It is Not Just Family Unity or Income that Determines Childhood Well-Being
Civitas, 21 April 2009
Far be it from me to say a bad word about the institution of marriage or the benefits of the two-parent family. However, anyone tempted to hold the vast recent increase of family break-down and single parent families in Britain responsible for the country’s very low place in the European rankings for youth well-being should think again.
Many European countries with appreciably much higher rates of out-of-wedlock births than Britain come much higher than it in those rankings. One other European country, with a much lower rate of out-of-wedlock births than Britain (Lithuania), comes even lower than it does in the rankings.
Compare the ranking for youth well-being with that for out-of-wedlock births. (The basis for the comparison is not perfect, since the figures below for the former pertain to 2009, and for the latter to 2007. Still, I believe, they are close enough to permit some rough comparisons to be made.)
Half the countries in the top ten for youth well-being had a higher rate than Britain had for out-of-wedlock births. These countries are Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland, Denmark and Slovenia.
Half the countries in the bottom ten for youth well-being had a lower rate than Britian for out-of-wedlock births — viz. Poland, Portugal, Hungary, Greece and Lithunia.
Assuming all the comparative rates and trend-lines have remained roughly similar across all these countries in recent years, it follows the connection between youth well-being and growing up in a two-parent family must be far from simple and straight-forward.
I am tempted to think that at least two other factors play a very big part in affecting youth well-being in addition to whether children are born to married or unmarried parents.
The first such factor is national wealth. If one looks at the bottom ten countries, besides Britain, they are invariably among Europe’s poorest countries. Six of them were either part of the former Soviet Union (Latvia and Lithunia) or were under its control) Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria).
Britain sticks out among the miserable countries of Europe in being among its most affluent. So, there must be an additional factor at work at work there depressing its level of childhood well-being, besides those of poverty and growing up without the presence at home of one’s biological father.
I believe I know what that additional factor is, and believe there is evidence for supposing it plays an even greater role in determining the level of youth well-being in a country than both level of wealth and level of births within wedlock.
It is a factor that I hesitate to mention because mention of it is always such a politically explosive topic. That factor is the level of a country’s diversity. As well as being among Europe’s wealthiest countries, it is among its most diverse ethnically-speaking.
Growing up within a highly diverse community makes it far, far harder for children – and for adults too — to enjoy life. It is because Britain ranks so high in terms of diversity that it figures so low in youth well-being despite the country’s comparative affluence.
It is because the Nordic countries are so comparatively ethnically uniform that they rank so high in youth well-being, despite their comparatively very high rates of out-of-wedlock birth.
There is considerable evidence in support of my hypothesis.
In April 2007, BBC Radio Four broadcast an Analysis programme entitled Miserable Children that took up the results of a recently published Unicef report that had ranked Britain in bottom place in terms of child-hood well-being. In that programme, the government’s happiness guru Richard Layard drew attention to one very interesting fact that had emerged in that Unicef report.
One of the questions the children whose views had been surveyed were asked in its compilation was: Are most of the other children in your classes kind and helpful?’ Laylard drew attention to the following striking fact about the answers that had been given. He said:
‘Whereas you get something like 70 per cent or more saying yes in Scandinavia and Germany, here [in the UK] we get 43 per cent… Also the US is very low.’
Being left-leaning in his political orientation, Laylard attributed the comparatively low levels of trust reported by the British and American schoolchildren to what he called ‘the philosophy of individualism that your job is to be as successful as you can be with other people’ which he was of the view distinguished Britain and the US from the more communitarian-minded countries of Scandinavia and Germany.
However, Laylard’s analysis is flawed for the following reason.
Levels of trust and community are very high in many regions of the US where that individualistic work-ethic that he claims undermines trust is very prevalent. Where levels of trust in the US have been found low, it has been the consequence of their exposure to diversity.
That diversity has a depressive effect on levels of trust is the striking conclusion of no less an authority on the subject of social capital than Robert Putnam. He arrived at that conclusion on the basis of a massive survey of social attitudes in different types of community in the US that took place in 2001.
