the gym with my son when he was 6 or 7 and there was this guy taking a lot of interest in him. I remember saying to myself ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ But then I had a reality check and realised that he was behaving normally, and if I’d been my father, in his time, he’d have just viewed it as a friendly gesture and welcomed the interest that was being shown.”

What we need, he says, is a cultural change where we regard childhood differently, where adults are allowed to hug children, but also to have responsibility for them; looking after them if they look in trouble, telling them off if they’re behaving antisocially. That way children would be less fearful and become more engaged in adult ideas of social responsibility, and adults would tune their emotional radar to real sources of concern, rather than having to rely on criminal record checks.

Furedi denies that he wants to go back in time, but what he says constantly harks to a better past: old-fashioned, let-’em-take-care-of-themselves parenting. His theories seem to have their roots as much in his own extraordinary background, as in the hours of contemplation and self-inquisition that he tells me also lie behind them.

Born to a Jewish family in Hungary, his mother was a concentration camp survivor and his watchmaker father spent the war on the run from the Nazis, first pretending to be a regimental doctor and then spending the last six months of the war in the same hotel as German high command. It would be the last place they would look, he correctly reasoned.

His mother let him take care of himself

Through most of Furedi’s childhood, his father was in jail at the hands of the Stalinist regime (“he was a loudmouth, very right-wing and not too diplomatic”) and his overstretched mother let him and his sister more or less take care of themselves. He recalls often catching a train to Budapest and back on his own from the age of 7.

The family fled to Canada, after the 1956 Hungarian uprising, when Furedi was 9. He left home at 16, joined the Army, went to McGill University, got involved in “extreme” politics, of unformed political hue he says. It involved occupying university buildings to try and radicalise political teaching and he found himself blacklisted when he applied for PhD courses. He decided to study in London instead.

His emerging - and to many puzzling - brand of Marxism brought him notoriety among leftwingers when he opposed Arthur Scargill during the 1980s miners’ strike because of his refusal to hold a ballot, and he criticised the Anti Nazi League for preventing freedom of speech. Some have called it extreme right-wing libertarianism. Furedi calls it upholding free speech and the rights of individuals above institutions. He prefers to be called a humanist rather than a libertarian.

He vehemently opposes what he calls the “medicalisation” of society, the process by which existential problems, such as shyness, active behaviour, poor schoolwork, are recast as medical problems such as social phobia, ADHD and learning difficulties. This is the result, he says, of “cultural drivers” (by which I think he means short-termist, vote-grabbing politicians).

“There’s a fear market, which the pharmaceutical and other industries benefit from,” he says. “I wouldn’t trust them any more than the Department of Health’s idiotic campaign on child obesity. The idea of what it means to be human is constantly downsized, making us imagine that we are more mentally ill, have more invisible diseases, and are less able to cope with chronic diseases than we imagined. It encourages people to feel less in control of their lives.

“I see the impact of this in quite a devastating way. You go to a nursery and you find every year the number of dyslexic children grows, and you know that it’s both real but also principally the result of culture, and not biological causes.”

Furedi claims that, in private, many journalists and academics see the sense in what he says. He seems faintly bemused by why he has attracted such spleen from people like Monbiot. What he says is outspoken but nuanced, he says. Others would say the consistent anti-state agenda behind his academic efforts, and his involvement with the magazine Living Marxism, which regularly caused outrage by appearing to defend the indefensible, certainly haven’t helped.

Perhaps it’s also down to a natural, intellectual pugnaciousness inherited from his father. There’s the curious spring of the fighter in his walk, and a slight, tense withdrawal when he feels challenged. He tells me a revealing story. Since infancy, his father scolded him when he didn’t stand up for himself and encouraged him to fight back if he was pushed around. So that’s what he did. When he was 17 and living in Montreal, he went on a bus to see his girlfriend. Between getting off the bus and getting to her house, Furedi claims to have got into three fights. “It was a very anti-Semitic area and I got a lot of abuse. But I relished the opportunity to make something of it.”

Shortly after that, he vowed never again to confront problems in that way, or to embarrass his own children into action.

“If I don’t exercise I become a bad person”

Now he has other physical outlets. He goes to the gym three times a week, but not to keep fit. “I take physical exercise seriously. If I don’t do it, I become very uptight and a bad person. I find it phenomenally relaxing.” He and his wife love climbing and skiing, which, he says, absorb most of their disposable income. But he’s definitely not faddy about his food, with lots of fatty meat (”the Hungarian diet”) on the family menu, not much junk because he wants Jacob to understand quality in food, but not too much emphasis on fruit and veg either “because we want to encourage him to eat whatever he wants”.

But it’s clearly not easy running against a tide of human anxiety. “I’ve been to my doctor several times with worries. I would like to be less concerned than I am, but that’s me.” And when he tells me about the planning he and his wife do to allow their son as much freedom as possible without isolating him from friends and safety-concerned parents, and about worried parents of schoolmates turning up on the Furedi doorstep to report that they’ve found Jacob out on his own...well, it all sounds quite pressurised.

Furedi doesn’t blame any parent for leading an anxiety-filled, health-conscious life. “It’s very difficult for any individual to adopt a parenting style that is fundamentally different from anyone else’s. We interact with each other, we are influenced by similar fashions, and I don’t suggest that anyone should adopt a childcare strategy that isolates you from the rest of the world. But I can see the day when we are more mature in making choices and don’t have to pee in our pants about every new experience.”

We await the revolution.

Child safety in numbers

11.7m under 16s in England and Wales

68 children were abducted by strangers in 2002-03

166 children are killed on the road every year

96 children drowned in 2002

917,498 children were injured in falls in 2002

Source: Times database

First published by The Times (London), 26 July 2008

Our little emperors: does worrying do more harm than good?
A backlash has begun against the all-must-have-prizes culture that has produced children used to getting their own way. By Margarette Driscoll.

As the mother of two young daughters, Ruth Appleton is used to doling out praise for almost everything they do. Even she was taken aback, however, when her younger daughter, Rachel, now 5, arrived home from nursery clutching a certificate for “sitting nicely on the carpet”.

“It made me wonder what she was doing the rest of the time,” said Appleton, from Porthcawl, Wales. “I thought it was a bit over the top rewarding her for something so routine. But it’s part of a whole culture of stickers and smiley faces and ‘celebration assemblies’.”

Anyone with children at primary school will instantly get the picture: no child’s existence is complete without “circle time”, or “show and tell” sessions at which they are encouraged to parade their achievements and examine their feelings. The received wisdom on child-rearing says nothing should be allowed to damage a child’s sense of self-worth: just last week the Football Association (FA) decided to ban teams including children under eight from publishing their results, for fear of putting the kids under too much pressure if they lost a match.

As parents, we are encouraged to nurture our children’s sense of “self”, but are we unwittingly doing them more harm than good?

Our child-centred society means we fret over what our kids eat, what they wear, their friends, their exam grades and their safety. A US academic has coined the term kindergarchy – a new (affluent) world order in which children rule.

“Children have gone from background to foreground in domestic life with more attention centred on them, their upbringing [and] their small accomplishments,” wrote Joseph Epstein, a recently retired lecturer at Northwestern University, in The Weekly Standard, a US magazine.

“On visits to the homes of friends with small children, one finds their toys strewn everywhere, their drawings on the refrigerator, television sets turned on to their shows. Parents seem little more than indentured servants.”

Epstein’s recollections of his own childhood evoke an utterly different world. Parents didn’t feel the need to micro-manage their children’s lives. He doesn’t remember his parents reading to him, or turning up to watch him compete at athletics. They left it to him to decide which foreign language to study at secondary school and weren’t much bothered that he was a mediocre student.

Now, he says, it’s a wonder more teachers aren’t driven out of the profession by parents bombarding them with e-mails, phone calls and requests for meetings. “Students told me what they ‘felt’ about a novel,” he recalled. “I tried, ever so gently, to tell them no one cared what they felt. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to – but did not – write, ‘Too much love in the home’.”

In Britain, too, there has been a seismic shift in parenting. “At the weekends, the kids are saying to us, ‘What are we doing today?’ – in other words, ‘You are going to entertain us, aren’t you?’ ” said Appleton, who works part-time for Netmums, an online network for mothers.

It is becoming a worldwide trend. A recent production of Snow White at a primary school in Japan featured 25 Snow Whites, no dwarfs and no wicked witch, as parents objected to one child being picked out for the title role. In Sweden a boy was prevented from handing out invitations to his birthday party at school because he was “discriminating” against the two classmates he did not invite.

A straw poll in Netmums’ virtual coffee house produced distinctly mixed feelings about the phenomenon. “The cushioning effect of awarding stickers and praise for inconsequential trivia masks what children really need and are looking for – guidance, consistency, self-reliance and love,” said one mother, Liz.

Another, Jeanette, was concerned that her daughter’s teachers would not correct spelling mistakes, “because she was spelling the words how you said them”, nor correct her writing when she drew letters back to front.

“The reality is, she does need to be corrected,” said Jeanette. “Children have to learn. I’m not saying it has to be negative, but there has to be a balance. When our kids go into the workplace, they are in for a shock.”

That would appear to be true. Earlier this year the Association of Graduate Recruiters said the generation born since 1982 – the so-called generation Y – were “unrealistic, self-centred, fickle and greedy”.

They used the example of a new recruit to a transport company who rang his mother to complain: “I have got to go to London tomorrow and they haven’t even given me a map.”

The employer threw up her hands in anger, according to Carl Gilleard, AGR’s chief executive: “Here was someone working for a transport company, who had spent three years at university, who was aggrieved because he hadn’t been given a detailed map.”

On a more sinister level, the child-centred approach also seems to have contributed to a decline in standards of behaviour in schools, with children ever more conscious of their “rights” and teachers afraid to chastise unruly children for fear of being attacked or accused of assault.

Last week Boris Johnson, the London mayor, highlighted the problem of indiscipline in schools as a factor in street violence. “Too many kids in London are growing up without boundaries, without discipline and without the family structures they need,” he said. “We should bring back discipline and the idea of punishment.”

In Merseyside an academic is bucking the trend of navel-gazing in schools. Peter Clough, head of psychology at the University of Hull, is working with children at All Saints Catholic high school in Knowsley, attempting to teach them to be “mentally tough”.

“Positive psychology says, ‘Count your blessings.’ My kind of psychology says, ‘Life can be hard and you have to learn to deal with it’,” he explained.

According to Clough, mentally tough pupils do better in exams and are less likely to see themselves as victims of bullying. If they fail at something, they try again. Using a diagnostic test devised by AQR, a business consultancy, Clough has been assessing his group’s attitudes to challenges, looking at such factors as whether they consider themselves optimists or pessimists and whether they think they can stay cool in stressful situations. Those with the lowest scores are learning visualisation, relaxation and anxiety-control techniques to help them toughen up.

“I’m encouraging kids not to run away from stress but face up to it,” said Clough. “If you’ve got a maths exam, just do it.”

We have to decide what we want our children to be – tough go-getters or touchy-feely carers. Or is it even about them?

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University, believes our child-centredness is really adult-centredness. “It’s a way of reassuring ourselves that our children are going to be insulated from pain and adversity,” he said. “We tell children they are wonderful now for tying their shoelaces or getting 50% in an exam. But really it’s our way of flattering ourselves that we’re far more sensitive to children than people were in the past.”

The trouble is, Furedi says, that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. “You’re subtly giving kids the message that they can’t cope with life,” he said. “I have a son of 12 and when he and his friends were just nineI remember being shocked at them using therapeutic language, talking about being stressed out and depressed.”

While researching The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, its co-author Dennis Hayes, visiting professor of education at Oxford Brookes University, discovered a leaflet telling students that if they studied sociology they might come across poor people and get depressed and if they studied nursing they might come across sick people and get distressed – so the university offered counselling.

“It was telling students they could not cope before they started,” he said. “The focus on feelings has become ridiculous. One friend told me his daughter was crying at home one night and when he asked why she said, ‘It’s my turn to put my worries in the worry box tomorrow and I haven’t got any!’ ” Perhaps we underestimate the resilience of children. One coach of an undereights football team was in favour of publishing results, saying they just enjoyed playing, whatever the score. “They didn’t care that they lost,” he said of one game. It was only 21-0, after all.

First published by Sunday Times, 29 June 2008

Licensed to Hug
The report Licensed to Hug, by Frank Furedi and Jennie Bristow, generated a storm of media coverage.

The following appeared on 26 June 2008.

A quarter of adults to face ‘anti-paedophile’ tests. Daily Telegraph - front page

Time for sanity in the vetting of volunteers. Daily Telegraph - leader

Government will crack down on unnecessary CRB checks, Phil Hope says.  Daily Telegraph

Are we overprotective of our children? Daily Telegraph - discussion

Has vetting damaged trust? Today, BBC Radio Four

Adults ‘scared to go near kids’. BBC News Online

Is our response to child sex abuse in proportion? BBC News Online - Analysis by Mark Easton

Child safety laws mean adults ‘scared to approach children’. Guardian

Child protection laws are ‘poisoning the relationships between adults and children’. Daily Mail

Quarter of adults must be CRB checked under new rules. The Times (London)

Paedophile label scares off adults. London Metro

Child protection measures ‘increase risk to children’. Inthenews.co.uk

Adults Scared Of Children. Raising Kids

New report explores the damaging effects of child protection policies. innovations report, Germany

Escalation in child protection measures make adults ‘afraid to interact with children’. 24dash.com

The following appeared on 27 June 2008.

An obnoxious brat in the street, a chilling leaflet… and my 14-year-old son who chants ‘Childline’ when I try to hug him. By Tom Utley. Daily Mail

This child protection hysteria deflects attention from a real, and growing, danger. By Dominic Lawson. The Independent

Protecting kids is far from child’s play, by Tim Gill. Guardian - Comment is Free

Acting on instinct, by David Wilson. Guardian - Comment is Free

Are we overprotective of our kids? Guardian - news blog

Parents banned from ferrying children to sports matches. Daily Telegraph

Baby photos that fall foul of the PC police, by Lesley Thomas. Daily Telegraph

‘I was treated like a paedophile’, by Julian Joyce. BBC News Online.

Londres multiplie les contrôles antipédophiles. Le Figaro (France)

Esther Rantzen’s fury over kid check. The Mirror

Welcome for record check on volunteers. Dorset Echo / Daily Echo

Letters to the Telegraph, including from Meg Hillier MP, Home Office Minister

The following appeared on 28 June 2008.

John Pinnington sacked after CRB check reveals unsubstantiated abuse allegations. Telegraph

New Report Explores The Damaging Effects Of Child Protection Policies. Medical News Today

Letters to the Telegraph

The following appeared on 29 June 2008.

If we can’t learn to trust each other, we will lose ourselves and our children. By Tim Lott. Independent

Parents are kidding themselves over child protection. By Rod Liddle. Sunday Times

There is no law against photographing children. By Jemima Lewis. Telegraph

The following appeared on 30 June 2008.

We’re all victims in Meg Hillier’s mad world. By Philip Johnston. Telegraph

Letters to the Telegraph

Further coverage

How magic might finally fix your computer. The Red Tape Chronicles, MSNBC, 7 July 2008

I launched Childline to protect the most vulnerable - but unleashed a politically correct monster. By Esther Rantzen. Daily Mail, 9 July 2008

Bureaucrats killing future British tennis stars. By Jim White. Daily Telegraph, 9 July 2008

Paranoia has taken over child protection, by India Knight. The Sunday Times, 13 July 2008

The Damaging Effects of Child Protection Policies. Children Webmag, 1 August 2008

Why are teachers scared of learning to give pupils First Aid? By Alexandra Frean, Education Editor. Times Online (London), 10 November 2008

Baby P: how does society best protect its children? Daily Telegraph, 12 November 2008

Also see:

Thou shalt not hug, by Frank Furedi. New Statesman, 26 June 2008

Now you need a licence to interact with children, by Frank Furedi. spiked, 26 June 2008

Childcare: child’s play is now a minefield, by Frank Furedi. Daily Telegraph, 26 June 2008

Licensed to Hug. Civitas blog, 26 June 2008

First published by All media, 26 June 2008

Emphasis on emotions is creating ‘can’t do’ students
by Alexandra Frean, Education Editor.

Schools and universities are producing a generation of “can’t do” students, who are encouraged to talk about their emotions at the expense of exploring ideas or acquiring knowledge, academics claimed yesterday.

The strong focus on emotional expression and building up self-esteem in schools and colleges was “infantilising” students, leaving them unable to cope with life on their own, according to the authors of a new book, The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education.

Dennis Hayes and Kathryn Ecclestone, of Oxford Brookes University, argue that this “therapeutic” approach to education is at odds with the acquisition of knowledge because it views the emotional skills associated with learning as more important than subject content or criticism.

“Turning teaching into therapy is destroying the minds of children, young people and adults,” Dr Hayes told Times Higher Education. “Therapeutic education promotes the idea that we are emotional, vulnerable and hapless individuals. It is an attack on human potential.”

They pointed to the increased presence of parents on campus, and substitute parents, such as counsellors and support officers. “Everyone looks for a difficulty to declare, like the hundreds of students who register themselves as dyslexic. Being dyslexic used to be something that people hid. Now students wear their difficulties as a badge of honour,” Dr Hayes said.

Therapeutic education pervaded all levels of education. Dr Hayes cited the case of a primary school boy who was asked by an emotional learning assistant why he was so happy. When he said he was looking forward to a treat at McDonald’s, she asked: “Are you sure there is nothing worrying you?”

The book follows the recent introduction into state schools of lessons in happiness and wellbeing under a programme known as Seal (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning).

Ministers are convinced that teaching children to express their emotions boosts concentration and motivation. But there is growing disquiet that this attitude could undermine teaching and learning.

Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, said: “It inflates the importance of feelings to the point where they eclipse what is supposed to be going on in the classroom.” It also made teachers and lecturers overcautious. “They will give a piece of work 55 per cent and then write on it ‘this essay is superb’ because they daren’t say it’s crap.”

John Foreman, dean of students at University College London, agreed that students were not as “self-sustaining and robust” as they once were. He partly blamed overprotective parents. “If young people don’t start learning to solve their own problems, when will they ever?” he said.

Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College in Berkshire, a pioneer of wellbeing classes, defended the approach. “Since we started wellbeing lessons [in 2005] our A-level results have gone up from 64 to 86 per cent of students getting As and Bs.”

The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education is published on July 14.

First published by The Times (London), 12 June 2008

Times Online marriage and sex survey
Darling, that was wonderful: British couples reveal the quantity of sex after parenthood may be down. By Jennifer Howze.

Do people’s sex lives start to fizzle out after they have children? Does their arrival mark the end of romance and the start of fantasising about other sexual partners - or even a night of uninterrupted sleep?

Shining a light on this deeply private area of couple’s lives is not always easy. So when we posted a questionnaire on Times Online, we were not entirely sure what to expect.

So far nearly 1,700 men and women have answered questions that range from how often they have sex and how long it lasts, to how many children they have and whether the children have affected the quality of their sex lives. Many also wrote at length about their own experiences.

David Thompson - the only one of those we contacted who agreed to give his real name - spoke with lyrical nostalgia about a long walk in the woods with his girlfriend. The weather was perfect, no one else was around and they had nothing on their minds but each other; so they made love beneath the trees.

Now aged 37, Thompson is married to his girlfriend and a father of three. “Making love spontaneously outdoors is something we would never do now,” he said. “We’re too busy running after the kids, making sure they don’t beat each other with sticks.”

His experience seemed typical: most of the respondents to our survey agreed that having children meant having less time for love-making. Yet despite recent reports about the rise in sexless marriages, the overwhelming majority still had a sex life – and few complaints about its quality.

“Frequency has gone down because we are both constantly tired and frazzled with the demands of our jobs and looking after the family,” wrote a married mother of two, who said she had sex two to three times a month. “But quality has gone up, as we have got closer after the birth of our child . . . We trust each other more and so are more open with each other.”

In all, 1,675 respondents - 54% of them male - filled in the survey on the Times Online’s Alpha Mummy blog. While not strictly scientific - because the respondents were self-selected - it painted a reassuring picture of what happens to romance after having children. The majority of parents said they had sex more than once a month; and 63% said the frequency of their love-making ranged from several times a week to two to three times a month. For 46%, love-making sessions lasted 20-45 minutes, while 34% made love for up to 20 minutes and 3% for more than an hour.

Tiredness was the chief reason given for having less sex now than before having a family; causes of this included the sheer physical energy needed to look after children, disturbed nights, early starts, pressures at work and general stress.

One pregnant mother, who has one child, said the reason why she was having sex only two or three times a month was, in fact, nothing to do with having a baby. “Running our own business does more damage,” she wrote. Other reasons for less frequent sex included sharing a bed with children or sleeping in separate beds - in some cases so that fathers were not woken up when a baby needed to be breast-fed.

One mother of three complained that it was hard ever to escape from children - “I’m worried about little hands opening bedroom doors,” she wrote.

Sex with his wife was described by one father as “quick, covert, much like a military strike . . . My daughter seems to have been born with a built-in radar which informs her any time my wife and I try to get close . . . even if she’s in the other room . . . at two in the morning”.

Some parents said they stole private moments while the children were playing in the garden or when the nanny was on duty. “We have to make the most of the opportunities, but the quality seems to get better with age and experience,” wrote a father of three, who described sex with his girlfriend as “better than ever” after 13 years together.

It was striking just how many parents had a positive view of their sex lives - whatever the frequency. “The sex we have is really great. It is maybe not as saucy as it was when we first got together, but it is more effective in that we both know what the other likes and what works for us both,” said a mother of one, who has been with her husband for eight years. They still have sex several times a week: “Although sometimes I am tired and think I can’t be bothered, afterwards I always think how much fun it was and am so pleased that I made the effort.”

Another mother, who has three children, said: “Being constantly tired and busy with activities after school made it hard to feel ‘in the mood’. Once the kids were older and more independent, we could return to more intimacy, and now that the kids have left home it is great.”

Some in long-term relationships admitted that the ebb and flow of their sex lives did not necessarily have anything to do with having children.

“We thought children affected our sex life when they were very little; but looking back, it was better then than now,” wrote a mother of two, whose relationship has so far lasted 11 years. “It may be our age, or we may have just got lazy.”

According to Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University and author of Paranoid Parenting, mothers in particular can find parenting a desexualising experience. After a baby is born, he said, “there’s a sense that the baby becomes the priority; the body is given over to the child. And that is sometimes slightly contradictory to the woman as a sexual being”.

Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, says that there can be a tension between “the erotic and the domestic. Family life thrives in an atmosphere of consistency and stability. The erotic crumbles under routine”.

Several respondents recognised these strains in their relationships. “I believe that my partner saw me as a mother/housewife rather than as being a sexually attractive, interesting woman,” said a mother of one.

And a father wrote: “Being in the birthing room was very traumatic for me. Taking second place to our child hurt our sex life . . . I think we both withdrew from the sex part of the relationship.”

One father of two, who had been in a relationship for five years, said: “After the second child, desire just disappeared and never really came back to full strength - and it’s been three years.” The couple’s love-making - two to three times a month - was, however, “great when you get it”.

Another father said that his love life had dwindled to having formulaic sex several times a year: “It was never the right moment so I gave up trying . . .”

On the other hand, many felt that pregnancy and parenthood had put renewed energy into their relationships. “It’s great now because she’s pregnant and has a sex craving,” said a father who has sex about once a week.

Perel said this was not uncommon. “There are lots of women who actually discover through pregnancy, through birth, nursing and bonding with a child, a whole new sense of themselves as women - physically, sexually and sensually.”

The iron bonds of parenthood can often reinforce a relationship, according to Furedi. “Having kids and having some very positive shared experiences bring people together,” he said. “A good sex life for a couple depends on there being a kind of bond, a friendship - it’s what gives you confidence to relax.”

What can be done if the sexual spark between a couple has simply fizzled out? Scheduling time to be alone together is vital, advises Suzi Godson, author of The Sex Book. Perel advises going out for a meal, dancing - anything that the couple will both enjoy. “Just don’t talk about the kids,” she says.

However, one desperate parent asked: but what else is there to talk about by that stage in a relationship?

First published by Sunday Times, 25 May 2008

Government to quiz households on sex lives and salaries
by Lewis Carter

More than 500,000 people a year are to be questioned about their sex lives and salaries by Government inspectors, it has emerged.

Officials will ask for information about former sexual partners, contraception and how long couples have lived together before getting married.

The 2,000-question survey, which will be carried out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), has prompted fears of further data security breaches as both names and addresses will be logged by inspectors.

Critics also say the £3.5 million-a-year cost will be a waste of money as people tend to lie about their private lives and begrudge intrusion into personal matters.

Eric Pickles, the shadow communities secretary, said: “Day by day, the liberty and privacy of the British public is being undermined by Labour’s surveillance state. People will be shocked that taxpayers’ money is being spent on intrusive surveys. Now state spies want to log and record who sleeps with whom and how often. Not even the Stasi went this far.”

Inspectors will ask the questions as part of the new Integrated Household Survey.

They will visit 200,000 homes at random each year and question each occupant, meaning that about 500,000 individuals will take part.

One of the questions asks: “Have you ever had a baby - even one who only lived for a short time?”

Interviewers are warned: “Exclude: Any stillborn; Include: Any who only lived for a short time.”

The survey features intimate questions on exact dates when relationships ended, and the precise amount of money people take home.

There will also be 35 questions on contraception, such as whether men have had vasectomies, the brands of Pill women use, and whether they have ever taken the morning-after Pill.

Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at Kent University, said: “When researchers ask about sexual habits there is a very strong tendency for ­people to clam up, or to say what they think they want to hear.

“I would resent being asked these questions and I don’t think the Government should be doing it.”

A spokesman for the ONS said the survey was the most efficient way of meeting the Government’s “information needs”.

He said that all names and addresses would be deleted from the files once they arrived in the main office.

First published by Daily Telegraph, 21 April 2008

State busybodies want to pry into your bedroom secrets
by Paul Sims

Government inspectors are to ask us intimate questions about our sex lives, it was revealed.

More than half a million people every year will be asked about their past and present sexual partners, contraception and how long couples have lived together before marriage.

The 2,000 questions are part of the Integrated Household Survey, and the responses will be logged with respondents’ names and addresses.

Civil servants insist that the sensitive personal information will be made anonymous once the files arrive at the Office of National Statistics, where they will then be held on a secure server.

But campaigners last night branded the survey “intrusive” and another example of Labour’s “surveillance state”.

The survey will cost £3.5 million to carry out each year and will see inspectors randomly visit up to 200,000 homes to question each occupant.

They will ask 35 questions on contraception alone, covering vasectomies, the pill and if respondents have ever used the “morning after” pill.

Other intimate questions include the exact dates when previous relationships ended, precise monthly earnings and details of any second jobs or bonuses.

Investigators will also ask about the health of any children in the household.

One insensitive question asks: “Have you ever had a baby - even one who lived for a short time?”

Interviewers are then told: “Exclude: Any stillborn; include: Any who lived for a short time.”

Even though the survey is voluntary it has been claimed that inspectors will press respondents into revealing personal details with follow-up questions designed to draw out more information.

The ONS said it needed to carry out the annual poll to keep abreast of constantly changing social trends and so help Whitehall formulate policy.

But some experts cast doubt on the survey’s accuracy, suggesting that some respondents may hold back information, especially of a sexual nature, or say what they think the interviewer wants to hear.

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University, said: “If they want to find out about intimate details they should do it in a much more sensitive way.”

Tory Communities spokesman Eric Pickles said: “Day by day, the liberty and privacy of the British public is being undermined by Labour’s surveillance state. People will be shocked that taxpayers’ money is being spent on intrusive surveys.

“Now state spies want to log and record who sleeps with whom and how often. Not even the Stasi went this far.”

Last night, a spokesman for the ONS defended the survey and said it was “a high quality, adaptable and efficient” way of “meeting the Government’s future information needs”.

First published by Daily Mail, 21 April 2008

Irrational fears fuel stifling regulations

The image of the deputy Labour leader walking through her constituency in a stab-proof vest generated plenty of debate last week. Harriet Harman likened it to wearing a team kit, but the picture provided easy pickings for the Conservatives. William Hague, shadow foreign secretary, asked if she wore a clown’s outfit to cabinet meetings. Harman responded that she would not take fashion tips from a man previously photographed wearing a baseball cap.
But away from the yah and boo of Westminster, the image was symbolic of the wider aversion to risk in society - a subject debated at last week’s Fund Strategy Investment Summit. Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at Kent university, argued that attitudes have changed over the past 20 years, with pessimism and irrational fear fuelling a culture of excessive caution. In the other corner, Alistair Milne, a senior lecturer at Cass Business School, proposed that a simple application of risk management remains prudent.

Furedi won over the summit delegates. But fear of the unknown is more visible than ever in the markets. Retail investors continue to move into cautious managed and protected products, despite the long-term arguments for holding equities. A desire to mitigate risk is also apparent at a higher level, with calls in Britain and America for tighter regulation of financial services, following the failures of Northern Rock and Bear Stearns.

In particular, the influence of foreigners, from “non-dom” individuals to sovereign wealth funds is under scrutiny. While some investors have welcomed the arrival of the funds, and the estimated $3 trillion (£1.5 trillion) of funding they offer, others are cautious. In a bid to soothe concerns and pre-empt the introduction of tougher rules, two of the funds are set to adopt a code of conduct created by the British Venture Capital Association.

The financial services industry has seen such clamp-downs before. Most notably, the imposition of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002 in America came in the aftermath of accounting scandals at WorldCom and Enron. The act satisfied the public outcry for action, but consigned American companies to extra regulatory burden and led to the rise of London as a financial centre. The British government will face similar pressures in the months ahead. While extra protection may be required, it should remember that over-regulation can be stifling.

First published by Fund Strategy, 7 April 2008

The Suspect Society

The Surveillance Society. The New Authoritarianism. The Age of Paranoid Politics. These are just a few of the ways writers and thinkers describe the age we’re now living in. The signs of anxiety and fear in this post 9-11 era are all around us. School lock-downs are called the new fire-drill. Recently, many schools boards in Canada made rehearsing the lock-down mandatory. The number of security staff in schools is increasing every year. By 2010 for example, there will be more security guards than teachers in American schools. But, the uniforms aren’t just being worn by security staff. More and more American public schools have adopted uniforms for students. Meanwhile the U.S. army is embedding itself in schools - targeting younger and younger students for recruitment. In Canada recruitment comes through video games that inform, entertain and seduce “action-focused males starting at 17 years old”.

Military symbols and myths are gaining prominence in western societies. In Britain, a recent report recommended that military personnel continue to wear a uniform in their daily life as citizens to boost support for themselves. One of Canada’s military boosters is Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In April, 2007, he told us that the Battle of Vimy Ridge is Canada’s creation story. Military Heroics. Bunker politics. Us against Them. The world, indeed seems more dangerous than ever, in the most intimate of environments. In daycares within Canada, the US, Britain and Australia, there is now video surveillance of very young children, easing we’re told, parental anxieties. Never mind cameras at intersections, in elevators. Cameras everywhere. In Baltimore, they’ve gone further. Based on an idea from Glasgow, Scotland, blue flashing lights have been installed around Baltimore - to signal: this is a high-crime neighbourhood.

