Remember free-wheeling down the hill on your bike to buy groceries for your mum? Like conkers, hula-hoops and Enid Blyton books, certain concepts of childhood and adolescence are obsolete. There are high tech replacements for sure – who doesn’t secretly crave a go on a Wii, dodging and diving in front of your TV screen while the kids howl for their turn. But those symbols of a time of innocence and freedom – ‘sevensies’ against the wall of your house, blackberry picking, making Airfix models and hanging them above your bed – are all gone and it’s no use whining about the good old days. Or is it?
I live in a tiny village in rural Spain, that values it’s teens as the tax-paying citizens they will grow up to be. Children are doted on, cuddled and kissed in the street, bought exorbitant presents like motorbikes and sent on school ski-ing trips, when some families only earn minimum wage in a local supermarket. This is not seen as ‘spoiled child syndrome’ in the media however, but pride and rewards for your offspring. The yearly school Nativity play is a riot of obvious parental pride, flashing cameras and camcorders recording every star turn, and a local grandpa or ‘abuelo’ roped in to play Santa at the end and dish out prizes to every child in the village.
Every August, the town holds the fiesta of its patron saint (Lorenzo) and that year’s eighteen year olds and six year olds are feted and adored in street processions. Whole families return to their roots in Parcent and thousands of euros are spent – houses of the ‘festeros’ are re-painted and the front doors decorated with palm fronds and paper flowers, while a mural is painted on the street with the child’s name and year. Hairdressers and dressmakers are fully booked for weeks, for the lavish dresses and tuxedos that the teens will wear and the ten days of partying, fireworks and parades begins. The teenagers organise the events themselves and spend long nights at the Town Hall discussing fund-raising, selling T-shirts and lottery tickets, devising carnival costumes, booking bands and pyrotechnicians. Even the shyest ones blossom by the end of the fiesta, having received universal praise and applause for their hard work.
You could accuse me of having a blinkered view from our rural idyll. We left East London in 2001 when gunshots could sometimes be heard outside our windows at night. A homeless man began preying on our first child’s nursery school, and police were too busy dealing with larger issues to eject him from the school gardens. The area suffered such bad overcrowding that the local GP refused to use an appointments system, and instead you queued each day on the street in the hope of being seen. When we last returned to the UK for a holiday, we avoided the area in favour of visiting friends and family in rural Hertfordshire and Essex. Notwithstanding the development Stratford has seen in preparation for the Olympics, it felt to us unsafe, undesirable and symptomatic of the price we all pay for city life.
Now we read from afar about escalating knife crime, and monitor the grim tally of London teenagers killed this year. The school-post code lottery, private corporations taking over public institutions, banning drink on the Underground, ‘mosquitos’ in city centres, suggest that fear is the overriding factor in decision making. Every day on the radio there is another announcement about the ways that Boris or David/Nick will tackle London’s problems, or how the UK will legislate its way out of trouble.
This sounds like a profitless spiral. All the social studies suggest that self-esteem is the key factor in whether children do well; whether teens go on to university or successful careers. But this does not just mean we should give delinquent kids a holiday, where they can see how the other half live. In a country as over-populated as the UK, how can individual kids feel valued, appreciated or loved? Is it just a parental responsibility?
That adage about it taking a village to raise a child has never been more relevant. A village, not an overcrowded capital. Sweeping measures designed to protect the population from dangerous young men are failing to stop them from carrying weapons and behaving in antisocial ways, because they are unanimously reviled wherever they go – for wearing hoodies, or shutting off their ears with iPods, or hanging out in gangs who understand one another.
Overcrowding at home and school, unemployment, lack of prospects and peer pressure combine to leave teens feeling depressed, which manifests in two common ways. Boys act out, and girls self-harm. Boys grow increasingly anti-social in public to impress their peers, while girls form gangs, bully the weaker ones, get into shoplifting for kicks or remain isolated from friends and prone to depression.
It will take much more than a change of government or some ASBO’s to make an impact on a whole generation of teenagers. The media attitude that demonises all teens because of a statistically small number of offenders must change, and large towns and cities need to look at providing community ‘barrio’ projects that inspire neighbourhood pride and offer apprentice schemes for teens living within the post code.
Schools and communities must work together to support the most isolated teens and capitalise on the immense and often hidden talents of this generation of 18 to 25 year olds. Training schemes that simply provide businesses with cheap labour must be replaced by those that value young people’s input, and provide incentives and reward schemes especially during a recession when companies need the competitive edge provided by their fresh ideas and enthusiasm. When Facebook campaigns can influence a nation’s voting habits, the older generation really needs to listen to some of the media-savvy kids who know how to work Twitter and launch marketing campaigns from their bedrooms. The media should get behind some of the successful stories of the day that will inspire younger teens to stay out of trouble and go on to succeed.
When neighbourhoods begin to rally round their local teens and set them suitable graded benchmarks for success in the long term, we might see a return to the good ole days when teenage life was about having fun and letting off steam before you knuckle down to a career. Letting the youthful pressure cooker atmosphere burst in a flurry of artistic and sporting activity will surely result in teens more inclined to grow up gracefully, rather than be rushed into making career choices at 11 and obsessing over weight, looks and skills before they’ve had a chance to get to know themselves or their capabilities. So stop giving kids a hard time and let them have their ‘teenage kicks’ now. We’ll grow a new generation of planet-conscious, hard-working taxpayers soon enough.
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