One of the reasons for this growing commercialisation is the rapid increase in family incomes over the past fifty years (a threefold rise), which has meant that more money is spent on children, and by them. Advertisers have followed the money, which has created more materialistic demands by children. Toddlers can’t distinguish between advertising and programmes. Over the past century, the economic role of children has shifted from being producers (if largely unpaid) to consumers. One of the things they end up consuming, in effect, is a more solitary lifestyle, which is increasingly mediated through products, especially electronic products. (In this and below, I am summarising a longer paper by Piachaud. which has a good summary of the literature and a detailed analysis of the important trends, available in pdf.)

One of the results is that poor families end up poorer as they try to keep up, according to the National Consumer Council:

‘Advertising makes poverty bite. The children that have the least, in socioeconomic groups C2 and DE, are most interested in consumer and materialist concerns. This ‘aspiration gap’ is most marked in the poorest households’.

A broader effect of this “constant barrage of advertising” is that children may develop higher levels of materialism, and that this harms their psychological wellbeing.

One of the rights embedded in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation. But frameworks of rights usually assume that rights holders can exerise their rights for themselves. This is not the case for children. Piachaud argues that:

It is abundantly clear that children are weak in the face of the strong commercial pressures. It is also clear that these pressures increasingly intrude on intimate relationships within the family. It may therefore be that the law can and should be increasingly used to protect children’s rights to a childhood free from commercial pressures.

The paper reviews the arguments in favour of regulation or education as methods of protection, and concludes from this that there is a case for significnt market intervention:

“The evidence presented here suggests that the freedom of children would be substantially enhanced if commercial pressures were drastically curtailed. This might comprise:

1. The end of all advertising and other commercial pressures, of any sort on any media, directly or indirectly targeted at children aged under 7.
2. The end of all advertising directed at children aged 7-15 where this may have adverse effects on some children’s health, education, or their personal or social development.
3. Control of this advertising to made the responsibility of a body whose primary concern is with children, rather than, as now, being left to self regulationby the advertising industry.”

It could be that the modest regulation introduced to address obesity concerns is only the start of ‘darkening’ the children’s advertising market. David Piachaud is more trenchant when interviewed for The Edge article:

“The evidence indicates that the freedom of childhood is being eroded and their rights ignored,” says Professor Piachaud. “Protection of children from commercial pressures is seriously inadequate. Each child should be free to be a child.”

The whole November issue of The Edge is themed around  research on “Britain’s children”, including their health and education.

Related posts: Blindspot – our over-examined children?, Childhood more depressing than it used to be, ‘Darkening’ the soft drinks market and Toxic consumption.

The UK Gambling Commission finds no increase in prevalence of addiction – but uncovers some interesting contradictions in attitudes; perceptions of UK child poverty, and cyber-bullying moves in from the edge; the UN takes on corruption in Africa; booming demand for global shipping capacity; and a folksong take on honour killing.

Almost the first act of the new UK Gambling Commission has been to release its study on the prevalence of problem gambling in the UK. It found that the prevalence was about 0.5% of the adult population, which is the same as in 1999. Problem gamblers tended towards spread betting, fixed odds betting terminals, and betting exchanges. The attitudinal findings may be most interesting: “The average view [among respondents] was that gambling was more harmful than beneficial for individuals, and for society, and should not be encouraged. However, generally people surveyed agreed that there was a right to gamble and rejected total prohibition.”

A curiosity of the way in which the Dare to Care campaign’s findings on children’s perceptions of child poverty was reported was that newspapers seemed more interested in the 20% of 7-16 year olds who thought not having a mobile phone was a sign of a poverty than the larger proportions who thought that not going to be able to go on a trip (44%), not having the right school uniform (40%), not being able to afford a present for a birthday party (28%) or not having a safe place to play (24%) were signs of poverty. The size of the national sample (700) didn’t really sustain the rather wild regional variations which were included in the news release.

UK government research (by the Department of Children, Schools and Families) found that up to a third of 12-to-15 year olds had experienced some form of ‘cyber-bullying’ – through mobile messages or social networking sites. It’s launched a campaign against it. That single data point is all that seems to be available.

The United Nations and the World Bank have launched ‘StAR’ – the Stolen Asset Recovery initiative – o help poor countries recover money looted from their economies through corruption. The scale of the problem? The World Bank estimates that between $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion from corruption, crime, and tax evasion crosses borders – up to 25% of GNP of some African states. TED.com has a video of a presentation by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, sometime finance minister of Nigeria, on why recovery schemes are about more than the money involved

I blogged recently about the long-term growth in shipping volumes. The Guardian has a report on the current short term growth, which seems explosive. Here’s an extract:

Shipowners were celebrating more records last night as booming trade volumes with China – and increasingly India – brought unprecedented demand and a shortage of vessels. The London-based shipping market – the Baltic Exchange – confirmed that its dry bulk index that tracks the cost of shipping commodities such as iron ore and coal, had hit an all-time high at 99,215 points, up 133 points on the day… “The records are beginning to be broken on an almost daily basis,” said Jeremy Penn, chief executive of the Baltic. “It is absolutely booming and almost beyond explanation.”