A grant worth millions of dollars from the United States Department of Homeland Security has helped pay for Baltimore’s video fortress. That video is streamed into the Baltimore Police Depatments “Watch Centre”. In New York City and London, England similar surveillance is called, “The Ring of Steel”.

Britain has 4 million cameras trained on it’s citizens. The country’s information commissioner has publicly stated the British are sleepwalking into a surveillance society. One study revealed a single person in London, going about their business would be filmed about 300 times in one day. But what are we to make of all of this? We know that video cameras can, in specific situations, help solve crimes but must everybody be watched all the time? And what’s at stake?

IDEAS producer Mary O’Connell takes us inside the new authoritarianism – which, if we’re paying attention, seems to be all around us.

In Episode 2, Mary O’Connell explores violations of academic freedom and expression. Dr. Steven Kurtz is an arts professor at Suny - State University of New York at Buffalo. Dr. Kurtz has been the subject of an FBI investigation and his trial will begin in summer 2008. The second case involves the story of Religion and Philosophy professor Douglas Giles who was dismissed from his
job at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

Follow this link to listen to The Suspect Society, Part 1 (13 March) and Part 2 (20 March).

RESOURCES

Books

Against the New Authoritarianism, by Henry A. Giroux.

The University in Chains, by Henry A. Giroux.

Paranoid Parenting, by Frank Furedi.

Witch Hunts from Salem to Guantanamo Bay, by Robert Rapley.

The Age of McCarthyism, by Ellen Schrecker.

Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, by Ellen Schrecker.

Suspect, Alphabet City, editor John Knechtel.

Websites

The American Civil Liberties Union - Is the US Turning Into A Surveillance Society

Canadian Civil Liberties Association - CCLA In The Schools: The Right To Personal Privacy

Media Matters for America - Savage Nation

Alligator Online - Capital Bill Aims to Control Leftist

CBN.NEWS.com - The 101 Most Dangerous Professors in America

The Nation - Burning Cole

Critical Art Ensemble

American Historical Association - Scholars Become Targets of Patriot Act

The Human Behavior Experiments by Alex Gibney on CBC Television’s The Passionate Eye - Watch an excerpt from the documentary

First published by CBC Radio, 13 March 2008

Think positive
Richard Schoch on whether children should be taught how to be happy.

On Monday night, before a capacity audience at the Guardian newsroom, Anthony Seldon, head of Wellington college, and the sociologist Frank Furedi debated whether happiness should be taught in schools. The event was the first in a series of public programmes co-sponsored by the Guardian and the education think tank Agora.

Seldon is the first headteacher in the country to timetable happiness lessons. Wellington students are now taught ‘how to be happy’ according to the tenets of positive psychology. Seldon defended the movement by stressing that it defined happiness not as maximising pleasure but as cultivating meaningful relationships.

The controversial academic Furedi agreed with Seldon that education should enable people to flourish. But he denounced happiness lessons as the intrusion of “psychobabble” into the classroom. The entire project, he argued, was misconceived because happiness cannot be taught; it can only be experienced in the daily challenges of life. Yet Furedi’s gravest concern about teaching happiness through positive psychology was that it threatened, rather than fostered, individual autonomy by imposing a formulaic and doctrinaire approach to life.

In a post-debate show of hands, the audience was evenly divided on the merits or demerits-of teaching happiness. I can see why. Seldon rightly insists that education must prepare young people for something more than high-earning jobs; it must help them to become loving parents, loyal friends, and responsible stewards of the planet. Families, communities and faith groups must do the same.

But how? Seldon’s answer is to teach positive psychology. But that hardly inspires confidence. Though the happiness scientists wisely promote “meaning and engagement” as the pinnacle of the good life, they consistently fall back upon a much weaker version of happiness - positive feelings, good moods - because that’s the only kind they can measure. (How do you measure meaning?) And positive psychology is all about measuring happiness.

Though quick to ridicule the notion of happiness lessons, Furedi failed to offer much of an alternative. His derision is so sweepingly negative that it excludes any curricular focus on happiness. Yet such an extreme response hinders the educational mission that Furedi himself promotes: developing moral character, judicious intellect and good citizenship. A person who possesses those attributes is likely to be the person whom we call happy.

What happened on Monday night, and what happens so often in such debates, is that happiness itself gets sidelined and the discussion becomes a verdict upon positive psychology - you love it, you hate it. At the end nobody is much clearer about what happiness is or how to achieve it.

Missing from the debate is the recognition that happiness has a history. People have been talking, thinking, and writing about the good life for thousands of years, beginning with Aristotle in ancient Athens and the Hindu sages who composed the Upanishads. Though it sounds incredible, some people in the past have actually been happy. To assume that nobody knew anything about happiness until positive psychology emerged a decade ago is intellectual arrogance. And it’s a mystery why critics of positive psychology are so often blind to the well-established traditions of happiness that have developed over humanity’s long history.

The truth is that for the past 2,500 years, happiness has been understood - and experienced - mostly in the context of philosophical and religious beliefs. Only in the past few centuries, and mostly in the west, has happiness become divorced from broad visions of the good life. From Epicureanism to Stoicism, and from Buddhism to Christianity, the question “what makes a life happy?” has never stopped being asked.

That the question is perennial shows not only its importance, but also the difficulty of finding the right answer. Just as “one swallow does not make a springtime”, Aristotle reasoned, one pleasant day does not make a whole life happy. Which is another way of saying that we could all use some help in our search for happiness.

So, yes, there is a place for happiness in the classroom, just as there is a place for it in the home, in youth groups, in churches, in mosques, and in synagogues. Call it happiness, call it morality, call it “life skills”, the label scarcely matters. What matters is that the ideal happiness curriculum already exists, and had existed for centuries. The problem is that it has been overlooked, sometimes in the faddish pursuit of the latest scientific discovery and sometimes out of historical amnesia. Still, humanity’s accumulated wisdom about the pursuit and achievement of happiness is there for anyone who wants to learn from it.

If Wellington college really wants to teach its students how to be happy, it could do far worse than directing them to the library, where they might discover some books, perhaps dusty from long neglect, that will inspire them to excel in the art of living, the art whose other name is happiness.

Richard Schoch is professor of the history of culture at Queen Mary, University of London and author of The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life. He also sits on the advisory board of Agora.

First published by Guardian, 28 February 2008

Council bans social network site

Workers at Kent County Council (KCC) have been banned from using the social networking website Facebook.
The authority said it had restricted access to the site under its electronic-use policy, and was one of several organisations to take the step.

It said the move was an effort to reduce time-wasting, but some workers have objected and want Facebook back.

“Like any other organisation, we have a responsibility to keep our IT systems secure,” the council said.

The authority employs 32,000 people.

It can be difficult to know when to stop
John Woodley

One Facebook user, John Woodley, said: “You have your network of friends and there is always that element of trying to develop other relationships and meet other people on there.

“We are social animals - it can be difficult to know when to stop.”

Professor Frank Furedi, from the University of Kent, said the site could be “a very valuable asset for creating communities between employees”.

He said: “It’s a way that employees can share experiences, and it’s a way that employers can learn about problems that exist in the workplace.”

But employment lawyer Jonathan Gauton said: “Employers are facing employees who are wasting a lot of time, who are ill-focused on their correct responsibilities.

“Ultimately, they can be sanctioned. They can be disciplined for it, and we have seen employees ultimately dismissed.”

First published by BBC News, 28 August 2007

A world view built on worst-case scenarios
by Guy Rundle

HABITUES of second-hand bookshops tend to develop a more sceptical sense of intellectual fashion than those who prefer their ideas shiny and new, straight from the everlasting present of Borders or Amazon. Amid dusty shelves and wobbling stacks one finds whole runs of ideas and obsessions now discarded, such as lost civilisations or those long polar ice-core samples that have become part of our mental furniture.

Nowhere is this more telling than in the area of the social sciences, where dominant ideas and research programs rise and fall and rise again over decades, leaving rich lodes of once popular works obsolete with a turn of the calendar.

When I started to haunt such shops in the early 1980s, the ideas that had excited and informed the ‘60s and ‘70s were at their nadir and books that had been eagerly read classics were available in fire-hazard volume.

As the Reagan-Thatcher-yuppie-greed-isgood years took off, it was above all works of grand cultural criticism that were dumped. Works that had inspired a revolution in thinking, such as Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report, Ivan Illich’s Celebration of Awareness and Paul Goodman’s Growing up Absurd had come to appear, as we all got stoned and it blew away, irrelevant, if not a little embarrassing.

They had warned of a world tearing up its finite resources at a furious rate, in which the variety and quality of life had been suborned to a commodified, inhibited one-dimensional society. By the time we got to the ‘80s many of their answers turned out to have a few problems of their own, and here we were in a world of bright lights and big cities and, well, it didn’t look so bad.

The classic ‘60s works were part of a longer tradition of cultural criticism stretching right back all the way, if one wanted to go there, via authors such as John Ruskin and William Morris, Emile Durkheim and Geoffrey Bateson, to the traditions of Theocritus and the other pastoral poets of the Greek city-states, who wrote endless odes about happy shepherds frolicking in a simple, uncorrupted world.

To many, the glorious dawn of cultural criticism in the ‘60s was, in its twilight, more readily identifiable as traditional, rather than revolutionary, cyclic rather than unprecedented. Two decades further on, such concerns have once again come to the fore, prompted by a variety of great and small events.

Yet such was the wrenching power of the fire last time, such were its promises and disappointments, that current contributions are haunted by a memory of embarrassing naivete, of the ease by which the smiley face became a logo. Even those predisposed to offering a more prophetic account of contemporary life feel a need to hedge their bets. Such caution, and what haunts it, is exemplified in Robyn Davidson’s Quarterly Essay on nomadism.

Davidson, a life-long travelling writer, best known for her book Tracks, has written a highly readable and sometimes moving account of encounters with various nomadic peoples, with an explicit attempt to offer some reflections on our way of life - and a concerted attempt to disown any sense that what she is offering is a program for another way to live.

Yet whether one agrees with or is exasperated by her argument that we must look to other cultures for solutions to an unsustainable way of life, many will be irritated by her idealised view of those other cultures.

Beginning with a fairly outdated historical account identifying the coming of agriculture with the “fall”, Davidson moves through a consideration of the Aborigines she grew up near, but did not know, in rural Queensland, a journey to a horse fair in Tibet and, most substantially, a period travelling with the Rabari people of Rajasthan in India.

Having early on sketched out a more limited purview-"I do not mean to say that we should (or could) return to traditional nomadic economies. I do mean . . . that it would be foolish to disregard or underrate (them)"-the essay itself is a process of falling into a deep romance with her subjects.

“I never once saw one of them show discourtesy to another human being, no matter how lowly, nor cruelty to another form of life,” she writes of the Rabari. “Although they were proud of themselves as a caste, they seemed to exist somewhere outside the more rigid hierarchies of settled people. They were aware of the air of freedom and liberality surrounding them.” Not only that, but they retained a pre-Edenic innocence that other cultures have lost: “Their success depended upon formal generosity, tolerance and honesty among migrating individuals, families, dangs (small groups), castes and religions.”

At times, Davidson slips into a near Rudolph Valentino mode in which the nomads are a glamorous aristocratic other: “It was something they identified as their own, which made them different from (and I’m sure they would tacitly agree, superior to) the peasantry.”

At other times they are “comfortable with uncertainty and contradiction. They are cosmopolitan in outlook, because they have to deal with difference, negotiate difference. They do not focus on long-term goals so much as continually accommodate themselves to change. They are less concerned with the accumulation of wealth and more concerned with the accumulation of knowledge . . . Adaptability, flexibility, mental agility, the ability to cope with flux. These traits shy away from absolutes, and strive for an equilibrium that blurs rigid boundaries.” You can almost see them walking down Glebe Point Road, Brunswick Street or any groovy inner-city locale.

By now you can see the denouement coming. It is we, the knowledge and culture workers who are the true heirs of these insouciant nobles: “And increasingly, there are people like me, who live in several countries, have complex identities and feel allied to more than one culture. We live in what Edward Said called ‘a generalised condition of homelessness’. These new forms of nomadism will shape the culture of the new century in unpredictable ways.”

For all the genuine passion and knowledge in Davidson’s account of her time with the Rabari, the account of nomadism as a whole is a farrago. Though such cultures have many qualities to be envious of, you don’t have to know much about non-agricultural peoples (and my knowledge is confined to second-hand acquaintance with Inuit culture) to know they have a harshness we would find intolerable.

The abandonment of the weak or ill, infanticide, shunning, scapegoating, exile, summary judgment, violence, xenophobia, feuds, splits, slighted honour and retribution - all are essential to their survival as coherent and mobile peoples. And they issue from the same place as the qualities more attractive to a contemporary audience.

Nor does the equation of nomadism with contemporary atomised hyperindividualism ring true. The most important point, surely, about nomads is not that they move, but that they move together, and that the identity of each person in the group is bound up in those of the others to a greater degree than we would find possible or desirable.

Both short and long-distance nomadic groups travel within a known world, a world in which part and whole - landscape, flora, fauna, weather - are knitted together, organised and made vivid by myth, totem systems, taboo, kinship rules and complex language systems. Though early anthropology was wont to see these systems as more stable than they now appear, and although contact with modernity has created hybrid systems, the fact is that nomads have more in common with non-mobile, substantially non-agricultural people - Pacific Islanders, for example - than with mobile moderns.

In all traditional cultures, stories of solitary wandering are either cautionary tales of exile - the worst punishment imaginable - or of the wanderer’s triumphant return home. What the contemporary traveller seeks is repeated strangeness, the exciting, frightening, delicious process whereby the utterly alien starts to become known, without losing its alien quality.

The encounter between the traveller and the nomad is not an encounter between two nomads, and to imagine it as such obscures the real difference between the intimacy and connectedness that Davidson finds in the Rabari people, and the anomic disconnection of contemporary life that she sees it as an answer to. For anyone in sympathy with some of Davidson’s conclusions about the contemporary world, it’s an enormously irritating piece, its initial cautionary tone no more than a figleaf for the worst sort of narcissistic identification, whereby a particular modern social class finds, via the Third World, its own values reflected as those of essential humanity.

But for all the certainty of this and other books centred on the one big idea - “something has gone wrong” is how Michael Bywater sums it up in Big Babies, his critique of contemporary media and consumerism-induced adult infantilism - is anything distinctive really happening? A publishing boom in this area - two books titled Affluenza (by Australian political theorist Clive Hamilton and, more recently, British psychologist Oliver James), Shelley Gare’s Triumph of the Airheads, James Hawes’s satirical novel Speak for England, James Martin’s The Meaning of the 21st Century are the standouts - would suggest there is.

Or are we merely in the throes of a new transition between one social form and the next, one in which the new world, seen from the perspective of the old, looks chaotic and bizarre? After all, anyone essaying cultural criticism has to be chastened by memories of vicars denouncing the corrupting effect of cinema or the widespread belief that young girls reading novels represented the end of the world.

For sociologist Frank Furedi, much cultural criticism that focuses on the allegedly disastrous trends within modernity is less an expression of intellectual agency than it is a symptom of a deeper social and historical process whereby Western peoples have lost the power to think of themselves as capable of collectively shaping and controlling their environment, and thereby making History, the capital H signifying not simply events, but the capacity to qualitatively change and improve the human condition.

Hungarian-born Furedi is one of the more high-profile public intellectuals in Britain, keeping up a stream of articles, essays and books addressing a set of themes uppermost in contemporary Western life, most particularly the amorphous, all-encompassing phenomenon of fear, whose changing nature seems to be reshaping our idea of the relationship between humanity and the world.

Originally the theoretician of a group called the Revolutionary Communist Party, part of the rich fauna of the ultra-Left in ‘80s Britain, Furedi in his work was always concerned with understanding the conditions and possibilities by which real change happens.

The failure of Marxism to revive itself as a liberating movement once the dead weight of the USSR had vanished prompted him to argue that we are in a new historical period in which the core humanism of Marx’s ideas - the promethean capacity of human beings to shape their destiny - was no longer expressed or carried forth by class politics.

Instead the RCP, now dissolved and by various stages reconstituted as the Spiked group, began to focus on a series of what its leadership saw as regressive cultural themes and movements. Furedi argued that there was a need to regroup the people and forces, from Left and Right (in Australia, he has been a guest of the Centre For Independent Studies), who believed that humanity should “play for high stakes”.

In particular, this has amounted to a critical attitude to the green movement, for an alleged underlying loss of faith in human control of nature, and also to much of the recent commentary of the Big-Brother-is-the-end-of-civilisation stripe, arguing this usually is a form of conservative elitism masquerading as critique.

Yet nor is Furedi part of the anti-critical cultural studies movement, arguing instead that much of the current “stalled” nature of history results from the collapse, within a media society, of the webs of association that formed the underlying social connectivity that made class politics possible.

Once people feel isolated and atomised, fear rather than solidarity becomes the primary social medium, whether expressed as distrust for science, an appetite for apocalyptic scenarios, panics about pedophilia and other social “monsters” and so on: a world in which the worst-case scenario has become the default setting. Furedi’s work, especially his much-praised recent book Where Have All the Public Intellectuals Gone?, tends to be claimed by conservatives as conservative, by libertarians as libertarian, but he has never made much secret of the fact that it was about recapturing a sort of historical audacity implicit of the type, though not of the form, last seen in its purest incarnation in October 1917 in Russia.

The object is not simply to push things forward but to hope that qualitative change in technology and economy will produce a transformation that will take us into a radically new future. From that perspective, diverse critical commentaries are united by a limited view of what human beings are capable of, a perception of new problems through the lens of old ideas, a fear of our capacities and desires.

One of the most important aspects of Furedi’s work is the manner in which it goes beyond the narrow confines of a single perspective, which constrains the other works discussed, to offer a more general diagnosis of our cultural-political condition and the manner in which it shapes our perception of particular problems.

Much of his earlier output, such as in the ‘80s and ‘90s, was concerned with how the guts had been knocked out of the Western project by 20th-century events. Prior to World War II, imperialism had been grounded on a racism that gave an assurance to its capacity to subjugate other peoples (and it’s probably a measure of the times that I need to clarify that this wasn’t a Niall Fergusonesque defence of imperialism, but a Marxist analysis of its character).

The Holocaust and the war had put this selfbelief in crisis, only partly assuaged by the defining dualism of the Cold War. By the time the latter ceased, structural changes to social life, a loosening of “webs of shared meaning” by a media-dominated society, had undermined the class politics of Right and Left.

The combined effects of the failure of the Western Left, revelation of environmental problems and the enlightenment critique of postmodernism had put notions of freedom, rationalism and human capacity in the shade. For Furedi, the war on terror is really among the lesser effects of a fear culture; far more important is, say, the widespread popularity of alternative medicine, to the extent that insurers and public health bodies will provide for it, and the loss of faith in a scientific medicine held to be “invasive” or “toxic”.

And all such small-picture worries are mirrored in the big picture of the environment, and global warming in particular. Neither a supporter nor a sceptic as regards the evidence for global warming, Furedi’s argument is that our response to it - one of despair, and a barely disguised millenarianism - is determined by a culture of fear, rather than a clear-headed response to the evidence.

In earlier days, Furedi and Spiked were robust in their critique of such approaches; more recently, such as in his book The Culture of Fear Revisited, there is a deal more circumspection about the truth or otherwise of the more alarming forecasts, but the cultural critique of our response to it remains.

Yet while Furedi is right to connect the large and the small and to see the issue of global warming as one principle focus of contemporary dilemmas, the issue is one that also points to a contradiction in his work, indeed of all of those who interpret widespread disquiet about global warming from a culturalist perspective.

We have long since passed the point where the most alarming scenarios are coming from the wilder fringes of the green movement; today it is world-class scientists such as James Lovelock (in The Revenge of Gaia) and E. O. Wilson (in The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth) who are suggesting that an irreversible destruction of the biosphere is well advanced.

If your political project is to restart a genuine humanism with confidence in its capacity to bend nature to its will through scientific excellence, then you have a problem if the most excellent scientists tell you that we are creating potentially catastrophic problems far beyond our forseeable capacity to quell or mitigate. Once that occurs, then a culturalist analysis of such movements reverses on itself and begins to look irrationalist, while more pessimistic scenarios start to look relatively clear-eyed.

A more persuasive account of their connection, and by far the most thorough-going reading of the present period, comes from Zygmunt Bauman, for a long time professor of sociology at the University of Leeds. Bauman’s work is voluminous, but one metaphor has become central: that of “liquidity”. For Bauman, our current state is one in which there has been a radical shift in the manner in which society and selfhood are constituted.

In a process we have barely begun to recognise, we have passed from a society in which a whole series of dynamic elements and flows - the movements of individual selfhood, the movement of capital, values formation - were anchored within a static framework that guaranteed a degree of stable social reproduction.

In recent decades, the flow has become the norm, for the first time in history, and many apparently unconnected phenomena can be explained as the effects of this liquidity.

Capital flows around the world and when the tide goes out, as in the contemporary West, it leaves a section of the population as a useless surplus. Subjectivity changes and the dominant dilemma for the individual becomes a sort of flowing towards meaning, always knowing that any achieved will be provisional. Life becomes fragmentary and strategic. Big Brother is not the end of this civilisation, but its epic poem, an unfolding and ritual retelling of life’s shifting uncertainty and isolation, the ever-present threat that we will go down the drain.

Bauman’s idea of liquidity has similarities with Furedi’s notion of “shared webs of meaning”, and also of the notion, explored here in Arena magazine and journal, of a society ungrounded by having all human relations drawn through its most abstracted levels, such as the market and the media.

It is the change that writers such as Bywater, who suggests that the way to deal with an infantilising culture is to ignore it, can describe yet not understand, because they try to read them through older, exhausted notions of liberalism and conservatism.

When you live in a world of media and meaning flows, the ideas of John Stuart Mill or Friedrich Hayek are as relevant as debate about the doctrine of the divine right of kings.

Bauman’s account of this new world in Liquid Fear is so powerful because he has connected it to the shifting role that life and death plays within any culture, and how it manifests in ours. However much civilisational criticism forms part of a genre stretching back into the centuries, what is apparent is that the capacity exists to destroy the civilisation from within, whether by nuclear death, biosphere destruction or what Bauman calls “metaphorical death”, the manner by which human connection becomes so fleeting, unpatterned and attenuated that the sense of a living other dies away.

For Bauman, “all human cultures can be decoded as ingenious contraptions calculated to make life with the awareness of mortality liveable”. Once death comes to the heart of a culture, the search for immortality becomes individual rather than social, and thus fame and celebrity become driving mass obsessions, and especially of fame “lotteries” such as reality TV. Deep down, Bauman would argue, we all know that globalisation is on an unsustainable trajectory and that global warming is the most visible sign and symbol of that process, but that knowledge is sublimated through every aspect of our life.

What appear to be disparate effects-say, the normalisation of plastic surgery for teenagers at one end, and wars for control of oil reserves at the other - are really shards of the same shattered vessel, our cup which hath overfloweth. As denial comes to the centre of the culture, two social tasks, steering rational action and reproducing an ideology, start to be confused for each other. The production of values is rendered cynical and strategic (the knowing emptiness of Paris Hilton) and planning comes to be based on illusion and fantasy (the empty knowingness of George W. Bush).

It seems to me that it is this aspect of our culture that will expand in the years to come. We are in the strange cultural situation whereby the core process at the heart of our civilisation - scientific rationality - overwhelmingly argues that we are undermining, or already have undermined, the basis of life. And yet there seems no way in which a real process of cultural change (as opposed to near-useless “carbon neutralising") might develop on a global scale, before visible and disastrous effects start to concentrate the collective human mind.

This is not to suggest that the case for global warming has been utterly, unequivocally proven, or that the (fairly rare) honest sceptics should cease to offer alternative accounts. It is simply to make the cultural point that the phenomenon has been taken into people’s lives as a truth, and that the utter state of denial in which we find ourselves cannot but have a series of corrosive cultural effects. After all, if even the mid-range scenarios prove correct, then a vast amount of current human effort, the megacities, airports, highways, stadiums, plane fleets and resorts, amount to the most phenomenally futile project in human history.

Simply decrying “apocalyptic” thinking may serve short-term political ends, but it is ultimately pointless if large numbers of people come to feel that such a scenario is a wellfounded possibility. What we will face culturally in the immediate term is a strange and possibly self-destructive period in which there is the building of a movement that believes a truly radical degree of cultural change is necessary for human advancement, while a majority, convinced that such a task is beyond collective human agency, pursue the creation of what, by Bauman’s terms, would be an anti-culture. It seems likely that such an interim period will not be transformed until the first large-scale and unequivocal effects of global warming occur (or until the hypothesis is weakened by their non-occurrence).

The climate records written in those layered polar ice-core samples might then be the model by which we judge those shafts and ridges of old cultural critique in the second-hand bookshops: as part of a continuity with present and future volumes, to which our wandering attention comes and goes, but which measures, in a manner often fallible and foolish, the dimensions of a crisis deeper than we care to acknowledge.

First published by The Australian, 7 February 2007

Teaching children how to be happy
by Julie Henry

When 15-year-old Charlie Maughan takes his position at the side of the pool for a big swimming meet next week, he will be thinking about techniques he learnt in “well-being class” as well as in PE.

“Before the competition, I will close my eyes, slow my breath and visualise the positive aspects of what could happen,” he said. “And because of the meditation, I feel more confident and less jittery when I walk out.”

Charlie is one of the pupils at the £24,000-a-year Wellington College, in Berkshire, who has benefited from fortnightly “happiness classes”, introduced last year.

Designed by Ian Morris, the school’s head of philosophy and religion, along with Nick Baylis, the director of the Well-being Institute at Cambridge University, the programme gives pupils practical skills in areas as diverse as meditation, channelling “negative” emotions and drug and alcohol safety. There is even a session on “dumping” a boyfriend or girlfriend. It has been championed by the master of the school, Anthony Seldon, one of the independent sector’s most high profile heads.

The scheme has been so successful that next month the college will host a conference where headmasters and teachers from across the state and independent sectors will sit through one of the 40-minute lessons and learn how they can be applied.
advertisement

The adoption of “well-being” classes at a traditional public school demonstrates the extent to which emotional intelligence, a term coined in 1995 by American psychologists, is fast becoming education orthodoxy in Britain. It has spawned a multi-million pound industry of consultants, publishers and educational training.

Ministers have embraced the idea that emotional literacy — defined as the ability to perceive, access and regulate emotions — should be part of the state curriculum. Schools now have a statutory obligation to promote children’s mental, emotional and social well-being.

Extensive curriculum guidance, produced by the Department for Education and Skills and sent to England’s 23,000 primary schools, recommends that all children, regardless of age, background or ability, be given sessions in talking about their emotions.

To teach pupils how to make friends, resolve squabbles and “manage their anger”, it suggests using a quiz called “Guess what I am feeling?”, or designing an “emotional barometer” so children can rate the strength of their feelings.

Secondary schools are also being encouraged to put emotional literacy on the timetable this year, with staff focusing on five areas: self-awareness, empathy, managing feelings, self-motivation and social interaction.

Government guidance to primary heads revealed why it was felt necessary to teach characteristics that many regard as part of a good upbringing.

“The breakdown of the extended family and communities, and the higher rates of divorce and one-parent- families, have led to a shake-up of the belief that we can leave children’s emotional and social development to parents,” it said.

Exponents of emotional literacy believe that children who arrive at school angry, anxious or depressed cannot learn until those barriers have been removed. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the techniques are having an impact on behaviour and motivation.

However, a few dissenters have raised concerns about the rise in “therapeutic education”. Frank Furedi, a sociology professor at Kent University and author of Therapy Culture, fears that academic and moral education are being jettisoned for the easy option of discussing emotions.

“In pushing emotional literacy what some teachers are really doing is abandoning teaching,” he said. “They are giving up, talking about emotions instead, so that children value all this non-discipline-led activity more than maths, English or science. What is amazing about this is that time and time again, research says that it does not work. Self-esteem education produces no positive outcomes.

“My view is that it is actually harmful. The more we talk about self-esteem in schools, the more kids become obsessed with their emotions and the more they have emotional problems. Children who talk about being ‘stressed’ play the role of being stressed. It normalises and promotes the behaviour.”

Prof Furedi said that Shakespeare and Jane Austen had more to teach children about emotions than the substandard materials used in much therapeutic education.

“If you want children to feel happy and stable, you make them feel good about their achievements in their school work. What is particularly pernicious is that it will be working-class kids who will bear the brunt of this — a third-rate education, but lots of emotional literacy.”

Dennis Hayes, the head of the centre for professional learning at Canterbury Christ Church University, also raised concerns about a widespread emotional literacy agenda that is “anti-intellectual and potentially destructive”.

“In some schools, it is filling a vacuum that is being left by the downplaying of knowledge,” he said.

“Students in schools like Wellington will then go off and do Latin and the sciences. The problem is that this balance is being lost to children elsewhere.”

First published by Daily Telegraph, 22 January 2007

A time of fear and loathing
by Helen Razar

One afternoon, about a week after the 2005 London Bombings, I took the Pakenham Line from Flinders Street Station. It was peak hour and commuters were crammed into the carriages like neo-cons at a cockfight. I was making no particular haste to get home. I was as tranquil as it was possible for a commuter to be.

As any city loop habitue will know, a train’s interior light has the tendency to flicker. The brief fade-to-black is only as maddening as one’s reading material is good. These lapses rarely, if ever, are cause for alarm, but as the carriage lights darkened between Flagstaff and Central, I felt the stuff of my limbs just sort of dilute. I knew the hectic ripple of anxiety attacks, but this monstrous wave diminished them all. In this tidal flourish of despair, no buoyancy seemed possible. In an instant, I was sweaty and breathless and as sure as I have ever been that my life was in immediate danger.

My first instinct was to claw my way out of the train. The second was to call my partner and bid an emotional farewell a la the passengers on Flight 77. Fortunately, I did neither. Instead, I looked in the fleeting darkness for the aggressor. My myopic mind’s eye found her. I’d registered the presence of a woman who looked to be about 19. She wore a hijab and a backpack.

“You racist shallow bastard,” I told myself. Reason told me that the backpack contained text books and the headscarf contained an ordinary student at the end of her ordinary day. I couldn’t help myself. I alighted at Melbourne Central, took four buses home and watched CNN for three solid hours.

When the fear had stopped resonating somewhere in Elsternwick, I was struck by its pervasive and elaborate quality. In an age of cool reason, it seemed rather odd to be overcome by something very much like scorching religious passion. Perhaps this was a secular version of fear of the wrath of God.

