Children in need

‘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.