The commercialisation of childhood is a topic that has gained traction with policy makers over recent years, and is one of the major pillars of work that the cross Government taskforce on childhood announced by the Deputy Prime Minister last year is focusing on. A review commissioned by the Prime Minister and led by Reg Bailey published its findings in June this year, making a series of recommendations under the banner “letting children be children”.The Bailey review built on previous reviews including Professor Tanya Byron’s review “Safer Children in a Digital World”, Dr Linda Papadopoulos’ review on the Sexualisation of Young People and Professor David Buckingham’s work on sexualised goods aimed at children. The recommendations include measures which aim to make business more accountable giving Government responsibility for checking on progress regularly.
The Bailey Review’s recommendations include important steps that must be taken by businesses’ and others to reform practice, but there is more that can be done to support parents to take an active role in mediating their child’s access to inappropriate media and influences.
Pressures of Modern Parenting
Family Lives recognises the challenges many parents face in balancing their children’s access and exposure to commercial pressures and the fast pace of modern society and technology.In a 2010 survey on Family Life completed by visitors to Family Lives’ website 70% of respondents felt that parenting today is harder than when they were children, and 76% found parenting either harder, or much harder than they expected. This finding was backed up by a nationwide survey in June 2011, conducted by Vision Critical on behalf of Family Lives and Drinkaware, which found that three quarters (74%) of parents think the issues their children face today are more serious than the issues they faced at the same age. Developments in technology and a society in which over the years sexual permissiveness has increased contribute to giving parents a complex job in keeping their children safe. Technology plays a major role in exposing children to influences outside of their parent’s control.In a June 2011 survey of young people by Family Lives and Drinkaware, 12% of 10-12 year olds and 25% of 13-15 year olds reported that they had seen sexually explicit images on the internet.Family Lives has worked to support many families where early sexualisation has caused difficulties.
Elena’s story
Elena, a mother of two, came to Family Lives for Intensive Telephone Support after a very traumatic few months. Her youngest daughter, 14 year old Charlie, was a shy girl who struggled to fit in socially at school and felt very much on the sidelines of her friendship group. Elena was shocked to discover that Charlie had been regularly accessing an internet chat site where she had been groomed for online sex. It was in the aftermath of this discovery that she rang Family Lives. She was struggling to deal with Charlie’s behaviour at home- she was very argumentative and was increasingly closed off from her parents. Moreover, Elena was particularly concerned that her daughter, at such a vulnerable age, had been exposed to an extreme and debasing representation of sexuality, and feared that her daughter felt this type of interaction was ‘normal’.
Elena wanted to develop more awareness of her daughter’s needs, and be able to support her through what was a difficult time for the whole family. Through individual telephone sessions Elena explored strategies to develop assertive communication between herself and her daughter. She learnt strategies to deal with conflict, and noted by the end of the sessions that she often reflected on a given situation before reacting, preventing things from escalating out of control. At the same time, Elena used new parenting techniques to ensure that she maintained clear boundaries within her home. By dealing with conflict effectively, Elena had more time to build her daughter’s self-esteem, and to reassure her that she was not there to judge, but to understand. Our parent support advisor worked with Elena to deal not only with the significance of her daughter’s trauma, but with Elena’s own feelings of guilt, her partner’s reluctance to engage, and the effect these challenging issues were having on her siblings.
Technology – KeepingChildren Safe online
In a survey by Family Lives and Drinkaware in June 2011, 86% of parents feel increased technological exposure is influencing their children growing up too quickly. The survey exposed real gaps in parents’ confidence around technology and the way their children interact with the cyber world. 54% of parents have never heard of the term ‘sexting’, despite its increasing prevalence in schools and amongst young people.Alarmingly, despite several years of messages to parents about the importance of not allowing unsupervised access to technology in a child’s bedroom, half of 10-12 year olds we surveyed have unsupervised access to a computer in their bedroom. This indicates that the messages about how to keep children safe online are not filtering through to parents.It is clear that there is more work to do, both to ensure that all parents hear the advice about the simple ways to help keep their children safe online, but also to offer more advanced training for parents to increase their confidence around interventions such as parental controls.
Policy Interventions
The commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood is not a policy area with simple quick win solutions. It is neither possible, nor desirable to turn back time and it is too simplistic to view the past as an age of innocence. Instead, policy solutions must focus on supporting parents to have open and frank conversations with their children about what they are seeing and hearing, and empowering parents to mediate their children’s access to media and items in the commercial world that they feel are inappropriate. There is also a significant role for policy makers to think about how to up-skill those parents who feel out of their depth with the technology their children are using.
Another important policy approach that remains largely unexplored is building resilience in children by educating them about the way that the commercial world works, the psychology of advertising and raising their awareness about sexualised gender roles and bullying that may seem to be part of the wallpaper of their lives.Teen Boundaries UK, part of Family Lives is a charity that delivers workshops to school children to combat sexual bullying. The programme consists of five lessons covering the causes and effects of early sexualisation (media influences, popularity mechanisms and how they affect behaviour within peer groups); the use of sexualised language and bullying; the effect of the cyber world; Sexting/Internet (porn-fantasy and reality) and how it adds to the issues of sexualised bullying; the use of FormSpring and FaceBook in Cyber Bullying; positive gender relationships (including domestic violence) abuse in relationships; sexual violence, safety tips and awareness, reporting and further help, individual responsibility in stopping sexual violence.
Conclusion
There are many new issues that face parents when trying to keep their children safe from harm largely made more challenging by the advent of new technologies which despite their many advantages also bring risks for young people and families. This topic is attracting interest from Policy makers, with a specific commitment to address the issue in the Coalition agreement published after the new Government took power last year.It is clear that despite the implementation of many of the recommendations from the 2008 Byron review, many messages have not filtered through to parents to help them keep their children safe online. More must be done in this area – Elena’s story points to the damage that can be caused if families don’t manage this risk adequately, and the many posts on Family Lives’ message boards about concerns over their child’s internet usage reinforce this.
Empowering parents to help their children manage the influence of new technology and the commercial world is one important policy avenue to explore, and another is building resilience amongst children and young people by helping raise their awareness and understanding of how to keep themselves safe and manage the risks they may face. Whilst Government and companies must take their share of responsibility for allowing children to be children, parents and young people themselves are the key to mediating against the potentially harmful impacts of commercialisation and sexualisation in modern society.