Almost as soon as it has subsided, my fear seemed cartoonish and unreasonable. Generally, I prefer reason over impulse. Trembling like a devout Christian at the onset of a solar eclipse seems odd. I had joined the coalition of the nervous and I wasn’t at all certain why.

True, each era has its own dreadful preoccupations — from natural disasters to Godless communists to terrorism. And certainly, what we fear changes over time. These days, though, it’s not simply that we’ve exchanged old fears for new ones. Fear in the 21st century has acquired the skill of fastening itself to the culture and to our psyches with a new viral speed.

Within hours of the British bombings, news media had attached a snappy tag to an event that left 52 people dead. “7/7” entered the marketplace of fear like a miniature foreign franchisee of the original 9/11 terror brand. Television gave us a Euro Disney staffed by brave London Bobbies, stoic Eastenders and Churchill’s ghost with a plucky Brit Pop soundtrack. In no time flat, catastrophe had been pressed into the service of selling newspapers, engaging eyeballs and justifying foreign policy.

“Fear and dread has attached itself to our psyche and many people living and working in Melbourne have changed their personal and professional behaviour to reflect this,” Luke Howie says.

Howie, a PhD candidate in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University, recently conducted qualitative research into behavioural responses to terrorism. He found that people in Melbourne, “were fearful and cautious of sitting with, or near, others on public transport who they deemed to be of foreign or Middle-Eastern appearance”.

Intrigued by the way in which the “low probability, high consequence threat” of terrorism engages Australians, Howie interviewed 105 respondents. The subjects, many of whom work in prominent Melbourne buildings conceivably susceptible to terrorist attack, described a “sense of fear and panic disproportionate to the gravity of the threat”, Howie says.

Many interviewees, he says, conceded that their dread was irrational, or even superstitious. The overwhelming majority of respondents mentioned the World Trade Centre attack as a key moment in the construction of their dread. One subject reported having no concern for terrorism while at his desk. However, viewing his office tower from afar evoked the likeness of the September 2001 strike. Looking up at his office, he felt all the dread the televised moment has come to signify.

“The role of the image is very different to what it was in the early 20th century,” Howie says.

Part of the problem, says Howie, is that while the images assailing our senses have multiplied unimaginably in recent decades, our poor old bodies have not kept up. As brain physiology understands it, it is the brain that sees and perceives; eyes and ears are simply neutral observers. Our visual and auditory association areas, Howie says, apprehend external stimuli in the same way, whether we are watching television or perceiving an actual event. The primal jerk of fear is identical.

Such imagery now mingles intimately with our every day. Our psyches are simply ill-prepared or unable to distinguish between an event and its electronic depiction.

Late communications theorist George Gerbner theorised that contact with real trauma was not a prerequisite for fear. In describing the consequences of a world increasingly navigated by visual media, he coined the phrase Mean World Syndrome. Its distinguishing features are an increased indifference to the consequences of violence and an amplified sense of our own vulnerability and dependence.

So, while we find ourselves unable to rationalise or even respond to the newest reported tragedy, we feel more fearful for our own safety. Years of terror served in real time may have drained us of compassion for everyone but ourselves.

Fear for our individual safety is now as readily manufactured as the image of the World Trade Centre.

The city worker interviewed by Howie is not alone in his psychological discomfort. Swayed more by images and fridge magnets than reason, many of us are preoccupied with terrorism. Last year, The Lowy Institute asked 1000 respondents to rank potential threats from the world outside Australia. In the institute’s 2005 Poll Data Book, international terrorism scored third place. Nudging in at fifth, just behind disease epidemics, Islamic fundamentalism romped away with a robust 57 per cent of public anxiety.

And fear inheres in the trivial just as much as it does in our more public anxieties. Our careening public obsession with everything from border control to pedophilia to real estate to fine lines and wrinkles is fed and assuaged by entrepreneurs and policy makers.

In her new work Fear and Politics, Carmen Lawrence asserts that “we are living, not for the first time, in an era of heightened collective fear, a fear which is being exploited and encouraged by our governments through the media”.

In this view, fear is meticulously crafted and controlled. Along with public figures like Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore, Lawrence posits a mechanism of control that recalls the moral panic of Reds under the Bed or McCarthyism. I have long thought of Michael Moore as the left’s most agreeably concise ambassador. Up until “7/7” opened for business, I enjoyed his documentaries immensely. He is a soothing polemicist who made it easy for me to understand the Western world and all the fearful white middle-class people in it. But a genuine encounter with a public anxiety has problematised my seduction by Moore and other straightforward accounts of fear.

True, policy makers bluff, exaggerate and obscure truth to intensify fear for political gain. National security and vulnerability is a great platform for an election. This year, it was also a winning formula for a television program in the form of Border Control.

But this doesn’t begin to illuminate the dark chaos of my fear on the city loop.

“We have to think in a complex way about this,” says Dr Vicki Crowley, senior lecturer in communications at the University of South Australia.

The temptation to think about fear in a simple way, she says, is overwhelming. There is a drive to be reductive. As our fear becomes more diffuse and less connected to anything real, our mode of understanding it seems to become firmer and more concise, observes Crowley. “Things are laid out as a series of singularities. Because of those five second bites, our thinking strives to parallel these things,” she says.

However it is happening, fear seems to have acquired an existence independent of any connection to real threats. Or even to the possibility of threat. It is its own evolving currency that emerges from every corner of the culture.

“Political debate is often reduced to competing claims about what to fear,” says British-based sociologist Frank Furedi in his 2005 essay The Market of Fear.

The Lowy Institute Poll indicates that we are becoming more bipartisan in the way we fear. At number one is the fear of nuclear proliferation. At number two, we see John Howard’s bugbear, global warming. By one measure, says the report, both Islamic fundamentalism and US foreign policy are worrying to 57 per cent of Australians. The authors describe this as “a startling equivalence”.

Furedi contends that environmentalists are no less implicated in the use of scare tactics to promote their principles than conservatives who court attention through amplifying fears about border protection.

In the new open marketplace of dread, Furedi says, fears compete with one another to capture our attention. The intensification of fear, he says, amounts to a rejection of politics altogether. It also indicates, in his reading, a rejection of logic.

Meanwhile, fear is pressed into the service of selling newspapers, engaging eyeballs and justifying foreign policy. It flourishes and advances by its own momentum.

As Carmen Lawrence points out, there is nothing particularly new about making powerful claims based on fear. The economy of fear, however, has changed. Once, fear was a more tightly controlled market. Fearing God, communists, monsters and foreigners was a simple business. The newer free market has liberalised fear to a point where it attaches its “value” to just about anything.

Our vulnerability to fear might be ancient, but its vast and chaotic reproduction is something new. Fear has become a stand-alone occurrence and has a dwindling relationship to experience.

Days before my experience on the train, the London bombings had taken place.

With a bad case of what I can now diagnose as Mean World Syndrome, I remember watching it quite indifferently. The catastrophe itself seemed unreal and airbrushed to me. I was unconcerned until the event reproduced itself in peak hour. The back pack, the Muslim and the underground train ignited my fear.

It’s an awful thing to admit, but I believe that my only emotional reaction to the London bombings was a delayed and extreme sense of my own vulnerability. The marketplace of fear, writes Furedi, has no clear or single objective.

“The distinct feature of our time is not the cultivation of fear but the cultivation of our sense of vulnerability.”

There are, of course, real things in the real world that are genuinely scary.

As I discovered, there are imagined things in the real world that are equally terrifying.

First published by The Age, 2 December 2006

Troubling as it may be, fear sells
by Barbara Wall

Some see companies preying on insecurity; others cite innovation.

It sometimes seems that the more wealth a society creates, the more insecure it becomes. Companies are preying on our anxiety about natural disasters and pandemics and obesity and terrorism to sell a growing range of products and services. Are these fear entrepreneurs cynical self-promoters, or ideal investments for uncertain times? Probably a little of both.

Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at the University of Kent and the author of the books “Politics of Fear,” “Culture of Fear” and “Paranoid Parenting,” says that business leaders are extremely talented at harnessing anxiety to sell products - even when our perception of fear bears little relationship to actual experience.

For example, even as politicians proclaim that crime rates are falling, the market for household alarms and personal security gizmos is booming.

Consider child-tracking devices, the latest hot products in the security business. Sprint-Nextel and Verizon have come up with products that let parents track a child’s mobile phone for as little as $10 a month. If that sounds over-the-top, high-tech Halloween costumes, with tracking devices that allow parents to keep track of their little trick-or-treaters, were on sale this autumn at Angels Fancy Dress in London for £500, or $945, apiece.

That, Furedi said, is nothing but marketing. “There is no evidence to suggest that the incidence of child abductions is any greater today than, say, 40 years ago,” he said. “But parents are being encouraged to fork out large sums of money for peace of mind.”

Experienced investors will recognize the link between fear - and its counterpart, greed - in explaining and understanding stock market dynamics.

“One reason why stock markets display such a strong average growth is greed,” said Frank Westerhoff, a professor of economics at the University of Osnabrück in Germany. “People want to participate in this game, and as they do, they drive prices up. Eventually some traders realize that markets are extremely overvalued. When the markets start to correct, a fear-driven panic sets in, pushing prices down or even crashing the market.”

Yet where experts like Furedi and Westerhoff see misplaced anxiety and manipulation, others see innovation and gain.

The insurance industry, for example, is often criticized for making big money by exploiting fear. But Mark Stacpoole, an investment director for Hiscox Insurance fund in London, pointed out that the insurance industry is characterized by fierce competition that has resulted in many policyholders getting a better deal.

“Young males tend to pay higher motor insurance premiums than any other class of driver because statistics show that they are more likely to drink and drive late in the evening, when most accidents occur,” Stacpoole said. So Aviva Insurance, a British company, has introduced a new plan that bases premiums on the time of day policyholders use their cars. Drivers are monitored using a global positioning satellite system and charged accordingly: the earlier in the day the car is driven, the cheaper the premium.

Innovation in insurance underwriting, Stacpoole said, has become one of the main drivers of an insurance company’s stock price.

“It is no coincidence that Progressive Insurance - one of the first auto insurers in the United States to base premiums on factors other than age and gender - has seen its stock price rise 800 percent over the last 25 years,” he said. Stacpoole’s fund holds shares of both Progressive and Aviva.

Not surprisingly, Furedi and other skeptics reserve their harshest criticism for military contractors. Love defense stocks or loathe them, there is no question that industry fundamentals have seldom looked perkier. Scott Sacknoff, manager of the Spade defense index, a benchmark that tracks about 50 companies in the military and security sectors, noted that defense budgets were robust and corporate activity within the sector was increasing.

The Spade index, started in 2004 by the International Space Business Council, a clearinghouse for information on the aerospace and military industries, has been trading at historic highs recently, prompting some analysts to speculate that the military spending cycle may have peaked. But Sacknoff said that the upward trend was sustainable. He predicted that U.S. spending on homeland security would increase by around $2 billion a year into 2009.

According to a report released in August by Heavy Reading Enterprise, more than half of the 200 small and midsize U.S. enterprises surveyed indicated that they planned to increase spending on homeland security products and services over the next three years. Analysts said that investors would focus on experience and market leadership when choosing the companies to back - and that the perceived leaders in the field of security technology, were old, familiar names, including Cisco Systems, Symantec, VeriSign, McAfee, Oracle and Microsoft.

While many investors hold stocks of military contractors for diversification purposes - the sector is not strongly correlated with the broader market - others use them as a hedge against geopolitical turbulence.

“In times of uncertainty all stocks tend to suffer, but stocks focused on homeland security and defense invariably bounce back quicker,” Sacknoff said.

It is easy to be cynical and dismiss the activities of fear entrepreneurs as disingenuous, but some industries have become the hapless victims of our fears. For example, health care and biotechnology companies have helped create a situation in which people live longer, yet the same industries are widely mistrusted by consumers, Furedi said.

“New drugs are being developed to help us fight disease, yet fear of potential side effects are preventing us from embracing some of them,” he said.

Health care and biotechnology stocks are volatile because they react quickly to negative news. But Nora Frey, an investment director at Adamant Biomedical Investment, said that investors would not be easily discouraged by the ups and downs because of the potential for major breakthroughs in cures for diseases like cancer and HIV.

Adamant Biomedical has recently been appointed by Syz, a Basel-based investment management firm, to manage a new fund, the Oyster Oncology Fund, that will focus on cancer diagnostics and treatment. Syz estimated that the market for cancer treatments would grow at an annual rate of more than 10 percent over the next five years, to reach a 12 percent share of the global pharmaceutical industry market.

“Substantial progress has been made in understanding and treating the disease, and there have been numerous exciting advances in the past year, such as in breast, cervical and kidney cancers,” Frey said. “We are expecting many more interesting and promising drugs to come to the market in the next five years.”

The Oyster Oncology Fund currently holds Roche Pharmaceuticals, which derives 75 percent of its revenue from cancer treatments, and several biotechnology companies, including Genentech, Amgen, Exilixis, Genprobe and Genmap. The last, a Danish company, is rumored to be a potential takeover candidate, Frey said.

Frey’s other biotechnology picks include Panacea Biotech, a profitable company listed in India that focuses on vaccines, and Bionomics, an Australian company that focuses on treatments for cancer and multiple sclerosis. She also holds a number of hospital stocks, like Parkway Holdings in Singapore and Network Healthcare Holdings in South Africa, which both stand to benefit from increased government spending on health care infrastructure, she said.

Gordon Elvey, manager of JO Hambro’s US

Opportunities Fund in London, has increased the fund’s health care holdings in recent months.

“Health care is one of the few sectors in the U.S. where growth looks assured,” he said.

“We also expect corporate activity to pick up next year as midsize pharmaceutical companies come under pressure to expand the diagnostics side of their business.”

Elvey’s main stock pick is Cubist, a U.S. biotech company that plans to introduce early next year a medicine for the MRSA antibiotic-resistant “superbug” staph infection. Novartis, which has the rights to sell the vaccine in Europe, has been mentioned as a potential acquirer of Cubist - another reason, according to Elvey, to buy the stock without fear.

First published by The International Herald Tribune, 17 November 2006

Smaller babies born in 9/11 climate of fear
by Roger Dobson and Steven Swinford

Study finds birth weights fell even in Europe after twin towers attack.

THE shock of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America led to a drop in the weight of babies born in western Europe, according to a study published this week.

Researchers discovered that babies born between three and six months later were on average nearly 50 grams (1.7 ounces) lighter than they should have been. They say that the stress and anxiety caused by the attacks led directly to more underweight babies.

The study, published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, is the latest in a body of work that seeks to quantify the precise effects distant events can have by creating a climate of fear. Instant communications means people thousands of miles away may experience similar symptoms to those actually present.

Professor Gerard Essed, an obstetrician from Maastricht University who co-authored the report, said: “The impact of 9/11 was so huge it affected everyone in the world. For these women [in the Netherlands] the impact was further magnified by the emotions of pregnancy. It was a very, very clear correlation. We were surprised.”

Previous research conducted in New York showed that women who were in the World Trade Center on the day of the attacks or near it within the following three weeks had babies that were on average 120g (4.2oz) lighter. Doctors have attributed the difference to stress and the large quantities of dust and debris in the air at the time.

The terrorist attacks also led to an unusually high level of stillbirths of male foetuses, a phenomenon noted elsewhere during natural disasters and wartime.

A team from the University of California, Berkeley, which studied data relating to 700,000 births in New York between 1996 and 2002, showed that the stress of the Al-Qaeda attacks resulted in the proportion of baby boys to girls dropping from the usual 1.05:1 to a level below parity in January 2002.

The Dutch researchers followed 1,885 women who were at least 12 weeks pregnant at the time of the September 11 attacks. They compared their babies with the offspring of 1,258 women who were pregnant exactly a year later. They excluded premature babies from the study and took into account other factors that might affect the babies’ weight such as smoking and the age of the mother.

Babies in the womb on September 11 were 48g (1.7oz) lighter than those in the later group. The scientists believe the difference was caused by high levels of cortisol in the mother, a hormone associated with stress and anxiety.

The hormone, which helps break down and burn off fats, can transfer from the mother to the foetus, resulting in weight loss. Stress can also result in loss of appetite and cause the blood vessels to constrict, reducing the flow of blood to the baby and potentially stunting growth.

Essed said the results were alarming and indicated that the impact on health of “remote” threats could not simply be dismissed. “We need to do more to reassure pregnant woman who may be stressed,” he said. “We need to be telling them that there are reasons to be confident in their pregnancy.”

The impact of traumatic events on the health of the wider community has long intrigued medical researchers. In 1942 a study in The Lancet, the medical journal, examined the health of Londoners who survived aerial bombardment by the Luftwaffe. According to The Lancet, there was a 50% rise in the number of Londoners who went on to suffer from peptic ulcers. A similar phenomenon occurred in 1995 following the Kobe earthquake in Japan, which killed 5,100.

However, Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at Kent University, is sceptical about the true impact of catastrophes on people who are not directly caught up in them.

Furedi, who describes the syndrome as “culturally induced trauma”, said: “If enough people tell you that you are pale you may begin to feel there is something wrong with you.”

First published by The Sunday Times, 12 November 2006

Nanny to the nation
by Denise Winterman

Baby expert Gina Ford has threatened legal action over “gross personal attacks” about her on a website for mothers. Not usually known for their vitriol, why does she bring out such extreme reactions in parents?

To find a parent who is neutral about Gina Ford is rare - very rare. You’re probably more likely to see a Cross River gorilla and there are only 200 of them left in the world.

Ford is a baby guru whose advice is either loved or loathed. A former maternity nurse, she is known as the Queen of Routine and advocates introducing a strict structure to the lives of new parents and their babies in The Contented Little Baby Book.

In general terms parents tend to fall into two camps when it comes to Ford: those who think she is the wicked witch of childcare and those who hail her as the saviour of modern parenting.

‘Surreal’

But she is dividing opinion even more after instructing her lawyers to demand the closure of a popular internet site for mothers because it published comments from readers that she says are defamatory.

Mumsnet - set up and run by mothers - says the threatened legal action is a blow to free speech and “wholly disproportionate’’. But it has taken the “extreme step” of asking members to stop discussing Ford.

“It is a surreal and rather sad moment,” says the website, equating the ban to “barring discussion of Manchester United from a football phone-in”.

There are times when I’d prefer to be living with Gina Ford than my own husband - she’d be able to help me more
Mother Claire Winsome

In a statement, Ford says she has no objection whatsoever to people discussing or disagreeing with her advice and methods concerning childcare.

“What has caused me so much upset has been the defamatory campaign waged against me as a person in which I have been described in the most vile and disgusting terms.”

Since the book’s publication in 1999, it has completely divided the parenting population and continues to do so. It has also become a bestseller, shifting over half a million copies.

She advocates a strict daily routine - for both parent and child - broken up into five-minute slots. For many it is “military” in its precision, the baby must be awake and fed by 7am and parents must have their breakfast by 8am so they slot into the baby’s day.

‘Natural instinct’

After that the baby must be fed every four hours and allowed to cry, for up to an hour if necessary, so they learn they will not always be picked up. Parents are also advised not to make eye contact with their child when feeding it at certain times.

“What the baby actually feels, wants and needs doesn’t seem to matter,” says Julia Drayton, who has two girls aged two and four months. “She seems to think babies are just out to disrupt their parents’ lives, there is no time to get to know your baby and form a real bond.

“It’s about making them fit in with what the parents think will cause the least amount of work or disruption to their lives. In my opinion you should work round the baby. They eventually find their own routine.”

Ford worked as a maternity nurse for more than 12 years and has looked after more than 300 babies, but has no formal childcare qualifications. She also doesn’t have any children of her own, a detail that has prompted many a heated debate.

Ford has reportedly said in the past that she has a “natural instinct” for looking after children.

Her defenders say people use the fact she has no children of her own as an argument that she doesn’t know what she is talking about.

“But why does having a baby for six months make me more of an expert than someone who has worked with children for years - it doesn’t,” says Claire Winsome, who has a six-month-old son and is on the pro-side of the Ford debate.

Trust

“The fact he is my own child means I love him in a way no other woman could, but that doesn’t automatically mean I can look after him better than anyone else on the planet. The truth is there are times when I’d prefer to be living with Gina Ford than my own husband - she’d be able to help me more.

“Most people I meet who dislike her still rock their baby to get them to sleep or have to walk them around in the buggy for miles. Their kids usually still wake several times a night as well.”

Claire did not have family nearby to support her and says the book took the place of her mother. “I didn’t have a clue what to do and needed to be told,” she says.

How society has evolved over the years is a key reason why childcare experts have become such big business. Fewer people now live close to their families, so someone or something else has to take their place.

But it also creates problems, says Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at University of Kent and author of Paranoid Parenting.
With so much conflicting advice from childcare experts parents do not know whom they can trust, but one thing is made clear to them - they cannot trust their own judgement, he says.

And people have such polarised views on experts like Gina Ford because parenting is no longer just about raising a child.

“With Gina Ford it is nearly always a love/hate thing,” he says. “That’s because parenting is no longer about just bringing up a child, it is a statement of who the parent is and if people see someone doing things differently they see it as a threat to themselves.

Failing

“My parents viewed their job as bringing me up and that was it, but the parenting culture has changed. Now a child is seen as a reflection of the parent. If the child gets bad grades at school, they are seen as failing and so are the parents.”

But there is a growing group of mothers who have decided to pick and chose what advice they want from the vast range of childcare experts available.

“I took what I thought was sensible advice from Gina Ford, but not the whole regimented routine,” says Anne Smith. “I did that with other experts too. Mothers need to find the confidence to do what they want, but not feel embarrassed if they need to totally follow experts like Ford.

“Parenting is hard enough without us turning on each other.”

First published by BBC News, 9 August 2006

No laughing matter
By Pilita Clark

Who do you think would be the happier of these two people: Bob, an intellectual 35-year-old single, athletic, handsome white man earning $100,000 in sunny California who spends his spare time reading and going to museums? Or Mary, a sociable 65-year-old plain, black, overweight woman on dialysis, who spends most of her free time on church activities and lives with her husband in a snowy part of New York state on a joint income of $40,000?

Before I started to read some of the new books on so-called “happiness research”, I would have bet that Bob would be happier. But I would have been wrong, according to University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who poses the Bob and Mary case in his work The Happiness Hypothesis. One of the biggest findings in happiness research, says Haidt, is that environmental and demographic advantages - such as Bob’s health, wealth, youth and sunshine - are less important than we think. Marriage and strong social connections are more significant, so Mary is likely to be happier than Bob.

Talk of happiness studies, or the “new science of happiness”, is everywhere at the moment. The BBC has just aired a six-part series on it. The Conservative leader, David Cameron, wants to focus “not just on GDP but on GWB - general well-being”. Harvard University’s most popular class is now a course in happiness, or “positive psychology”. Cambridge University and Wellington College boarding school offer similar instruction.

The flurry of recent books on the subject is a symptom of the happiness phenomenon. But these writers are also fuelling the debate, as they bring previously obscure academic research on happiness - by economists, philosophers, psychologists and geneticists - to more mainstream attention.

So what can an academic usefully add to such a familiar, yet elusive topic as happiness? Happiness is common territory for philosophers who, going back to Plato and Aristotle, have broadly believed that contentment depended on leading a virtuous and ultimately satisfying “good life”. And we understand - even if we don’t always agree with - the great religious figures of history who said happiness was the reward for a life well lived. But is there really such a thing as an objective state of happiness that can be scientifically measured and observed? There is, according to today’s happiness thinkers.

Psychologists say the simple act of asking people how they feel over time will give a surprisingly accurate assessment of their contentment. Those reported levels of happiness may be further verified, they say, by measuring brain activity with electronic scans (happy people have more activity on the left front of the brain; unhappy ones have more on the right). Happiness-school economists then say these findings should help us to shape public policy, by focusing more on the “general well-being” of which Cameron now speaks.

But the happiness movement is making some people very unhappy. Wellington College’s classes are “a recipe for mediocrity” according to one critic in The Independent; “namby-pambying” (the Daily Mail); and an “ideal formula for raising good animals” (The Times).

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, says the new “happiness crusade” would please the Controller in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. To Furedi, the secret of happiness is a paradox: you only find it by seeking something else, namely the virtuous life advocated by the ancient Greeks. “Happiness,” he has written, “is the indirect outcome of engaging with others in the pursuit of civic virtues, and attempting to do good.”

So who is right? Those who think we cannot much improve on what the ancients said about happiness? Or those who argue that, just as our surgeon knows more about brain surgery than Hippocrates, we can now have a much more sophisticated understanding of what makes us happy?

A persuasive case for the scientists rather than the sages can be found in five new books on happiness, including the one that tries to argue the reverse.

Richard Schoch, professor of the history of culture at Queen Mary, University of London, is very much of the school that the ancients still know best. I was looking forward to reading Schoch’s book, The Secrets of Happiness. The blurb on the cover by Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine, said it was a “kick up the rear to the ‘new science of happiness’” and “hugely enjoyable”.

This will depend on how hugely enjoyable you find Schoch’s descriptions of, say, Stoicism (”like a battery fully charged, it is ever ready”) or desire (”Silk against skin. Scarlett Johannson”).

As for the kick up the rear to the happiness thinkers, Schoch singles out Richard Layard, whose Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (2005) has become a bible for neo-utilitarians swayed by his argument that the ability to measure happiness has significant public policy implications.

One of Layard’s central observations is that even though westerners are now better paid, fed and sheltered, they are not necessarily happier. And once average income exceeds about $20,000 per head, more money does not guarantee greater happiness. So governments would be better off raising taxes and tackling great sources of misery such as mental illness, which accounts for a quarter of disease yet receives just 13 per cent of health spending in the UK and 7 per cent in the US.

But Schoch says Layard’s definition of happiness (”feeling good - enjoying life and wanting the feeling to be maintained”) is a “weaker, thinner” version of contentment and “the so-called ‘new science’ of happiness perpetuates this impoverished notion of the good life.”

Real happiness, he says, requires much more effort. Far better to consider the lessons of detachment and indifference offered by the Stoic thinkers, such as Seneca, or the traditions of India’s jnana yogins, who gave up their family, home, property and career to pursue wisdom, and therefore true happiness.

Schoch does admit that walking out on one’s children, spouse, home and job is unrealistic for most of us. “But that is our problem,” he says, “and it reveals more about us - our weaknesses, our fears or perhaps just the circumstances that press upon us from all sides - than it does about happiness.”

But Schoch’s closing definition of what it means to be happy is curiously unsatisfying: “To be authentically happy means to take possession of ourselves, to bring about the person we are in potential, to become more real.” (His italics.) For many readers, Layard’s ideas of how to achieve happiness will sound more real still.

Nicholas White, a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, offers a more balanced view of the nature of the ancients in A Brief History of Happiness. The chief worth of White’s (unhappily dull) book lies in its attempt to explain how thinking on happiness changed from Greek antiquity through to Jeremy Bentham’s 19th century utilitarian idea of the “greatest happiness of the greatest number”. Unfortunately, his history barely mentions the most recent thinking on happiness. But he does concede that when it comes to giving advice on happiness, philosophers may not be the best source.

“Philosophers’ concrete advice about how to become happy isn’t any better (in fact, it’s probably worse) than that of the average person,” says White. “They generally don’t know enough of the relevant facts, and they don’t have the right temperament.”

Moreover, the Greek prescription for a happy life was often rigidly planned. This, says White, is because Plato and Aristotle were fundamentally private educators, “in the business of persuading Athenian gentlemen to send their sons to them for training for a career”. This meant they saw the need for plans, requiring education to see them through. Real life, of course, can be far more complex.

A more comprehensive, and much more gracefully written, narrative of the evolution of thinking on happiness comes from Darrin McMahon, a Florida State University history professor, in The Pursuit of Happiness. McMahon is wary of some of the newer happiness thinkers: “It is probably worth treating the recent ‘revelations’ of psychologists as less genuinely revealing than they and their publicists would have us believe.”

Even so, he acknowledges that many of the new studies “do shed empirical light on a process of pursuit whose rhythms we have followed in a less clinical context over the course of roughly two and a half thousand years”.

One of the psychologists McMahon cites is probably the most entertaining happiness thinker, Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert specialises in “prospection”, the study of how we think about our futures. His style may not appeal to all readers but there is much to admire in a Harvard man willing to start a chapter with the words: “The last decade has seen an explosion of books about poo.” (Referring to children’s books about potty training, his point is that the brain learns to make its owner use a toilet much more readily than it learns what really makes us happy.)

Gilbert briskly disposes of the idea that the ancients have a monopoly on wisdom about happiness, in part because their lives were so fundamentally different from ours. As he says, we barely think about the fact that most of us now make three big life decisions: where to live, what to do and whom to marry. But we are among the first humans to have had such choices. For most of recorded history, people lived where they were born, did what their parents did (Millers milled; Smiths smithed) and married whomever religion, caste or geography dictated. The agricultural, industrial and technological revolutions unleashed an explosion of personal liberty our ancestors never faced and, as Gilbert says, “for the very first time, our happiness is in our hands”.

The trouble is, as Gilbert shows, the human brain is pathetically ill-equipped to decide what to do to be happiest. We are, he says, the only animals whose brains can imagine the future. “Until a chimp weeps at the thought of growing old alone or smiles as it contemplates its summer holiday, or turns down a toffee apple because it already looks too fat in shorts,” humans will always be distinguished by their brains’ ability to imagine.

But we don’t imagine well when it comes to thinking about future happiness. We could draw on the advice and experience of others (as we did when learning about toilet training). But we don’t, in part because we believe ourselves to be terribly special.

As several studies cited by Gilbert show, young Americans expect to live longer, stay married longer and have more trips to Europe than average. They also believe they are more likely to have a gifted child, own their own home and appear in the papers than have a car accident or venereal disease. (The rest of us are not as optimistic as Americans, but still believe our futures will be superior to those of our peers.)

Similarly, we continue to strive for bigger cars or better lovers, even when past experience teaches we will rapidly adapt to their wonder and they won’t make us any happier. “Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility and the rest of us call it marriage,” says Gilbert.

We also imagine that we will be much more miserable than we often actually are about things we dread and fear, be it the death of a spouse or paralysis from the neck down. So we believe Humphrey Bogart when he tells Ingrid Bergman on the runway that if she doesn’t get on the plane with her husband Victor she will regret it “for the rest of your life”. If she had stayed with Bogey, the man she really loved, she probably would have been just as happy, according to Gilbert.

But for the final word on the ancients versus the happiness thinkers, we should go back to Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis. The subtitle of his book is “Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science”, and as it suggests, Haidt has explored how traditional thinking on happiness compares with more recent empirical research. Haidt is a psychologist, but is far from dismissive of the teachings of Buddha or Confucius.

Confucius, for example, was correct to insist on reciprocity, the principle of doing unto others as you would have them do to you. Research repeatedly shows, Haidt says, that such behaviour is vital for social animals such as humans. But Buddhist and Stoic ideas that happiness can be achieved by detachment or emotional indifference are harder to accept today. Echoing Gilbert, he says such ideas may have made sense in the turbulent times in which ancient thinkers lived, when life was subject to the whims of warring kings or capricious Roman emperors. But we no longer live like this: “For the first time in human history, most people [in wealthy] countries will live past 70 and not see any of their children die before them.”

