http://helene.ehclients.com/index.php/site/index/ en helene.guldberg@spiked-online.com Copyright 2010 2010-03-01T14:19:41+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/the_myth_of_racist_kids/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/the_myth_of_racist_kids/#When:14:19:41Z The problem with anti-bullying and anti-racist policiesTeachers in Britain are obliged, under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, to record the number of racist incidents in their schools. This has resulted in the reporting of an estimated 250,000 such incidents, and race relations officials claim this is just the tip of the iceberg.Yet Adrian Hart, a community filmmaker and tutor, argues in The Myth of Racist Kids: Anti-Racist Policy and the Regulation of School Life that ‘the notion of racist kids is in large part a myth’. Hart became concerned about today’s anti-bullying and anti-racist policies while working on a government-funded educational film about racism in schools. He writes: ‘I observed a strange and concerning phenomenon: in modern cosmopolitan Britain, where race is becoming less and less relevant, and where children often have friends from many different ethnic groups, the dominant racialising influence on children is anti-racist policy itself. It is state anti-racist policy that is keeping the question of race alive at a time when many people - especially children - are living increasingly colour-blind lives.‘ He argues that today’s anti-racist educators ‘may have the best of intentions’, but ‘their missionary zeal reifies race, exaggerates racism and profoundly misunderstands children’. Through tackling head-on the controversial subject of children and racism, Hart deals with a number of important issues that are particularly close to my heart. He argues that ‘anti-racist policy operating in schools has had a disabling effect on both children and teachers’. In my recent book, Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear, I also stress the need to appreciate that children are children and not nasty little brutes or helpless victims. Whereas in the past it was accepted that children, in their unsophistication, would employ the kind of tactless, heartless, even in-your-face offensive behaviour that adults could not get away with, today such behaviour in the playground is seen as just as shocking and problematic as if it were between adults in an office. The problem with this is that by focusing on bullying and racism in schools we can end up denying children the experiences they need to develop. Children need free time to play, have fun, stumble into difficulties, and work out how to resolve differences. Break-time is an important context for children to learn how to make decisions, take turns, and consolidate or break off friendships - and, of course, to let off steam and have some fun. As Hart writes: ‘Of course schools should, and frequently do, discipline children for name-calling and bullying, just as for any other form of anti-social behaviour. But the fact that children are required to respect adult authority in the classroom does not alter their need to engage - at break-time - in unfettered peer interaction. In this sphere adults should take a step back and allow children the freedom to flourish.‘ Anti-racist policy, like anti-bullying policies, also has a disabling effect on teachers. ‘It undermines trust in teachers, their autonomy and their ability to deal with minor disputes occurring in their school’, Hart writes. This is part of a broader problem where teachers, like all adults, are increasingly treated as emotionally illiterate beings: they are spoonfed information about what to teach and given detailed guidance about how to engage with their pupils. Anti-racist measures in schools have been put beyond criticism. Hart’s report is a brave and lucid attempt to break this censorious silence and hold these measures up for scrutiny. play, children and risk, education 2010-03-01T14:19:41+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/racist_kids/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/racist_kids/#When:14:01:00Z A brave new book challenges the introduction of anti-racist policies in British schools, arguing that they blow everyday spats out of proportion and split kids along ethnic lines.Teachers in Britain are obliged, under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, to record the number of racist incidents in their schools. This has resulted in the reporting of an estimated 250,000 such incidents, and race relations officials claim this is just the tip of the iceberg. Yet Adrian Hart, a community filmmaker and tutor, argues in The Myth of Racist Kids: Anti-Racist Policy and the Regulation of School Life that ‘the notion of racist kids is in large part a myth’. Hart became concerned about today’s anti-bullying and anti-racist policies while working on a government-funded educational film about racism in schools. He writes: ‘I observed a strange and concerning phenomenon: in modern cosmopolitan Britain, where race is becoming less and less relevant, and where children often have friends from many different ethnic groups, the dominant racialising influence on children is anti-racist policy itself. It is state anti-racist policy that is keeping the question of race alive at a time when many people – especially children – are living increasingly colour-blind lives.’ He argues that today’s anti-racist educators ‘may have the best of intentions’, but ‘their missionary zeal reifies race, exaggerates racism and profoundly misunderstands children’. The government’s recommended definition of a racist incident is ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’. This is in line with the 1999 Macpherson Report, the landmark inquiry into the police investigation of the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993, which famously accused the police of ‘institutional racism’ and laid the basis for the framework for subsequent official anti-racist policies in Britain. This has, Hart says, ‘generated an army of race-equality officials and a raft of “interventions” – awareness-raising drama workshops, special assemblies, books, videos and teaching packs’. And as more and more teachers are actively on the lookout for racist incidents, so, unsurprisingly, the statistics show that racism among children is on the rise. The most recent figures available from the Department for Children, Schools and Families show a 29 per cent rise over one year in the number of pupils suspended from schools for racist abuse. Sarah Teather, education spokesman for the UK Liberal Democrats, obtained the figures through parliamentary questions. She says: ‘[This is] another shocking picture of the poor state of race relations in Britain today.’ The Commission for Racial Equality said the figures hint ‘that [racism] is deep-rooted and ingrained’. But do they, really? At one of the schools Hart visited he asked a teacher whether everyday playground spats are being elevated, somewhat erroneously, into racist incidents. ‘He looked horrified’, says Hart, ‘so I attempted to clarify. “Surely when kids fall out they grab anything that will hurt, then minutes later they’re friends again?” “We have to be seen to be taking racism seriously”, the teacher answered. “It’s the law.”’ Some teachers, however, are alarmed by the effect of official anti-racism on relationships between their pupils. One teacher told Hart: ‘I think we’re a good school, but because we are trying to be responsible and abide by the policy on racist incidents, our problem is that it’s having the opposite effect. In fact it’s creating an absolutely awful atmosphere around the school. Children who used to play beautifully together are starting to separate along racial lines.’ By viewing childish insults through the prism of adult politics, racial divisions are assumed to exist. But just as a seven-year-old calling somebody ‘Fatso’, for example, should not be taken as seriously as if a 30-year-old used that insult, so what a child means when he calls someone a ‘Paki’ is not the same as what an adult means when he uses that word. And by attempting to deal with such insults by elevating them into racist incidents, racial divisions are actively created. As children are made aware of the penalty of drawing attention to any apparent racial differences, it is hardly surprising that they might play safe by sticking to their own ethnic groups. Through tackling head-on the controversial subject of children and racism, Hart deals with a number of important issues that are particularly close to my heart. He argues that ‘anti-racist policy operating in schools has had a disabling effect on both children and teachers’. In my recent book, Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear, I also stress the need to appreciate that children are children and not nasty little brutes or helpless victims. Whereas in the past it was accepted that children, in their unsophistication, would employ the kind of tactless, heartless, even in-your-face offensive behaviour that adults could not get away with, today such behaviour in the playground is seen as just as shocking and problematic as if it were between adults in an office. The problem with this is that by focusing on bullying and racism in schools we can end up denying children the experiences they need to develop. Children need free time to play, have fun, stumble into difficulties, and work out how to resolve differences. Break-time is an important context for children to learn how to make decisions, take turns, and consolidate or break off friendships – and, of course, to let off steam and have some fun. As Hart writes: ‘Of course schools should, and frequently do, discipline children for name-calling and bullying, just as for any other form of anti-social behaviour. But the fact that children are required to respect adult authority in the classroom does not alter their need to engage – at break-time – in unfettered peer interaction. In this sphere adults should take a step back and allow children the freedom to flourish.’ Anti-racist policy, like anti-bullying policies, also has a disabling effect on teachers. ‘It undermines trust in teachers, their autonomy and their ability to deal with minor disputes occurring in their school’, Hart writes. This is part of a broader problem where teachers, like all adults, are increasingly treated as emotionally illiterate beings: they are spoonfed information about what to teach and given detailed guidance about how to engage with their pupils. Hart writes: ‘Interfering with the daily life of schools, mistrusting teachers and undermining their ability to manage internal affairs has become the hallmark not just of official anti-racism, but of a range of interventions over social issues which the state now feels schools must play a crucial role in.’ As one deputy headteacher says in Hart’s book: ‘This top-down interference in how we manage discord in schools ignores our professional skills. In my experience of primary schools in the inner city, there’s always been a “hidden curriculum” which acknowledges and makes reference to how children acquire good social skills within a mixed environment. We don’t need these so-called “experts” telling us how to do it and monitoring what we think.’ Anti-racist measures in schools have been put beyond criticism. Hart’s report is a brave and lucid attempt to break this censorious silence and hold these measures up for scrutiny. Reclaiming Childhood is published by Routledge. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) My next book, Just Another Ape? will be published in 2010 by Imprint Academic. The Myth of Racist Kids: Anti-Racism Policy And The Regulation of School Life, by Adrian Hart, is published by the Manifesto Club. Buy it here. play, children and risk, education 2010-02-26T14:01:00+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/let_the_children_play/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/let_the_children_play/#When:15:56:33Z Adults’ fears and mistrust are the reason our youngsters can no longer enjoy free-roaming summer holidays, says Helene Guldberg in The IndependentA report published last week titled Big Mothered Britain found that traditional childhood games – such as skipping, taking part in conker fights, climbing trees and playing hopscotch – are in danger of dying out in today’s overprotective culture. The survey of 4,000 parents, commissioned by Robinson’s Fruit Shoot, shows that 80 per cent of parents believe our “cotton-wool culture” is to blame. Children are indeed losing out on many of the childhood experiences that my generation took for granted. There is a real danger that by cocooning, overprotecting and oversupervising children, society could endupdenying the next generation the opportunity to mature and develop into becoming capable, confident adults. Children need to be given space away from adults’ watchful eyes – in order to play, experiment, take risks (within a sensible framework provided by adults), test boundaries, have arguments, fight, and learn how to resolve conflicts without adult intervention. Today, they are increasingly denied these opportunities. Parents feel compelled to monitor their children a lot more closely, and research indicates that children’s games have steadily moved indoors into adult-controlled