Oh, to be a child again … but it wouldn’t be the same, would it? In fact, in some ways I can liken my childhood more to that in developing countries now. Not that we were poor. There wasn’t a lot of money but there was enough and we were “rich” in ways I believe kids no longer are. I feel we had more freedom, more time in the outdoors, more time with family, more street and neighbourhood community and less need for stuff. Nowadays, the more things and experiences kids have, the more dissatisfied they seem.

Mary-Elaine Tynan returned from a stint at St Jude’s School in Tanzania and was struck by how the African children, who owned nothing, seemed so much happier than the kids back home in Australia, who have so much. Having been among smiling, uncomplaining youngsters for a few years, it seemed to her that Australian children were constantly whining and asking for things, never satisfied for long, even when given what they wanted.

Paule Browne-Cooper, CEO of Kids in Kenya, an organisation that supplies basic school materials and sporting equipment to about 5000 primary-aged children in a remote, poverty-stricken area of western Kenya, says much the same. “The Kenyan kids in Usonga, Siaya, have very little — in fact, most have no shoes. They have no power or running water in their village, hence no TV, computers or radios. They walk everywhere, usually in groups, laughing and playing together.”

Audiologist Cathie Bruce, who fits underprivileged Colombian children with hearing aids, tells a similar story about children there. “They are just always smiling and laughing…” And, according to a UNICEF report, An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries, even among wealthier countries “…There is no obvious relationship between levels of child well-being and GDP per capita. The Czech Republic, for example, achieves a higher overall rank for child well-being than several much wealthier countries including France, Austria, the United States and the United Kingdom.” Child wellbeing was measured using a number of indicators, including children’s own assessment of their happiness.

We can’t, of course, deny the reality of poverty, neglect and abuse for so many of the world’s children, from the poorest nations through to rich countries like our own. However, leaving aside extremes, we generally feel sorry for children in the developing world and consider our own incredibly lucky. But is childhood in rich countries as great as we think or have we spoiled it somewhat by trying to make it too good, too predictable, too structured; by being too protective and ambitious for our kids and by giving them too much?

The previous UNICEF (2007) report stated, “All families in OECD countries today are aware that childhood is being re-shaped by forces whose mainspring is not necessarily the best interests of the child … a wide public is becoming ever more aware that many of the corrosive social problems … have their genesis in the changing ecology of childhood.” The term “ecology of childhood” encompasses the family, school, neighbourhood and community contexts in which children grow up.

There’s always a multiplicity of factors at play in a changing world, but there are particular issues that have profoundly changed the way childhood is experienced in the developed world compared with our past and poorer parts of the contemporary world. These include time spent in nature/outdoors, family and community relationships, children’s own expectations and their sense of entitlement. There aren’t useful figures for some of this, so it’s somewhat homespun — my take on it as a keen observer, user of technology and social media, and frequent child carer.

Being in nature

First-world children spend much less time in nature than do kids in developing nations. For many city children, weekends are the only time they get to move around in nature, other than in the school or preschool playground. Even at weekends, the computer, Wii, Xbox, iPad etc beckon far more magnetically than the great outdoors.

According to Dr Stephen R Kellert, author of Birthright: People and Nature in the Modern World and a pioneer in the field of biophilia — the study of human beings’ inherent affinity for nature — nature is important to children’s development in every major way: intellectually, emotionally, socially, spiritually and physically. However, he says, “Children are increasingly disconnected from nature.”

A recent UK study of 2000 families compared the time kids spend outdoors nowadays with how much their parents enjoyed. It found that, during the 1970s and 1980s, on average, children enjoyed more than two hours of outside play each weekday and a further nine hours at weekends. Today’s kids ventured outside for just over an hour each weekday and less than five hours on Saturdays and Sundays. “Children are now, on average, spending 52 hours per week in front of a monitor,” says Kellert.

He believes this is compromising health and wellbeing. “We will never be truly healthy, satisfied or fulfilled if we live apart and alienated from the environment from which we evolved.” He explains why children’s outdoor experiences are a more powerful source for their learning and development than indoor, representational or managed contacts with nature.