Moreover, he cites more recent psychological studies showing that some things really do make humans much happier and are thus clearly worth striving for, such as a sense of control over their lives. In one famous study, two groups of nursing home residents were given extra benefits - a plant in their rooms; a movie once a week - but under different conditions. One group could choose their own plants and movie night; the other couldn’t. Eighteen months later, the group with more control had better health and half as many deaths.

Similarly, strong relationships have been shown to strengthen the immune system; extend life (more than quitting smoking); speed recovery from surgery; and reduce the risk of depression and anxiety disorders. Detachment certainly sounds a far less assured path to happiness in comparison.

But one of the significant findings that Haidt mentions is also perhaps the most sobering: happiness appears to be surprisingly hereditary. Researchers think that between 50 and 80 per cent of all the variance among people’s average levels of happiness can be explained by their genes, rather than life experiences.

It is easy to see why when one considers the case Haidt cites of the so-called “giggle twins”, Barbara Herbert and Daphne Goodship. Both left school at 14, met their future husbands at 16, suffered miscarriages at the same time and then each gave birth to two boys and a girl. Both feared blood; drank their coffee cold; and had a habit of pushing up their noses with the palm of their hand that both called “squidging”. As Haidt says, none of this would be astonishing, except that they were separated at birth and didn’t meet until they were 40 years old - when they turned up wearing almost identical clothing.

Both women also had notably happy personalities and a habit of bursting into laughter mid-sentence. They had, says Haidt, “won the cortical lottery”: they had more activity in the left frontal cortex of their brains, making them what he calls cortical “lefties”: less subject to anxiety and more able to recover from negative experiences from infancy on.

In other words, no matter how much we earn, how well we marry and how virtuously we live, the pursuit of happiness will end up being partly determined by the set of genes we were born with.

We can never know what Plato or Aristotle would have made of such findings. And perhaps the fact of knowing these things will not make us any happier. But they surely reveal as much about the enduring human desire for happiness as the teachings of those who lived such very different lives more than 2,000 years before us.

First published by FT.com, 21 July 2006

If your face fits
by Sean Coughlan

An online social network is sweeping the most famous universities. Is the Facebook website going to create the digital equivalent of the old school tie?

What are the three most important things in the life of students in the United States? Beer, iPods and Facebook.

That’s the finding of a lifestyle-tracking survey in US colleges this month. But what’s that third one again?

Facebook is an online social network which has swept the university population in the United States and is making a foothold in this country. It’s already a verb: “to facebook” someone. And if a couple are really publicly together they’ll be described as “facebook official”.

But what is this thing that US students say is now more important than sex and texting?

Founded by a Harvard student a couple of years ago, Facebook allows people to list their personal details online and communicate with other people through the website. It’s an online Who’s Who. It’s how you advertise your parties and politics.

Digital ivy league

So what? You might think this is just another campus fad, or a pale imitation of Myspace, the social networking site that’s one of the top five websites in the world. But what’s different about Facebook is that it’s not just an easy way to keep in touch, it’s also a way of keeping it exclusive.

The website works around individual institutions. So if you don’t have an e-mail account from the University of Oxford, you don’t get into the Facebook for students at Oxford.

And in the UK, the Facebook wave has made its biggest impact at the upmarket universities - in places such as Oxford, Cambridge, University College London, the London School of Economics.

“It’s pretty much universal at Oxford, everyone is on it,” says Richard Hardiman, deputy editor of the Oxford Student newspaper.

Students put on their pictures, describe their likes and dislikes and romantic status - and use the website to swap messages. You list your friends, you can check out your friends’ friends, or find people who have matching interests.

People use their real names and pictures - and the fact that these are identifiably fellow students makes it seem safer, says Richard Hardiman.

There’s also a dating aspect of the website - as account holders can identify their current relationship status as anything from single to “it’s complicated”.

Blind dates

“A tremor can go through a social group when they hear someone has updated their relationship profile,” says Hardiman.

So widespread is the use of “facebooking” of potential partners - checking out how they look and what they like - that Cambridge students have warned about the death of the blind date.

This hasn’t met with universal approval. Sam Steddy, a languages student at University College London, says that the obsession with using Facebook is disrupting non-online relationships.

“People will organise parties and I’ll say ‘I didn’t know you were having one’. And they’ll say: ‘I put it on Facebook’. They forget that there’s a real world out there.”

Among the students supporting lecturers during the recent strike was UCL’s Kat Lay - and she said distributing information through Facebook was the most effective campaign tool.

“Leaflets would get thrown in the bin. But everyone is so obsessed with Facebook that they use it every day - people would be more likely to see something there,” she says.

‘Wheat from the chavs’

But what are the implications of all this? In the United States, Facebook has drawn the enthusiastic attention of politicians and businesses, eager to influence the hatching ground of the bright, young middle classes.

For politicians, it’s a form of digital hustings, giving them a chance to set up stall in the place where young people are meeting. And for brand promoters, it’s an instant insight into what young people like and dislike.

Employers have also been using the website as a way of checking out job applicants - creating a rash of stories about sober-looking job applicants being caught out by their own frolicking Facebook listings.

But in the UK, the question raised by Facebook is whether it’s going to be socially exclusive. As an Oxford paper asks, is it about sorting the “wheat from the chavs”?

This extends beyond university, because Facebook also provides an ongoing private connection for students after they’ve graduated and when they’re in the jobs market.

Will people be using these networks to tap each other up for jobs? How would you know if people were recruiting from lists of Oxbridge friends of friends?

Social commentator and university professor, Frank Furedi, says that the “sub-cultures gathering around these networks will become very powerful”.

Not least because these huge exchanges of information and ideas are all taking place below the radar - out of sight of the traditional media. But Professor Furedi says that overall these networks will help people to sustain relationships, rather than create division.

“On balance, these networks will be positive, people will be able to intensify their social engagement with each other.”

More to the point, these online networks have already entered the language. What’s the ultimate sign that someone is really committed to you?

“Can I say you’re my girlfriend on Facebook?”

First published by BBC News, 27 June 2006

The pursuit of gratification
by Suzanne Fields

Hillary Clinton is on to something when she says young people have a sense of “entitlement.” This may seem a little rich coming from an icon of the Boomer generation, and she retreated from her remark that young people think “work” is a four-letter word after her daughter, Chelsea, scolded her for saying it, but you don’t have to be an old fogey to see that youth isn’t what it used to be.

A puzzled old fogey asks Marlon Brando’s character in “The Wild One,” the 1953 movie about a motorcycle gang invading a California town, “What are you rebelling against?” Brando’s character replies, “Whatcha got?” This was the ethos of the ‘50s rebel, trying to figure out how to rebel and find something to rebel against. Two years later James Dean expressed similar angst in “Rebel Without a Cause”—the title says it all.

The ‘60s changed all that. Hillary and her Boomer generation wrote the book on rebellion, against parents, war, Puritanism and against “the greatest generation” which won the war so their children could “make love, not war” without the distractions of work and responsibility. Now even Hillary decries children growing up in the “culture that has a premium on instant gratification.” Their toys feed their appetites. They walk down the street with cell phones pasted to their heads, talking to their friends. They turn on their Blackberries and iPods to listen to their favorite music with the other ear. They play video games that maim and kill without getting their hands dirty. It’s a phenomenon for the globe.

An exhibition in Frankfurt, “The Youth of Today,” eschews the theme of rebellion because the popular culture absorbed what 1960s rebels said they wanted—sexual liberation and entertainment 24/7. They can rock around the clock. But they’re the insiders now, and that creates problems for everybody. Summerhill, a famously permissive “progressive” school founded by A.S. Neil in England in 1927, encouraged children to recite Shakespeare to the cows, enjoy communal nude swimming and anything else that occurred to them. Now Summerhill has introduced, of all things, rules. Once the do-as-you-like school without any discernible structure, Summerhill is changing because the culture is no longer giving kids anything to rebel against. “What we see in society is often a lot of spoilt brats,” Zoe Neill Readhead, the founder’s daughter who now runs the school, tells the London Times. “Children now come from homes where they have been overindulged.”

Americans agree. More than 80 percent of Americans polled by the Sacred Heart University Polling Institute say American young people feel more “entitled” than they did a decade ago. Asked what careers they most wanted for their children, 9 in 10 said medicine, followed by teaching and starting a business. (Their children would likely offer very different answers, but that’s work for another survey.) Frank Furedi, a British sociologist, says society sends a message that the pursuit of happiness is more important than work ethic, and that creates problems. “Happiness has become the buzz word of our times,” he writes in the London Daily Telegraph. He notes that the BBC has turned “The Happiness Formula” into a six-part series. “Politicians, educators, celebrities and cultural entrepreneurs frequently insist that happiness is the solution to our problems and that we have a responsibility to be happy.” That, it seems to me, is looking at motivation upside down.

John Stuart Mill famously observed that happiness is the wrong goal: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.” A sense of entitlement is a little like happiness—an unearned emotion—which is why it often coincides with the breakdown of the work ethic. “Happiness” is more easily achieved through hard work. The opposite of hard work is sloth, and lazybones can’t be happy because he spends so much time trying to avoid what he doesn’t want to do. Instant gratification is an addiction, casting the seeker of instant gratification in the thrall of demanding more, more, more.

“Today’s emphasis on feeling good reflects the fact that the individual self has become the central focus of social, moral and cultural life,” writes Frank Furedi. “Feeling good” becomes an escape from civic virtue and the demands of community life, where hard work, sacrifice, altruism and commitment are antithetical to immediate gratification.

A late education is better than no education at all, but Hillary obviously finds small consolation in the fact that it was her indulgent generation that put into play what she now rails against. Life can be a tough schoolmaster.

First published by Washington Times, 19 June 2006

The perils of our play-it-safe society
by Gregory Rodriguez

Be afraid. Be very afraid. That’s the message we Americans receive daily from everyone from government officials to newscasters, environmentalists and corporate marketers. Let’s face it: like sex, fear sells. But has hyperactive fear-mongering become corrosive to American society? That’s what a growing number of social critics and sociologists are concluding. In a nation so proud of its pioneering spirit, the culture of precaution, they say, is turning us into a bunch of chickens.

Even before 9/11, Americans -who like to think of themselves as the world’s most rational people - seemed particularly susceptible to waves of catastrophic thinking. We collectively obsess over one deadly terror after the other. If it isn’t West Nile virus, then it’s SARS. Today it’s the avian flu. Tomorrow we’ll be cowering from something else.

Are we more fearful because the world has become an infinitely more dangerous place? Probably not. Studies have shown that the level of fear people feel is often disproportionate to the risk they actually face. For example, elderly folk are considerably less likely to be victims of crime than young people, yet they tend to worry about it much more. And sometimes, we simply worry about the wrong things. While avian flu, which has never killed an American, grabs headlines, heart disease strikes down more than 1 million of us a year.

To some extent, fear is a luxury, the product of affluence. Kierkegaard called dread “the dizziness of freedom.” Have you ever noticed that people in relatively safe suburbs tend to be more hysterical about crime than are denizens of the inner city? David Ropeikof the Harvard School of Public Health, who specializes in risk, argues that that’s because people in the suburbs have time to be hysterical. “People in the city have to struggle more to get by, stay healthy and survive. And these day-to-day realities fill up more of their radar screens,” he says. On the other hand, affluent people in the ‘burbs, who have “fewer direct challenges to their comfort and health,” have a “bigger space on their screens” to worry about more abstract fears.

Further, although city dwellers are also worried about crime, they have to negotiate its perils every day and therefore have the information with which to put it into perspective. By contrast, people who don’t live in high-crime areas lack the practical knowledge that allows them to accurately assess the threat they face. And when people don’t have enough facts, worrying becomes their only form of self-protection.

The intensity of fear may also have to do with how much one has to lose. Those who have little tend to calculate risk differently than those who have more to protect. For people who feel they have nothing to lose, risks promise a higher payoff. Conversely, those who have a lot sometimes adopt strategies of “loss avoidance.” Frank Furedi, a British sociologist and author of “Politics of Fear,” argues that a combination of wealth, security and anxiety about the future is making Western cultures increasingly risk-averse. Westerners, he argues, have turned safety into an end in itself, deluding themselves that there are no such things as accidents or natural disasters. When something goes wrong, we assume that someone must be to blame, which drives the false belief that all bad things are avoidable if only we take the right precautions.

And because all risk is believed to be manageable, over the last few decades risk has become a huge business.

Consultants dispense advice on risk communications, risk management and risk analysis. Experts warn us of so many dangers it’s hard to keep track. Are eggs still bad for cholesterol, or did a new study disprove that? And how about alcohol? Should we avoid it altogether, or does a glass a day do a body good? The prescriptions are murky. And in this culture of anxiety, we no longer need to face danger to be consumed by fear. The illusion that we can cheat death if only we’re clever or disciplined enough has profound social and psychological consequences. Parents become afraid to send their children out to play. Strangers seem more threatening than ever.

To avoid harm, we insulate ourselves from real life. The climate of fear and precaution dampens our zeal for the kind of adventure and experimentation that leads to progress. Although we once may have hoped to spend our collective energies trying to make the world a better place, today we are increasingly willing just to play it safe.

First published by LA Times, 5 March 2006

Scaredy-cat society
by Shelley Widhalm

Risk was too risky and fear was too common even before September 11, and the growing obsession with avoiding danger may threaten our society’s future, scholars said at a recent Washington conference.

“Most human experiences come with a health warning, continually reminding us that we cannot be expected to manage the risks we face,” said Frank Furedi, a professor at the University of Kent in England. “A powerful culture of precaution works to estrange the public from the ideals of risk taking, innovation and experimentation.”

Policy-making has become more arbitrary, driven by “what if?” questions, said Mr. Furedi, author of “Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right,” speaking last week at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

A disaster occurs, some kind of meaning is attributed to it, someone is blamed and policy is implemented or changed with safety as the ultimate goal, he said. Social policy, as a result, is focused on reassuring people that they are safe, but what they get instead is the illusion of safety while losing autonomy and control over their own lives, he said.

“Nobody gets criticized for being safe,” Mr. Furedi said. “What is irresponsible is taking risks.”

Last week’s conference, “Panic Attack: The Precautionary Culture, the Politics of Fear and the Risks to Innovation,” was co-sponsored by AEI in cooperation with the Institute of Ideas, a British think tank.

The conference focused on exploring the impact risk aversion has on many aspects of life, ranging from education to business. It also focused on the power that the precautionary principle—a loose term that calls for precaution to the point of risk avoidance in innovation, human relationships and anything humans do—has on Western culture.

Such is the politics of fear, Mr. Furedi said, that children, women and the elderly are labeled as “vulnerable”—about 80 percent to 90 percent of the population.

The corporate “social responsibility” movement, initiated by some advocacy groups, pressures businesses to avoid risk, said Jon Entine, an adjunct fellow at AEI and scholar in residence at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

“Business leaders are increasingly paralyzed by caution ... reacting rather than leading,” Mr. Entine said.

The benefits of most innovations are unseen, while the risks are made public, said James K. Glassman, a resident fellow at AEI. If one person is harmed from the side effects of a medication that helped many others, the media tell the story of harm, he said.

“Bad news gets attention,” Mr. Glassman said. “In other words, forget the science; just ban it.”

The media generate an exaggerated sense of danger, said Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine.

“The media regularly fan the flames of fear of new technologies,” he said, citing fear-mongering accounts of the dangers of cell phones, chemicals, in-vitro fertilization, population growth and genetically enhanced crops.

In the legal world, risk focuses on the lowest common denominator—the few people who may be displeased by a product, said Philip Howard,vice chairman of the law firmof Covington & Burling inNew York. For fear of lawsuits, he said, some playgrounds have been stripped of climbing ropes or jungle gyms, businesses do not give employment references, and products have warning labels that nobody reads.

“Our leaders lost authority in themselves,” Mr. Howard said.
Judges, he said, no longer believe they have the authority to dismiss fraudulent cases. As a result, people can sue for almost any reason, he said.

“There needs to be a major revolution in the way judges perceive their jobs,” Mr. Howard said.

Excessive fears extend down to the cradle. Though American children, with few exceptions, are mentally and emotionally sound, many adults regard them as fragile and vulnerable, Christina Hoff Sommers said.

Adults try to insulate children from the remote possibility of getting hurt or injured or enduring a slight to their self-esteem, including from any kind of competition, even in sports, said Ms. Sommers, a resident scholar at AEI.

Psychologists state that, though the message has not reached the public, children need self-control, not bolsters to their self-esteem, she said.

“Today’s children are the most overprotected in history. They’re also the most overpraised,” Ms. Sommers said, adding that some adversity is necessary. “We shortchange them,” she said.

First published by Washington Times, 21 February 2006

Winning Ways
by Anne Moore

Jonathan Jay thinks it’s going to be another good year for coaching - and as a 34-year-old millionaire, it has all been pretty good so far. In 1999, Jay spent his last £145 advertising a seminar on how to be a coach. Now here he is, director of the Coaching Academy, the UK’s biggest coaching school, living in a panoramic Putney penthouse, all leather, suede and views of the Thames (if you can see past the plasma TV). Then there’s his new book, Sack Your Boss!, and his TV commitments - Now I’m the Boss! (for Living TV) and helping families emigrate (for the BBC’s Get a New Life). And let’s not forget the coaching for businesses, for a day rate of £10,000. ‘I think we need to reconcile helping people with getting paid for it,’ he twinkles.
If the typical image of a life coach is a bit new age and touchy-feely, Jay comes as a surprise. Slick and charming, he looks and sounds every inch the entrepreneur - he printed his first business card at 11, and says, ‘Me personally?’ when asked a question, before delivering the smoothest reply. And he is at the forefront of UK coaching. Until his seminars in 1999, wannabe life coaches had to train in the US. Now it’s impossible to count the number of courses available in Britain, some offering seminars, some online learning, some in FE colleges and others stamping certificates on their kitchen tables.

‘In 2006, we intend to take coaching into all the nooks and crannies of British life,’ says Jay. ‘We’re taking it to Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, Brighton. We want to take it into the NHS, local government and local schools. I reckon we could have more impact on the state of education through coaching than Tony Blair could ever have.’

For Jay, coaching is the all-powerful panacea. ‘You meet someone on the street who doesn’t know what to do with his life and you know that if you had one hour with that person, he’d walk away knowing exactly what he wants and believing he can do it,’ he purrs. ‘There’s nothing weird about it, nothing voodoo - it’s very simple psychology. It doesn’t take a genius to do it. Anyone can be a coach. And whatever critics say, coaching works. If it didn’t, it would be an American fad that disappeared in six months.’

A lot of people agree with him. In 1999, life coaching was practically unknown in the UK. Now, a Google of ‘UK life coach’ throws up 4.5m sites. You’ll find wardrobe coaches who’ll do a mini-Trinny and Susannah for £200 a day. There are parent coaches to tell you how to get your two-year-old to eat peas. There are cancer coaches to help you through treatment, crisis coaches, career coaches ... the list goes on.

On top of this are the self-help books, one of publishing’s fastest-growing genres. Each week sees at least one new title knocked out by a life coach elbow its place among the bestsellers. Then there’s TV’s saturation by self-improvement programmes. You can watch people being coached out of debt or obesity, a failed fashion sense, sloppy parenting or a dating drought.

According to the UK’s Association for Coaching, an estimated 100,000 British people used a coach last year and the industry has been valued at £50m. This month, it enters the mainstream with the finalisation of its National Occupational Standards as set by ENTO, the national network of training organisations. For the first time, there will be official standards of good practice and training for British coaches.

Pam Richardson, leading life coach, author of The Life Coach and principal of the UK College of Life Coaching, is just as excited about the future as Jay: ‘I can see coaching for newly qualified teachers, doctors, lawyers - newly qualified anythings. Now that the government are auditing stress, I can see a lot of coaching on work-life balance. We’re living longer and have a responsibility to stay well, which means coaching on exercise and diet. Let’s not expect the doctors to fix us! Parent coaching? Absolutely. I can’t think of an area of the community that wouldn’t benefit from it.’

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent and author of (among others) Therapy Culture (Routledge) and Paranoid Parenting (Allen Lane), is one man who disagrees. According to Furedi, while we pour scorn on institutions and mock our politicians, the monarchy and the church, we are developing a slavish, unthinking devotion to a ‘new priesthood of gurus’ who have stepped in to fill the void. Life coaching is, he believes, at best a waste of money and at worst dangerous.

‘There’s a growing idea that ordinary human beings lack the competence and resources to cope with everyday life,’ he says. ‘More and more areas are being complicated and professionalised. Some of this is trivial - I find it idiotic that thinking adults would pay someone to go shopping with them - but some of it is intrusive.’

Take parent coaching. ‘As parents, we learn through experience, through listening to our children and making mistakes,’ Furedi argues. ‘You wake up in the night and think, “Why did I say that?” You screw things up and change your behaviour. When a coach is telling you what to do, the relationship between you and your child is short-circuited; the coach is coming between you. You no longer trust your instincts or what your child is showing you.’

Fiona Campbell, a journalist and photographer, found this to be true. As a single mother of a one-year-old son, Campbell opted for life coaching to ease the parenting load. Her coach supported her through the ‘sleep training/controlled crying’ period. ‘She didn’t judge me, but supported me, which gave me the confidence to follow it through,’ says Campbell. But other aspects weren’t so successful. ‘I wasn’t happy about sending him to a nursery and was angsting over whether I should or not. I don’t blame the coach, but she said it could be life-enhancing for little ones. Maybe it was just wrong for my son, who already had a very complicated life, with me, with his father, at his granny’s. His father’s family were very much against nursery at that age. Anyway, I sent him and it was the wrong decision - it was far too soon for him and he was completely traumatised.’

For Furedi, this highlights the most worrying aspect of life coaching - its disregard of friends, family and community, the people in our lives. Advice is only heeded when it’s paid for: ‘We don’t trust each other as we used to. Life coaching stops us relying on traditional support networks.’

Top life coaches do display a depressingly cynical view of the people who love us. ‘With friends and family,’ says Pam Richardson, ‘there’s a trench mentality: “We may be wet and miserable, but we’re all in it together.” So if someone sticks his head up, everyone may grab on to his legs - because if he goes, they’d all have to go.’

Curly Martin echoes this opinion. Martin joined the personal-development path after being diagnosed with breast cancer, aged 39. She lived in London and worked as a business trainer, flying all over Europe. After her diagnosis, she gave up meat and sugar, moved to Bournemouth, where she could run on the beach, and started Achievement Specialists, which provides coaching and trains coaches. Last year, her book, The Life Coaching Handbook, was a number-one bestseller in the UK and US.

‘Everybody has a hidden agenda,’ she explains. ‘If you become very successful, a family member may not like that because you’re not going to be there on a Friday night for her. A friend may feel you’re going to meet other people. There’ll be some kind of sabotage stuff going on. A life coach is like a cheerleader on the sidelines of your life, to cheer you on for the good times and support you during your challenges.’

An alternative view would be that a life coach will never judge you. While friends may challenge and argue back, and see your life with all its history and habits, promises and peculiarities, the coach will just ‘cheer you on’. ‘In this respect,’ says Furedi, ‘it’s no different to when a prostitute smiles at a client and tells him how good-looking he is.’

What if you didn’t like a client? Martin blinks blankly. ‘With telephone coaching you don’t meet them, so there’s no judgment.’

However, not all life coaches are quite so impartial. Fiona Harrold, described by the press as ‘a guru who has got inside our minds’, ‘the queen bee of British coaching’ and ‘the most positive person alive’, is known for challenging her clients and telling them what she thinks (she calls this ‘feedback’). Harrold, author of bestsellers with titles like Be Your Own Life Coach: How to Take Control of Your Life and Achieve Your Wildest Dreams, first learnt self-help from her father, the most successful washing-machine salesman in Northern Ireland, who read his daughter How to Win Friends and Influence People at bedtime. She now has 25 coaches on her team and 20,000 subscribers to her website.

As an advert for coaching, Harrold’s own life appears a model of efficiency. She lives in Fulham with the teenage son she raised alone, describes herself as ‘fabulously, happily single’, but has scheduled marriage for the near future. Though she doesn’t know who to. (’I haven’t got that person in mind right now, but definitely over the next two years.’) Her home is as you’d expect - pristine, spacious, candles and cushions - her clothes look new age but expensive, and her speech is Ab Fab luvviness (’Darling’, ‘Wow. I mean? Really?’ ) mixed with a lurking Belfast twang. According to Harrold, her life is devoid of drama and chaos. ‘I don’t have people in my life I don’t want,’ she explains, simply. ‘The people in my inner circle are carefully chosen - I don’t have a problem letting go of people.’ Including her clients, if they don’t make the grade.

‘People come to me because they want to get things moving, they want me to give suggestions and point out what I see.’ For example, there was the management consultant who wanted to be a guitarist. When that was sorted (he went freelance and took up guitar lessons), he wanted help around women, so Harrold found him a fitness coach (’He was a bit scrawny, then he bulked up and looked great...’) and a style coach (’He dressed a bit nerdy so we handled that too!’).

Sue Loveluck, who lives in Berkshire with her 14-year-old daughter, is a recent client of Harrold and can only marvel at all she has achieved as a result. ‘I contacted her because I’d read one of her books and sent an email complimenting her,’ says Loveluck, a headhunter. ‘At that stage, I wanted to get my business to the next level. I was successful, but 90 per cent of my business came from one client and I wasn’t developing, I was in a comfort zone.’

Harrold made practical suggestions to simplify Loveluck’s life as a single, working mother. ‘She helped eliminate the problems that held me back. I was driving my daughter to her private school, which took three hours a day, and when I told Harrold, she said, “Honey, just stop it!” She told me to talk to the bursar, which I did that week and they arranged transport.

‘I also had a little dog that was always barking. I worked from home and it was like having a baby in the house. Fiona told me to solve that problem and in one week I found a dog minder. They are little problems, that you accept as part of your life - Fiona freed me up. She looked at what was holding me back and didn’t let me come up with excuses. She made me believe I could do it.’

In the past nine months, with Harrold cheering her on, Loveluck has flown to America to meet venture capitalists, expanded her income by 30 per cent and is now setting up another company. ‘Fiona helped me to start acting like a CEO. She advised me to stop reading those trashy celebrity magazines and to cut them out of my life - which I did.’ She also turned her attention to Loveluck’s appearance. ‘She’d say, “You’re too suburban, honey!” and “Go to Liberty, darling, the sale’s starting!” As I came to see her, I started changing my image from black suits to Ted Baker and Joseph. Although she was critical, it never felt negative because I knew she was on my side.’

However, not all of Harrold’s clients are so obedient. Those who consistently fail to carry out the agreed weekly tasks, she ‘lets go’. ‘They’re mostly people who’ve done a lot of therapy and acquired the habit of talking without doing anything,’ sighs Harrold. ‘It’s a disastrous habit and people don’t need to use me for that when they could get a counsellor for a fraction of the price. And I find it boring. I don’t need that nonsense. I’ve got plenty of fabulous people who want to crack on with their lives and don’t want to look at their navel endlessly.’

All coaches are very particular about this counselling/coaching distinction - and with good reason, since coaches can charge a lot more. The idea is that counselling will go over your past, your feelings, your unconscious mind, while coaching will find out what you want for the future and help you take the steps to get there.

But while the cost of counselling varies and is often free, coaching usually starts at £50 for 45 minutes - and that’s cheap. One session with Curly Martin costs £250. Four sessions with Harrold - plus email and emergency calls - costs between £700 and £1,500.

Professor Stephen Palmer has thought about the high price of coaching, and one of his concerns is that it reflects neither training nor experience. Coaches who set up last week after a few months of online learning - or not even that - start high. One of the most distinguished faces of British coaching, Palmer is president of the Coaching Association, and also a professor of psychology and founder director of the Centre for Coaching and Centre for Stress Management. He also coaches online, by phone, even by text.

‘I think the whole culture of counselling is that it’s a voluntary activity - you see it a lot in the voluntary sector,’ he says. ‘Coaching has never been voluntary so people expect to pay for it.’ Research by Palmer and his students has shown that British people also tend to view coaching in a more positive light than counselling. ‘It’s the stiff upper lip,’ he says. ‘People are far less prepared to say, “I’m going to see my counsellor” because it may suggest there’s something wrong, they’re not coping. There’s embarrassment around it. But life coaching is seen almost like a sports-coaching model. It’s a positive thing to make your performance better, to help you achieve your life goals.’

Not surprisingly, UK counsellors don’t agree. Philip Hodson, fellow of the BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy) believes TV lies at the root of the coaching explosion. ‘There are so many coaching programmes because it’s much easier to accommodate on television than counselling,’ he says. ‘It’s a quick fix. It’s skimming the surface, shunning one of the most important developments of the 20th century - the unconscious mind. Counselling is tough on the attention span.’

It’s unarguable that watching coaches turn toddlers into little angels and knock 10 years off frumpy, menopausal women is enough to send thousands of viewers in search of a similar service. But Palmer believes this isn’t the primary reason we want coaching. ‘It’s been a gradual change, but we’ve become less and less stoical as a nation,’ he says. ‘There have been huge changes in the way we’ve raised our children, and now, from a very early age, we’ve learnt that whingeing and throwing a tantrum will get us what we want. We’re impatient. We believe we can have what we want. That’s why we have road rage, air rage, trolley rage. We have higher expectations and get stressed very easily. So when we’re thwarted by life, the universe and everything, we don’t accept it. We’re more likely to go to a coach.’

But while Palmer thinks his duty is to bring his clients back down to earth and help them develop ‘realistic goals’, most coaches seem to see their jobs as cheering on their clients whatever they’re after. For example, says Palmer, ‘If a client told me he wanted to go to the moon, I’d ask him if he had a million pounds, then try to come up with something more realistic.’ This is the opposite of Pam Richardson’s approach. ‘If someone says, “I want to fly to the moon,” I won’t say, “Get real!”,’ she says. ‘I’ll say, “Have you booked your place? Are you fit enough? How are you going to make it happen?“‘

Life coaching is starting out, it’s in its infancy, but there’s no doubt it’s here to stay. At present, there are so many training schools and accreditation systems, and so little regulation, that each coach has a different definition of what they do and the proper way to do it. Some believe they are there to direct you, others just to cheer you on. Some wish to make your wildest dreams come true, others want to wake you up to reality. But in all cases, a coach is someone you pay so that, for 45 minutes a week, they are as interested in your life, your kids, your career, your clothes, your cancer as you are. ‘Once this would have been seen as the height of alienation,’ says Furedi. ‘Now, we celebrate it.’

