‘I want people to feel quite shocked,’ said Professor Tanya Byron in her opening lecture for Radio Three’s annual Free Thinking festival.
‘I want people to feel quite shocked,’ said Professor Tanya Byron in her opening lecture for Radio Three’s annual Free Thinking festival. This year’s theme is the 21st-century family and Byron, the clinical psychologist and presenter of the television series The House of Tiny Tearaways, was addressing an audience in Gateshead where this year’s festival is based. The purpose of ‘free thinking’ is to focus on a subject and take it to its extremes, in the hope that some creative ideas might emerge. Professor Byron’s ‘take’ on the family today focused on the children, and not just any children, but those who are out of control, dysfunctional, anti-social and presenting to the authorities as a ‘problem’. What can be done about them? She’s shocked by the ‘general climate of intolerance towards children which appears to exist within the UK’, and wants us to be shocked too. Three children out of a typical primary-school class of 33 will have some kind of mental-health problem, declared the professor in her most controversial statement. We’re frightened of them, she says, and unwilling to face up to our responsibility for them.
This was a really depressing opening to the festival. Is our society in such a bad way? Where does her figure of 10 per cent of children come from, I wondered? And what does Byron mean by ‘mental-health problem’? It was not at all clear whether that figure refers to behavioural difficulties, literacy issues or depressive symptoms. She argues that society itself is ‘family’ and we all need to take responsibility for the love and respect that children need. But she gave us no suggestions as to how we can all do this in practice.
The professor did come up with a neat way of looking at children — we should think of them as ‘becomings’ rather than ‘beings’ — but as a whole her lecture was in itself a paradigm of what has gone wrong in the last few decades. She began every other sentence with the words, ‘I do believe…’, ‘I have a real issue with…’, ‘I want people to feel…’, ‘Let me say this to you…’. The trouble with such an I-centric approach is that it narrows the horizons, and crushes rather than inspires the questioning spirit.
Elsewhere on the Free Thinking weekend we were reminded of one of the north-east’s greatest thinkers, the Venerable Bede. He described the experience of life as like the flight of a swallow as it flashes very quickly through the hall where you are taking dinner (he lived in the seventh century when halls were draughty places with lots of sky between the beams). In the brief time it is indoors the tiny bird is safe from the winter’s storm that is raging outside. But such calm is over in a moment as it flies back out into the storm. ‘Man’s life appears to be more or less like this; and of what may follow it, or what preceded it, we are absolutely ignorant,’ wrote Bede.
On Radio Four, the business editor Robert Peston was also talking about childhood as he interviewed a group of successful businessmen for his programme The Entrepreneur’s Wound. Peston has observed that many of them had experienced some kind of trauma in their early lives. Did this in some way contribute to their determination to succeed? Peston should perhaps stick to economics. The one thing all these successful people shared was not just trauma but also the experience of having one person who had great faith in them. That surely is the key to all healthy child development — one true thing.
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