Reports on the sentencing of an Indian woman resident in the UK for the honour killing of her daughter in law bring to mind a sleeve note on Martin Simpson’s fine new CD Prodigal Son. He writes about “Andrew Lammie”, an old Scots ballad based on real people and real events which (as he points out) unmistakably tells the story of an honour killing in the 17th century.

The final report of the UK’s ‘independent model health inquiry’, chaired by Baroness Kingsmill and partly funded by the fashion industry, proposes medicals to make sure that models are fit to work, and the enforcement of bans on under-16s working as models in London. The intention is to protect the vulnerable young in a largely unregulated industry, but the British Fashion Council will need more resources to implement this. Will Hutton of the Work Foundation, who contributed funding to the inquiry, welcomed steps to reduce exploitation of young people. The inquiry stopped short of the initiatives in Spain and Italy which involve measuring models’ body mass index – usually a clue to their level of anorexia.
With perfect timing, in Australia the Gold Coast found itself in flak – not least from the prime minister John Howard – after choosing Maddison Gabriel (who turned 13 at the weekend) as the ‘face’ of the inaugural Gold Coast fashion week. Howard said “We do have to preserve some notion of innocence in our society”. There were also criticisms from the Labout leader Kevin Rudd. The age restrictions proposed in London were mentioned.

At the same time the Labour Behind the Label campaign – an alliance of advocacy groups and trades unions – released it’s “Let’s Clean Up Fashion” report on wages and conditions in the garment trades in the countries (clue: they’re dreadful).

If I were sitting anywhere in the fashion industry, this combination of ethical trading (and concern about exploitation of vulnerable workers) and public and political concern about exploitation of the young starts to look like an overwhelming combination, not matter how nice the dresses look. Regulation looks inevitable.

Let’s deal with my scepticism first. However influential Nicholas Negroponte was in the great “bytes to atoms” debates of the 1990s, he’s still a rampaging technological determinist (the technology will make the social change follow). Seymour Papert’s educational theories about the role of technology in the classroom are beguiling but probably wrong. The business model required massive scale (minimum orders of one million machines which precluded pretty much anyone from actually buying them). Anyone who takes a technology to show off at Davos is more interested in performance than implementation. The list could go on.

But putting that aside, the pilot version of the laptop is made of tough white and green plastic, has a four-hour battery, a color screen and built-in Wi-Fi. For last week’s issue of Balancing Act, Russell interviewed Antione van Gelder, who’s part of OLPC’s South African pilot programme. Some headlines from the interview:

• The current price of the machne is $175US
• But the minimum size of order is now down to 250,000 – so the minimum order costs $4.375mUS
• Obviously that means you don’t have to worry about marketing and distribution, since the price means that only governments, the United Nations and the Gates Foundation (OK, I made that last bit up) can afford them. In South Africa van Gelder believes that the government can be persuaded to underwrite the cost (it’s not huge compared to the total education budget
• The machines are designed to have a five year life
• They’re hoping to mitigate the risk of theft with a ‘revocation key’ system which will disable machines in the wrong hands.
• But there are still problems about training (“after we leave the teachers will sink or swim”).
• And the school needs a server (about $250-300)
• The battery life is “awesome” – currently four hours and could climb to eight.
• There are other pilots in Nigeria, Nepal, Argentina, and Mexico. In the Nigerian trial, in a village, the arrival of the computers is said to have increased school attendance strongly – even among kids who were thought to have quit education.

There’s an interesting part of the interview about an earlier trial, albeit in an affluent white heighbourhood, which is worth repeating in full:

To start with we put in a free mesh network. After a year, the whole village was connected. One of the first things that happened was that the kids started socialising using the network and playing games. There’s an incredibly strong community of kids as a result. We gave them a whole universe of their own they can play with. They’re now running their own radio station.

After about six months the adults started to get it. Scarborough has a huge but not much used community hall. A couple of parents started a youth centre with ping-pong and pool tables and a DVD player. They set this up for the kids. All kinds of politics came with it. There are new power structures, leaders and followers. So it’s not been all wine and roses but new life has been pumped in.

Balancing Act is a website and a weekly email newsletter. For a recent post from a reader about Balancing Act’s coverage and view of Africa, try this from Ethan Zuckerman.

The report is available here (as a PDF), and it’s not pleasant reading.