Fiona Campbell came to the end of her life-coaching course with many of the same problems she had at the beginning - but considerably less money. ‘It is shockingly expensive,’ she says. ‘My coach was a lovely person, but at the end of three months I still had a career that was a bit of a mess and I was still a single mother. Life is tough. Nothing’s going to change that and you have to deal with your own life. Life coaching is lovely and life-enhancing and it focuses solely on you. But it’s probably best for people who don’t have problems.’

First published by The Observer, 22 January 2006

Did respect die or just f-fade away?
by Ben Fenton

Respect, from the Latin respicere, literally means to look back, although Tony Blair would rather we didn’t associate his new quest with any halcyon era of the past.

But we all have a sense that respect died some time ago, flattened by our juggernaut world of progress and left by the kerb.

We are harder pressed to figure out when it died, though. Is it long gone, and just a skeletal memory, or is the body of deference still warm, with a pulse tantalisingly detectable?

It’s tempting to think of watersheds for the death of respect, moments after which nothing was ever the same again.

Was it the quintessentially English film The Blue Lamp, in which old-fashioned friendly bobby George Dixon, played by Jack Warner, is shot dead by tearaway Dirk Bogarde, that opened the floodgates for violence against the main symbol of law and order in Britain?

In fact, in the Metropolitan Police, almost as many policemen and women (21) were killed by criminals in the 49 years between 1900 and the release of The Blue Lamp as in the 56 years since (23). As many London policemen (eight) died at the hands of the public from 1910-19 (excluding war-related deaths) as in the other most violent decade of the century, the 1990s.

And even the streetwise 1990s might have been shocked at the story of Sgt Thomas Green, who was beaten to death when Epsom police station was stormed by an angry mob in 1919.

Casting around for another moment when deference died in Britain might point to September 1953, when the Daily Express, searching for a phrase to describe the long-haired, drape-jacketed, drainpipe-trousered gangs suddenly appearing on the streets of London, coined the phrase “Teddy Boys”.

These gangs spawned the first of a number of moral panics in post-war Britain and their defiant individualism was perfectly suited to the music that arrived from America in 1956.

Frank Sinatra denounced rock ‘n’ roll as “the martial music of every side-burned juvenile delinquent on the face of the earth”, and the first tour of a paunchy Bill Haley and his middle-aged Comets gave rise to an epidemic of seat-slashing in cinemas, seen as the clearest expression of youth rebellion in the late 1950s.

Out of the Teddy Boys came the Rockers who battled the Mods on the beach at Brighton to the tunes of a new music, more closely derived from soul and blues, the sound of The Who and the Rolling Stones.

The romance of Elvis Presley’s Are You Lonesome Tonight? became Mick Jagger’s Let’s Spend The Night Together, leading us down the path towards such romantic sentiments as Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up. But models for these gangs, whether the Teds or the Mods or the Rockers, could all be found in pre-war Britain, on the racetracks of Brighton or the streets of Glasgow or the East End of London.

The sociologist Prof Frank Furedi thinks there is another side to the coin, with respect being killed off by those who once enjoyed it.

He agrees with Henry Buckle, the Victorian historian, who wrote: “When any class of men cease to be respected by the nation, they soon cease to respect themselves.”

Prof Furedi reckons his own watershed moment to be in 1963, when as a young Canadian he saw a British revue in Toronto.

“It was That Was The Week That Was and this was something really significant to me, because it was not just satire of the British Establishment by Angry Young Men from outside,” he says.

These were the alter egos of the Establishment, from the same schools and the same colleges as the people who ran Britain.

“There was a real sense of ‘This is the end’, that authority had lost its legitimacy,” Prof Furedi says.

Apart from the vicious satire of David Frost, Bernard Levin, Peter Cook and all the rest, there was the betrayal of the ruling class by its own members.

The Cambridge spies, toffs to a man, and Jack Profumo, the war minister who shared his prostitute girlfriend Christine Keeler with a Soviet spymaster, were exposed in all their dramatic treachery. That must have rubbed away the last veneer of worthiness from a governing class already exposed as hapless bunglers by the disaster of the Suez expedition in 1956 and as powerless bystanders by the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

There was, too, the sense of a new generation taking power in the early 1960s. In Washington, John F Kennedy, a new leader for a new decade, symbolically removed his silk top hat for his inauguration speech in January 1961.

Harold Wilson wore a raincoat, spoke with an easily ridiculed northern accent and saw spies round every corner.

The authority figures of the past - teachers, doctors, politicians, policemen, even parents - saw their symbols of authority blunted.

Doctors lost the trust of the nation. Teachers lost the cane. Both discovered the costs of litigation.

Politicians lost the protection of their crusty aloofness when they started to wear jeans in public. Policemen in panda cars lost local knowledge and the ability to clip the occasional ear.

Parents, bombarded by generations of lifestyle gurus with conflicting advice on bringing up their children, simply lost the plot.

Prof Furedi says: “The people who belonged to the Establishment, the old authority figures, no longer believe in the ethos that made them what they were, they no longer feel able to uphold the values they traditionally stood for.

“It began with a healthy challenge to deference from below and it became a crisis of nerves from above.”

First published by The Daily Telegraph, 11 January 2006

Why art is a dirty word
by Miranda Devine

Big Brother will be over next week but that doesn’t mean popular television is going highbrow any time soon. Channel Ten’s replacement ratings-puller, Australian Idol, has revealed in its first episodes performances of such woeful quality it’s a wonder plasma screens all over the nation don’t spontaneously self-destruct in horror.

But while it’s fun to hurl brickbats at trash TV, Big Brother is a symptom, not a cause, of our creeping philistinism, says the visiting British sociologist Frank Furedi.

At a lunch in Sydney this week hosted by the Centre for Independent Studies, Furedi had bigger culprits in mind. Cultural institutions such as universities, galleries, museums and libraries, which are supposed to nurture the best of art and culture, have lost sight of their purpose.

They are so anxious not to appear “elitist” or make value judgements, so intent on being “inclusive” and “relevant” they have become meaningless. They “no longer challenge us or encourage us to question what we know. Instead they flatter us.”

The reason, says Furedi, is that the state’s increasing propensity for social engineering has transformed cultural institutions into mere vehicles to “improve society”. He cites the example of British libraries. Where once they were all about books, now they are places of “inclusion”, de facto homeless shelters and “chill-out zones” where young people can watch MTV. The result, he says, is that more money is being spent on libraries but less on books.

Similarly, in Canberra, when the $155 million National Museum of Australia opened its doors in 2001, apart from its Holocaust-themed Aboriginal exhibit, the most profound items in the collection were an upside-down Hills Hoist and Azaria Chamberlain’s dress. The underlying message was that Australia’s white history was either a joke or too boring to dwell on.

As cultural institutions flounder around trying to craft mission statements about being “relevant” and socially “inclusive”, they become shallow and alienating, just as publications and political parties which rely on focus groups and polling to determine their beliefs wind up as empty shells spinning this way and that.

By spoon-feeding the masses pap we are assuming they are “too thick and too stupid to appreciate art for its own sake”, says Furedi. “We are systematically disempowering people. The consequence is to change what people are about.”

The Hungarian-born Furedi aims much of his criticism at Britain, where he teaches at the University of Kent. But the problem may be worse here, because of what Dr Barry Spurr has described as an ingrained “Australian anti-intellectual cultural prejudice against the lucid expression of informed and sustained ideas”.

Spurr, a senior lecturer in English literature at Sydney University, made the point last year in Education and the Ideal, a book of essays bemoaning ideologically driven philistinism in our schools and universities.

He says it is politically incorrect now to rank a work of art based on artistic value because that would be “elitist”. The result is armies of illiterate students entering university after passing an HSC in which Ginger Meggs is as valid a “text” as King Lear, the Alicia Silverstone movie Clueless is equal to Jane Austen’s Emma and Bush Tucker Man videos preferable to The Grapes of Wrath. Shakespeare has to be Baz Luhrmann-ised before we trust our students with it.

At school, As and Fs have been replaced by the inoffensive phrases “Working Beyond” and “Working Towards”. Everyone is gifted and talented, and “excellence” is a social construction.

Thus in last year’s HSC, 99 per cent of students passed the English standard course, and a 63-word answer to a 40-minute question in Advanced English was deemed to be a borderline pass in a guide for markers.

Educators will claim they are trying to make a syllabus relevant to a generation weaned on Nintendo, short sound bites and with even shorter concentration spans. But Furedi says setting our expectations of students so low does children a grave disservice, denying the capacity of ordinary people to comprehend great ideas or great art and be transformed.

We are so intent on immunising our children from any challenge which might “traumatise” them we aren’t teaching them anything of value, Furedi says. “We find it difficult to accept that choices must be made.”

He points to the success of the Harry Potter books, with millions of children across the globe devouring the latest dense instalment. J.K. Rowling’s creations resonate with their imaginations and demonstrates that children are the same as ever, perfectly capable of reading long books.

Furedi says the only way to combat dumbing down is by speaking up. There has been a “loss of nerve by intellectuals in their own beliefs”.

“Both left and right have become estranged from what they really are,” he says. “They no longer have a web of meaning through which we can interpret our lives … a sense of right and wrong.”

For fear of being seen as old and uncool, or worse, socially conservative, those with a natural aversion to such cultural trash as Big Brother or Piss Christ avoid speaking out by adopting a libertarian, live and let live attitude.

Of course most of the intellectuals Furedi claims are too cowardly to man the barricades against philistinism have actually been too busy for decades destroying those barricades. Their cultural institutions didn’t succumb by accident but by deliberate design - the “long march” of the left advocated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who died in a fascist prison in 1937. They were long ago captured by the idea that all art is political and has no objective value.

Therefore philistinism might be seen as a valid defence mechanism against destructive ideas, the consequences of which (70 million deaths) are catalogued in Jung Chang’s new book Mao: The Unknown Story, just for one example.

Is it better not to think at all than to think destructively?

First published by Sydney Morning Herald, 11 August 2005

The sum of our fears
by Michael Duffy

Frank Furedi is one of the most interesting thinkers in the humanities today. If he had a personal motto, it would probably be the same as George Pell’s: be not afraid. But where the Cardinal’s concern is mainly personal, Furedi sees fear more broadly, as the defining emotion of our time.

Fear is on the increase and it’s corrosive of our humanity. In a series of books and articles, Furedi, who is professor of sociology at the University of Kent in Britain, has sought to alert readers to this and urges us to seize control of our lives and our futures.

One of the events that alerted him to the climate of fear occurred when his child was born nine years ago. A surprised Furedi was told by the hospital, “Don’t worry, everything is all right. We’ve got a really good system here to make sure your son doesn’t get kidnapped.”

“Until that point,” Furedi recalls, “it had never occurred to me that this was a risk I was facing. But I noticed from that stage on that virtually every experience, every developmental stage to do with children, has some sort of risk attached to it [by professionals]. Everything comes with a health warning.”

Furedi is in Australia to talk about fear. “Fear itself has become a perspective on life,” he explains. “There used to be a time when people had specific fears, such as fear of spiders or heights. But increasingly, as we’ve lost touch with other people and become more lonely and isolated, we’ve adopted a perspective where just about every experience is looked at in terms of the worst possible outcome.” This leads to an increase in counselling and therapy, which often increases fear instead of diminishing it, and an impoverishment of politics due to timidity and low expectations.

These are large claims, but then Furedi has always been interested in the big picture. Born in Hungary in 1947, he moved with his family to Canada after the failed revolt of 1956. By the 1970s, he was living in England and helped found the Revolutionary Communist Party of Great Britain. He moved on, wrote many books, and today is one of those behind the edgy libertarian internet magazine Spiked Online. It has a particular interest in the ways people deal - or fail to deal - with risk in daily life.

In his book The Culture of Fear (1997), Furedi set out the paradox of modern life that lies at the root of much of his writing: the less we have to worry about, the more we worry. For instance, we are healthier than ever yet as a society worry about health more with each passing year. Safety, he says, was the fundamental value of the 1990s, when in Britain fear of tap water doubled sales of bottled water in just five years, and the frequency of words such as “trauma”, “stress” and “counselling” skyrocketed in newspapers.

“Today,” according to Furedi, “the fear of taking risks is creating a society that celebrates victimhood rather than heroism. We are all expected to compete, like guests on a television program, to prove that we are the most put-upon and pathetic people in the house, the most deserving of counselling and compensation.”

Our expectations have been lowered; merely to survive is now considered a wonderful achievement. One example of this is the changed attitudes within the women’s movement.

Furedi says feminists in the 1960s and early 1970s were keen to portray women as empowered and strong. But by the 1980s this had swung around to the idea of women as victims that is still so pervasive. As a result of this trend, he believes, our lives are impoverished: “The celebration of safety alongside the continuous warning about risks constitutes a profoundly anti-human intellectual and ideological regime. It continually invites society and its members to constrain their aspirations and to limit their actions.”

Why do we worry so much? Furedi believes we have a diminished sense of control due to things such as the growing complexity of society and the increase in loneliness brought on by the breakdown of families and institutions such as churches and trade unions. The nervousness induced by such major changes is fed by the increase in knowledge and an emotionally rapacious media, and the fact that our ability to assess risk is at least as woeful as ever.

An outcome of this trend has been the boom in therapy. In 1980, there were 1800 individual and 160 organisational members of the British Association for Counselling. By 1993 this had swelled to 10,000 individuals and 500 organisations. Turning to experts so frequently leads to a surrender of our sense of responsibility for our own lives. And often, Furedi says, it doesn’t work. Counselling can make problems worse not better, thereby contributing to, rather than breaking, the cycle of fear.

Children suffer from their parents’ insecurities. Our kids are far more healthy than in the past, but we worry about their upbringing endlessly, seeking advice from a bewildering range of experts. While attacks on children are even more infrequent now than before, we take far more precautions to prevent them. Children grow up thinking the world is a dangerous place full of risky strangers. The proportion of British children taken to school by car quadrupled between 1971 and 1990, while the number of activities that children undertook on their own nearly halved. This is wrong not just because risk-taking is one of the most important expressions of our humanity, but because it makes children less capable of dealing with the unexpected. (Many parents today like to think their twentysomething children won’t leave home because they enjoy their cheap creature comforts or love their mums and their dads. But maybe they’re just scared?)

Furedi thinks these problems are worse in the Anglo-American part of the world than in other countries, where formal relationships have not broken down quite so much. He recalls walking down a street in Brussels a few years ago.

“I knew something strange was happening,” he says, “but I didn’t know what it was. Then I looked and saw there was a bunch of six-year-old children going to school on their own with little backpacks, and they were all squealing and laughing and yelling and walking down this busy street. That’s what I used to do when I was a kid, but I haven’t seen it happen in England for 15 to 20 years.”

Protectiveness towards children has now reached absurd levels. Furedi says he is forbidden to photograph his son playing football unless he gets the permission of every parent on the field. “This is next to impossible. So basically it means I don’t have a pictorial memory of my child doing athletics and football, which to me is a symptom of the fact we’re all looking at the world from the point of view of the pedophile. We think every adult is a potential pedophile, and ultimately that’s a triumph of pedophilia over common sense.”

Furedi says the rise of fear has rendered the old political labels fairly useless. “In the old days,” he told me last week, “the left was very pro-experiments, pro-science, pro-future, while the right was much more hesitant. Today there’s been a complete reversal. For example, supporters of scientific innovation tend to be on the right.”

Furedi’s optimism about science has attracted some criticism from the left. Writing in The Guardian in 2003, commentator George Monbiot described Furedi as “the godfather of the cult” of a group of ex-communists who now, thanks to campaigns such as one in support of genetically modified food, were destroying public trust in science and medicine with their “repugnant philosophy”.

He’s no longer of the left, but Furedi rejects the claim of fox-hunting philosopher Roger Scruton that he’s now a conservative. Furedi says: “Today conservatism has collapsed. Many conservatives are scared to uphold tradition. Old conservatism had beliefs, a system of thought and morality. New conservatism upholds nothing except an unswerving conformism to the present. It seems to me that conservatives have given up on the past while the left has given up on the future. We now live in a kind of infinite present.”

Furedi describes our times as “pre-political”, by which he means politics has lost the desire and confidence to change things in a big way. “The larger debates of the past have been replaced by single issues such as literacy in classrooms or school lunches or the environment,” he says. “These issues don’t have much to do with traditional politics. They become the focus for almost arbitrary divisions among people. I call them arbitrary because they don’t have much to do with the future, or with morality. They concern people’s lifestyles. Sometimes today our most heated debates are over nothing more than individual preferences rather than things that affect us deeply as human beings.” He has written about some of this in his most recent book, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? (2004).

So what is to be done? “We need to become much more interested in the past and learn from it, but we also need to embrace the future.”

And be not afraid.

First published by Sydney Morning Herald, 6 August 2005

Child of our times
Gillian Bowditch

IT’S 5PM on a Saturday afternoon in Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire and a clutch of pre-teen girls are getting ready for their first “under” (as in under-18 disco). The fake tan has been applied, toenails have been painted, boys have been texted. With two hours to kill and no more lip gloss to apply, they run into the garden and start to bounce on a giant trampoline. Dressed like adolescents but playing like toddlers, these 11-year-olds are suspended between two worlds. Watching them, one thought occurs - honey, we’ve shrunk childhood.

Computer literate, fashion-conscious, wealthier and more worldly-wise than their parents, today’s children are subject to more choice and arguably more pressure than any previous generation. They live accelerated lives, as milestones - physical, emotional and social - are passed at younger ages. They have more rights, more say and more possessions than their parents, but they have less freedom and independence. Is the price they are paying for their new-found status too high?

The answer, according to Richard Louv, an American author who has just published Last Child in the Woods: Nature-Deficit Disorder, is yes. An essential element of childhood, he argues, involves playing in woods and fields, mucking about on ponds and riding bikes through the countryside. An entire body of literature, from Swallows and Amazons to The Famous Five has taken children’s relationship with nature for granted. Louv believes cultural changes in the last 20 years - such as the technology boom, the emphasis on academic attainment and parental paranoia - are leading to what he calls the “first denatured generation”.

“Never before have kids in western culture been so separated from nature,” says Louv, speaking from a Denver hotel room where he is on tour to promote his book. “Kids watch lots of nature programmes on television. They can tell you all about the rainforest, but they no longer have the hands dirty and feet wet type of contact with nature, which their parents and grandparents had. This is happening at the very moment that we are discovering that contact with nature may be essential for healthy childhood development. Studies done over the last eight years show that adults, as well as children, get important stress reduction from contact with nature.”

Louv says children now present to doctors, “not with broken limbs sustained from falling out of trees, but with repetitive stress injuries from playing too many computer games”. When children do play outside, it is in sanitised play parks with bark chips under their feet, a fence round them and adults hovering on the sidelines. “We are in danger of criminalising outdoor play,” he says.

In Britain, snowball fights, conkers, marbles and skipping have been banned in some schools because of fears for children’s health and safety. If parents turn up at accident and emergency on three or more occasions with a child who has bruising or broken bones, they risk an investigation by social services. Critics warn that we are in danger of breeding a generation of mollycoddled wimps.

But like so many of the changes to childhood, the decline in unstructured outdoor play has been driven not so much by children’s changing tastes, as by adult fears. “Parents are essentially worried about abduction,” says Louv. “They see stranger-danger as the biggest threat. The irony is that in the United States, the number of abductions of children has actually been going down for at least a decade. Having said that, I am a parent of a 17-year-old and a 23-year-old and I certainly felt that fear.”

A recent survey of 1,400 children for the children’s charity, 4Children, showed that, while more than 50 per cent of children rated an open space in which to play as the most important feature of their neighbourhood, only 44 per cent ever played outdoors.

But perhaps parents are right to be paranoid. In Britain, abductions and attempted abduction of children rose by 45 per cent to 864 in the 12 months to April 2003. Half of these involved attacks by strangers. Actual abductions remain extremely rare, however. In 2002-3, 68 children were abducted by strangers. Parents, however, remain extremely fearful that if they allow their children out unsupervised, they will come to harm. Research by the Policy Studies Institute indicates that, while 80 per cent of eight-year-olds were allowed to walk to school without an adult in 1971, that figure had fallen to nine per cent by 1990.

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent and author of Paranoid Parenting, says the biggest change to have occurred in childhood over the past generation is the way children are perceived by society. “Children are increasingly defined by their vulnerability. The implication is that children lack the resources to cope with life. Adults have decided to insulate children from life-experiences.

“Everything, from the food children eat to the games they play, is now viewed from the position of risk. The more you regard children as being an endangered species, the more you regard the threats out there as being impossible to deal with. Threats to children are now considered both routine and extreme.”

At The Museum of Childhood in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, the concept of childhood is frozen in an aspic of Corgi toys and old dolls houses. But the consensus among the visitors is that children today have a harder time than their parents or grandparents had. Linda, from Nairn, feels that there are increased dangers. “I read recently about a child who was abducted from her garden. It really makes you think.” Andrea, from Edinburgh, feels that the days of children heading out to play on their own all day are gone for good. “When I was growing up, all the kids in the neighbourhood played together in a gang. These days there aren’t the spaces in the city for kids to play outdoors.”

But if children have less freedom than their parents, they have much more in the way of material goods. The average cost of raising a child in Scotland is estimated to be £6,638 a year. By the time they graduate from university, £140,000 will have been spent on them, according to the Liverpool Victoria Friendly Society. The typical ten-year-old’s birthday costs £270, and the average amount of pocket money for children aged 12 to 16 is currently £9.82 a week. Pocket money has risen by more than four times the rate of inflation in the last year, according to The Halifax.

Andrea believes that children’s toys today leave little to the imagination. “All they do is sit in front of a screen,” she says. “And kids today expect so much more. When I was growing up you got one big present at Christmas. Now they get five or six big things.”

Juliet Schor, an American academic whose book Born To Buy examines the relationship between children and marketing, believes consumerism is consuming our children. “Children,” says Schor, “have become conduits from the consumer marketplace to the household, the link between advertisers and the family purse.” A 1997 study found that 70 per cent of parents were susceptible to pester power. One-quarter of children aged seven to ten now own their own mobile phone, and sales to youngsters are the fastest growing sector of the market. More than 50 per cent of primary school children in Scotland have an e-mail address. But the backlash against the consumer culture has already started. Next year, the British pop-psychiatrist Oliver James brings out his book Affluenza. His thesis is that materialism and over-consumption have wrecked havoc with our mental well-being.

Researchers at the University of London have found that the number of children and teenagers on antidepressants has been increasing year on year. Of the nine countries studied, the increase has been highest in Britain, where the number of under-18s taking antidepressants now stands at around 60,000. Furedi says the growth in unhappy children is in part due to the fact that they are absorbing their parent’s anxieties.

“Kids are still kids, but they are conscious of their parents’ view of the world. It’s not uncommon to hear nine year-olds talking about being ‘stressed out’. Children aspire to be adults and that is good. It’s an important part of their development. But we want to make them more dependent. We are afraid to let them stand on their own two feet.”

Affluenza-style books already abound in the US, where statistics show that parents spend seven times as long shopping as being with their children. Connie Dawson and David Bredehoft, the authors of How Much is Enough?: Everything You Need to Know to Steer Clear of Overindulgence and Raise Likeable, Responsible and Respectful Children say overindulgence has hit every social group, not just the Beckhams and Osbournes.

“It happens when a mother offers the breast to a baby every time he squeals,” say Dawson and Bredehof. “It happens when a three-year-old gets what she wants when she wants it.” Older children, who are exempted from chores, and young adults who live a carefree life at home waited on by their mothers, all suffer from overindulgence, the authors claim. “It’s not just children pressuring parents; it’s other parents pressurising parents. Society likes overindulgence.”

That overindulgence can take some destructive forms. An Edinburgh University study of 7,000 Scottish pupils last year found that 34 per cent of 15-year-olds and 13 per cent of 13-year-olds were drinking on a weekly basis.

But if children’s entry into the adult world is happening faster than at any time since we stopped sending small boys up chimneys, it may in part be because children are physically growing up earlier. In the last century, the average age of the menarche has fallen from 14 years to 12.5 years.

Many of today’s children also experience more emotional upheaval at earlier ages. One-quarter of dependent children in Britain live in lone-parent families, almost twice the proportion in 1981. According to the Economic and Social Research Council, 70 per cent of children today have working mothers, compared with 53 per cent in 1980. “As relationships between adults become more fragile, parents make a bigger emotional investment in their children,” says Furedi. “If a woman knows her husband or boyfriend will leave her, she looks to her children to fill an emotional gap.”

Back at the Museum of Childhood, Linda believes that even in two-parent families, the pressure is intense. “In lots of families, both parents work, and when they do get time with the children, they are tired.”

Since the 1950s, there has been a growing sense of the erosion or disappearance of childhood. Social change, which a century earlier might have been interpreted as progress has, since the Second World War, been interpreted by many religious and political groups as a threat to the sanctity of the family and the innocence of childhood. The trend accelerated in the 1980s with a body of literature, by authors such as Neil Postman and Marie Winn, which suggested that children were entering a new Dark Age. They predicted that childhood, as a separate time in life, free from the worries, expectations and responsibilities of adulthood, was coming to an end.

David Buckingham, professor of education at London University’s School of Culture, Language and Communication, says: “There is a popular argument which suggests that children in the past didn’t have access to adult secrets and that they have now been exposed to adult knowledge through sexual content in the media,” he says. “While boundaries between adulthood and childhood are blurring, this theory plays into a rather melodramatic view of how the world is changing. A lot of the arguments are overstated. Children always knew about sex, but in the past the fact that they knew was not apparent to adults. Now adults know that children know. It’s about adult awareness not the fact that children have gone from a state of pristine innocence to a state of complete knowledge. The interesting point is not about the sexualisation of children per se, but about the fact that responsibility is being placed on children at a younger age to make decisions about their lives.

“In an age when there is no longer a clear moral code and where many more things are tolerated, the responsibility for working out how you want to live your life is something that children are having to confront much more on their own. Children have a great deal more choice but in some ways they also have a burden of choice. What I don’t buy into is the idea that children have been prematurely dragged into adulthood and that this is damaging for them. People increasingly talk about children’s rights and about children being consulted. So even if that blurring of boundaries is happening, and it is in certain areas, then it is a positive development. Children are increasingly being seen as citizens with rights.”

Furedi, too, believes children are much more robust than we often believe. “I think kids are really good at coping,” he says. “They are much better than adults in many ways.”

Buckingham points out that, despite adults’ fears, parents remain the most important influence in children’s lives. In a recent 4Children survey, 70 per cent said the person they most admired was their mother, while 62 per cent said the person they admired second most was their father.

“Dialogue between parents and children is as important as it ever was,” says Buckingham. “What is changing is child rearing. That is due in part to the changing structure of the family. In single-parent families, children are involved, by necessity, in decision-making at a much younger age, so they have more power. But even the traditional nuclear family is moving away from an authoritarian style of parenting towards a style of parenting which involves much more consultation with children.

“Parents want to arrive at consensus through debate, not through imposing a strict set of moral values. This places more of a burden on children, but it also makes it harder for parents. It’s much harder to negotiate than to just lay down the law. There are material changes in family life, particularly as people have fewer children, but also as they become more affluent. Children do have more power within the family, not least as consumers. Kids are growing up in a much more complex world, but I don’t think you can interpret it as parents losing control or abandoning their role.”

It could be argued that, rather than childhood disappearing, what are actually disappearing are children themselves. In Scotland only 22 per cent of households contain dependent children. In 2002, the Scottish birth rate fell to the lowest level since records began in 1855. But having fewer children means valuing them more as individuals. In the last 50 years, parenting has developed to include paying attention to children’s psychic and emotional needs as opposed to simply their material wants.

Back in Bridge of Allan, the disco is underway. The girls are ordering soft drinks and comparing body jewellery. The boys are refusing to dance. Then, suddenly, the party takes off as everyone starts to do Crazy Frog impersonations. We may have shrunk childhood but it still seems to fit.

First published by The Scotsman, 23 July 2005

Who knows best - mother, or TV?
by Judith Woods

I was recently bemoaning to a fellow parent that my three-year-old daughter was going through a phase of refusing to go to bed. I had barely finished the sentence when my friend scuttled off, purposefully. I presumed she had gone to fetch a stiff gin and tonic, but no. She returned, triumphant, waving a book.

“This has got the perfect strategy for that kind of flashpoint situation; it’s just what you need,” she said, with evangelical zeal. “It’s the spin-off from the television series Little Angels and it’s a revelation.” I mumbled that I had actually intended just muddling through, as always. But it seems I was wrong.

Without proper guidance, and possibly a clinical psychologist staked out in the spare bedroom, wearing a headset and barking commands in my ear, I would be lucky if I didn’t destroy my marriage, shatter my mental health and turn my bright toddler into a pint-sized sociopath.

Given the recent plethora of television series, such as Bad Behaviour, Who Rules the Roost?, The House of Tiny Tearaways, Driving Mum and Dad Mad and Supernanny, how dare, I, a mere mother, have the temerity to suggest I might know best? More important, how could my daughter possibly survive her formative years without a “naughty step”, hours of “controlled crying” and a welter of other tortures?

One moment in the aforementioned Little Angels is etched on my maternal soul. A mother quietly announced: “I feel stupid.” No one chipped in to disagree. It was excruciating to watch.

“Modern parenting programmes are based on a prior assumption of parental incompetence, and that parents are too stupid to handle child-rearing on their own,” says Prof Frank Furedi, of the University of Canterbury’s sociology department. “From the beginning, there’s a very poisonous, corrosive atmosphere, where mothers and fathers are treated like inferior amateurs compared to ‘experts’ with ‘special skills’.”

Furedi, author of Paranoid Parenting, points out that parenting programmes may purport to be useful - educational, even - but they are first and foremost entertainment. And exploitative entertainment at that. “If you really want to help people who are having problems with their children, then you don’t do it in front of a camera,” he says. “The self-aggrandising experts place themselves at the centre of things and relegate the parents to the role of audience.”

This summer sees the launch of a new ITV series, Baby House, in which six women in the final stages of pregnancy and their partners move into a Big Brother-style house and have their every anxious move filmed. We will see them preparing for the birth and possibly having curry and sex to precipitate the first contractions.

Then they will bring their newborns “home” and endure sleepless nights and leaking nipples in front of the cameras. Why anyone would want to expose such an intimate chapter in their lives to prying lenses utterly defeats me. Yet there’s worse to come. Oh, yes. A new programme has just gone into production for BBC Three. It’s called Honey, We’re Killing the Kids. Really.

Using Larkin’s premise that “they f--- you up, your mum and dad”, this “groundbreaking” series aims to create detailed pictures of how a group of children will turn out in 20 years’ time, and to demonstrate what useless parents they have. “Many of the children are found to be unhealthy, unhappy underachievers - and it’s all their parents’ fault!” crows the press release.

The programme uses data compiled from scientific and medical tests, together with state-of-the-art graphics technology to create a detailed profile of how each child will look and behave. Then a government health adviser-cum-child psychologist will lay down new guidelines for them (the parents) to follow, on everything from diet to sleep and leisure activities, in order to save themselves before it’s too late.

