We've heard a lot about the effects of the recession on job opportunities for young people leaving university and on members of the adult working population who lose their jobs. But we see very little about what financial recession means for children. The publication of the Children's Society The Good Childhood Inquiry report this week provides an opportunity to think again about the newly poor, as well as the large number of children already living in poverty.
We know that for all children feeling loved, having good friends, getting on with parents and enjoying school are the most important sources of wellbeing. But the fact that many parents will have less to spend on their children is going to be a hard blow. In a survey carried out for Consumer Focus recently a high proportion of 9-13 year olds preferred buying things to anything else (47% of children in schools in a deprived area and 23% of those in schools in an affluent one). Materialistic children – those who put a higher premium on buying things and having possessions – had lower self-esteem than others; low self-esteem is linked to depression so this does not augur well for children's mental health in the future.
Indeed, an American study has shown that children who score highly on a consumer involvement scale also show more anxiety, depression and psychosomatic symptoms. Now there is some evidence that over the last 40 years of the 20th century rates of child mental health problems have been rising, not just aggressive behaviour problems, but also emotional difficulties. There seems to have been a plateau since then, but no signs of a decline. Further national surveys of childmental health problems carried out in 1994 and 2004 suggest that, depending on the measure used, poor children have two or three times the rates of disorder compared to the better off.
Forty years ago, when children were less emotionally involved with their possessions, the links between child mental health problems and social class were weaker. It seems that being poor now is more of a problem than it used to be. Many children are going to be less well-off, and many of these will have been used to getting all the latest gadgets and clothes just by asking for them. Pester power is going to get more painful.
In their recently published book Consumer Kids, Ed Mayo and Agnes Nairn have documented the shocking extent to which children are caught up in the commercial world. Children as young as eight are recruited to be active marketeers among their friends. The hidden message that is conveyed in advertising – that to be happy you have to be successful, wealthy and beautiful – often run counter to the values that parents and teachers would like to encourage. Up to about the age of 11, children are just not capable of resisting the covert messages that advertisers communicate.
To protect children from premature entry into the commercial world, the Children's Society report recommends that commercial advertising to children under the age of 12 should be banned. We should also ban the advertising of unhealthy foods (high in fat, sugar and salt) before the 9pm watershed. If commercial companies are hurt by the loss of advertising revenue with a resulting reduction in children's programming, perhaps this might lead to more public service television for children – something we badly need anyway.
The report also recommends that children and young people are taught critical understanding of the media in schools. Only a few schools currently offer it, as teachers have not been trained to do so. And the teaching material available sometimes does not encourage the level of scepticism one would like to see.
It is often said parents who must take responsibility for the values, materialist or otherwise, their children absorb. True. But too often once children reach their teen years and even before that, parents often feel powerless against the influence of inadequately regulated media and the marketing world. By reducing the commercial pressures on children and helping them to be more sceptical of marketing messages, governments can do much to make the work of parents easier. I hope our government considers the recommendations of the Good Childhood Inquiry report very seriously and acts upon them.
Philip Graham is emeritus professor of child psychiatry at The Institute of Child Health, London and an inquiry panel member of The Good Childhood Inquiry