So potentially explosive were the results of this study that Putnam sat on their results for six years, not publishing them until after the Analysis broadcast. That may, perhaps, account for why Laylard was left unchallenged when he suggested that it was a prevalent culture of economic individualism that lay at the root of Britain’s high level of childhood unhappiness.
Assume, however, Laylard is right that growing up in a social context in which levels of trust are low does have a depressive effect on happiness. Assume also, as Putnam claims to have established, that the level of diversity in a community has a depressive effect on levels of trust within it. It would then follow that the levels of diversity in school classrooms and their neighbourhoods would be liable to have a depressive effect on the level of childhood happiness.
Herein, I believe, is to be found the true explanation why, despite being comparatively affluent, the UK is also such a miserable place today for young people to grow up in. Life has become so hard for so many of them today because diversity has made it hard for them to share their school playgrounds, parks and streets with those who share the same cultural values as those of their families.
If my analysis is correct, a different light is shed than is normally cast on it of another headline story today — viz. that ‘faith schools lead to greater segregation of children’. Well might they do so, if religiously and ethnically mixed community schools are also likely to be those in which the level of trust between pupils is lowest.
It is all very well for opponents of faith schools to accuse them of preserving the cultural differences that make it hard for people of different backgrounds to get on well. As much as being anxious for their children to do well in public examinations, parents who care for them will also care just as much about their well-being whilst at school. It is often just such a concern that lies behind their often desperate attempts to place their children in schools whose pupils will be likely to share the same cultural values as they and their children have.
Forcing Britain’s highly diverse children to attend the same schools is unlikely to result in their all acquiring the same cultural outlook, since the force of familial background is liable to be much stronger than that of school in cultural formation. The result is only likely to be a very high level of pupil unrest and bullying, often along ethnic and religious lines, which is precisely what we do find in Britain whose schools have the highest rates of bullying in Europe.
It is too late to put the genie of diversity back in the bottle. Britain will just have to learn to live with it for the foreseeable future as best it can.
One consequence of Britain’s high level of diversity, however, is that it can also expect comparatively low rates of childhood happiness for the foreseeable future. This will be the case, no matter how much it might be able to stem or reverse the trend towards out-of-wedlock birth or however much public money the government pumps into the families and schools of disadvantaged children.
very thought provocking. I live where Ethnic minority houehold are 76% for this consituancy at last cencus. My family is all white. My son now a graduate of a russel group university, went to a local shool, where the Arabs, Afro-Carrabean and White children saw themselves as a block against the majority of Asian children. This was in junior and infants in an inner city ward ranked the 11th most deprived in UK. From 11 to 16 he bussed out to a suburban school with a more balanced racial mixture. one of his experiences was that an Asian friend was told to not mix with him or the other Asian boys would shune him. My son said “I’m not offended, I understand, we can walk together when the other boys are not looking.” At this his friend looked so relieved.Another common observation from those who hoped for really good race relations which would improve over the generations is that when you look into a playground you can see that the ethnic groups don’t mix. The majority of the boys I’m refering to are second, third or even four generation, born here.I would like to have more data. What happens if you compare diferent districts for violence and crime ? A further variable would be to look at the status rank of the ethnic group and reported happiness?A truely difficult one would be to look at the relationship between the school and parents. Does any particular Ethnic group feel the head and school staff understand their ethnic group? Are children of any including the White parents happier where the prents with some evidence feel the school understands their culture?One Carrabean friend sold her house and moved when her son was to move to the comprehensive school. She didn’t do it on the grounds that a particulare head was more in tune with Carrabean values but she did do it on the GCSE results of Carrabean boys and the fact it was the wisper amoungst middle class Carrabean paerents that that school was best in Birmingham for aspiring parents to send their sons to.In the 25years I have lived at this house, I think segregation on a voluntary bases has got worse. In 2000 I did a youth survey not a big or carefully chosen one, about youth clubs. ain the course of it I discovered the most antaganistic and false steriotypes were between the Asions and the Black Carrarabean community, they were on a par with the National Frunt with no BBC cameras around.Over the same 25years I felt the CRE policy was inefective as it looked at the wrong things and a too small a picture. I appload Trever Phillips as wiser.I can’t rubbish this suggestion. I can’t lay all the blame on Racial mixture. I desperatly hope some research funding is found to look at what works for children who are in this situation. If you educate them separatley and make their childhood happier, how then do you teach them to mix when they are older? If we drop the hope of mixing, how will the minoriy access the professions and better paid jobs?