Presumably, television producers will soon be snatching off the streets any child spotted eating a bag of chips (abuse!) and whisking them off to the BBC studios at White City to bring them up properly. At licence payers’ expense.

But how on earth did all this happen? We British traditionally hate being told what to do. We thumb our noses at outside interference, and cavil at European attempts to change our way of life. Yet, in recent years, we have grown shamefully supine in the face of an army of self-styled television experts.

They sneer at our interior decor and castigate us for our household hygiene. They poke fun at the partners we choose and humiliate us over the way we dress. And now the schedules are awash with programmes highlighting our appalling inadequacies as parents. The human drama of these shows is exhausting to behold; semi-feral boys running wild at mealtimes, Violet Elizabeths who screech for attention, tiny despots whose rule of misery beggars belief. Yes, of course their distraught parents need help, but is the result informative and enlightening, or simply car-crash television?

“Parenting programmes have little behavioural impact on people,” says chartered psychologist Jack Boyle. “They are simply the sort of facile entertainment that people seem to want these days. You don’t become a better or worse parent because you’re watching one, and how a child turns out in life depends far more on its genes than its parents’ childrearing techniques. Parents shouldn’t feel bad about themselves, most of them do a pretty reasonable job.”

Sasha Nicholas, 40, mother of three boys aged two, three and five, admits that she is hooked on such programmes. “I’m just fascinated to see how hideously behaved the children are. It makes me feel so much better when my lot are kicking off, to know that they aren’t a patch on the spoilt little horrors that are featured on television.”

It’s hard not to conclude that some sort of open season hasn’t been declared on parents, as we are lambasted for not giving our children the right sort of play and told that our “poor baby-settling routines” are to blame for our exhaustion.

But according to a provocative new book, just published in the United States, parents are all too easily manipulated by experts. A fascinating polemic, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, examines what makes a perfect parent.

The writer, Steven Levitt, draws on a wide range of research into educational achievement to conclude that nature far outweighs nurture in determining a child’s destiny: children turn out the way they do, not because of what the parents do, but who the parents are. “Here is the conundrum: by the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late,” he says. “For parents - and parenting experts - who are obsessed with child-rearing techniques, this may be sobering news. The reality is that technique looks to be highly overrated.

“Parents who are well educated, successful and healthy tend to have children who test well at school; it doesn’t seem to matter whether those children are trotted off to museums, or spanked, or frequently read to, or plopped in front of the television.”

Yet parents on both sides of the Atlantic now find themselves continually bombarded with diktats on how to bring up their offspring.

In Washington, business is booming at the Parent Coaching Institute, and the Parent Coaching Company charges £125 for six weekly sessions designed to “MoT your parenting style”. No wonder first-time parents in particular can find their confidence undermined.

“Fear is a major component of the act of parenting,” observes Levitt. “No one is more susceptible to an expert’s fear-mongering than a parent.”

But out-and-out despair is every bit as potent a driving force as fear. According to Laura Mansfield, executive producer of the BBC’s The House of Tiny Tearaways, more than 1,000 people responded to an advertising campaign for volunteers. In the series, families come and live in the Tiny Tearaways’ house for a week, where the behaviour of both adults and children is carefully monitored via secret cameras.

“You have to be pretty desperate to pick up the phone and say: ‘I want to come and spend a week of my life trying to sort out my kids’,” says Mansfield. “There’s a huge demand out there for sources of help. People don’t know where to find the help they need.”

But television exposure is not to every expert’s taste. Gina Ford is the de facto godmother of modern parenting manuals. Her famously prescriptive bestseller, The Contented Little Baby Book, has sold millions and been translated into languages as diverse as Dutch, Hebrew and Taiwanese.

Six books later, she has just completed The Gina Ford Baby and Toddler Cookbook. Yet she has steered clear of television; the current vogue for high-octane confrontation doesn’t chime with her robustly traditional values. “I don’t watch parenting programmes, although I’ve glimpsed at some of them. I’m not into reality TV,” she says. “If I ever found a production company that would not try to sensationalise and sex up my work, I would go on television. But it would need to be a serious documentary.”

A serious documentary might perhaps be going a little far in the opposite direction. I do, however, believe I can offer a compromise solution: an idea for a brilliant new parenting programme.

It’s radical, not to say revolutionary, in its approach. It’s bound to strike a chord with millions. Its title? Just Muddling Through. I shall sit and wait for Channel 4 to ring.

First published by The Daily Telegraph, 15 June 2005

Out of sight, out of mind
by Chris Arnot

Professor Steve Fuller has a voice powerful enough to reach the back row of any lecture hall. He is using it to good effect this afternoon, expounding at full volume his ideas on intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic and, indeed, the Channel. What the other denizens of the Pumpkin cafe at Coventry station make of all this is difficult to gauge. One is reading Glamour magazine; another is staring into space while clutching a bottle of Budweiser.

The professor is catching the 4.50 to Euston and then a plane to his native US. He is to be quizzed by students and academics in Chicago on his new book, The Intellectual. But he will be back well in time for next Monday’s debate at Warwick University, where he is a professor of sociology. Fuller will be opposing the motion, to be put forward by Professor Frank Furedi from Kent University, another sociologist, that the intellectual is an endangered species.

Furedi is the author of Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? There is no shortage of big issues for them to tackle, he argues, citing global warming and stem-cell research. But he says there is a dearth of academics prepared to put forward complex and controversial arguments. “Public debates are generated by market researchers or thinktanks. Every week I get asked by someone in the media to comment on a narrow, anecdotal issue and that’s what drives it.

“As a result, intellectuals have become very defensive. They don’t take themselves seriously because they don’t want to come across as know-it-alls. A false, anti-elitist sentiment has sprung up at a time when, paradoxically, there have never been so many bookshops.”

Never so many people in higher education, either. Furedi talks about what he calls “the McDonaldisation” of knowledge - the way in which universities have had to reorganise themselves to “encourage predictable, bite-sized knowledge that can be digested by other sections of society”.

Is he suggesting, then, that scholars should remain cloistered in academia, holding conversations only with each other? “No,” he insists. “I’m a great believer in reaching out. We should be challenging ourselves, our students and the wider world. Instead we’re giving out more and more degrees while flattering the public, as if they were children, instead of drawing them into challenging dialogues.”

If Furedi and Fuller agree on one thing, though, it is that UK universities have become infertile ground for the sowing of ideas across a range of subjects. Even Fuller admits that “the way that academics are rewarded discourages participation in mainstream intellectual life. Increasing numbers are on short-term contracts. They don’t have the luxury of being able to speak across disciplines because they’re too busy proving themselves in their own discipline.”

He believes there is still a wider public in this country that academics could engage with. “Academic life is not the same as intellectual life,” he argues. “I’d say that you can’t have an intellectual life unless it’s in the public domain. Unlike Frank, I don’t believe that dumbing down is a problem.”

Surprisingly, considering concerns about how science is taught and how it is conveyed in a press dominated by arts graduates, Fuller believes the British public is knowledgeable about the subject ("compared to the United States, anyway"). This country has a bigger per capita readership of popular science books than anywhere in the world, he points out. What’s more, Richard Dawkins is the No 1 intellectual with the public, according to a survey in Prospect magazine.

But surely intellectuals are not re­garded as highly in Britain as they are in France, say. “Unlike the French,” Fuller concedes, “we don’t have sections of our broadsheet newspapers put aside for major intellectual discussion. The nearest thing we have to it are the review sections in the nationals. But it’s worth remembering that, during the Thatcher era, a lot of young academics found it difficult to find work in universities, so they went into the media instead.”

One or two found their media niche BT (before Thatcher). Professor Laurie Taylor, for instance, had established himself as a BBC talking head when he was still a comparatively youthful professor of sociology at York University. Today he presents Thinking Aloud on Radio 4, where he recently asked listeners to define an intellectual.

“I quite liked the notion that he or she was someone who goes to the library even when it’s not raining,” he says now. “Even better was the suggestion that an intellectual was one so preoccupied with great thoughts that he or she could walk into a kitchen at a party, spot a tea cosy and resist the urge to wear it like a hat.”

All of which suggests Taylor is not too worried by Furedi’s argument on the decline of intellectual life in the UK. But he adds: “Some of the ways that government is attempting to manage universities are absurd. Academics are forced to produce papers that will never be read by anyone in order to keep themselves in a job. Still, I think Frank has a slightly romantic idea about what universities were like before the era of research assessment targets. I’m not sure senior common rooms were full of people debating Kant and Kierkegaard. In my experience, they were more likely to be discussing how their geraniums were faring.”

Taylor did, however, meet with some raised eyebrows in the common room after his first BBC broadcast in the 1970s. “Somebody said to me on the Monday morning: ‘Why didn’t you mention Max Weber?’ - as though, by failing to mention a key figure in second-year coursework, I was somehow guilty of appalling philistinism. When I did a phone-in programme, I remember telling one of my academic colleagues that it was an exercise in counter-hegemonic discourse.”

Back at Coventry, Fuller is proclaiming: “It is the burden of an intellectual to make his or her ideas matter. He or she should be out there in the public domain, fighting their corner and rebutting argument. That’s the stuff of intellectual life. You’re not throwing it out like a message in a bottle.”

First published by The Education Guardian, 10 May 2005

Your child in their sights
by Gillian Bowditch

SHOP TILL YOU drop! - the cheerful, self-indulgent exhortation of Gucci-shod, Prada-clad women everywhere has taken on a sinister connotation. According to a new book by the American author and academic Juliet Schor, Born to Buy, consumerism is consuming our children, turning them into pasty-faced, stunted, miserable versions of the carefree spirits we want them to be.

Depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, psychosomatic complaints and obesity are almost as closely associated with childhood as Barbie, Game Boys and Happy Meals. But according to Schor’s controversial book, the latter is actually causing the former. Children, she believes, are now the main targets of an avaricious and amoral marketing industry which puts profit before everything.

The targeting of children by multi-nationals is a political issue in Britain, too, but so far it is only the food manufacturers facing the music. Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, announced last week that a third Labour government would “legislate to ensure children are not bombarded by junk food advertising when they are watching television”. Junk food advertisements may have had their chips, but, according to Schor, it shouldn’t stop there.

“By 18 months babies can recognise logos,” says Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College. “By two they ask for products by their brand name. During their nursery-school years, children will request an average of 25 products a day. By the time they enter primary school, the average child can identify 200 logos and children between the ages of six and 12 spend more time shopping than reading, attending youth groups, playing outdoors or spending time in household conversation.”

The children she describes are American, but it is not hard to envisage their British counterparts toddling behind them in Nike trainers. Jamie’s Dinners, the recent Channel 4 series which prompted Kelly’s pledge to ban junk-food advertising, showed a class of primary school children who could all identify Domino’s Pizza, McDonald’s and Burger King but did not recognise rhubarb, asparagus or leeks. Advertisers are using ever more sophisticated techniques to reach children, by-passing parents altogether and subtly sending out the message that adults are killjoys who should be ignored.

“Children,” says Schor, “have become conduits from the consumer marketplace to the household, the link between advertisers and the family purse.” Not surprising, perhaps, as a 1997 study showed that 70 per cent of parents were susceptible to pester power with children admitting to asking for a product up to 50 times before their parents gave in.

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, says it is a huge issue for parents. “As a parent, I recognise that advertisers have a very powerful influence on children. If a stranger knocked on your door and said he wanted to come in and talk to your children, you’d tell him to go away. But that is precisely what is happening to children when they watch television. It’s a huge challenge for parents. There are all these strangers out there who want to get at your children in order to get at you.”

“Contemporary American ‘tweens’ and teens have emerged as the most brand- orientated, consumer-involved, and materialistic generation in history,” says Schor. “At the same time, evidence of distress among children has been mounting. Rates of obesity are at epidemic levels. Diagnoses of attention- deficit disorder have risen dramatically and record numbers of kids are taking drugs to help them achieve self-control and focus.

By the end of her study Schor has concluded that: “Involvement in consumer culture causes dysfunction in the forms of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and psychosomatic complaints.”

IT’S A HUGE leap to make and one which is not entirely justified by the research, but before she gets there, Schor takes a stroll down Madison Avenue to interview the alpha males and females of the advertising industry. What they have to say would induce depression and anxiety in an eternal optimist.

The language is the language of war. Children are “targets”. Printed matter is “collaterals”. Impromptu interviews with consumers are “intercepts”. Advertisers spoke to Schor of “turning kids into users” and of “sending out a virus”. Nancy Shelek, president of the Shelek Agency, says: “Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, you’re a loser. Kids are very sensitive to that. You open up emotional vulnerabilities and it’s very easy to do that with kids because they are the most vulnerable.”

This can lead to some very miserable children. “In 6th grade all my friends basically dumped me because other people gave them grief about the uncool state of me and my clothes,” says Amanda, who is now 17. One advertising executive heavily involved in tween marketing, puts it this way. “I am doing the most horrible thing in the world. We are targeting kids too young with too many inappropriate things. It’s not worth the almighty buck.” Bucking the buck is another matter, however. Youth spending in America has almost doubled to $170 million (£91 million) in the last ten years.

Greg Philo, Professor of Communication at Glasgow University, says the pressure on both parents and children is immense and it is causing a great deal of unhappiness. “The message children are being given is that their status is inexorably linked with what they buy and what they wear. It causes a huge amount of conflict and misery. Working parents who feel guilty about not spending time with their children, compensate by buying them what they want. The whole of our society is predicated on buying. There is a huge amount of guilt involved.”

Schor is at her best when revealing the advertising industry’s trade secrets. One of the hottest trends in youth marketing is age compression, using marketing messages originally designed for older children and targeting them at younger children. Abercrombie & Fitch, the clothing retailer, sells thongs with sexually-suggestive phrases for children as young as seven.

Duel marketing is used to sell children one image of a company and their parents another. Think about the recent McDonald’s advertisements where parents are reassured by the idea of carrot sticks and yoghurt but the children are still targeted with burgers, chicken nuggets and toys.

‘Trans-toying’, where everyday objects are turned into toys - toothbrushes with characters, shampoo bottles whose tops are cartoon figures, sticking plasters made to look like tattoos and scratch and sniff jeans or socks - is another big trend in the US which is beginning to take hold in the UK. It may seem innocent enough, but child development experts worry that if every item becomes a toy, there is little space for imagination.

“If all children’s experiences are geared towards excitement, surprise and thrills, they may not experience that happiness and well-being are mainly gained through an appreciation of the quotidian,” says Schor. Harvard psychologist Susan Linn goes further. “Marketers would have us believe that the purpose of food is to play with it. Isn’t that an obscene value when there are people in the world who are starving?”

FUREDI AGREES THAT children are being more aggressively targeted by advertisers, but he also perceives another trend at work. “We are living in a society which finds it very hard to make a distinction between children and adults,” he says. “Look at cross-over films. It’s not unusual to see adults without children going to see films such as Shrek II. The Harry Potter series has been published with adult covers. A third of MTV’s viewers are adults.”

Schor, whose previous books include The Overworked American and The Overspent American, is part of a recent backlash against the traditional American Dream. She has helped to set up www.newdream.org aimed at more responsible and ecologically sustainable consumerism. Her research certainly gives ammunition to those who, like her, want advertising to children banned.

In Britain a groundswell of opinion for banning junk food advertising has been spear-headed by Jamie Oliver: “I’d ban it,” he says. “I’ve told Sainsbury’s. If they wanted me to make an ad for pre-packed foods, I wouldn’t do it. Kids are very brand aware.”

But those seeking a panacea in the ban of junk-food advertising need to be realistic. “In Sweden advertising to children has been banned ever since commercial television began there, but 18 per cent of Swedish children are overweight - much the same as in Britain,” says Winston Fletcher, who chairs the Advertising Standards Board of Finance and is a director of advertising agency DLKW. “Advertising to children was banned in Quebec more than 20 years ago, but 28 per cent of children in the province are overweight - about the same as in the rest of Canada where advertising to children has always been permitted.”

“There may be other forces at work,” says Philo. “But Swedish parents are certainly very appreciative of the ban, especially as far as toys are concerned.”

While it is impossible not to be shocked by many of Schor’s findings, there is an element of junk science in her work. Her conclusion that “consumerism is a significant cause of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and psychosomatic complaints” is based on interviews with 300 children using a questionnaire she devised. Her views may have some validity, but they would not pass muster in the medical world where double blind trials are standard and where researchers are very careful to correct studies for factors which could skew the conclusions.

SCHOR, WHO HAS brought her own two children up in a largely television-free environment, does not acknowledge the importance of the retail sector to the American economy or the benefits America has gained from consumerism, free markets and a low level approach to business regulation. She deals with liberal objections to banning advertisements in a page-and-a-half, arguing that consumption is not a matter of purely personal choice but a thoroughly social activity, where what one person buys and consumes affects other people’s choices. How else can one explain the popularity of Nike trainers or the fad for sun-dried tomatoes, she asks. Taken to its logical conclusion, it is a prescription for restricting personal choice.

Professor Furedi says: “It’s a very ambiguous area. Everybody targets children, not just advertisers. Government anti-smoking campaigns, drink and drug campaigns are all directed at children who are perceived as soft targets. But we are living in a society where this is happening all the time and it is part of our job as parents to help kids understand what they see on television. We have to teach children that most of the things they see in the advertisements are lies. But we mustn’t have double standards, we should teach them to question everything that is targeted at them, government campaigns included. It’s a good lesson to learn at a very early age.”

Despite his distaste for advertising aimed at children, Furedi is against banning it. “We need to equip our kids to deal with these advertisements. Children have to learn to live in the real world.”

He also takes issue with Schor’s conclusion that consumerism and too much television are the causes of depression and anxiety in children.

“Anything children do to excess is a problem,” says Furedi. “If they spend three hours a day looking at the sky, that can be a problem. But that is to do with the way that we parent. Parents can restrict television viewing to half-an-hour a day if they want. They can refuse to buy certain foods. What Schor is doing is confusing the failure of parenting with the technological issues. There is no point blaming the goods or the technology if the problem is with the parenting.”

The solution, says Furedi, is to change parenting culture. Parents need to get back in control and set some boundaries. You don’t have to give children television in their bedrooms, he says. “Yes, children are being targeted by advertisers and that is not good, but it is not just one sector that is targeting children. This is part of a much broader problem.”

Philo is passionately in favour of a ban and has argued for one before Westminster MPs. “It is a huge issue for parents. Family life is made extremely difficult by the way children are bombarded with advertising. It is causing a great deal of pressure and unhappiness. I think we should dump Christmas, too. It is just an orgy of consumerism, and instead give the money to people who need it. But it is not just about banning advertisements to children, we need to think about the kind of society we want to live in and the values we want our children to grow up with. That is the debate we need to be having.”

“The worlds of adults and children are merging,” says Schor. “In my mind, that’s mainly a good thing. But the commercial aspects of that integration are not working for children. The prevalence of harmful and addictive products, the imperative to keep up and the growth of materialist attitudes are harming kids. If we are honest with ourselves, adults will admit that we are suffering from many of the same influences.”

First published by The Scotsman, 28 March 2005

Parental Guidance
by Alan Crawford

DOES fish oil help with your child’s behaviour problems? Do you opt for gloves or bandages to stop your five-year-old sucking his thumb? And where do you stand on “injecting silly humour and fun into every day home life” to relieve family tension? (Try serving dessert first at dinner time “just to see the looks of shock and glee on their faces”.)

Just an average day’s postings on one of an avalanche of practical parenting websites set up to help with what should be our most basic human function: looking after our children. It’s not just an internet phenomenon. Just take a look at the newsagent shelves – packed with all sorts of parental-help periodicals vying to play on your paranoia.

A brief browse on the bookshelves reveals the same trend. Guides such as The Pocket Parent; Positive Discipline For Preschoolers; Positive Discipline A-Z; Easy To Love, Difficult To Discipline; How To Talk So Kids Will Listen And Listen So Kids Will Talk; or how about Raising Children Who Are Responsible, Respectful And Resourceful? It makes them sound like they are chimps, not kids.

The parenting industry, as it has been styled, reaches it apotheosis in Supernanny, a television show aired last summer on Channel 4 and due to return later this year. The book of the show, published by Hodder and Stoughton, is out in just over a week.

Supernanny’s big idea is to send a 34-year-old childless expert on parenting, Jo Frost, to join a family on the edge of a collective nervous breakdown. With the help of some good, old-fashioned authoritarian discipline, she restores peace and calm to the household.

Whether or not you agree with Frost’s solutions – the “naughty step” where mischievous children are sent to brood over their misbehaviour being one of them – is neither here nor there. Six million-plus viewers for the first series suggests Supernanny is on to something. US network ABC bought the show and reeled in 30 million viewers, give or take a million mumbling wrecks of parents, proving that it’s not just Brits who feel they are out of sync with their children.

Can we have really regressed so far that we no longer know how to raise our kids?

Take this everyday parental situation. My daughter Freya turned two a few weeks back, so we organised a party and invited 15 or so of her little friends around for juice and sweeties. All was sweetness and light as children toddled around and poked each other with curiosity – all except one little man, who snatched at everyone’s jelly, bawled and stomped on various tots’ heads before squeezing himself into a play tunnel and refusing to come out. Humdrum temper tantrum or potential nutcase in need of specialist therapy? Have children really become more difficult? Have parents really become less able to cope?

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University and author of Paranoid Parenting, argues the “so-called parenting industry” perpetuates the feeling that every issue, from how to toilet train a child to whether to force them to eat their greens, leads to a sense among parents of being “overwhelmed by the sheer scale of troublesome issues” confronting them. He talks as a result of a “crisis of parental nerve”, which manifests itself most clearly in irrational fears over children’s safety.

“There seems to be a fairly poisonous parenting culture whereby mothers and fathers are continually told that whatever happens to their children is a consequence of the quality of parenting. We as parents are continually told that the most everyday, routine aspects of child-rearing are very complicated. We now have books that tell you how to smile at your child, classes on how to hold and cuddle your child; it’s almost as if you need a PhD in psychological development if you want to be a good parent.”

Yet parenting experts have no greater understanding of your child’s needs than you do, and formulaic advice is unlikely to work in your specific circumstances. According to Furedi, “horrific” programmes such as Supernanny are just part of a growing genre designed to disempower people.

“They’re telling people that they’re too stupid to be able to go shopping on their own and they need someone to go shopping with them; they’re too stupid to decorate their houses and need somebody to makeover their house; they’re too stupid to cook for themselves or get cosmetic products for themselves. Similarly they’re too thick to bring up their children, and these wonderful individuals have the skills. But when you talk to these wonderful individuals with incredible skills, you find they’re either people with just a bit of common sense or alternatively they’re fraudulent individuals who prey on our anxieties.”

The ubiquitous Jo Frost made an appearance yesterday at the Baby Show in Glasgow’s SECC. In among stands for products such as Totseat – “the washable, squashable highchair” – and competitions including “Could your baby be a model baby?”, Frost gave a talk on “The Five Golden Rules of Toddler Taming”.

Frost has claimed her success is down to a gift for connecting with kids on their own level. After 15 years of “trouble-shooting nannying”, she has, her publicist tells us, honed her methods of child-rearing to cope with all sorts of “child-rearing challenges”, from potty training and sibling rivalry to sleep issues and tantrums. And all this without one of her own?

“Ultra-strict” Frost said recently that her secret is to help put parents back in control. “Parents have asked, ‘How do you have an understanding of this when you have no children?’ Maybe I just do and that’s how it is. It all comes from my personality and what I believe in.”

One of her fellow panelists in the subsequent discussion at the SECC was Linda Russell, co-founder of Parenting Together, a new group aimed at meeting the needs of modern-day parents.

Russell, a nursery nurse with three children who runs the “Parent Coaching Studio” in Edinburgh, provides a dedicated one-to-one service to iron out any family problems or uncertainties from birth to adolescence in the family home.

She maintains that parenting today is far more challenging than at any time in the past, with unrealistically high expectations leading to parents who are “confused rather than in crisis”.

“We don’t live in communities now where we have mum and dad and Aunty Betty down the road. Therefore accessing hands-on help and information that would have naturally passed down through the generations doesn’t happen any more.”

Other factors include the proliferation of computers and televisions, meaning that sitting down to read a story to your child doesn’t happen as often as it used to. The modern child tends to be taken to supervised clubs rather than playing with friends at home. The result, says Russell, is that a lot of parenting is done by people other than a child’s parents.

“Whereas before, parents would rely on their own skills to bring up their children, we’re relying now more and more on outside help. More and more parents both need to work to continue the lifestyle they’re used to, so children are brought up in nurseries.”

Russell is not willing to draw any conclusions from this arrangement. She is adamant she and her colleague are never critical of parents, since they have “a very rough time now”.

Russell may not be willing to say so but some experts believe there is a more serious side to all this. Might the changing nature of parenthood, with more working parents spending less time at home with their children, be contributing to behaviour problems? Might we be spawning plagues of feral kids?

Some fans of Jo Frost, whose programme was mentioned in both Houses of Parliament last July, on both occasions by Conservatives in relation to anti-social behaviour, seem to think so. Peter Luff, Tory member for Mid-Worcestershire, commended to the Leader of the House this “marvellous superhero”, Jo Frost, “whose wonderful combination of old-fashioned discipline in a modern context … is doing more to be tough on the causes of antisocial behaviour in families up and down the land than the government have done in seven years”.

His theme was taken up in the Lords by Lord Lucas of Crudwell and Dingwall, who urged the noble members to watch this “most extraordinary programme” and called for local authorities to emulate Frost’s approach to help tackle antisocial behaviour.

Yet, while there is anecdotal evidence of worsening behaviour among young children, there are few statistics to back it up. Scottish Executive figures for the six years leading up to 2003/4 show little change in exclusions in primary schools; in fact, there has been a slight fall since 1999.

This is not to dismiss any problems. Each year, some 30,000 children are referred to the children’s hearings system, and about 9000 under-16s run away from home.

A recent study by the Institute of Psychiatry identified clear patterns of more challenging behaviour from young people, including less respect, more emotional problems, more disobedience and more young people facing mental health problems.

However, evidence shows that what most bothers teachers – who might be expected to bear the brunt of this behaviour – is low-level disruption such as children eating in class, leaving their seats, talking out of turn, idleness and causing unnecessary noise. Violent incidents toward teachers are relatively rare, reported by 2% of teachers in primary school on a weekly basis. Indeed, 82% of primary teachers do not find any behaviour difficult.

Announcing these figures in January – contained in the first example of the school discipline report – Scottish education minister Peter Peacock concluded that concern about school behaviour is not new, but rather is taking new forms.

He quoted from the Synod of Aberdeen of 1675, which asked its presbyteries to ask their headteachers whether they “chastise their pupils for cursing, swearing, lying, speaking profanietie: for disobedience to parents and what vices appeared in them”.

Scrutiny of the 1920s publication The Nursery World also shows parents then were haunted by many of the same doubts, worries and preoccupations as today’s generation of self-flagellating mums and dads. Concerns were expressed in letters over normal development, tantrums, shyness, aggression, thumb-sucking and sleep, as well as what the agony aunt called “a problem as old as parenthood itself – that of how to get [children] to obey us”.

Frank Furedi, who has researched the issue, says that what in the past was dismissed as tearaway behaviour is now classified as attention deficit syndrome.

“The more we tell children they’re stressed- out or they’ve got some medical problems, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We now have a situation where children as young as eight and nine are using expressions such as ‘I’m really stressed out’. If they think there’s a problem with their behaviour, they’ll behave accordingly.”

The same could be said of parents and their approach to child-rearing. Tell them there’s a better way of doing things, and they’ll start to believe it.

So, Supernanny, you’re setting a bad example. Go and sit on the naughty step.

First published by The Sunday Herald, 6 March 2005

Protection risks doing more harm than good
by Sandra Dick

A BEWILDERED little girl is banned from giving her friends Christmas presents at school, another sternly told sharing her birthday cake breaches her school’s healthy-eating policy.

Elsewhere, the once traditional playground game of conkers is outlawed as a danger sport, children are banned from climbing trees in case they fall and parents told filming the school play is strictly forbidden.

Try entering a public swimming pool with a camera phone or video mobile and there’s every chance your motives for being there will be questioned: are you planning to snap your children as they learn to swim or are you really a pervert?

Now librarians in West Lothian are being issued a set of guidelines warning them against - among other things - allowing children to sit on their knee at storytime for fear they may be branded paedophiles. Staff in its 16 libraries and two mobile libraries are being told to refrain from virtually all physical contact - even down to cuddling a distressed child or tending to an injury.

The guidelines, argues the council, are necessary to protect staff from complaints or accusations about their behaviour towards a child, as well as to reassure anxious parents.

Of course, West Lothian Council is far from alone. Indeed, this is just the latest in a long line of directives issued by nervous organisations the length and breadth of the country which have left adults having to think twice about throwing their arms around a sobbing child, tending to a scraped knee or even speaking to a youngster that doesn’t happen to be their own.

No wonder many parents and child-care experts are now questioning whether the main reason for so many increasingly bizarre rules is to protect organisations from today’s “claims culture” - at the expense of children who are increasingly become “untouchables”.

Frank Furedi, a sociologist at Kent University and author of child-care book Paranoid Parenting, is among those who firmly believe the scales have tipped much too far in the wrong direction. “Public concern with safety has reached obsessive proportions,” he warns.

“Directives such as this library’s are all about distancing children from adults - we are being told not to have anything to do with children who are not our own. That’s a very powerful message, it suggests children’s lives are no-go areas for adults.”

There is, he warns, a serious impact on children’s view of the adult world as a result.

“It means we are telling them that adults are a group of predators - hardly role models for the future generation. Also, human physical contact is part of everyday behaviour, but we are telling our children that only mum and dad can do that: we are complicating the whole area of emotional and physical contact.

“If children have this idea of what adults are, then what kind of adults can we expect them to become?”

The kind, it seems, who have to think twice about offering their friends Christmas presents in case, as one five-year-old Sussex girl was recently told by her school, it puts “undue pressure” on other parents to buy return gifts. Child psychologist Dr Pat Spungin, who runs www.raisingkids.co.uk, agrees today’s stringent regulations surrounding our children’s safety may well have an impact on our their future behaviour.

“I believe we are seeing a culture now where children are fearful of touch unless it’s from someone who is familiar to them or someone who is very close to them - and that’s a great shame,” she says.

Hazel Kennedy, 55, a Sea Scout petty officer from Leith, agrees that the rules are troublesome but insists they are there to protect everyone. “It’s not easy when you have a youngster who is hurt or upset, your natural instinct is to help them straight away in whatever way you can,” she says.

“Instead, if you do have to help them by, say, treating a wound, you always have to make sure there is someone else in the room with you. I sometimes find myself training just one child at a time, so I always make sure I keep a door wide open.

“It’s a shame,” adds Hazel, of Tolbooth Wynd. “But the rules are there to protect us all.”

At Girlguiding Scotland, strict “Safe from Harm” policies are in place which advise physical contact should be avoided where possible. A spokesperson explains: “When it does occur it should be ‘appropriate’ and with the girl’s permission.