“Among the most important are its greater degree of variety, challenge, complexity, unpredictability, immediacy and even danger.” These characteristics — some of which contemporary society actively shields children from — “provoke a child’s curiosity, imagination, creativity, problem solving and independence”, which in turn fosters confidence and self-esteem. No book or website can reproduce or match the variety, complexity and flux of nature.

Physicians Hillary Burdette and Robert Whitaker, in a review of scientific literature, also concluded, “…the problem solving that occurs in [outdoor] play may promote executive functioning — a higher-level skill that integrates attention and other cognitive functions such as planning, organizing, sequencing, and decision making.”

Bring nature into everyday life

• When you want to buy something for a child, make it something related to outdoor activity: a brilliant kite, swimming toys, a skipping rope, bat-and-ball toys, a skateboard.
• If they’re old enough, let them camp out in the backyard for a night.
• Sit outside with them on a clear night and work out together which star is which.
• Turn a walk in nature into a treasure hunt, looking for particular things, such as white stones, wildflowers, birds, lizards etc.
• Give your child a part of the Garden in which to grow flowers, vegetables or fruit.

Social ecology

In 1967, two-thirds of American children had one parent at home full-time, while around one-third had both parents working; by 2009, it had reversed. In other words, twice as many children have both parents working now. The figures for working vs stay-at-home single parents have almost doubled in that time as well. Making no judgements about which is better or worse for children, or whether it’s necessary for parents to be working while their kids are young, the fact is it’s a big change in the ecology of childhood.

The time spent in care outside the family also has an impact on how connected children are with their neighbourhood and local community. They may be in a childcare centre that’s close to a parent’s employment rather than near home. The pre-school-age members of the family may be in one centre and the school-age kids in another, before and after school. Kids often forge friendships with children who live miles away.

Children in poorer countries tend to spend more time with their parents and siblings, as we did in the past. They see their mums and dads at work and have a better understanding of what they do to keep the family fed and housed, often helping out themselves. In this way, their own roles in society develop gradually from childhood. There are always other close relatives and neighbours around in moments of need.

In developed societies, parents disappear off to their jobs early in the morning and don’t return until day’s end, their children generally having little idea of what they do when away from the family. A common scenario is that the whole family is segmented off: babies and toddlers to daycare, school-aged kids to different classes or schools, Mum to her job, Dad to his. Grandparents, once the reliable, nurturing back-up, are often still working, off travelling or have moved away to a retirement area.

When the family meet up again in the evening, everyone is tired and hungry; homework has to be dealt with, dinner has to be cooked and then everyone is anxious to get to their various electronic entertainments, so often the easy way out for everyone, including Mum and Dad. Then it’s bedtime, sometimes accompanied by arguments between fractious or rebellious offspring and tired parents who just want some relaxation time.

Expectation

Children in the developed world are in a state of expectation a lot of the time. They are little clock watchers, waiting to be dropped off, picked up and taken places. They often have a packed schedule of after-school and weekend activities, playdates and sleepovers.

They are in an almost constant state of expectation around material things, too. There’s a trend of allowing them to say what they want for birthday and Christmas gifts, to put in their orders, so they expect to get what they want rather than what the giver would like to select for them. Many typical gifts cost hundreds of dollars but what might be exquisite anticipation can be spoiled by the child’s worry over whether it will be the right colour or brand.

When they get the thing they want, the joy is real enough but short-lived; they are soon thinking about what the next thing will be or what their best friend got. Getting teaches them to expect. It doesn’t matter how much they have, advertising is omnipresent with the sole purpose of telling them what they don’t have. Capitalism needs growth; growth needs more consumption; to achieve more consumption, “need” has to be created. Not having the next thing creates a sense of something lacking or missing, which is easily moulded into something that feels like need to a kid. When they are manipulated by such seductive forces, how can children be content for long?

It wasn’t until the 1980s that television advertising began to be directly targeted at children. Before then, the ads for child-related products were aimed purely at parents, and before the 1960s there was almost no advertising of child-related products. Sweden, since 1991, has banned all advertising during children’s primetime due to findings that children under 10 are incapable of telling the difference between a commercial and a program and cannot understand the purpose of a commercial until the age of 12.

