By Tom Geoghegan

BBC News Magazine



Fat, spoilt, feral and stupid. Who would be a child or teenager today? They even mistime their coming-of-age, apparently.

"I think children act like adults at an alarmingly early age," said Dame Jacqueline Wilson, who has sold more than 30 million books. Her remarks came as a poll by her publisher suggested that more than half of parents believe childhood is now over by 11.

But a glance through recent history shows that adults have long raised concerns about children "growing up" too quickly. Did they always?

EDWARDIAN

Clothes were Victorian-style and heavy fabrics restricted movement

This added to a feeling of a moral and physical decline among the youth, and was compounded by recruitment problems for the Boer War. The Boy Scout movement was founded in an effort to address that.

The constant threat to children of a thrashing meant parents and teachers wielded great power. Physical punishment was considered to be a matter of duty towards the child, says a spokeswoman for the Museum of Childhood in London.

"A surprising number of children got away with things like scrumping apples and placing booby traps. But disobedience or defiance of authority, whether of parent, teacher, or any other adult was also taken particularly seriously, and likely to lead to moral reproach as well as physical punishment."

They were abstaining [from sex] for a number of reasons, such as social pressure and lack of opportunity

Lesley Hall

Author

"There was quite a problem with truanting and some worked after school on the land or in a business," he says. "And there was a group left out, probably working in sweatshops."

Lesley Hall, author of Sex, Gender and Social Change, says a lot of young boys were being employed in dead-end jobs like messaging because they were not old enough to have proper apprenticeships and there was anxiety that they were hanging around street corners smoking.

Under-age smoking is nothing new

"They were abstaining [from sex] for a number of reasons, such as social pressure and lack of opportunity. Children were less free and able to go their own way. People lived in neighbourhoods where everyone knew what was going on. There was a certain amount of community policing that we don't get now."

But that's not to say they weren't interested. The "monkey-walk" was a pre-courtship ritual common among 14 and 15 year olds, which enabled mingling of the sexes in a collective way. Members of the lower classes would go to some part of town and there the boys would hang around and watch and the girls walk past.

INTERWAR

Carefree days

About 1,000 middle class children attended the first clinic in about 1925 and paved the way for the provision of one in every local authority area under the 1944 Education Act. Susan Isaacs, a pioneer in education psychology, wrote Nursery World, which advised middle-class parents on rearing children.

Meanwhile Sir Cyril Burt and John Bowlby advanced understanding of juvenile delinquency.

POSTWAR

"The militarised society was gradually fading and with it the hierarchy and deference that characterised it. And a key shift in the child-parent dynamic came in this period, says Hugh Cunningham, author of The Invention of Childhood.

Post-war Britain was one big playground

The word "teenager" was coined in 1941 and by the early 50s the concept of the sexually-charged, rebellious youngster emerged through the likes of Marlon Brando in The Wild One.

Despite perceptions to the contrary, not a lot has changed to teenage sexuality since the 1950s, especially for boys, says sex psychologist Dr Petra Boynton.

What's altered since the 50s is that then women were more likely to be virgins when they married but now they are getting married later and having their sexual experiences beforehand."

60s & 70s

The start of the age of mass-consumption marked another moral panic, this time about the influence rock 'n' roll was having on young people. There was a newly-emancipated working-class in the 60s, and young people had cash and optimism in abundance.

The runaway success of Dr Benjamin Spock's self-help book, Baby and Childcare, helped renew enthusiasm, mainly in the US but also in the UK, for strengthening the family, against the then pervasive Communist threat.

"The nuclear family for people like John Bowlby [a British psychoanalyst noted for his work in child development] and Benjamin Spock represented the best of liberal democracy. It would be a happy place and a place of affluence and would stand against agitators."

But 1973, and the economic downturn, was a year when for the first time people became pessimistic and not optimistic about childhood, says Cunningham.

"Until then there was a clear agenda which dominated public discourse that we were making life better for children - the welfare state, NHS and education - but in the 70s we began to lose that confidence and now we never see optimism in reports about childhood."

80s TO PRESENT

Since the mid-90s the internet, lads mags and an abundance of sexual imagery through TV and video has created a more sexual culture for young people, says Boynton. But it's an aspirational not an educational version of sex that increases anxiety.

It makes the whole question of when childhood ends very difficult because dependency is regarded a sign of childhood

Hugh Cunningham

A survey last week found that most adults believed children's well-being was being damaged because childhood had become too commercial. In the early 20th Century they were targeted by Meccano and teddy manufacturers, now it's iPods and mobile phones on their wish-list.

But this love of things shiny and new has lent them a unlikely new authority as effective gatekeepers, over their adult parents, to the perplexing world of home entertainment technologies. Yet the focus on home entertainment has also been a result of children being kept indoors.

Used to be sand castles, now sand phones

Parents now subsidise their children to a very late age, in a way unprecedented in history, says Cunningham, buying them houses in their 20s and 30s.

"This is a reverse from the normal flow of money from children to parents. It makes the whole question of when childhood ends very difficult because dependency is regarded a sign of childhood."

Far from growing up too fast, he says, they don't grow up fast enough.