• They identified 330 children believed to have been trafficked, while acknowledging that this was probably only the visible tip of the trade
• There’s an assessment of the strength of the evidence – the strongest being categorised as ‘level 4’
• Of level 4 cases, five-sixths were girls – of whom 65% were trafficked for sexual exploitation, and 29% for “domestic servitude” (as they put it)
• Traffickers from China and Albania appear to be most sophisticated
• Traffickers were effective at using child protection and asylum processes to get children into the country while keeping control of them
• More than half of the children identified in the data were missing – some may have been ‘re-trafficked’ to other jurisdictions.

The depth of a blindspot can be assessed by how quickly the discussion is closed down – and the strength of the language used to do this. I couldn’t help but think of this as I watched the instant and negative reaction of the government, the Conservatives, and newspaper leader-writers to the argument of the General Teaching Council that the extensive testing of under-16 year old children in England might be bad for their education.

The story in brief: the General Teaching Council, which is the professional body for teaching in England (and an independent regulatory body set up by the government), whose “purpose is to help improve standards of teaching and the quality of learning in the public interest”, gave evidence to an inquiry on “Testing and Assessment” by the House of Commons Select Committee on Skills and Education. The evidence hasn’t yet been published yet but was circulated to journalists. To quote one report:

“It says exams are failing to improve standards, leaving pupils demotivated and stressed and encouraging bored teenagers to drop out of school… Schoolchildren in England and Wales are now the most tested in the world, facing an average of 70 tests and exams before the age of 16. Standard Assessment Tests, or Sats, currently taken by children at the ages of seven, 11 and 14, should be abolished, it concludes.

The response from ministers was immediate: that’s not going to happen. The Conservatives agreed just as quickly. One absurd newspaper column compared school tests to the columnist’s (untaken) driving test. Newspaper leader writers joined in.

If blind spots are about assumptions, then some assumption-testing might have asked a couple of questions.

The first might be whether being the “most of” anything – in this case most tested – is usually a good policy position.

The second might be to wonder what the UK evidence said, given that it’s possible to have a look at whether there are differing outcomes in Scotland (which has a different system) and Wales (which has abolished SATs).

The third might be an international question: broadly, Japan is close to England in terms of testing, and Scandinavian countries furthest away. But the social and educational outcomes in Scandinavia are widely regarded as superior.

And the fourth might be to look at the news of vast cohort study by London University’s Institute of Education also reported this morning. It shows that disadvantaged children are already a year behind in attainment terms by the time they reach nursery school. (Scots children were ahead of the UK average; Bangladeshi and Pakistan children were likely to be behind, but this may be an income effect, since they’re also like to be far poorer (see my post on the recent Rowntree report). Generally, the labelling that results from frequent testing disadvantages those who do poorly.

What’s also striking is that this isn’t new. There was a flurry of coverage in 2003 on SATs for 7 year olds, which seems to have been prompted by a Liberal Democrat sponsored survey which found that teachers and parents reported that their children were stressed by them. But although there was media coverage, it seemed to provoke little political response.
But sometimes with emerging ideas, they go through a cycle of being ignored before they start irritating people. The irritation is a sign of greater traction, that the emerging idea is finding its way into the mainstream. As (I think) Tony Benn said, “First you’re mad. Then you’re dangerous. And then you can’t find a sensible person anywhere who’s willing to disagree with you”.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/fd7e040a-17b7-11dc-86d1-000b5df10621.html

It looks more like a trend than a blip: the Office of National Statistics reports that fertility rates in 2006 in England and Wales were at their highest for 26 years. The reason is that older mothers, and women born outside of the UK, are having more children.

The figures are provisional but they show that an average number of children per woman (“total fertility rate”) in 2006 of 1.87 children per woman in England and Wales. This is the fifth successuve annual increase, from a low in 2001 of 1.63.

The two significant changes in the data is, first, the continuing increase in the number of women over 40 giving birth: now 11.4 per thousand women, doubled since 1986. And second, the increased proportion of births to women born outside the UK, representing 21.9% of birth in 2006 compared with 12.8% a decade ago.

Obviously it’s still below the replacement rate (2.1), and here European comparisons are interesting:

• France 1.9
• England and Wales 1.87
• Germany 1.37
• Italy 1.33
• Spain 1.32
• Greece 1.29

The Guardian reports evidence submitted to the Inquiry by the Nuffield Foundation, which compares a 1986 survey of 16-year olds with a group the same age in 2006. It found that the proportion who say they have no best friend has climbed from 13% to 18% in that time. A wide range of research has linked friendhsip to children’s happiness. (News story here). The 2006 sample size was 700, which suggests that the change is outside of the bounds of possible sample error.

Meanwhile the Ecologist news service reports that  a survey of adults done for the Inquiry found that 43% would not let their children play outside unsupervised until they were 14. (Sample sixe: 1148). Unsupervised play is one of the ways in which children are able to develop their own freindships.