Penelope Leach - Children First: What Society Must Do—and is Not Doing—for Children Today

Instructive and ambitious realistic and exacting articulate and impassioned. [Leach] is pre-eminently the thinking parents guide, encouraging not just sensible reflexes but subtle reflection.

The New York Times Book Review

Leachs insights come at an opportune time. They can inform new efforts to do right by young children and their families and contribute to an understanding of early childhood that could help prevent some grievous policy mistakes.

Washington Post

A powerful case for putting children at the top of the nations agenda.

David Elkind, Boston Globe

I wish Children First would be required reading for all members of Congress, all employers, and, yes, all parents. This important book could improve the lives of all our children.

Jane Daugherty, Detroit Free Press

[Leach] affirms her role as a militant advocate of the young and, just as crucial, of their parents.

San Francisco Chronicle

Children First: What Our Society Must DoAnd Is Not DoingFor Our Children Today (1994)

Your Baby & Child: From Birth to Age Five (1979, 1989)

The First Six Months: Getting Together with Your Baby (1987)

Your Growing Child: From Babyhood Through Adolescence (1984)

Babyhood: Infant Development from Birth to Two Years (1974, 1983)

Penelope Leach, author of Your Baby & Child, Your Growing Child, Babyhood, and The First Six Months, was educated at Cambridge University and the London School of Economics, where she received her Ph.D in psychology and lectured on psychology and child development. A Fellow of the British Psychological Society and Chair of the Child Development Society, she works in various capacities for parents organizations and sits on the Commission on Social Justice. Her program Your Baby & Child is broadcast on Lifetime Television. Penelope Leach is married to an environmental policy analyst, and they have two children.

First Vintage Books Edition, February 1995

Copyright 1994 by Penelope Leach

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1994.

, Growing Up Takes Time, was excerpted in Child magazine.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Leach, Penelope.

Children first: what our society must doand is not doingfor our children today/Penelope Leach. 1st ed.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-80337-5
1. Child rearing. 2. Child care. 3. Parenting. I. Title.
HQ769.L3265 1994 9335476

v3.1

This book is dedicated to four women:

My mother, Elisabeth Ayrton, who got me started; my friend and colleague Anne Hurry, who kept me, and it, going; my daughter, friend, colleague and creative critic, Melissa Leach; and Katherine Hourigan, to whom I owe much more than friend and editor suggests.

During the five years I have spent amassing material for this book, hundreds of people whose names do not appear in the notes have helped me with their experiences and their ideas. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them all.

A book of this kind relies on so many sources of research and opinion that the notes can only refer readers to a small selection. I gratefully acknowledge my debt to all the rest.

Friends and colleagues have given most generously of their time in discussion and in reading and commenting on drafts of the manuscript. In particular I should like to thank James Fairhead, Judy Gardner, Rachel Hodgkin, Anne Hurry, Melissa Leach and Peter Newell; each had expert input, all were endlessly patient.

Finally, I am immeasurably grateful to Katherine Hourigan and Gerald Leach for their unfailing enthusiasm for what I was trying to do. She has edited everything I have ever written, and nursed and steered this project in particular from the moment I thought of it; he has put up with months of abstraction and hours of talk as well as keeping my software sorted out and my statistics untangled.

Despite all this help, responsibility for the facts selected and the opinions expressed throughout the book is mine alone.

Penelope Leach

1993

Are todays kids spoiled rotten or are selfish parents giving them a rotten time? Choose your answer with your newspaper or talk show, your politician or your cab driver. On my last transatlantic trip I rode to Heathrow with a driver who told me: Todays parents arent fit to have kids. They think about nothing but their pockets and pleasuresout to work, off to the bar; poor kids arent brought up: they have to drag themselves up But it was the other story on the ride in from Kennedy: Kids today dont know when theyre well off. When I was a boy I worked for what I got and then it wasnt much, Im telling you. Now kids from decent homes where parents work to buy them everything just think theyre entitled to do as they like beating up teachers, raping, robbing.

Todays parents Kids today When I was a boy Social debate always relies on statements about past times and distant places to throw the present into high relief, but most such statements should start with Once upon a time, as in Once upon a time there was a golden age of the family a proper balance between rights and responsibilities majority agreement on decent social values. Many people certainly believe that things are worse than they have ever been, but many people in each successive generation always do, and our generation is rendered especially susceptible by mass communications.

A torrent of media messages reflects, and may also create, societies that are fascinated by their boundless potential for horror and horrified by themselves. Fiction and faction, commentary and news seem to compete to make us think about the unthinkable, and to find new limits to challenge us as our tolerance rises. Rape has become a subject everyone can discuss, so now we must face male rape, mass rape and the rape of children. Everybody has been forced to accept that many children are abused in ordinary families, but there is still shock value in child abuse by bishops and priests, by satanists and porno rings and in the institutions we set up to care for children who are at risk. And if we are near to having faced the limits of horror with children as victims, there is still mileage in children as aggressors and more still if their victims are children, too. Rape by a twelve-year-old is certain of headlines, while the recent death of a British two-year-old allegedly at the hands of two ten-year-olds received more coverage than all the 100-odd murders of toddlers at the hands of adults in the same year put together. We are being shown children and young people from every kind of backgroundyours and mine as well as his and hersnot just failing in schools but terrorizing them; not just flouting teachers but injuring them; not just getting into mischief but joyriding, burglarizing, destroying, out of control.