Don’t tell me about the millions of brilliant youngsters with dozens of A Levels: how are they really doing? (From Bucks Free Press)

Don’t tell me about the millions of brilliant youngsters with dozens of A Levels: how are they really doing?

10:39pm Saturday 27th February 2010

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When UNICEF raises the alarm about children, it’s serious. So, what is happening?

Our young people are bottom of the wellbeing league tables. UNICEF’s 2007 findings make all these outstanding academic results seem worthless.

It’s not a new report but it’s the most recent with this kind of clear information.

It’s almost like am empty boast. Like that kid at school always brought in the newest toys, always had the trendiest clothes and boasted about their summer holidays. Years later you find out they were ill-treated by their parents or desperately lacking in self-esteem or beaten.

The report highlighted some obvious and probably already well-publicised data including the quality of children’s relationships, education and health. But it also renders some more subtle information.

For example, in Italy somewhere near 95% of 15 year olds eat their main meal with their family ‘several time per week’. Compare this with the UK’s 65%.

And I’m agog at the figures corresponding to cultural and educational circumstances. To quote: ‘These three indicators show that children appear to be most deprived of educational and cultural resources in some of the world’s most economically developed countries.’ Britain included.

The UK comes below the Czech Republic, Hungary, France, Poland and Germany for 15 year olds with fewer than ten books in the home. Hang on, books are cheap. Charity shops and boot sales are full of them – reference books and fiction alike, some very new ones too.

Worse are the 55% of UK children of 11, 13 and 15 who report eating breakfast every school day. The Portuguese do it much, much more, so do the Poles French and Danes and many more. It’s looking bleak already. Worse is to come.

The UK has the highest number of the same age group smoking, having been drunk and the bar almost shoots off the table when it comes to 15 year olds having had sex. And well known UK’s highest number of teenage pregnancies.

Young people spend less time talking with their parents (less than in Hungary, Ireland and Finland), and find their peers least kind and helpful of all the nations.

Enough of the statistics. Their emotional life is in pieces. Right now, I’m in the midst of the 11+ trauma. Virtually all I hear at the school gates is ‘coaching’, ‘pass’, ‘fail’ and ‘appeal’. It’s a sickness.

One mother who I’m barely acquainted with and who only nods politely as a rule made a point of standing next to me the other week and told me her daughter had passed. Hurrah. What concerns me is the impact all this has on the poor little ones.

Our children have low self-esteem and poor quality of life to use a common phrase. Don’t we encourage them? Don’t we make them feel worthy and lovely and terrific and loved? Certainly not enough. We’re impoverished socially – a third world country.

We’ve got all our priorities wrong when our children have to tell us through a report that they’re unhappy, emotionally neglected and pining for some care and attention.

I know that parents want their children to be successful. But using that kind of language in such a general way is highly suspicious. Again, what kind of success are we talking about?

Not, I think the success of a balanced emotional life, general sense of satisfaction and acceptance of oneself, physical health, a long marriage, ability to manage money...

It’s as though parents and their children are talking different languages. We’re talking about success and our children are saying, ‘Damn grades, give me some love.’

UNICEF has put the UK under a microscope. We don’t look too healthy. I’m aware that education (as in schooling) is a big thing in the UK but it looks like we have the narrowest of definitions.

Further, how can an emotionally deprived young person possibly hope to make a success out of their relationships? Or even their academic achievements.

UNICEF has put the UK under a microscope. We don’t look too healthy.

I’m aware that education (as in schooling) is a big thing in the UK but it looks like we have the narrowest of definitions.

Surely we don’t really believe that education is the time our children spend with trained teachers learning about isosceles triangles and circuits. We ourselves are impoverished if we do.

Surely we’re teaching them to be members of society. Yes, they have to work but good Heavens there’s more to life than that. I sometimes think the UK’s obsessed with work. We all have to make and keep friends, manage difficult feelings, deal with grief, love and decisions.

I now have this dismal picture of the average UK youth waking up, going to school with no breakfast, coping with indifferent friends and a harsh school environment, smoking, drinking, having unprotected sex (maybe at break time) and coming home where no one speaks very much to them and they somehow have to buckle down and get their homework done. It makes me feel desperately sad.

Just what sort of leaders and society are our anxious, depressed, stressed, pressured children going to make? Perish the thought.

It’s interesting the times I’ve been accused of boasting here. Could it be that we expect our children just to be invisible as individuals, not feel proud, not celebrate themselves, just keep their heads down and try not to stand out? Then come interview time, they suddenly have to sound confident and sell themselves.

It’s barbaric and we need to acknowledge it. Just what sort of leaders and society are our anxious, depressed, stressed, pressured children going to make? Perish the thought.

As a parent, I’m fully aware of the priorities parents have and how strong the tide is to have your child get top marks, be entering music grade exams before their peers, pass the 11+, and be generally a child their Mum and Dad can boast about: ‘My kid’s brilliant, aren’t I lucky?’

As my grown up son constantly reminds me, when you get a bit older no one gives a hoot what school you went to (apart from a very small and dull few). He works with the very affluent and the very modest, the schooled and the starting out – I don’t think he’s ever been asked when he passed his Grade 3 on the drums or whether he was went to basketball club after school or got A* or any of that utter tripe. You see it doesn’t matter.

Canute couldn’t stop the tide but we do have the power to stand up to other parents with their priorities all wrong. I try to. I don’t want to know about coaching or private lessons or kids winning trophies or exam results particularly. I’m aiming every day to be involved in what matters to my daughter – struggles with friends, teachers, moral dilemmas and emotions.

Sometimes it’s hard not to feel I may not be pushing her enough and I hope I’m never blamed for that kind of neglect. But I do feel it’s more acceptable than the kind UNICEF has highlighted.

Harder to measure a child at the top of the wellbeing league tables and maybe that’s part of the problem. I await the day some mum comes up to me and boasts, ‘My son lost the skipping race but told me it didn’t matter because he was brilliant at art.’ Success.