ORGANIC FAMILIES

The news that more and more families are choosing to buy organic food will have raised a cheer in many quarters. Surely it’s good news to think that so many of us have put our money where are hearts are, rejecting cheap dairy products with their nasty hormones, over-crowded livestock and vile chemicals? Surely we can be proud that the British, more than any country in Europe, have rejected GM foods and encouraged the Old Macdonald style of farming, not the new? Yet as you click on ‘O’ marked organic milk when internet shopping, or fill your basket with knobbly, pesticide-free vegetables, pause and ask yourself: why are we so proud of filling our children’s bodies with good food when so many of us are simultaneously filling their minds with junk?

Last week’s findings by Mother & Baby magazine and Pampers that 42% of children now have TVs in their bedroom was bad enough. What was truly horrifying is that this isn’t just 10 year olds, or children who might just have had the bare minimum of time to get hooked on books. These are children of under 3. These are the children who should be singing nursery songs, doing jig-saws on real pieces of cardboard or wood, running over grass, talked to, read to and above all played with. They should be making shapes and baking cakes, sticking collages, threading beads, doing hide-and-seek under the laundry-line and sitting on a parents’ warm lap. Instead, they get a hot TV screen, more toys than they can possibly play with and act, as the survey said “like tiny teenagers who have been there, done that and bought the T-shirt.” Far from advancing their intellect at the grasp of a mouse, their behaviour and tantrums are worse than ever. As Karen Pasquali Jones, editor of Mother & Baby magazine said, “Hot-housed 21st century toddlers are suffering from over-stimulation and their volatile behaviour is harder to handle than ever. They are failing to learn the art of inventive, imaginative play.”

When I started having my children, 10 years ago, I was too broke to afford designer clothes, toys and computers. The country was in deep recession, my husband had lost his job and I was struggling to write my third novel on £2,000 p.a. Consequently, my children had what some might consider a deprived childhood. Their clothes were all second-hand, we had a tiny portable TV and a video largely stocked by trips to the local library. They had a cuddly animal each – plus about ten wooden toys, bought after much thought, and over time. What they did have was a mixture of total attention for half the day, and what I hoped was benign neglect for the other, in which to potter about, look at hundreds of picture-books and use their imaginations. They still regard their childhood as exceptionally lucky, rich and happy. When my daughter read Madonna’s first children’s book, and came to the page where the poor girl’s room is described, she was astonished at the pity we were supposed to feel for her, because she has “only one doll.” She had, you see, a book-case full of books. The rich “English Roses” of the book’s title had none.

It’s books that parents should be buying, not TVs and fluffy toys. Reading stories to your children is as essential as breast-feeding, but it’s only this month that the Arts Council is setting up a national strategy for children’s literature. Not that extra funding stands a chance of making a difference if toddlers are being switched onto easy electronic amusements rather than the rewards of the printed page, which takes time and effort to master. I don’t agree with what Roald Dahl said in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that TV “kills the imagination dead”; it just has to be moderated as a communal treat, not a solitary solace. Many middle-class friends, terrified by the prospect of seeing their children falling behind educationally, have banned the box altogether, but this is to make it a forbidden fruit. Yet with children of 1-3 now spending up to five hours a day glued to the TV or computer screen, the time to severely curtail telly-boggling has clearly arrived. The moment a TV or computer becomes your child’s companion, its window on the world and its electronic babysitter is the moment to look long and hard at just what it is your child needs, and why you bothered to have one.

Being a good parent is seriously hard work, and the idea that you can buy your way out of this is for parents with no more brains than Pamela Anderson (in whose swimming-pool, remember, a small boy drowned because there were so many inflatable toys nobody noticed his disappearance.) It isn’t just about keeping your kids well-fed, clothed and “stimulated”. It’s also about fostering and encouraging all the most precious aspects of childhood – its energy, its creativity, its imagination. That can only be done if they are given stories to digest, and, as importantly, enough time in which to get bored and make up their own. The great children’s novels, from The Lion the Witch & The Wardrobe to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, all instinctively recognise this by having children who are left to their own devices. Boredom, not computers, is the single greatest gift to a child’s imaginative life, and the £780 pa currently spent on chauffeuring toddlers to weekly “stimulating” play activities is money down the drain. Today’s toddlers are being, quite literally, spoilt by being given too much.

The saddest thing of all is that small children themselves have said in the survey that what they most enjoy are the age-old pleasures of a walk in the park, and a visit to grandma. Parents should listen to them. Perhaps it's only the knowledge that grandma is likely to stuff them with wicked sweets and cheap cuts of meat. Judging by the number of letters I get, as a children’s book reviewer, from grandmothers eager to encourage their grandchildren to read, I doubt it, however. Rather, it’s the older generation who are the ones to remember how to stimulate a child’s imagination, and who care more about what goes into their minds than fussing over what goes into their bodies.

BREAST CANCER

Poor career women. As if we didn’t have enough to worry about already, there is now the research proving that we are 50% more likely to get breast cancer. Of course, the working woman is blamed for everything these days, from falling male self-esteem to crop-circles, but in this case it’s because we “choose” to have babies too late, breast-feed too little and are generally as unsexed as Lady Macbeth.

Who are these women who “choose” to have babies too late? I’ve never met one, in twenty years of work. Yes, women have weighed up the “opportunity cost” of starting a family, and that is probably why the age at which she first does so has risen from 24.6 years to 27.1. But the assumption that women mysteriously just “decide” for or against a baby is part of the creeping paranoia about the sexual and financial independence women have discovered since the invention of the Pill. Apart from those who decide they loathe the whole idea of motherhood, most women seem pretty keen to have a baby. The real problem is finding a decent man to have a baby or two with. Often, you just don’t meet him until you’re in your late thirties – look at Helen Fielding, who had to put the Atlantic between herself and Bridget Jones. Or look at Emma Thompson, whose beautiful daughter arrived in the teeth of infertility problems that had nothing to do with being a divorcee in her thirties. I know women who have had miscarriage after miscarriage in pursuit of a child, irrespective of their professional status. They don’t “choose” to get cancer. They are, like today’s toddlers, rich in a material sense but poor in too many others.