“Working within those guidelines, however, leaders also need to create a supportive, caring and happy atmosphere. We recognise that a girl may approach her leader and wish to make physical contact - such as a Rainbow [aged five to seven] needing to be comforted because she’s missing her parents or hurt herself.

“In those instances leaders would return a hug that is initiated but would then set about occupying her with something else.” But why have we became such a jittery nation, terrified that our every move in the presence of a child could land us in court?

Craig Connal QC, commercial litigation partner at McGrigors solicitors, which has offices in Edinburgh and nationwide, says today’s regulations are a result of organisations’ attempts to head-off the threat of legal action or even the costs of investigating a complaint.

“Employers may be thinking of their own pockets, the best interests of their staff and, in other cases, they may be driven by insurers who are asking what steps they have taken to avoid claims and what instructions have they given staff.”

“It’s often forgotten when people look at statistics and debate whether there is a claims culture, that it’s not simply measured by the number of cases that end up in court or the decisions. Say it’s the head librarian who is sitting at home under suspension while a complaint is investigated - all that public cost has been incurred.”

Iain Whyte, Tory group leader at Edinburgh City Council, is another who believes the balance has tipped too far in the wrong direction. “We are getting to a stage where we are taking children away to protect them from a few small minority of people or the very few occasions where something might go wrong,” he says.

“But children do need contact. They need love and care. And I would hope that with all the other safeguards in place these days to protect children that there really is no need for all of this.”

First published by The Edinburgh Evening News, 18 January 2005

In two minds about therapy
by Tom Geoghegan

A new play which suggests therapy may increase dependency has reignited the debate about whether it makes people more needy. As more Britons than ever before seek counselling, many are in two minds about talking over their feelings.

Forget the famous British stiff upper lip - more people are opening up to talk through their problems with a professional.

The number of qualified counsellors has tripled in 10 years to keep up with rising demand. And January is the peak period for sessions as people reassess their lifestyles, according to charity Drugscope.

A society becoming more mobile, detached, stressed and divorce-ridden is blamed for the rush to the couch, underlined and encouraged by celebrities such as Robbie Williams speaking openly about their therapy.

Although widely held as a cause for celebration that the British are no longer bottling up their problems, there is scepticism in some quarters.

Therapy can become an addiction in itself, says Alice Kahrmann, 23, who has written a loosely biographical play called Powerless, which opens on Friday in London. It tells the story of two people who try to break free from the rigours of treatment.

Ms Kahrmann had an eating disorder for five years and went on a 12-Step treatment programme, an approach popular all over the world with groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous. But she says she merely substituted one addiction for another.

“The way the programme works isn’t about empowering the individual but becoming dependent on the group,” she says. “The mentality is that once an addict, always an addict and a ‘separation’ develops with normal people because drinking and drugs makes them dangerous. You’re told that once you will leave, you will relapse.”

Fear on leaving

She says the system worked really well for people with drug and alcohol dependency but not for her, because talking about food, weight and image incessantly meant she was living the identity of someone with an eating disorder.

Depression was the root cause of the problem, she says, and she left the programme after six months to seek help - a move which initially struck her with fear. But she tried alternative treatment called neurofeedback and has felt better since.

An Alcoholics Anonymous spokeswoman said the 12-Step Fellowship was designed 70 years ago for people with drink problems and had been successful in “repairing the damage of the past” for thousands of people.

But Ms Kahrmann’s experience is not uncommon for people undergoing counselling or psychotherapy, claims sociologist Frank Furedi.

“Therapy does increase dependency,” he says. “It distracts people from dealing with their problems and makes them estranged from their friends and lovers.”

Counsellors are shaping people’s lives, he argues, because “you find you are doing things according to a script written by someone else”.

“A lot of people say it works for them but what they mean is they are being listened to and taken seriously by someone. Their problems remain and they go from one therapy to another, on a lifelong quest.”

‘Diana effect’

He fears the rise in the number of counsellors - and more recently “life coaches"- is creating a needy society encouraged by an Oprah Winfrey culture.

Nonsense, that’s just nostalgia for the repressed 1950s, says Phillip Hodson of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, who is delighted more and more people are talking about their feelings.

“Britain’s stiff upper lip has wobbled, if not on occasion broken down,” he says, since the public grief of Princess Diana’s death.

Counselling has spread because organisations have found it to be an extremely successful and cost-effective solution, he says. It can reduce rates of sickness and absence by half.

“Life has changed since we became a rich country. It isn’t about a struggle to survive but we may well be troubled by the meaning of life and where it’s going. These are marginal areas of relative pain.

“So in the absence of an overwhelming theology or a paternal family, we look for therapy to help us in a supportive and questioning role. It doesn’t just deal with problems, but existential philosophy as well - the meaning of life.”

He says 12 Steps does not constitute proper therapy, - although it has “saved the lives” of countless drug and alcohol addicts - because it tackles the effect, not the root cause.

“Therapy is being able to tell a story of your own life and the feelings you’ve been hiding, so you can address them, put them away and free up your behaviour.”

He concedes there needs to be more regulation of practitioners and is critical of the notion professionals can take away pain or heal the soul.

But he scotches the theory that counsellors encourage dependence. “The goal of a therapist is to get rid of his clients.”

Powerless runs at Barons Court Theatre in London until 23 January

First published by BBC News Online, 7 January 2005

Do we worry too much about the safety of our children?
by Andrew Johnson

The lanterns and Hallowe’en costumes are ready, and a school holiday long-associated with harmless mischief has begun. Yet for millions of children, this could be the quietest half term yet, as worried families tell their children to watch television instead of playing out.

A third of British children never go outside the home alone, thanks to growing fear of violence and abduction. Three-quarters of parents feel the risks of playing out are growing, while two-thirds say they are anxious whenever their children go beyond the front gate.

The findings, based on a national NOP survey, are to be released tomorrow. They show that nearly half of all children spend more than three hours a day in front of television or computer screens, despite warnings about the dangers of obesity. Kidscape, the child protection charity, said the figures show we have “a generation of children afraid of their own shadow”.

This week, national Parent’s Week, psychologists and children’s groups will respond by calling on families to let their children play out. They blame a culture of “creeping paranoia” about the outside world, saying that children who stay indoors are at risk of long-term psychological damage and weight-related problems.

Studies show that the typical amount of outdoor space that children play in has been reduced by 90 per cent in a generation, with the average eight-year-old now going no further than 100 yards from the front door.

Last month, the outgoing director of the Children’s Play Council, a national charity, said that children are being raised as if they were “battery chickens”, with damaging social and emotional consequences. Rising levels of traffic and bullying remain genuine concerns for children and parents alike.

According to new research by the National Family and Parenting Institute (NFPI), a think-tank, nearly one in 10 children were bullied or threatened during the last summer holidays.

Yet the number of child abduction and murder cases remains no greater than in the past, running at about six a year, despite their prominent treatment in the media. “Children should have the chance to play independently, and we are calling on adults to make sure children feel welcome in their communities,” said the NFPI.

Michele Elliott, the director of Kidscape, said: “What we’re doing to our kids is telling them the world is a very horrible and scary place. We’re creating a generation of children who are afraid of their own shadow. As a charity we have become more vocal in our message that it isn’t such a terrible world out there.”

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent and a specialist in “risk consciousness”, said: “Parents are almost forced to fall in line. Most parents are getting bombarded with these kind of messages in all kinds of ways.

“In the past two or three years there has been an exponential rise in the pressure on parents with scare stories. The minority of parents who try to resist it are stigmatised as irresponsible. When your own kid is the only one allowed to go shopping, to go to the swimming pool by himself, it looks very strange.”

Oliver James, the psychologist and commentator, said: “From the age of seven or eight, I went to school on the bus, then I went on the tube.

“There isn’t any reason today why a child shouldn’t do that. There’s plenty of evidence, too, that watching television for long periods of time is bad for them.”

The poll was commissioned by the Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest, which are paying for 450 school playgrounds. The number of safe places for children is steadily diminishing. Thousands of sports fields have been sold off in the past two decades and, even though the rate has slowed, 800 applications to build on playing fields were approved last year, according to the National Playing Fields Association.

The Demos think-tank recently urged ministers to provide access to green space within 250 metres of their homes by 2020.

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport commissioned a report on the issue by the former health secretary Frank Dobson. Reporting in January, he urged the Government to spend millions renovating the country’s decaying playgrounds. As yet there has been no response, provoking fears that ministers are reluctant to spend the £200m they promised.

Mr Dobson said: “We did make a promise at the last general election that £200m extra from the lottery should go into children’s play, and I assume we’re going to keep that promise.”

Rick Philips, 65, a retired teacher, and Linda Philips, 49, a secretary. They have a 21-year-old son who grew up in the street.

Mrs Philips says: “My son used to go out in front of the house when he was smaller, but I used to watch him all the time because you can see how busy this road is.

“He used to ride up and down here on his bike at age three and four. There is a lot more traffic now. When the school starts it is very busy. I don’t think the kids play out in the street like they used to.

“Bringing him up now, I’d be absolutely frantic. There is so much more in the news now about paedophiles. We worry about paedophiles now much more than we used to.”

Andy Davey, 50, a printer, and his wife, Julie, 41, who are bringing up their children James 14, and Chris, 17.

“They used to play out,” says Mr Davey. “Chris was about 13 when we allowed him out. James was 12. They were allowed in the garden at six or seven, and in the street in front of the house when they were nine or 10. At the time there seemed to be quite a lot of nutters about. They seemed to be more cases on the news about kids getting abducted.

“James is now 14. The rule is that he has to be home by eight, but later if he is with a group or is at a friend’s house.”

Mrs Davey adds: “You can’t keep him cooped up because they just rebel more. When they were younger I was happy as long as they were in the street or in the school where I could go and spy on them.”

Brian Hill, 53, an accounts administrator whose grandchildren Grace, seven, and George, four, visit regularly.

He has two grown-up children, a daughter, 29, and a son, 28. But while his children used to play in the street, his grandchildren stick to his back garden.

“My son used to roam all over the place,” he says. “We didn’t have fears about them then. I now have grandchildren and my daughter doesn’t let them play out. Whether there is greater risk or whether it’s implied through the media I don’t know. I think it’s more in the mind. I don’t think that it has got much worse.

“There is a huge amount more traffic now, however. This area has been built up tremendously over the last 30 years. But I don’t think children have the same road sense they used to.”

Richard Clarke, 44, a computer software engineer, doesn’t let Ian, nine, play out on his own, partly because of safety fears and partly because he hasn’t felt he is old enough until now.

“I don’t let him play in the street,” he says. “If he plays out there is always an adult with him. He can play in the immediate area in front of the house where I can keep an eye on him. A little bit of that is concern for his safety and about him wandering off, but also it is just what we do, we do things together. If he goes to see his friend at the top of the street then we take him.

“But I’m not paranoid. At nine, I’m now beginning to think he should be out more. It is something I’ve started to think about. But when he’s at home he is often playing inside on his Playstation 2.”

Stephen Roo, 48, a gas fitter, and Gabrielle, 47, a special needs assistant, brought up three children, now 19, 21 and 24. Ten years ago the street was quieter, they say, and the school fields across the road were open for children to play in.

“The problem with the school playground now is that it is closed all the time,” says Mr Roo.

“The kids used to play in the school fields but they’ve put gates around them now so they can’t get in. There are acres of fields over there, and the kids had access to them.

“I think it’s because of security concerns. They’re worried about strangers walking through the grounds.

“It’s a shame. They used to be able to use the tennis courts, but not now, unless they climb over a fence.”

Julie Jones, 35, a clinical nurse who specialises in palliative care, lives with husband, Steve, and two children, Sam, nine, and Ellen, four. She is wary of letting her children play in the street.

“I don’t let Ellen out, but I do let Sam out, within reason,” she says. “I need to know where he is. If he is with a friend, then he’s allowed to go into the next road, or to the grounds of the secondary school which is opposite our house. He’s not allowed to do those things on his own. I’m worried about paedophiles. Some of his friends have mobile phones. My child hasn’t got one, but we do have long-range walkie-talkies.

“Traffic is also a concern. The other week Sam took my husband’s bike out and he fell off because it was too big for him.

“When I was a child I lived in a terrace house and all the kids used to play in the street. There’s a loss of community spirit.”

First published by Independent on Sunday, 24 October 2004

An interview with Frank Furedi
by Mark Thwaite

Mark Thwaite Zero, began with Punk, helped puncture cultural elitism. After 1968, post-structuralism theorised multiplicity over Truth. Both these strategies had exhilarantly anti-authoritarian tendencies but their excesses have now become anti-intellectualism. How do you prevent your call for an intellectuals revival avoiding the opposite distinctly authoritarian tendencies?

Frank Furedi “Intellectual and cultural movements always contain the potential for both opening up and closing down discussion. This was something that I learnt through my engagement with the sixties experience. I suppose as individuals we find it difficult to maintain a consistent free-thinking and questioning stance. That is why in the end we can not rely on the energy and creativity of the individual but on the maturity, confidence and involvement of the wider public. The best antidote to the emergence of illiberal and authoritarian intellectual trends is a questioning and critically involved public.”

MT You were a founding member of the RCP back in the early 70s and a key figure subsequently in their political journal Living Marxism and later LM. Are you politics still revolutionary and/or communist?

FF “I find it difficult these days to give myself a publicly defined political/ideological label. Why? First because many of the 19th century labels have lost much of their meaning in our era. Secondly, and more importantly, I find the conventional terms quite confusing. Many of the ideas associated with contemporary leftism - worship of the state, its addiction to conspiracy theories, its dislike of experimentation, its instrumental approach towards free speech and knowledge, its ambivalence towards the ideas of progress and development, its paternalistic orientation towards the public - are ones that one classically associates with conservatism. So being leftwing today is often associated with the absence of a transformative impulse and on the history making potential of humanity.

Whether we like it or not, we are living through a pre-political era. As a result if one wants to be relevant one can have political sensibilities but not clearly defined world-views. For a variety of reasons, communism has little content today - so I would not call myself one. Even in the old days I never called myself a revolutionary - that’s always for history decide.

My main political project is to do what I can to promote the ideas associated with the enlightenment and to try to give humanism a contemporary and future oriented meaning. In contrast to previous times, one needs to give great consideration to the question of individual subjectivity - the development of a more robust sense of self is the precondition for creating an environment hospitable to radical thought.”

MT Where does Marx figure in your thinking now?

FF “Marx continues to exercise an important influence on my thinking. I regard him as the most systematic exponent of Enlightenment thinking. In particular his emphasis on a human-centred view of history and the transformative potential of subjectivity represent a significant contribution to development of humanist thought.”

MT Is the call for intellectuals to stand up and be counted a call for the return of a kind of vanguard?

FF “Not at all. We need intellectuals to take themselves more seriously, to explore new ways of interacting with a wider audience and adopt a more intelligent relationship to the future.

The last thing we need is for intellectuals to transform themselves into a distinct group. We need a genuine clash of views about the key questions facing our time and we need to do that in public.”

MT Blair or Meacher? Or is party politics and the democratic dance an avoidance of real politics? What are or should be real politics?

FF “This is a very difficult question and the fact that I can not give you a clear answer is a source of immense frustration to me. At least provisionally I approach politics with a degree of hesitancy and ambivalence. Despite my reservation about the contemporary state of politics, I am very concerned with the all-pervasive anti-political mood.

Cynicism and cheap-jibes at political life are symptoms of a defeatist climate of disengagement. If we take our ideas seriously we need to interact with formal politics. However, that alone will make very little difference. In our pre-political time, the most important contribution that can be made is to try to influence the public agenda, try to reformulate the issues of our time and genuinely question everything. For me, real politics today is inseparable from involvement in a battle of ideas. It is only when we begin to take ideas a bit more seriously, that we can move towards a more democratic and genuinely participatory situation.”

MT What are you working on now? What is coming next?

FF “I am working on a project, which is tentatively titled the Politics of Fear or maybe The Fear Market. The aim of this work is to look at the way that fear has become institutionalised and politicised and its impact oncontemporary subjectivity.

MT How do you write? Longhand, straight onto the computer?

FF “I always work on 2-3 projects at the same time so I need a notebook to write down ‘insights’ and unexpected thoughts. But I am a real computer person and when I write it is straight unto the computer.

MT What is your favourite book/who is your favourite writer?

FF “My favourite novel of all times is JT Farrell’s Studs Lonigan. I love all of Farrell’s Chicago novels, which are now sadly out of print. I am not sure if ‘favourite’ is the best adjective to use - but when I feel in need of intellectual stimulation - I sometime re-read something by Gyorgy Lukacs.”

MT What book do you wish you had written?

FF “Without a doubt Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism.”

MT What are your favourite web sites Frank?

FF I am a website junkie. Every morning I look at Arts and Letters Daily. I often contribute to my favourite web site, which is spiked online. I also use Powerreporting when I need to find something quickly.

MT Do you have any tips for for the aspiring writer!?

FF “Don’t worry about the writing - spend a lot of time on working out what it is you are trying to say.”

MT Anything else you’d like to say?

FF “Thanks so much!”

MT Thank you very much for your time Frank - all the very best!

First published by the Ready Steady Book website, 22 October 2004

Entr’acte: Thinkers down and out in Paris and London
by Alan Riding

PARIS: Among the striking cultural differences between France and Britain is the way their intellectuals operate in the public arena. While the French expect their thinkers to speak out on matters of conscience and state, Britons view the very idea of an “intellectual” with suspicion, preferring their “scholars” to work more quietly in elitist circles. Both, though, have added weight to the political debate. And now both, it seems, are becoming endangered species.

The waning of the power and status of the intelligentsia is hardly exclusive to France and Britain. Yet it is an alarming trend for countries that once boasted imperial and military might and now rely on the “soft power” of their culture and brains. And this is where the long-divergent paths of France and Britain meet: In both countries, governments, media and public opinion are learning to live without the input of the critical intellectual.

The change is most apparent in France, because probably nowhere in Europe has the “intellectuel engagé” been more accepted as a political actor. Specifically, Émile Zola’s “J’Accuse” in 1898 - his denunciation of institutionalized anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus affair - set an example that encouraged Catholic, fascist, Communist, Trotskyite, anti-Communist and liberal intellectuals to hold forth and claim the moral high ground.

But since the end of the cold war, the ideological combat that once spawned major figures like Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron has become largely irrelevant. The French government seems less interested in courting intellectuals, newspapers that serve as their vehicles are losing circulation, and even college students have switched their attention from politics to job-hunting. Once an end unto itself, knowledge is becoming a means.

A handful of intellectuals - most theatrically Bernard-Henri Lévy - have become media and literary celebrities. But cries of lamentation are heard more often. In February, 40,000 members of the educated elite signed a petition accusing the right-of-center government of waging “war on intelligence” by cutting scientific and other research budgets. One minister retorted: “Being an intellectual should not be considered a protected species.”

France’s top thinkers are gloomy. The headline of a recent article in Le Figaro’s literary supplement asked: “Why don’t intellectuals of left and right occupy a more prominent place in the public arena?” The article’s author, Jacques de Saint-Victor, added a rhetorical question: “The end of intellectuals?” Perhaps many earned this fate by defending indefensible communism. Yet, he concluded, there is still a need for critical thinkers to raise the tone of political debate.

Britain’s recent experience also suggests that a “thinking deficit” has become a fact of political life.

Notwithstanding the Cambridge Communists and Oswald Mosley’s Brown Shirts in the 1930s, political extremism has never flourished in Britain. But the Fabian Society demonstrated that intellectuals could affect politics. Founded in the 1880s to advance democratic socialism, it shaped the trade union movement and the Labour Party. A few individuals also stood out: In the 1950s and 1960s, Bertrand Russell was as influential in Britain as Sartre was in France.

But in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher broke the power of the unions; and in the mid-1990s, Tony Blair’s New Labour abandoned the old left. In Britain too, then, with socialism seemingly defeated, ideological debate evaporated. If British cabinets of the 1960s and 1970s included intellectuals like Richard Crossman, Michael Joseph and Roy Jenkins, their place was now taken by pragmatists more obsessed with opinion polls than ideas.

So, outside the chattering classes, does any of this matter?

Yes, in the view of Frank Furedi, a British sociologist who addresses the issue in a new book, “Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? Confronting 21st Century Philistinism.” His focus is on Britain, where, he argues, people with genuine learning, breadth of vision and a concern for public issues have been replaced by facile pundits, think-tank apologists and spin doctors. His diagnosis might also apply to other Western democracies.

As societies have dumbed down, with television crowded with reality shows and newspapers with gossip, so has the public debate. Politics - without policies - is even marketed by the media as soap opera: Will France’s president, Jacques Chirac, be outmaneuvered by his ambitious economy minister, Nicolas Sarkozy? Can Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, outmaneuver Blair to succeed him in 10 Downing Street?

Still, if politicians are unwilling to examine their societies in depth, can intellectuals do any better? In France, intellectuals - everyone from writers and movie directors to philosophers and scientists - do raise their voices, but mainly to defend their own interests. In Britain, by seeking out a new audience through the media, they have gained notoriety but lost clout. One interesting spinoff is that political theater in Britain is now tackling issues that newspapers skim over.

In his book, Furedi, who teaches at the University of Kent, argues that “massification” of higher education has conspired with political correctness to lower standards of learning, to reward mediocrity and to discourage excellence in academia. He sees a culture of “low expectations” fueled by the credo of social inclusion as infantilizing the way both government and media address public issues. And one result is a new generation of intellectuals who fear being thought elitist.

“The heroic image of the classical intellectual has given way to a more down-to-earth pragmatic person, whose job is not a particularly important one,” Furedi writes. He adds: “In such circumstances, knowledge and art are not likely to be valued for themselves, but because of their usefulness to society.”

Certainly in Britain, the government increasingly promotes education as a job tool and culture as an entertainment industry. “There is a new breed of university managers, museum and gallery directors and ‘knowledge’ entrepreneurs who regard the content of culture and ideas with indifference,” Furedi notes, recalling that Britain’s education minister recently expressed contempt for the notion of “scholars seeking truth.”

Clearly these are difficult times for public intellectuals. Governments feel safe in ignoring them; politicians and the media, in Furedi’s words, “spoon-feed the public with sound bites”; and the public at large shows little interest in political debate. Still more alarming, Furedi believes, the world of art and education is going along with this “philistine social engineering agenda” in the guise of promoting equality.

But society as a whole may pay a price if intellectual elitism is written off as antidemocratic. Critical intellectuals once represented an independent voice outside the ruling establishment and, as such, enhanced democratic pluralism. Today, with political debate increasingly orchestrated by government and media, the silence of the intellectuals risks undermining one of democracy’s crucial checks and balances.

First published by The International Herald Tribune, 14 October 2004

Fathers are ‘too competitive to be playmates’
by Sarah Womack

Children rate their fathers as among their least popular playmates because they are too competitive, according to research among more than 1,000 youngsters.

They “played to win”, lacked imagination or were simply at a loss as to how to play games, said the Children’s Play Council, which commissioned the survey with the Children’s Society.

Children up to the age of 12 would rather play with their friends, their mother or their brothers and sisters.

Only one in 16 chose their fathers as their ideal companion. Dads were rated slightly above grandparents (one in 33). One in 50 children said they would rather play on their own.

Tim Gill, director of the Children’s Play Council, said: “Dads have difficulty not being too competitive. Several fathers said they found it hard to get down to their children’s level. And they don’t find it easy to let children win.

“But children will get fed up if they lose all their time. It’s frankly demoralising and not much fun.”

The competitive dad was epitomised in the BBC comedy The Fast Show where the father torments his long-suffering children, Peter and Toby, with constant challenges they can never live up to.

Simon Day, the comedian who created the character Competitive Dad, said he was inspired by a father he saw once at a swimming pool.

“These two little kids said, ‘do you want to race dad?’ and he just tore off and beat them really easily and left them floundering in the pool - drowning while he waited at the other end, really proud of it.”

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, said: “Fathers are living through their children much more which means they lose sight of the line that distinguishes adult from child.

“It’s also partly a power control issue. Fathers want to let their children know they are still ‘players’.”

But he said being competitive was not altogether unhealthy. “Almost every child I know who is good at sport has a mother or father who is physically active. The thing is not to be obsessive about it.”

Mr Gill said not being competitive did not mean playing the loser day in, day out. “It doesn’t mean dads having to wimp out constantly but they should avoid winning all the time.”

The rise in divorce and separation also contributed to children not seeing their fathers as playmates, he said, as did the long hours culture.

Some fathers did not know how to entertain their kids but should think of the games they enjoyed as a child. “A lot of the games we played are still enjoyable - ball games outdoors, balloon games indoors, simple word games like ‘20 questions’ or role playing where the child is the waiter and the parents are the customers,” Mr Gill said.

One father of two, who declined to be named, told The Telegraph: “I don’t think I am overly competitive but it is better my children learn to lose with someone who cares for them. You have got to get the balance right. Most children are very bad losers and I say to mine, ‘you could say well done to me occasionally’.”

The NOP poll of 600 parents and 1,200 children, to coincide with National Play Day today, found that most parents (72 per cent) claimed to play with their children daily but children said the reality was once a week or rarely.

Children said they did not play with their parents because their mothers and fathers were often too busy, too tired, too bossy or less fun than their friends.

One boy, aged seven, said: “I think it is sometimes a bit harder for older people to play because they lose their imagination.”

A poll by the parents website, www.parents.org.uk, found 60 per cent of parents admitted being competitive with their children against 40 per cent who said they were not.

Patricia Halliday from Essex, who has been a nursery nurse for over 30 years, said she had trouble finding time to play with her 11-year-old daughter.

“As a working mother I don’t have time to play with her every day. Most of my friends would say the same. Kids are becoming independent at a younger age and it leaves less room for parents to get involved.”

Mary McLeod, chief executive of the National Family and Parenting Institute, said parents needed to find ways to be actively involved in their children’s lives. “Fathers tend to play computer games with their sons,” she said.

“Even cuddling up on the couch and watching TV and talking about it afterwards is useful and intimate.”

First published by The Telegraph, 4 August 2004

Safety in Numbers
by Anna Smyth

In the Eighties, you had to have a 10p piece. In the Nineties, it was all about BT Chargecards that only let you phone one number. But in the Noughties, a child’s lifeline to home comes in the form of a mobile phone.

This week a survey revealed that one in four primary school children has their own mobile. The number has almost doubled since 2001, as parents push aside scares about radiation and brain cancer in the name of keeping their child safe by staying in contact.

There are those who believe this signals the end of the English language as we know it. The current generation of twentysomethings is said to be struggling to remember the point of vowels, as text speak establishes itself as the only conversational tool. If the next generation are sucked into the vortex before they reach ten, we will have a nation of Dom Joly caricatures before we know it.

But mobiles have their uses. They have proved vital in several emergencies involving children in recent times. Two years ago, a couple of East Lothian girls intervened at a beach when a woman collapsed in the water. They used their mobiles to call the police, and kept the woman warm until help arrived and she could be taken to hospital. The emergency services said that the girls’ quick response - facilitated by the mobile - saved the woman’s life. The two friends have been awarded a Certificate of Commendation by the Royal Humane Society for their efforts.

A couple of years earlier, an 11-year-old girl was able to summon help with her mobile when she broke her ankle on an East Lothian hill. She had been out walking with friends when she slipped and injured herself, but after contacting the emergency services she was airlifted to hospital in Edinburgh.

Many parents are now giving their young children mobile phones as a safety precaution. Niki MacDonald is one mother who followed the trend so that her ten-year-old son, Jordan, could enjoy more freedom.

“We gave him a phone last year for his birthday because I was worried about him going out alone,” says the 30-year-old childminder.

“There aren’t any children of his age around our house, so he goes down the road to play with some boys there. He had been borrowing his dad’s phone for the walk, so we thought it was better to get him his own one.

“I do feel much happier knowing that he can always phone me. Since he’s had the phone he has been very good at keeping in touch, always calling if he is going to be late home. If he wants to play football with some friends after school he can do that now, because he just gives me a quick call. It saves me worrying that something has happened to him on the way home.”

This, of course, makes perfect sense. But some experts have queried whether the mobile is really as helpful as parents like to imagine. Frank Furedi is professor of sociology at Kent University, and author of Paranoid Parenting, which examines how parents have become progressively more mollycoddling of their children. He argues that although mobiles do have a practical use in communicating a child’s whereabouts, it is dangerous to think they offer anything more than this.

“Parents have this idea that by giving their child a mobile phone they will somehow make them more safe,” he says. “That is just an illusion. The only thing it does is give the parent more reassurance. It has absolutely no impact on the child’s safety in real terms.”

Furedi’s view is tragically supported by the Soham murder case. The search for Holly and Jessica may have been helped because of their mobile phone records, but having the phone in the first place did nothing to save them from their killer.

“I do have concerns that phones may in fact compound the problem of child safety, as they distract attention from the real issues,” says Furedi. “The more you look for technological solutions to social problems, the more you become pre-occupied with the wrong things. Parents start thinking that a more expensive phone that can track their child’s whereabouts will give them more protection. It distracts them from working out sensible strategies for training their child to be responsible, vigilant and communicative.

“I would rather parents spent more time developing the flow of communication with their child than on the technological methods for keeping in touch.”

First published by The Scotsman, 29 April 2004

Taking the blame for brat pack
by Miranda Fettes

Emotionally bereft, socially stunted, devoid of empathy or any sense of duty, sulky, selfish, rude, morally deficient and full of anger. It might sound like a description of a psychopath dreamed up by Hollywood, but brace yourself: it’s worse. Much worse. It’s a whole generation of youngsters.

This is the controversial diagnosis of the current crop of youngsters according to American psychiatrist Dr Robert Shaw. After a lifetime of observation based on years of family psychiatry, he believes society is facing a damaging epidemic of sullen children. “Our society has spawned an entire generation of cognitively smart but emotionally-stunted children who can’t appreciate the feelings and needs of other people,” he says. “We are in the middle of an epidemic that is devouring the children of comfortable, affluent and educated parents.”

And he believes absentee, permissive and over-indulgent parenting is to blame. He argues that as more parents work away from home for longer hours and spend less time with their children, they are failing to set out the fundamental moral parameters of love, respect and behavioural boundaries. Drawn into the western world’s obsession with career success, they work hard in order to provide for what they believe to be their kids’ every material need, while a carer raises their children.

Stressed and exhausted when they come home, according to Dr Shaw they stick their kids in front of the telly for hours on end and yield to their demands for the latest gadget or trainers to absolve their guilt for not spending enough time with their little darlings.

Dr Shaw claims in his book The Epidemic - which has swept America - that parents are terrified of accusations of neglecting their kids and embrace consumerism as a solution.

The result, however, is rude, ungrateful, demanding kids.

Ironically for parents, he is also talking about the children of families which in the past would have been expected to turn out the most fully-rounded youngsters, the middle and upper class families: “Comfortable families where there are two working parents, where there’s plenty of money but simply not enough parental time. That’s where the problem lies.”

