Diverse and confusing worlds

Children in the UK in the 1990s experienced a confused and confusing world. They found themselves bombarded with advice: salads are healthier than chips, avoid unsafe sex. Images proliferated: billboards targeted at children, adverts for ChildLine (the children's crisis phoneline), megastores, exotic holidays. Other images and experiences are more subtle and less unambiguously negative: signs on shops saying ‘no unaccompanied children’, ‘no ball games’ on housing estates, and the removal of seating from shopping centres to discourage ‘loitering’ youth. On the positive side, children's environmental knowledge is given considerable publicity: photographs in local newspapers of children planting trees (usually together with a local dignitary), schools undertaking litter clean-ups, and playground ‘greening’ projects.

What do these images convey? How do children make sense of them? How do they relate to children's own life experiences?

Children inhabit a complex and contradictory society. It is full of mixed messages, not only about what it stands for but also about what it expects and offers to its young people. On the one hand, it eulogises children's environmental actions when it comes to tree planting, but condemns young people who undertake tree-top protests at Newbury and elsewhere, where trees have to give way to roads and other ‘economically beneficial’ developments. Given this bewildering diversity of images that society portrays, how is it possible to gain any coherent understanding of the lives of children? The answer is that it is not possible. At best an approximation of children's lives can be portrayed, reflecting common experiences, ideas, beliefs and hopes. Children's lives are as different as adults’, influenced by their race, class, gender, health, location, and the attitudes, facilities and opportunities provided by their communities. This chapter explores the changing nature of children's lives, the opportunities provided and the constraints imposed. It considers the issues that are important in understanding children's lives: their families, social conditions and relations and, most importantly, the issues that children consider to be important in their lives.

Children's lives: changing social demography

Fewer children

Children's experience of society is influenced both by the kind of family into which they are born and by the nature of the wider society. Within both of these contexts children will be influenced by their experiences of how they relate to adults and the adult world.