In an article titled “Childhood for Sale”, author Kay Hymowitz, who writes extensively on childhood, family issues, poverty and cultural change, stated, “Marketers use the expertise of anthropologists, sociologists, brain-imaging specialists, child psychologists, and pollsters to plumb children’s desires, analyze family dynamics, and develop techniques that seem consciously designed to make parents’ lives miserable.” That is, create pester power.

Third-world children have little expectation because they are unused to getting. Browne-Cooper says, “I cannot remember ever hearing any of these kids complaining or asking for things. They have no expectations and when given anything — soccer balls spring to mind — they are so grateful it would make you weep! Their ‘soccer balls’ are usually scrunched-up plastic bags bound together with rubber bands. I feel privileged that I am able to spend time with these carefree, happy kids, in a world without luxury, indeed with only the barest of essentials.”

Play value

Toy consultant Julie Creighton advises parents to look more deeply into why their children want things. “Parents should be less concerned with what their child wants for a gift and more concerned with why they want it. If you ask children what they want, they give you the marketing information they’ve been fed by the media. But if you ask them why they want it, you’ll learn what meaning the toy has in their lives.”

Play value refers to how children use the toy or game to meet their developmental needs. “When you know why a child wants a particular toy, it’s often possible to find a more affordable or acceptable alternative with the same play value,” Creighton says. “When the child’s purpose of wanting a gift is met, any disappointment fades quickly.”

Sense of entitlement

In cultures where families comprise parent/s and only one or two children, those kids can — indeed, are encouraged to — develop quite an inflated sense of entitlement. Parents limit the number of children they have, in part so they can provide every material “benefit” and so they can afford the childcare that allows them to go to work to earn the money to provide those so-called benefits.

“We live in a culture that encourages children to get all they can,” says Lynne Namka, an American child psychologist. “Children are constantly bombarded with the message that they can have everything they want.” However, Namka believes there’s a positive side to not getting what they want.

“Kids actually need many little trials and tribulations, failures and disappointments to mature emotionally,” she says. “Learning to deal with these feelings increases their social competence and resilience. When parents try to spare them by buying everything as soon as they ask for it, kids never develop the ability to handle setbacks. Trying to insulate children from every small disappointment is a mistake.”

Schools face the problem of catering to this. With so much empowerment, children feel more in control of their own life choices. Combine that with ever-increasing exposure to pop culture through TV, the internet and social media and they are in danger of taking that as their moral compass, rather than traditional values of family, school and community.

“Today’s parents, teachers and child ‘experts’ know only how to celebrate the individual child, empowering him to ‘find his own way’ — even as pop culture beckons him in the wrong direction with its enticing fantasies,” wrote Hymowitz. In her view, the idea of childhood as a time of limited competence, in which adults prepare the young for maturity, has fallen into disrepute: “…Independence has become not the reward of time, but rather something that our children have come to expect and demand at increasingly younger ages.”

Rich or poor?

Most of what has been discussed here is summed up by Tynan, now living in Ireland. “Having grown up in the so-called first world and then lived in the ‘developing world’, I soon began to radically re-evaluate how rich we are in our first world. Undoubtedly, many of us have more than $100 in our bank accounts, so we are among the wealthy of the world, but we are so poor in many other respects,” she says.

“Ours is a culture that raises and encourages children who have a deluded sense of entitlement; who believe that the real world lives inside a screen and who are in danger of losing the ability to play and socialise. We often don’t know our neighbours and have lost what it means to be a community. So, while there may be many things that we can teach these developing countries, they know far more about family, community and real, meaningful communication. And in that they are supremely richer than we are.”

Reclaiming community

We are all busy, but some things are worth finding time for. Getting to know your neighbours and local community is one. Here are some ways to form and strengthen these relationships:

• Organise a street party.
• Organise a whole-street garage sale.
• If you have children, introduce yourself to other nearby parents.
• Find out if there are any old people living alone or requiring help with simple things, or just needing company occasionally. Send one of the kids to find out if they need anything sometimes — a great way to involve children in helping people and to teach them to be neighbourly.
• Do some of your shopping at the local shops instead of the supermarket.

 

Want to donate to kids in need?

Kids in Kenya, kidsinkenya.net
School of St Jude, Tanzania, schoolofstjude.org