So is he right? Have parents created a generation of joyless, selfish, over-indulged monsters - real-life aggressive, resentful versions of Harry Enfield’s uncommunicative comic creation, Kevin the Teenager?

Edinburgh child psychologist Jean Bechhofer believes sweeping generalisations about a whole generation of children’s shortcomings can be damaging and alienating, but she does highlight some of the same issues.

“There is some concern that kids are not getting the parental skills training that they require to bring up the next generation. A lot of people do have concerns that kids spend too much time interacting with machines and not with each other or their parents. Kids’ boundaries have been drawn in, but that’s not parents’ fault. It’s a change in the way that we are all living.

“I have had concerns about the long working hours that British society demands of parents, but if you think back, mums had a hell of a lot more to do in terms of house tasks and didn’t have as much time for kids and that tends to be forgotten. It’s quality rather than quantity that matters. Quality time with kids is what’s truly important.”

But she adds: “It’s very dangerous to be general on these matters. Shaw is talking from the basis of a clinical practice: he’s seeing the worst case scenario, he’s not seeing all children. A lot of children communicate pretty well.”

Sociologist and author of Paranoid Parenting, Dr Frank Furedi, is similarly wary of pointing the finger of blame at parents.

“I don’t think the fact that parents are working is the problem, because there are many societies where parents work very long hours without having any negative consequences for their family. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, women in Eastern Europe and Russia used to work all the time. Nobody made a point that because of that children had an emotionally diminished life or were out of control.”

He denies that parents are not spending enough time with their kids and says British research indicates the opposite.

“Even though a growing number of women are working, mothers and fathers spend far more time with their children today then 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago. If anything, they’re spending too much time with their kids rather than too little.”

The problem, he believes, boils down to a lack of parental confidence. “When parents are told they are responsible for everything that happens to their children, they lose confidence and they become scared of drawing lines. You have a situation where children are not really challenged or confronted. They get the worst of two worlds: they’re neither allowed to get on with life and explore the world on their own, nor are they given clear guidance for what they should do.

“We’re sending a signal to society that parents are bumbling amateurs, so it’s much more difficult to be confident about what you’re doing. Most parents intuitively know when they should say no but they are too scared about doing it.

“I think the solution is for parents to ignore all the advice they’re getting and trust their instincts - that’s how you build confidence. Kids need to be told what’s right and what’s wrong and they need to have much clearer lines drawn.”

Shaw agrees. What parents need to do is listen to their own common sense, he says.

“Be clear that as a parent, you always know inside what the right thing is to do. With children there have to be some rules and it’s up to you to make them.”

Furedi, though, doesn’t agree with Shaw’s premise that parents have produced a generation of joyless, selfish, emotionally-stunted children. “That’s a bit of an exaggeration. The kids are basically all right but they just haven’t been given the opportunity to gain the confidence and the independence that a more relaxed childhood would give them.”

He adds: “I think too much of anything is a bad thing - television included. But it is not this monster that it’s often made out to be. The issue is that there are problems with parenting when so little energy is given to allowing kids to be outdoors.”

But he says strictness is not the solution. Instead, he believes it’s all about consistency. “Most parents know what the boundaries are and can tell them to their kids, but it’s sticking to your guns and being consistent with it [rather than giving in].”

Shaw, though, maintains that atrocities such as the Columbine High School tragedy, in which two teenage boys slaughtered 12 fellow pupils and a teacher, are the inescapably real, brutal, chilling proof of this “epidemic”. And while horrors such as Columbine are an extreme and rare manifestation, he says the epidemic is visible and in evidence everywhere, albeit in a diluted form.

“To commit this cold-blooded crime, these boys had to be extremely detached and alienated from everyone around them. They must have been completely cut off, totally lacking in the understanding that there were people they could talk with about their feelings of loneliness, emptiness, despair, resentment and rage.

“But as sad as the events were, they did not surprise me. These children were not an aberration. They were the natural outcome of the way we have been raising children from comfortable and even affluent families today. They were developmentally crippled by the child-rearing attitudes and practices that have spread like a virus from home to home.” Shaw adds: “Over the past ten or 15 years I’ve become more and more aware of this epidemic, but now it has reached the point that calls for us to intervene. The behaviour of these discontented, joyless children is so common these days that many people no longer consider it abnormal.”

Recent Channel Four series Brat Camp, which centred around spoilt, aggressive, disaffected youths, could be considered a contender to back Shaw’s concerns, although the programme’s approach was different to the psychiatrist’s. Its premise is that all the “brats” needed was to be toughened up and would be as right as rain after a month surviving in the desert.

Shaw, on the other hand, believes the answer lies in simply loving, respecting and spending more time with children. His decades of clinical experience have led him to the conclusion that children flourish best in a nuclear family, where one of the parents stays at home to look after, love and morally guide them, and where traditional family values rule.

It’s a theory that seems to be going down well in the States, where parents are apparently getting fed up with the “children are king” idea. Bizarrely, that was brought to the fore by Pop Idol’s Simon Cowell when he criticised spoilt, overconfident kids. To British viewers of the show, the talent judge is notorious for his brutally honest put-downs. But to US parenting experts, he is pioneering a cultural revolution against precocious kids who have always had their way. Indeed, he is being hailed as the first person to have the guts to publicly state what for 30 years has been unutterable.

Parenting organisations, meanwhile, say parents are being hit with a barrage of confusing, often conflicting advice and it doesn’t help to blame them further and make them feel even more guilty.

Christian Jenner, a spokeswoman for the National Family and Parenting Institute, says: “There is a lot of evidence that parents are spending more time with their children rather than less. We very much try and avoid blaming parents where possible because most of them do a very good job and it’s an extremely challenging job. Parents are constantly being told what they should and shouldn’t be doing.

“We are currently looking at marketing and advertising to children and would say that a lot of the pressures on children and families nowadays come from the industries which promote products at children, some of whom can’t even talk. We are campaigning to get that changed.”

But Shaw is adamant: “Our society has become crippled. Yet there is hope, since this epidemic is not a disease of children themselves - it’s a problem of how they are being raised.

“The need is urgent; the time is now. A look at the nightly news - or even a walk down your block or into your neighbourhood stores - will show you why.”

First published by The Edinburgh Evening News, 23 April 2004

More students staying at home to reduce debts
by Liz Lightfoot

Fewer students are leaving home when they go to university, a survey shows. A quarter now continue to live with their parents. The desire to save money is a strong consideration for the stay-at-home students who leave with less than half the debts of those living in halls or rented accommodation.

But a liking for home comforts is also a factor says Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, because, allowing for inflation, accommodation costs have not risen significantly since the l970s.

“There are a lot of middle class students who pay rent during the Easter and summer vacations, but go home to their parents,” he says. “Students in the l970s were very different, They would rather have lived in a hole with five other people, sharing a bathroom and an outside toilet, than stay at home with their parents because they valued their freedom and autonomy.

“Someone who in the past would have gone away would rather have mum washing their clothes and the use of dad’s computer. It is a negative development because it means staying as an adolescent rather than becoming an independent adult.”

The survey reported in today’s Times Higher Education Supplement, found 45 per cent of students at the new universities said closeness to home was an important factor in their choice, compared with 33 per cent of those at traditional universities. It was the one deciding factor for 25 per cent overall.

Of those living at home, 40 per cent expected to complete their courses with debts of £7,500, or lower, compared with 15 per cent of students in halls of residence. They were more likely to rely on part-time jobs, however, and spent longer on travel. A third of the students living at home said they travelled for between two and three hours a day.

The increasing distance between university and the student’s home was worrying, said Mark Phippen, the head of the counselling service at the University of Cambridge. “It is important for a student to feel they belong within a university or a social group. That’s not a minor thing to have lost. If you have less connection to your institution it is easier to drop out.”

Eight per cent of the students questioned in the survey for the supplement and Sodexho, the student accommodation and catering company, said they had £9.50 a week after housing costs, but 10 per cent had £150 or more.

First published by The Daily Telegraph, 22 April 2004

All children need counselling, claims Minister
by Jamie Doward

Embattled Children’s Minister Margaret Hodge was plunged into a new controversy last night after it emerged that she wanted to see children given psychological counselling in schools.

The call was immediately attacked by senior educational experts, who said they feared it would see schools forced into playing the role of ‘social workers’.

Writing in the latest edition of the journal Counselling in Education, Hodge said that she hoped counselling would one day ‘be delivered in mainstream settings, like schools’, and added that ‘counselling for pupils and students who are having emotional difficulties both inside and outside school can be a lifeline, a turning-point in their lives’.

Hodge’s comments follow the publication of a survey showing that depression will be second only to heart disease as the biggest global health burden by 2020.

According to a new charity, the Depression Alliance, one in five people will be affected by depression at some stage. More than 2.9 million people in Britain are diagnosed as having depression at any one time, the alliance said last week.

‘All too often, it seems that there is no one to talk to, that there is no one who will understand what they are going through,’ Hodge writes.

She goes on to suggest that there is a need to encourage the development of multi-disciplinary teams of workers consisting of trained counsellors and other professionals who will work alongside teachers and also called for a debate on where the funding should come from.

‘Whether the funding comes from the school or from the Children’s Trust [the government taskforce that helps disadvantaged five- to 13-year-olds] is an issue for discussion. I’m interested in people’s views,’ Hodge writes.

The ideas are being explored as part of the Government’s consultation exercise on its recent Green Paper Every Child Matters, which examines introducing new services to schools.

‘I believe that schools are in the best position to give children and young people the skills they need to meet the challenges we all have to face in life, and that includes emotional wellbeing,’ Hodge writes.

Her calls received warm support from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) and other mental health professionals.

Phillip Hodson, fellow of the BACP, said that introducing counsellors to schools would help the Government to meet its recruitment targets for the teaching profession. ‘It would make teaching more attractive. Teachers could concentrate on being teachers,’ Hodson said.

He pointed out that there had recently been a spate of concerns about whether children should be prescribed anti-depressants and that many experts doubted whether they worked.

‘If you look at the prescription of anti-depressants, they’ve doubled in something like 10 years,’ Hodson said. ‘But if they don’t work, what are you going to do? If you can’t use the pills, how are you going to treat the ills?’

Mark Prever, a counsellor who works with schoolchildren in Birmingham, said the strains of modern society meant that counselling was increasingly necessary for today’s pupils.

‘It is hard for children growing up now. The pressures on young people are considerable. For me, counselling should be something you’re entitled to, no matter what your age. Older people can buy counselling, but young people don’t have the money.’

But Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent and author of Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in An Anxious Age, expressed deep scepticism over the plans.

‘It’s a bad idea. It would swamp the school system with non-educational issues. It already spends too much time acting as a social worker,’ Furedi said.

‘Ministers have got to ask themselves how far they want to go in allowing professionals to take over children’s lives?

‘More and more aspects of human beings’ lives are being put into the hands of an army of professionals,’ Furedi said.

First published by The Guardian, 18 April 2004

Broadband brings broad benefits
James Woudhuysen

The best thing about broadband is that it looks set to become part of the furniture. That, briefly put, is the thesis put forward by Frank Furedi, professor of social policy, sociology and social research at the University of Kent.

At a time when the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO) estimates that there will be 36 million ADSL lines in Western Europe - including Turkey - by 2006, that might appear a rather paradoxical thesis. There are, after all, nearly 10 times that many people in Western Europe, and a further 75 million East Europeans and others are due to join the EU in May.

The paradoxes increase. Furedi is a critic of capitalism. He’s best known for his mordant polemics against contemporary society’s weakness for panic attacks (Culture of Fear, 1999) and quack psychological remedies (Therapy Culture, 2003). But in Always On, Changing Britain, a major report put out by the European Policy Forum, he reckons that the lack of regulation of the internet explains much of the broadband explosion, and argues that regulatory pressures need to be resisted. Furedi also provides a balanced note of optimism about the potential of broadband. Narrowband, he contends, is tomorrow’s black and white TV.

As familiarity with internet research, email and e-commerce has grown, so time at home with broadband has risen to 17 hours a week. The number of Brits working from home for one day a week was nearly a million as early as 1998, and those working sometimes at home nearly reached six million. With broadband in 2004, Furedi maintains, millions more workers are set to be doing some of their work at home.

With human communication being the killer application of broadband, online communities are not nearly as important as the way in which broadband supplements and complements the offline world. It “provides the infrastructure for the maintenance of distant community and family ties”, Furedi observes, and by making work less location-dependent, “may well facilitate tackling the problem of uneven regional development”.

The relationship between the broadband and the offline worlds is certainly more fruitful than the internet’s critics allow. For every Columbine massacre allegedly inspired by videogames, there are thousands of deeper social contacts made with broadband.

Furedi believes that broadband will help overcome the isolation of old people, and that this kind of benefit far outweighs the few saddies and sickies on the web. He insists that new, risk-averse regulations against “broadcasting” on the internet, and digital rights management systems, will slow the development of IT.

Society needs more such informed, non-technical and libertarian advocates of broadband.

First published by IT Week, 30 March 2004

Forever young syndrome
by Olivia Ward

On Main Street Canada any weekend afternoon, middle-aged women with tattooed ankles jostle cheek by jowl with 50-something men in T-shirts and jeans, 16-year-olds in belly-baring tops, and couples in their 30s with electro-shock brush cuts gelled to knife-edge peaks.

This, says Marcel Danesi, is the Forever Young syndrome in action: a non-stop teen trip affecting people from pre-adolescence to twilight years, and stretching the bounds of immaturity to the breaking point.

“It’s a cultural disease,” laments Danesi, a University of Toronto anthropology professor specializing in semiotics and linguistics. “And now we’re into the final silly stages.”

Danesi’s book Forever Young puts youth under the microscope and finds it wanting: in this case, wanting more and more, but understanding less and less about the world.

Compiled from five years of research including more than 200 interviews with teenagers and their parents, the book focuses on the interplay of culture and consumerism that has made youth the altar at which most of North America worships.

“It’s the commercial media entertainment economy at work,” Danesi says. “Age is now considered a disease. Youth sells. There’s a big emphasis on having it all: Good living, keeping your youth, having as much fun as you can. It’s empty because there is no wisdom behind it.”

The problem, 58-year-old Danesi explains, is not that people are trying to look younger, healthier and trimmer for longer. But they are assured by society that immaturity is a desirable, even normal state for adults. As a result there’s a spreading sense of futility and dislocation: crucial decisions are made by people with the value systems of teenagers.

“People are simply not growing up,” Danesi says. “The category of adolescence now embraces everything from `tweenies’ before the age of puberty to people years and years older. Everything that keeps the culture thinking, reflecting, seeking understanding, is missing.”

Until a century ago, he points out, adolescence was an almost unknown concept. The struggling masses that made up most of the world’s population couldn’t afford it. Toiling from an early age, children passed into adulthood almost seamlessly, and the two stages were divided mainly by sexual maturity.

But in the early 20th century, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, focused on adolescence as a time of anxiety and confusion, as children struggle with the trauma of their new identity as adults. In psychology and child rearing, the idea of adolescence caught on.

Until the 1950s, “youth culture” scarcely existed. But as affluence grew in Western countries, the media and entertainment industries discovered the market potential of the young.

Adolescence became not just a transition period, but a permanent state of being.

It also became an industry.

By the 1960s, a “youthquake” shook the commercial world. Rebels without causes, troubled teens, Beatlemaniacs, potheads, hippies, total-life dropouts, all were setting a style standard, even as their elders wrung their hands over their views and values.

Back then, however, youth was a “counterculture,” and adulthood still mainstream.

But in North America and much of the West, by the turn of the century teenagers were the dominant culture. They, and those who rushed to impersonate them, had taken over a huge share of the advertising, manufacturing, media, music, film and television industries. North American teens now pump more than $160 billion a year into the market, and surveys show Canadian teenagers have more than $100 a week to spend.

But, Danesi warns, what the commercial youth machine is churning out is often “youth at its most negative,” promoting a feckless mentality that is ultimately damaging.

He likens the all-pervasive trend to Oscar Wilde’s chilling novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a book that showed the dark side of the pursuit of youth.

In it, the elegant young Dorian Gray, fearing the end of his youth, makes a wish that his portrait would grow old in his place. Under the influence of a corrupt, decadent friend, he descends into a world of instant gratification, depravity and murder, while remaining freshly handsome even as his portrait becomes steadily more hideous.

Wilde’s parable of the high price of being forever young is even more relevant today, Danesi says.

The increasingly brutal nature of the youth culture, with its enforced conformity of dress and language, bullying, ostracism, gang violence and suicide, he says, is a sign that “something is terribly wrong.”

So is escalating chronic depression, drug taking, anorexia and a pathological fixation on looks among teens and children of younger and younger ages, as well as their elders.

Social scientists have recently declared adolescence a condition that lasts well into the 30s. The American-based MacArthur Foundation’s landmark study “Transition to Adulthood,” concluded that it ends around the age of 34.

In our society, reaching the 30s heralds an increasingly feverish scramble to remain young. TV and magazine makeover features have shifted their focus from clothing and cosmetics to plastic surgery, much of it aimed at recapturing youthful beauty.

“What worries me is it might reach a tipping point,” shudders journalist Geraldine Bedell of Britain’s daily newspaper The Guardian. “It might become like cosmetics, hair dye or straight teeth, things people once lived comfortably without, but which are now almost required.... If I want to carry on looking, and more importantly, feeling young, I might have to have it.”

And, she adds, it’s all part of society’s movement away from judging people by character, and judging them instead on “personality” signalled by appearance, with youth being the qualifying characteristic.

“The infantilization of contemporary society is driven by passions that are quite specific to our times,” says British sociologist Frank Furedi of Kent University. “The understandable desire not to look old has been replaced by the self-conscious cultivation of immaturity.”

One of the signs, he says, is the marketing of toys for adults, from computer games to cyber pets, stuffed animals and in-line skates. Cartoons are pitched to adults in increasing numbers, along with fantasy and adventure books, and comics that were once the province of children and teens.

Marketing big-ticket items as toys has caught on, too. The American auto industry was quick to seize on the buying power of “urban audiences,” which are young, cool and shaped by the gangsterized hip-hop culture of young black city dwellers.

Even Cadillac, once the brand of newly rich suburbanites, made an astonishing comeback with its top-priced Escalade model SUV, now a hip-hop icon.

“It has been a totally great surprise,” the company’s general manager, Mark LaNeve, told Newsday earlier this month. “We can’t take credit for it. We’re too busy to know what’s cool. We let the kids tell us.”

Market testing the young and restless is now de rigueur for any company that wants to stay afloat. Much as anthropologists once observed the behaviour of exotic tribes, corporations now pay to watch how teenagers will respond to new products and marketing schemes.

But: “Teens responsible for establishing and broadcasting trends don’t want to be part of the mainstream,” says Peter Zollo, president of Teenage Research Unlimited, a Chicago market research firm. “They value their position at the top of the trend-adoption hierarchy or outside of it altogether.”

As marketers “aggressively mine youth culture” and publicize their current favourite products, he says, the kids thumb their noses and move on. Then their elders eagerly snap up the discards as the dernier cri of cool.

Corporations aren’t the only ones cashing in on the youth trend. Churches, too, are tapping the youth segment, with outreach activities like rock concerts and extreme sports. And at a recent meeting of the staid Davos World Economic Forum in Switzerland, curious moguls flocked to a panel on “How to be Hip.”

However, Danesi insists, embracing the youth culture is not merely a flirtation with fashion victimhood.

Being “tough and cool,” the dominant adolescent values, has deeper and more sinister implications for society. And he says, adults should look more closely at the young people they’re emulating.

“The power of gang symbolism, with its tribal connotations, has probably much more to do with teen violence today than any of the traditionally accepted social causes,” he concludes in Forever Young.

Teenagers, he says, are now less integrated into society, even as society tries to imitate their trends and habits. They have less meaningful contact with their elders and isolate themselves through language, as well as attitude.

Slang always existed. But now, Danesi says, instead of a fleeting fad that disappears as adolescents mature, it is a dominant part of the English language. It is also increasingly aggressive, ridiculing and obscene.

Teenagers’ contempt for their elders is echoed in society’s contempt for the middle-aged and elderly.

“Folk wisdom used to be respected, because it was something people could turn to in times of trouble,” says Danesi, who spent part of his childhood in the Tuscan town of Lucca in Italy. “Now nobody looks to the old for solutions. And nothing else has replaced them. Society has lost its anchors.”

Danesi says he has no magic formula for curing these social ills. But, he insists, we would be better off as teenagers and adults if there were a seismic shift in attitude to both.

It would include the radical step of “eliminating adolescence,” by recognizing it as a transition to adulthood rather than a dominant stage of life.

He believes authority should return to the family, not through punishment, but by encouraging adults to offer guidance and mature examples for the young.

And, he says, the media should stop “juvenilizing” the culture and catering to the worst adolescent stereotypes.

Are today’s teenagers a lost generation?

Danesi, who has a grown-up daughter and two school-aged grandchildren, is far from giving up on the young.

“I love teaching, because I learn so much from my students,” he says.

“They’re intelligent, they have great ideas and they’re really motivated. They deserve the best world we can give them.”

First published by The Toronto Star, 21 March 2004

Too much, too soon?
by Gillian Bowditch

Are you sitting uncomfortably? Then I’ll begin. Once upon a time you could open a picture book for the under-fives and be guaranteed to find nothing scarier than Fungus the Bogeyman or the occasional Gruffalo. The sexism of Thomas the Tank Engine might have raised a few eyebrows and all those wolves preying on young girls in the woods didn’t bear too much thinking about but, on the whole, there was nothing on the nursery bookshelves which was likely to frighten My Little Pony.

But innocence, it seems, is just so last century. We’re living in a post 9/11 world and children’s authors have decided it is time for toddlers to get real. We should have known something was up when Judith Kerr, the creator of the delightful Mog stories, decided it was time to send the nation’s favourite feline through the cat flap of eternity. In Goodbye Mog, published in 2002, Mog dies.

Since then there have been a whole spate of books for very young children dealing with the kind of issues more usually thrashed out on the psychiatrist’s couch than in the story corner. This month, picture books dealing with first love, sexual intercourse, bodily functions and poor body image will hit the bookstores.

Cinderella’s Bum (and other bottoms), Nicholas Allan’s take on a big sister who is worried about the size of her bottom, is published in a new edition by Red Fox. Jennifer Jones Won’t Leave Me Alone by Frieda Wishinsky and Neal Layton, the story of a classroom crush, is published in a new edition by Picture Corgi. The Sprog Owner’s Manual (or how kids work), a new book by Babette Cole, is published by Cape. But most controversial of all is Where Willy Went: The Big Story of a Little Sperm, a new offering from the pen of Nicholas Allan, under the Hutchinson imprint.

These books are all, in format at least, designed for pre-school children. The content, however, is considerably more sophisticated than anything you might come across in Percy the Park Keeper or Postman Pat.

In Nicholas Allan’s book, Willy is a little sperm who must make his way down through Mr Browne and up inside Mrs Browne to reach the prize: “a beautiful egg”. Willy is given a map showing inside Mr Brown and a map showing inside Mrs Browne. “That very night Mr and Mrs Browne joined together. The teacher cried: “Go!” and the great swimming race began”. The book does not feature erection or penetration but it is one of the most explicit books about reproduction available for the under-fives.

Michael Morpurgo, the author and children’s laureate, believes there is a trend in very young children’s literature towards more realistic topics, but cautions against reading too much into it.

“These trends come and go. Babette Cole has been writing about bodies for ages. In fact she probably started the whole thing off. The great thing is to trust the readers. With younger children you know very quickly whether something is working, whether it will hold their attention. If they are smiling and engaged that’s great. The reason Babette Cole’s books work is because they are witty and they make you giggle. They are full of integrity because that is how she is herself. Writers must be themselves. Some are wacky, some are serious, some are great fantasists, others do social realism. That is what is great about children’s literature; there is something for everyone at all ages.”

But at a time of fierce competition in the children’s market, authors may feel they have to attempt something more daring and risqué to get noticed, or even published. And, as most parents and teachers will testify, anything involving bottoms is likely to be a surefire hit. But are these topics about which today’s children are genuinely worried or are such books all part of the growing sexualisation of children?

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury and the author of numerous books on the breakdown of boundaries between adult and children’s worlds, says: “Adults can’t get it into their head that children attach different meanings to objects and relationships than they do. Adults who see children fooling around with each other perceive it in sexual terms. Children don’t. The more difficulty we have in comprehending what children are up to, the more we subject them to an adult-like ethos. We think we need to give them this sort of worthy instruction. Children learn about sex in their own way. I think these books are quite intrusive. They suck children into their parents’ mindset.”

Caroline Roberts, the publisher responsible for Where Willy Went, says publishers are willing to take more of a risk these days. “There are only so many stories you can do about monsters under the bed or that new baby in the family. The reason Where Willy Went works is because it is such a strong story. We weren’t planning to publish a series of edgy books for five year-olds. It’s just that Nicholas Allan came in with a wonderful story and that was what we went for. We’ve had fantastic feedback and it has been sold to 13 countries including Greece, Italy and Korea.”

But what do the children think? Sophie, 10, Tom, 7, and Clara, 3 have agreed to test some of the latest literary offerings for The Scotsman. They start with Cinderella’s Bum. Tom and Clara are familiar with Nicholas Allan’s book The Queen’s Knickers, which they think is hilarious. Cinderella’s Bum has more of a moral to it. “Be proud of your bottom!” the heroine says.

Clara thinks it “really funny. Bums are funny,” she says. Tom says: “It’s excellent. It’s really rude. It’s my kind of thing. The book says you shouldn’t be ashamed of your body. You should be happy with what you’ve got.” Sophie thinks it a good book but possibly not appropriate for very small children. “It would be OK for six or seven year olds,” she says.

At what age do the children think people start to worry about their body image? “In their 30s,” says Tom confidently. “No way,” yells Sophie. “I worry about my butt now. I compare it with other people’s and it’s huge.” When did she start worrying about her size? “When Katie joined the class. She’s so skinny and she has the smallest bottom in the universe. I’m like an elephant compared with her.” Does Cinderella’s Bum make her feel happier about her bottom? “A bit,” she concedes.

Where Willy Went proves a big hit with Tom: “It’s really cool and funny,” he says. Sophie is shocked at the content. “I don’t think children aged three or four should be looking at this. It’s too rude. It’s a book for eight or nine-year-olds.” The subject matter is way over Clara’s head. “What is that kind of creature called?” she asks, pointing to the picture of the giant sperm on the cover. “Do worms like that live in people’s bodies?”

But the book which causes most revulsion is ostensibly the most innocent. Jennifer Jones Won’t Leave Me Alone is a rhyming book about a little girl who develops a crush on a small boy. It isn’t until she moves away that the boy realises these feelings are reciprocated. For Tom, it is all too much.

“It’s sickable. It’s yuck. It’s not for boys. I don’t like it,” he protests. At what age does he think boys fall in love with girls? “Nine,” he says. “Girls start fancying boys in Junior 2 when they are six,” says Sophie. “Boys fancy girls too but they are more embarrassed about it. They are not so good at telling girls. I don’t know why. Maybe they think people will snigger and laugh about it.”

Clara wanders off to get her own books. She likes Cinderella’s Bum but the other two she deems “boring”. They are not funny or imaginative enough to hold her attention and the subject matter is too complicated. Books dealing with boys’ emotional relationships with girls, such as Jennifer Jones, trouble Tom but he likes the “rude” subject matter of the other two and although he has moved on from picture books, he settles easily back into a younger format.

The subject matter of all three books engages Sophie but the format is far too babyish for her. She would prefer to explore these subjects in a more serious way through books by authors such as Jacqueline Wilson or even Anne Frank’s Diary, which she has just finished reading.

Michael Morpurgo says the main problem with books such as Where Willy Went is choosing the right time to read them. “I have a book called The Dancing Bear which ends in a very bleak tragedy and it is for very young children,” he says. “It’s a similar kind of issue. A lot of people think young children can’t deal with the subject matter and there is some truth in that, but that is what the story is. If you don’t like it, don’t read it.

“I think the ‘oughts’ in children’s literature are an absolute minefield. This idea of what children ‘ought’ to be reading. We all have to accept now that children are exposed unbelievably young to all sorts of influences and the only thing that matters to me is that a book treats its subject matter intelligently, sensitively, wittily and with integrity.”

But is it as simple as that? Taken individually it is easy to justify each book. But taken collectively and set in a wider cultural context, are they part of the trend which the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams describes as “children becoming prematurely sexualised”? When high-street chains start stocking padded bras and thongs for nine-year-olds and six-year-olds clamour to watch the sexually explicit dances of their favourite pop stars, it’s easy to feel that childhood gets thrown out with the disposable nappies.

Professor Furedi believes the sexual content of very young children’s books is all part of that same trend. “It’s one thing for children to know that mummy and daddy are up to something or that there are topics which mummy and daddy are sensitive to. It is quite another matter to give them books which are infantilised versions of adult issues.

“These books are regrettable because they are intrusive, patronising and they unduly focus the mind on the sexual rather than the sensual. They distract children from the creative act of discovery. They short circuit that experience. Being open about sex means responding to children’s questions and their problems, not imposing adult perceptions on them. We need to trust children to learn for themselves.”

Morpurgo makes the point that books are different from other media because they depend upon the child’s skills and imagination, in a way in which film and television do not.

“The wonderful thing about books is that they are entirely interactive, so a child will make what he or she wants of them,” he says. “Books aren’t there to provide answers. They are there to ensure we go on asking questions. Books can help us sort things out. They don’t answer the questions but they help us not to worry about the questions quite as much. I would have loved a book like Where Willy Went when I was four. I didn’t know about this stuff until I was God knows what age.”

Sex in children’s literature is not a new phenomenon. Heavy Words Lightly Thrown, a new book by Chris Roberts, examines the sexual meaning behind nursery rhymes such as Goosey, Goosey Gander (venereal disease) and Mary, Mary Quite Contrary (adultery in the court of Mary Queen of Scots). From the virginal princesses of the Grimm Brothers’ fairytales, to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes, sex is a common theme. But in the past, authors dealt with it obliquely and allegorically. Today’s authors leave little to a four year-old’s imagination.

Children have always asked questions about their origins. In the past they were directed to look under cabbage leaves or keep an eye open for passing storks, a phenomenon which led to a generation unable to talk about sex. But we still confuse ignorance with innocence. Literature does not rob children of their innocence; it is one of the tools with which they make sense of the world.

The problem with the latest batch of children’s books is not their subject matter but their banality. Where Willy Went is much less engaging than Babette Cole’s pre-school sex manual Mummy Laid an Egg. Few four year olds will reach for Jennifer Jones Won’t Leave Me Alone if Julia Donaldson’s Room on the Broom is available. Sex may be a six year-old issue but, in the great panoply of children’s literature, it is still a pretty minor one.

First published by The Scotsman, 10 March 2004