A nation of babysitters

First, let us not submit to the self-indulgence of moral panic: there has never been a time when British children have been less afflicted by poverty, disease and malnutrition. The new Unicef league table for ‘child well-being’ across 21 industrialised countries, for all its disturbing statistics, gives little sense of historical perspective. Much of the information it collates is seven or eight years out of date. The report also idealises the notion of childhood and, in its litany of figures, glosses over the reality of human experience through the ages.

St Augustine was under no illusions about the capacity of even the youngest child to be brutal and selfish: ‘Myself have seen and known even a baby envious; it could not speak, yet it turned pale and looked bitterly on its foster-brother.’ William Golding’s Lord of the Flies describes the universal truth that children, unrestrained, will revert to amoral primitivism.