Caring about childcare

 

During the pandemic there has been a lot of concern about children and their futures, with a wide range of people keen to prioritise children’s future over the needs and desires of adults today. I read today, in Private Eye of all places (which is usually sane and balanced) that ‘the welfare of children in any society should be paramount’.

              I can’t think of any good reason for asserting such a thing, but what is even more strange is how little concern we have for children’s futures in a host of other ways. We have paid little attention to failures in schooling up to now. We have been uninterested in climate change, which will destroy prosperity and could easily turn humanity from a thriving species into one scratching around for survival. We have not given two hoots about the pensions pyramid scheme which will leave children paying exorbitant taxes to keep their parents wealthy; we even see people writing that it’s selfish not to have children precisely because their purpose in life is to support us when we’re old, as if they are merely a tool for our own welfare rather than beings who might want to choose their own purpose, and it’s selfish to think otherwise. We have fished the fish away and resorted to, literally, scraping the bottom of the ocean for last vestiges of life. We have burned as much oil as we could find with nary a thought about whether our children might like to use it for plastic themselves: we have heard stories about peak oil alongside those of climate change. Even if we miraculously find a way to avoid climate damage, there will still be relatively little oil left for all future generations to use for all its myriad purposes.

              We have failed to invest in good infrastructure, and when governments have finally decided to invest in the future, the investments have been more about helping their friends and getting good media coverage than about the hard, boring task of providing children with a good future. HS2, for example, is a waste of money, except that it’s a massive project that politicians can point to nice and easily. Spending that money on thousands of small local projects would be invisible and therefore pointless for a politician.

              We continue to allow poor housing conditions, overpriced housing, poor job prospects, bad diets, junk food advertising, traffic pollution, mercury in fish… there are so many examples.

              If children’s futures were really important, you’d think we’d have acted on some of these; that the cacophony of voices, both right wing and left, that insisted that children were so important, would also have agreed that they were important at other times.

              Children only became important when two factors arose: their parents were inconvenienced because the children were at home and they had to take responsibility for their own families; and when they could predict an immediate effect.

              As with everything else in society, what mattered was immediacy and convenience. It’s not about the children at all.

              Caring about the future would mean an entirely different society, and that’s not something most people are willing to countenance. We want our children to be kings of the dungheaps we leave behind.