THE GENERATION of children whose lives are captured in the Growing Up In Irelandstudy published last week is the one born around the millennium. These are the offspring of the boom years. The first report from the project gives us, therefore, an anatomy of the society we created in the good times. If we can say that it was at least a decent place for children, we can feel that, for all its problems, the creation of that Ireland was a worthwhile enterprise.
The study suggests that, on the whole, the kids are doing well. Most are happy at home and in school. Most are very healthy. Their parents have high aspirations for them. There are parents who err on the side of being too permissive or too authoritarian, but most manage to balance discipline with support. Very few parents now smack their children on a regular basis. The fact that most parents seem to rate their child’s abilities higher than their teachers do suggests at least that the era in which parents routinely denigrated their children is over.
Given this State’s appalling record in relation to child welfare, and the belief of some commentators that family life has been going to hell in a handcart, these are reassuring findings. Yet the study also shows that both State failings and economic pressures have created difficulties for children. Far too many of the schools the children attend are inadequate. A third of the children do not score at the expected level in reading vocabulary tests. Already in these young lives, chronic illness and disabilities are significantly more common among those in poorer households. Children in single-parent families are much more likely to experience poverty. We can see in this study that, even by the age of nine, the opportunities and possibilities for some children are being narrowed.
For those doing well economically, the stress of combining work and family life has a strong impact on children. Over half of the mothers of nine-year-olds categorised themselves as working principally outside the home. A third of the mothers and half of the fathers felt that work commitments were adversely affecting the amount of time they could spend with their children. Around a third of parents of both sexes felt, moreover, that the time they did get to spend with their children was more pressurised and less enjoyable.
This stress is surely not unrelated to the worrying finding that one in four nine-year-olds is overweight or obese. Exercise and diet emerge as obvious problems, and both are related to the ability of busy parents to give time to cooking and play. Watching television together is by far the most common activity that children share with their parents, even though it is very far down the list of activities that the children say they enjoy most.
The overall picture is of a society that is capable of providing a loving, supportive and safe context in which its children can grow and blossom. That capacity brings with it the challenge to help parents fulfil those aspirations and to ensure that for every single child only the best is good enough.