We have to have courage and look closer at this.
Yours
D.F.Chambers
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1172829/Olympic-swimming-star-Tom-Daley-kept-home-school-bullies-threaten–8216-break-legs-8217.html
I believe this is absolutely true, albeit with qualifications.
To deal with the essential, underlying truth of these ideas, I invoke the notion of property. There is a sense in which a country is a property common to the people which has inhabited and shaped it over the centuries. They have named and enhanced or built upon its features and this mixture of natural and artificial landmarks forms the “psycho-geographical” space in which they take their mental bearings. How the various chunks of this space are shared and mutually enjoyed is intimately related, therefore, to the history of its people. Footpaths, for example, embody one of the most ancient English conventions as to how the English people relate to their landscape. The right to hunt where you please is one of the most popular results of the French revolution and so on. Private property itself is a conventional subdivision of this national proprietorship and has traditionally carried responsibilities.
Different peoples, therefore, facing each other in a landscape, inevitably divide that landscape into a number of smaller reflections of themselves. Where the division is contentious or impossible, conflict is inevitable.
The happy situation in which newcomers have adapted to hosts is a strictly “tolerationist” one, in which the host remains culturally predominant and numerically preponderant. Successful tolerationism has been used as an excuse to go for “multiculturalism” – a contradiction inside a single term.
This analysis is correct but the nature of the diversity identified as an issue is wrong.
Diversity exists increasingly again in the UK in terms of ‘life-chances’, relative perceived poverty and an acknowledgement by children that their futures are very much dictated by what they see around them – lack of social mobility, massive wealth disparity, and a state educational system that is politically motivated to perpetuate these problems.
UK children don’t get help from their peers as much as in many other European countries because they are afraid of looking weak.
There has been a politically motivated erosion of respect by state policy which leaves child bullies untouched when they cause damage and sometimes suicide upon their victims. The state blames the victim and supports the perpetrator (I was a teacher for 11 years and this is what the Samaritans say – not I).
Many local children I have known cannot wait to leave the area in which I live because of the fear of being beaten-up. The police and schools ‘do nothing’ and the problem increases.
However when a local resident has her fence daubed with feaces, a teaching colleague from Africa suffers racist abuse, or a local is murdered because he remonstrates against his fence being destroyed – all at the hands of children who have never known any form of discipline, in and out of school, the politically correct ignore the problem, look at the perpetrators needs, make sure there is massive anti-discriminatory policies in place to support the perpetrator but leave the victim to suffer in silence.
New labour will lose at least the next two elections as a consequence of this failure – the economic disaster just adds grist to the mill.
This analysis is correct but the nature of the diversity identified as an issue is wrong.
Diversity exists increasingly again in the UK in terms of ‘life-chances’, relative perceived poverty and an acknowledgement by children that their futures are very much dictated by what they see around them – lack of social mobility, massive wealth disparity, and a state educational system that is politically motivated to perpetuate these problems.
UK children don’t get help from their peers as much as in many other European countries because they are afraid of looking weak.
There has been a politically motivated erosion of respect by state policy which leaves child bullies untouched when they cause damage and sometimes suicide upon their victims. The state blames the victim and supports the perpetrator (I was a teacher for 11 years and this is what the Samaritans say – not I).
Many local children I have known cannot wait to leave the area in which I live because of the fear of being beaten-up. The police and schools ‘do nothing’ and the problem increases.
However when a local resident has her fence daubed with feaces, a teaching colleague from Africa suffers racist abuse, or a local is murdered because he remonstrates against his fence being destroyed – all at the hands of children who have never known any form of discipline, in and out of school, the politically correct ignore the problem, look at the perpetrators needs, make sure there is massive anti-discriminatory policies in place to support the perpetrator but leave the victim to suffer in silence.
New labour will lose at least the next two elections as a consequence of this failure – the economic disaster just adds salt to the mill.