environments. There are far fewer children and young people out and about on street corners or in parks unaccompanied by adults. The much-quoted UK study One False Move shows a dramatic decrease in children’s independent mobility over the period of two decades. Whereas in 1971, 80 per cent of seven- and eight-yearoldchildren in England were allowed to travel to school on their own, in 1990 the figure was only 9 per cent. Figures from the Department for Transport show the proportion of primary school children who walked or cycled to school unaccompanied was as low as 5 per cent in 2006. According to research by Play England, a campaign group sponsored by the National Children’s Bureau that calls for children to have access to good and free local play space, in 2003 some 67 per cent of eight- to 10- year-olds and 24 per cent of 11- to 15-year-olds had never been to the park or theshopsontheir own. Similarly, research by Colin Pooley at Lancaster University in 2006 shows that few of the young children interviewed by him and his researchers had dealt withmanyrisks, and compared with earlier generations they had not had the opportunityto learn to negotiate or to deal with challenges. Ironically, if children miss out on opportunities for developing a sense of risk and danger, and taking more and more responsibility for their own lives, they are likely to be at even greater risk when they eventually are let out in the “big, bad world” without having learnt essential skills. How did we get to the situation in the first place where risk was seen as bad for children rather than something they needed to learn to deal with as a part of growing up? The media have a lot to answer for. No doubt, parental fears have been exacerbated by the relentless reporting of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007, and the previous stories we remember only too well: the murders of the Soham schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002, and the abduction and killing of Sarah Payne in 2000. But to focus all our fire on the media is to let more official sources of fear off the hook: in particular, governments and the charities they create and sponsor. There is no shortage of government-sponsored campaigns that try to poison children’s minds with fear and distrust. Take the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act – passed into law in England and Wales in 2006 – which requires that millions of adults whose work involves coming into contact with children undergo Criminal Records Bureau checks first. The message this gives to parents and children is to be suspicious of any adult who wants to work with children. In effect, every adult is presented as a potential paedophile. This is also the case in relation to taking photographs of children. almost impossible in Britain today to take photos of one’s children, grandchildren, nieces or nephews in public places if they are surrounded by other children. The rules governing the use of cameras and camera-phones in swimming pools, parks, at children’s parties, school sports days and any other placewhere children might be present are ubiquitous and strictly enforced. The kind of photos that have traditionally appeared in many a family album are now treated as being akin to potential child pornography. This is a very sad development. Ultimately, parents will only give children the independence they need if they have sufficient trust in other adults – trust in them not to harm their children but to look out for them. When we grew up, our parents assumed that if we got into trouble other adults, often strangers, would help out. Today that trust does not exist – or, at least, it has been seriously damaged by government policy and media debate, along with a rising culture of suspicion towards adults’ motives. Asad consequence of this corrosion of trust is the impact it can have on children themselves. There is a danger that many children are going to grow up fearing and deriding the adult world. A Child’s Place, a report by the think-tank Demos and the Green Alliance, found that children are keen to spend more time out of the house but they will often be too frightened to do so because they associate being outdoors with danger. And a survey of 800 children aged between four and 16 carried out by the Children’s Society and the Children’s Play Council in 2001 found that 25 per cent were put off playing outside for fear of being bullied by older children. We need to ask what the consequences will be for society – and for children themselves – if the trust that children have traditionally placed in the various people in their lives is to be continually undermined and eroded by external third parties. It is only by challenging the safety-obsessed culture that depicts every adult and child as a potential threat that we can start to build a better future, and present, for our children and ourselves. play, children and risk, parents and kids 2009-08-04T15:56:33+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/bullying/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/bullying/#When:14:27:42Z The latest NSPCC/ChildLine initiative on bullied children presents both adults and kids as toxic beings.A new report from the UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children shows that a record 58,311 boys called the NSPCC’s telephone counselling service, ChildLine, last year – twice as many as five years ago. The issue boys were most likely to call about was bullying, which accounted for 12,568 calls. In the NSPCC pocket guide for schools, titled Worried? Need to talk?: Keeping Safe and Strong, children are warned that ‘bullying and discrimination, whether by adults or by other young people, are abusive and can hurt you physically and emotionally’. Bullying is defined by the NSPCC as ‘hitting, taking a person’s things, name-calling and making racist or homophobic comments’. Children are encouraged not to ‘suffer in silence’ and not to feel obliged to ‘deal with these problems on your own’ (1). Only a heartless person would want to see a child ‘suffer in silence’. But that does not mean it is a good idea for schools, or anybody else for that matter, to promote the NSPCC’s message, encouraging children who are upset and distressed to deal with their problems by turning to a faceless person on the other end of a telephone line. There is a real danger that ChildLine does more harm than good, by filling children’s heads with negative messages about the adults and other children in their lives. Take the statement by the head of ChildLine, Sue Minto: ‘Desperate boys call ChildLine because they feel they have no one to turn to. It’s heartbreaking to hear their stories of rape and violent beatings, often by their parents.’ She adds that sometimes, by the time the boys call, ‘they can be suicidal’ (2). But how many of the children calling ChildLine are likely to have been raped and violently beaten by their parents? Very few, I suspect. Yet this quote about rape and violent beatings, ‘often by parents’, was the one that the NSPCC decided to include in its press release about the tens of thousands of boys who called ChildLine last year. The vast majority of parents are not abusive and violent; they love their children and try to do their best for them. Sadly, some parents do physically and sexually abuse their children, and some children suffer shocking neglect – sometimes with fatal consequences. Society does need to find a way to protect these children. But a helpline is not the answer. The solution is far more complex. I would be willing to concede that ChildLine may do some good for some children on some occasions: undoubtedly there will be examples of children who felt better after talking to a ChildLine counsellor. A concerned voice on the other end of the phone can no doubt give some children the strength they need to get through a difficult situation. But I would still argue that, on the whole, initiatives such as ChildLine do more harm than good. My main concern is the potentially damaging effect of the negative messages that ChildLine, the NSPCC and others communicate to children: they frequently depict the adults and other children in young people’s lives as predatory, nasty and harmful. We need to ask what the consequences will be for society – and for children themselves – if the trust that children have traditionally placed in the various people in their lives is continually undermined and eroded by external third parties. Of course, it is not only the NSPCC that is to blame for this corrosion of trust. The government should take its fair share of blame, too. There is no shortage of government-sponsored campaigns that try to poison children’s minds with fear and distrust. Take the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act – passed into law in England and Wales in 2006 – which requires that millions of adults whose work involves coming into contact with children undergo Criminal Records Bureau checks first. The message this gives to parents and children is to be suspicious of any adult who wants to work with children. In effect, every adult is presented as a potential paedophile. And it is not only adults who are presented by the government and government-sponsored charities like the NSPCC as abusive and potentially harmful; children are also presented as nasty little monsters who can destroy lives through bullying. For some children – a minority – bullying is indeed a profound problem. Some children are lonely and isolated, shunned by their peers, and regularly ridiculed, humiliated or even beaten by other children. Adults do need to work out how they can help in such situations. But we should be honest and acknowledge that there really are no magic solutions when children are shunned by their peers. By intervening in a firm but sensitive manner, an adult may be able to help a child who is being bullied. But equally they may make the situation worse, creating a more permanent wedge between the ‘victim’ and the ‘bullies’. Also, by intervening an adult may undermine the child’s ability to manage the situation for himself, making life harder for the child in the long run. Also, much that is defined as bullying today is not bullying. It is boisterous banter or everyday playground disputes that could – and should – be resolved without adult intervention. When bullying comes to mean anything from ‘hitting, taking a person’s things and name-calling’ to ‘making racist or homophobic comments’, then virtually every aspect of children’s lives and everyday conflicts become subject to adult intervention, including by strangers on the end of a telephone line. As I have argued previously on spiked, anti-bullying campaigns – including those initiated by the NSPCC – lead to a situation where children become unwilling to, and incapable of, resolving their own problems with their peers. This could damage children’s development, and their relationships with each other, far more than the odd stone thrown or insult shouted. We need to appreciate that children are children, rather than nasty little brutes or helpless victims. It is true that children argue. They trade insults. They fight. But, more often than not, they make up again. As I argue in Reclaiming Childhood: ‘If we can harness a more positive outlook about our fellow human beings and challenge institutionalised suspicion and state-authorised scaremongering, then we might free up our children’s lives and allow them both to enjoy themselves and to learn how to become an adult.’ Reclaiming Childhood, is published by Routledge. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) (1) Worried and need to talk, NSPCC, 2009 (2) Surge in boys calling ChildLine, NSPCC, 27 July 2009 (3) Surge in boys calling ChildLine, NSPCC, 27 July 2009 play, children and risk, parents and kids 2009-07-29T14:27:42+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/restating_the_case_for_human_uniqueness/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/restating_the_case_for_human_uniqueness/#When:13:56:18Z A brilliant new book cuts through all the media-oriented research about ‘clever chimps’ using tools, doing maths and feeling human emotions, and reminds us that, in truth, there is nothing remotely human about primates.Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes That Make Us Human is a refreshing defence of human uniqueness. ‘We are a truly exceptional primate with minds that are genuinely discontinuous to other animals’, Jeremy Taylor writes. The first half of Not a Chimp challenges ‘the basis of a 40-year-old concept of human genetic chimp proximity’. Taylor does admit that ‘over very appreciable lengths of their respective genomes, humans and chimpanzees are very similar indeed’. He writes: ‘This is where the oft-quoted “1.6 per cent that makes us human” comes from. Despite 12million years of evolutionary separation, six million for each species since the split from the common ancestor, we are surprisingly similar in our genes.’ Yet he argues that, despite the very small difference in the gene coding sequence between humans and chimps, some of the important genetic differences are in genes that regulate a whole host of other genes. So a small change can make an immense difference. The genetic difference between us and chimps may be much greater than the 1.6 per cent figure implies, as our uniqueness is based on a powerful network of gene regulation, he argues. Not being an expert on genetics, I do not know whether he is right or wrong. But his case is persuasive and well argued. There has to be a genetic basis to our uniqueness, otherwise we would be able to raise chimps as humans and in the process make them human. But despite the dedication of a number of primatologists, the cognitive and linguistic abilities of the great apes have never surpassed those of a two-year-old child. This is because they clearly lack the precondition for becoming human: a human genetic make-up. Taylor sets out to argue that it is ‘as wrong as it is misguided’ to ‘exaggerate the narrowness of the gap between chimpanzees and ourselves’: ‘It plays into the hands of our natural propensity to anthropomorphise our pets and other animals, and even our inanimate possessions, and it has allowed us to distort what the science is trying to tell us.’ His aim is ‘to set the record straight and restore chimpanzees to arm’s length’. Taylor shows that many of the overblown claims made by scientists are pounced on by the media. In 2008, the UK’s Channel 5 aired a documentary on Tetsuro Matzuzawa’s chimpanzee research in Japan, which had already drawn newspaper headlines such as ‘Chimp beats college students at math’. One chimpanzee, Ayuma, was able to beat humans at a computer game where the numerals 1 to 9 were flashed up in random patterns on a screen before being replaced by an empty box. The participants then touched the screen to put the numerals in the order they had just been shown. But does the fact that the chimps did well on this task merit the claims that they have ‘leapfrogged’ us in their mathematical abilities? Of course not. As Taylor points out: ‘This was a test of eidetic – or photographic – memory, not mathematical skills.’ He adds: ‘Tiny children have this skill before it becomes engulfed by language and a genuine symbolic understanding of numerals.’ This is something my husband discovered to his surprise when he was thrashed by a three- and a four-year-old child while playing the ‘Memory Game’, where one has to memorise the location of cards turned upside-down and try to retrieve matching pairs. In the chapter titled ‘Povinelli’s Gauntlet’, Taylor outlines the fascinating work of the comparative cognitive psychologist Daniel Povinelli, who runs the Cognitive Evolution Group at the University of Louisiana. Povinelli is unequivocal in arguing that no test to date has reliably demonstrated that chimpanzees – or any other primate for that matter – have an understanding of the mental life of others or an understanding of causation in the physical world. To investigate chimps’ so-called understanding of ‘folk psychology’, Povinelli tested whether chimps understood that their begging gestures will only be effective if the person they are begging from can see them. When one of two experimenters either wore a blindfold, held their hands over their eyes or wore a bucket over their head, the chimps showed no preference for whom they made their begging gestures to. In terms of their ‘folk physics’, Povinelli showed that despite many chimps in captivity being observed using rakes to pull out-of-reach food towards them, they didn’t show an understanding of how the tools worked. Povinelli designed an experiment that showed that, when attempting to capture a cookie on a table, the chimps couldn’t distinguish between the efficacy of a rake held in the normal position and one in the inverted position: ‘They consistently failed to understand that to move the cookie they had to make contact between the [rake and the cookie] by using the inverted rake’, Taylor writes. In order to demonstrate that far too much has been made of the tool-using abilities of chimpanzees in the wild, Taylor outlines recent discoveries showing that the tool-making of some birds equals, or in many cases betters, anything observed in chimpanzees. ‘In two species that parted company 280million years ago, performance is either very similar, or corvids might even have an edge. Bird brains, in specific contexts, are a match for chimp brains’, he writes. What this shows is that chimpanzees may not tell us that much more than corvids about the evolution of our unique genetic make-up, he argues. ‘Though you may argue that all the differences between us and chimpanzees, from variation among neurotransmitter regulators to spindle cell populations and a host of genes to do with the nervous system, metabolism, and immunity, are a matter of degree – quantitative rather than qualitative differences – I think that these quantitative differences are of such magnitude that their combined effect is to produce a cognitive creature that is unique and whose mind is in a league of its own’, he writes. Although the bulk of Not a Chimp focuses on the case for our genetic uniqueness, Taylor does recognise that biology alone cannot explain our exceptional abilities. Like a number of groundbreaking developmental and comparative psychologists, he recognises the powerful role of social learning – such as true imitation – in human development. The difference between emulation (which other animals are clearly capable of) and true imitation ‘is crucial to an understanding of how we, as a species, have amassed such a variety and complexity of material culture’. He writes: ‘Understanding that a demonstrator intends his actions to make something, allied to detailed copying of every move he makes, allied to the reciprocal understanding in the demonstrator’s mind that he knows something you don’t and therefore has to teach you it, produces a potent ratchet effect.’ Unlike any other animal ‘we build on very modest foundations and blow them up to extraordinary dimensions of power and complexity’, which has ‘led from the invention of the wheel, less than six thousand years ago, to the wheeling out of the latest passenger jet’. Taylor shows that both ape-language and ape-cognition research ‘were subjected to a cold douche of searching criticism during the 1990s’, but that ‘now the worm has turned again, with a number of research groups emerging with bolder and bolder claims for Machiavellian machinations of primate minds’. However, Taylor has thankfully added his voice to the few who are prepared to put the case – and convincingly so – for the idea of human uniqueness. Not a Chimp: The hunt to find the genes that make us human by Jeremy Taylor is published by OUP Oxford. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) animals, genetics, book reviews 2009-06-26T13:56:18+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/its_time_to_move_beyond_the_nature_nurture_divide/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/its_time_to_move_beyond_the_nature_nurture_divide/#When:09:58:34Z In advising parents to ignore hectoring experts, Judith Rich Harris’s book still packs a punch 10 years on. But its use of evolutionary theory and social psychology to explain how people are ‘shaped’ leaves much to be desired.Earlier this year, on the tenth anniversary of its first publication, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do by Judith Rich Harris was revised and updated. The book is a welcome antidote to the increasingly shrill voices lecturing us today about the ‘right’ ways of parenting. But as an insight into what it means to be human, and what shapes our development, Harris’s book raises more questions than it answers. ‘One of my purposes in writing this book is to relieve parents from the guilt that has been imposed upon them by the professional givers of advice on child-rearing’, Harris writes. ‘The nurture assumption has turned children into objects of anxiety. Parents are worried about doing the wrong thing, fearful that a stray word or glance might ruin their child’s chances forever.’ She rightly argues that ‘Somehow the advice-givers always manage to take the joy and spontaneity out of child-rearing and turn it into hard work’. ‘If you have occasionally lost your temper and hit your children, it is unlikely that you have caused them any lasting harm’, she continues. That is not to say it doesn’t matter if you are regularly nasty to your children; if you are, it is possible that you will seriously harm your relationship with your child, potentially for life. But it will not shape your child’s relationship with other adults. Your child will not relate to all other adults as if they are unpredictable, quick-tempered and nasty, but they may relate to you in that way, says Harris. Harris meticulously takes apart the claims made by academics and experts about children being determined by their early familial relationships: ‘The experts are wrong: parental nurturing is not what determines how a child turns out.’ Much of the evidence for the effect of parenting styles on children’s later outcomes is based on correlational research. Harris shows that many of these claims are vastly overblown. Researchers will often gather a good deal of data about the participants of their study. If, for instance, they were to gather five measures of the home environment and five measures of the children’s outcomes, these measures could be paired up in 25 different ways, yielding 25 possible correlations. As Harris points out: ‘Just by chance alone, it is likely that one or two of them will be statistically significant.’ She adds that if none of them is significant, ‘Never fear, all is not lost’: all the so-called experts need to do is split up the data further and look again. ‘Looking separately at girls and boys immediately doubles the number of correlations, giving us 50 possibilities for success instead of just 25. Looking separately at fathers and mothers is also worth a try. “Divide and conquer” is my name for this method.’ A good example of this type of analysis is the recent government-funded study by the Institute of Education, which, according to the UK Daily Mail, shows that ‘children are more likely to grow into well-adjusted adults if their parents are firm disciplinarians’ (1). The authors of the report set out to ‘understand the determinants of parenting’, and ended up recommending that ‘maternal mental health, breastfeeding and social networks form the focus of intervention efforts to boost parenting capabilities’ (2). On what basis did they draw such far-reaching conclusions about the need for further government intervention in family life? The researchers looked at the relationship between a whole host of measures and the ‘quality of the mother-child interactions’. The factors they looked at included: the mother’s marital status, marital satisfaction, family income, breastfeeding, attitudes towards breastfeeding, feelings about childcare, quality of maternal care that the mother received in her own childhood, post-natal depression, mother’s age at child’s birth, mother’s education, and much more. To assess the mother-child interactions, they measured the amount of ‘warmth’ and ‘educational communication’ involved when a mother shared a picture book with her child at one and then five years of age. Of course, the researchers came up with some ‘statistically significant correlations’. With so many possible correlations it would be highly surprising if they didn’t. For instance, they found: ‘Breastfeeding had a positive association with parenting.’ But it only continued to have ‘a positive effect’ at five years of age for single and lower income mothers - not ‘for married and higher income mothers, or for the sample overall’. Note Harris’s warning about ‘Divide and conquer’: if the correlations are not significant over longer periods for the whole data set, divide up the data further. The Nurture Assumption is an important book in guiding students – and non-students, too – through the minefield of correlational research and the various methodological tricks used to come up with publishable results. It also challenges the pressure on parents to raise children’s self-esteem. Contrary to the current orthodoxy, Harris argues that self-esteem is based on what we do, not on how we are encouraged to feel. Children are perfectly aware of how they compare to, and are regarded by, their peers – and therefore need to develop mechanisms for coping with difficult situations when they arise. She writes: ‘Kids are not fragile. They are tougher than you think. They have to be, because the world out there does not handle them with kid gloves. At home they might hear “What you did made me feel bad”, but out on the playground it’s “You shithead!”’ Sadly, since The Nurture Assumption was first published 10 years ago, the cultural preoccupation with protecting children from any possible negative messages has extended far beyond the confines of the home to include what goes on in the classroom and the school playground, too. There are those who argue that we have a duty to protect children from ever facing the possibility of being called a ‘shithead’ – even by another child. Yet this obsession with protection is problematic. The strength of The Nurture Assumption is that it encourages parents to worry less about how they bring up their children. However, it falls seriously short in explaining – in the words of the book’s subtitle – ‘why children turn out the way they do’. Harris says: ‘There are hundreds of books that give advice to parents – books that tell you what you’re doing wrong and how to do a better job of raising your kids. Find a good one and it may help to explain why children behave the way they do when they’re at home. My goal is to explain what makes them behave the way they do in the world outside the home – the world where they will spend the rest of their lives.’ Yet Harris’s theoretical framework for explaining what makes us who we are is no less deterministic than the frameworks that she criticises. It is not parents that shape us, she says, but a combination of our genes and ‘group socialisation’. Her model does not go beyond the dualistic concepts of nature and nurture that have plagued much of psychology. Harris welcomes the fact that ‘there is now more acceptance of the idea that behaviour is influenced by genes and that individual differences in behaviour are due in part to differences in genes’. But environment also has an effect, she says – ‘both on children and on corn’. She even puts a figure on it: ‘In our own species, differences in environment account for about half the variation in personality characteristics.’ Her thesis builds on social psychology’s ‘group socialisation theory’ and the two key concepts of ‘assimilation’ and ‘differentiation’. It is through this ‘groupness’ that children become socialised, Harris argues: ‘Children get their ideas of how to behave by identifying with a group and taking on its attitudes, behaviours, speech and styles of dress and adornments.’ She draws on evolutionary theory to explain the importance of group socialisation: ‘Hating the members of other groups is part of human (and chimpanzee) nature. Our evolutionary history has predisposed us to draw a simple corollary: that we prefer Xs to Ys. We also conclude, as a result of the categorisation process itself, that we are similar to other Xs and different from Ys.’ In truth, we cannot understand the complexity of human behaviour on the basis of simplistic rules, such as ‘assimilation’ and ‘differentiation’. These concepts may provide a framework for understanding some of the processes that shape our behaviour, but they would only give us a partial, ahistorical and not very meaningful insight. However, Harris implies that these processes can explain everything from patriotism and war to school achievement and truancy. Indeed, she goes so far as to argue that: ‘The basic phenomena of group relations – preference for one’s own group, hostility towards other groups, between-group contrast effects, and within-group assimilation and differentiation – are so robust, so easy to demonstrate in the laboratory or observe in natural settings, that social psychologists soon found themselves with little left to do but clean up the crumbs. It was the success of social psychology, not its failure, that led to the decline of the field in the wake of the brilliant research carried out in the 1950s.’ But for me, social psychology is one of the least illuminating and most reactionary branches of psychology. Social psychology was born out of a fear and loathing for the masses at the end of the nineteenth century, in the context of a wave of working-class unrest. In 1895, French social psychologist Gustave le Bon described crowds as mobs in which normal psychological capacities are suppressed, revealing a primal irrational nature. Explaining human behaviour on the basis of ‘group processes’, removed from any understanding of the social context, inevitably ends up undermining individual subjectivity. Steven Pinker called The Nurture Assumption ‘a turning point in the history of psychology’. But it is only ‘a turning point’ in so far as it has helped swing the pendulum back to the ‘nature’ side of the debate while at the same time redefining ‘nurture’ to mean ‘peer group socialisation’ rather than parental influence. ‘Children are not socialised by their parents’, Harris writes. ‘Parents have no lasting influence on their children’s personalities or on the way they behave outside the home… The personality we acquire in our childhood and adolescent peer groups is the one that accompanies us through the rest of our lives. It is the “me” that continues to look out of our eyes even when our eyes require bifocals’, she says. And cultures, apparently, are passed from one generation to the next via the peer group, not via adults. Yet even within the peer group, it is not the relationships that shape us, she argues, but the abstract concept of ‘groupness’. Just as we cannot blame any character defects on our parents, neither can we blame them on our friends, says Harris. ‘Relationships do matter – they generate powerful emotions and take up a large proportion of our thoughts and memories – but nevertheless they don’t have much effect on how we turn out.’ So peers are only important in so far as they provide a ‘group’ to identify with or react against, but the relationships with our peers per se are not important in influencing how we turn out. Far more interesting insights have been made in other fields of psychology – away from ‘social psychology’ – by individuals who have gone beyond the staid nature-nurture debate. Harris, and Pinker for that matter, fail to appreciate the wealth of research, not least from developmental psychology (a branch of psychology responsible for so much ‘worthless’ research according to Harris), that has elucidated the many transformations human beings go through during their lives. In fact, back in the 1930s the famous Soviet psychologists Alexander Luria and Lev Vygotsky put forward a theoretical framework for explaining what makes us human in their book Ape, Primitive Man and Child. They argued that human beings are the product of three distinct lines of development: the evolutionary, the historical and the ontogenetic (or, in other words, the individual). Anthropology, palaeontology, primatology, genetics and other disciplines have given us insights into the possible events in our evolutionary history that created the biological basis for the emergence of our unique human abilities. But, as Luria and Vygotsky stressed, the evolution of the human genetic make-up is merely the precondition for our humanity. Our human genetic make-up is almost identical to the first Homo sapiens sapiens that emerged around 150,000 years ago. But in terms of how we live and organise our lives – our aspirations, values, attitudes, social relationships, intelligence and much more – we are incomparable to our ancestors. Thus, in order fully to understand what shapes us, we need to go beyond the evolutionary line of development. Building on the work of Karl Marx – who famously argued that ‘Men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their choosing’ – Luria and Vygotsky showed that we are the product not only of biological evolution but also historical development and childhood relationships. Their historical concept of society is very different from the simple idea of ‘groupness’ put forward by most social psychologists. It is in the area of the third line of development – the ontogenetic or individual line of development – where psychology, and in particular developmental psychology, has made some important strides. At birth, human infants are merely bundles of reflexes. As Luria and Vygotsky wrote: ‘In all animals, inherited reactions or innate modes of behaviour form the first stage in the development of behaviour. These are usually called the instinct, and for the most part are associated with the satisfaction of the basic needs of the organism.’ (3) But at some point in the child’s development, this biological being is transformed into a conscious self-aware being, capable of participating in our collective culture. The developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello shows that this is only possible once infants understand other people as intentional beings like themselves. This ‘uniquely human cognitive competency’ does not emerge all at once ‘and then function the same way throughout’, he argues: ‘To the contrary, the human understanding of others as intentional beings makes its initial appearance at around nine months of age, but its real power becomes apparent only gradually as children actively employ the cultural tools that this understanding enables them to master, most importantly language.’ (4) Luria and Vygotsky, and many developmental psychologists since, have shown that our interpersonal relationships not only serve important developmental functions, but are conduits through which we engage with our collective culture. Culture is not passively internalised, in the way Harris and other new social psychologists imply, through the abstract concept of ‘groupness’. And human beings are determined neither by nature nor nurture (or ‘groupness’). We are active agents who engage with, and have the capacity to shape, the collective culture of our time. The Nuture Assumption: Why Children Turn out the Way They Do, by Judith Rich Harris, is published by Pocket Books. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) (1) Why children do best with strict parents, Daily Mail, 27 March 2009 (2) Nurturing parenting capability: the early years, by Leslie Morrison Gutman, John Brown and Rodie Akerman, Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning, March 2009 (PDF) (3) Ape, Primitive Man and Child: Essays in the History of Behavior, by Alexander Luria and Lev Vygotsky, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992: p1 (4) The Cultural Origin of Human Cognition, by Michael Tomasello, Harvard University Press, 1999: p56 play, parents and kids, book reviews 2009-04-24T09:58:34+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/chimps_are_like_humans_stop_monkeying_around/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/chimps_are_like_humans_stop_monkeying_around/#When:10:49:49Z This week it was revealed that chimps use sticks to smash open beehives. But there’s nothing remotely ‘human-like’ in such behaviour.Recent ‘revelations’ about chimp behaviours are forcing us to reconsider whether human beings are unique. Or so we are told. This week, BBC News reported on a study published in the International Journal of Primatology, which uncovered novel tool-using abilities among wild chimpanzees in central Africa: ‘Cameras have revealed how “armed” chimpanzees raid beehives to gorge on sweet honey’, the BBC reported (1). Scientists found that the primates ‘crafted large clubs from branches to pound the nests until they broke open’ (2). A few days earlier, the Guardian reported on ‘the loutish behaviour of a stone-throwing chimpanzee at a zoo near the Arctic circle’, which also apparently challenges scientists’ belief that humans are unique; you see, chimps can be yobs, too (3). The discovery that the aggressive chimp had gathered stones over a period of time, in order to throw them later on at unsuspecting spectators – implying some kind of forethought and planning – astounded many scientists. Mathias Osvath of Lund University in Sweden wrote in the journal Current Biology: ‘Such planning implies advanced consciousness and cognition traditionally not associated with non-human animals.’ He argued that the behaviour of the stone-thrower shows that chimps ‘have a highly developed consciousness, including life-like mental simulations of potential events’: ‘When wild chimps collect stones or go out to war, they probably plan this in advance. I would guess that they plan much of their everyday behaviour.’ Or as the science editor of The Times, Mark Henderson, put it: ‘The extent to which chimp intelligence has been found to approach that of people has surprised even some primatologists.’ (4) Similarly, in his book The Great Ape Project, Douglas Adams, best known for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, describes the human-like characteristics of free-living gorillas in Zaire: ‘They look like humans, they move like humans, they hold things in their fingers like humans; the expressions which play across their faces and in their intensely human-looking eyes are expressions which we instinctively feel we recognise as human expressions…’ (5) It is true that the chimpanzee is the only non-human animal that has been found to use a variety of tools for a variety of purposes in the wild. Unlike monkeys and other apes, chimps use leaves as sponges to soak up drinking water or as umbrellas in heavy rain; they also use leaves to wipe their wounds and use sticks to fish for termites and stones to crack open nuts. Humans are separated from chimpanzees by six million years: not a very long time in evolutionary terms. And, as we are often reminded, we share up to 98.8 per cent of our DNA with these apes, which is the same amount of genetic relatedness as that which exists between horses and zebras, or rats and mice. So do apes have sophisticated tool-using abilities reminiscent of those possessed by humans? Can they plan and think ahead? Do they have the capacity for cultural learning, where their tool-use is ‘a form of culture that can be taught from one generation to the next’, as The Times argued this week? Do they have the ability to teach one another new skills? My answer to all these questions is unequivocal: no. As I argue in my forthcoming book, Just Another Ape?, the fact that we share 98.8 per cent of our genes with chimps does not actually tell us very much. We also share 60 to 70 per cent of our DNA with goldfish and 50 per cent with bananas. It would be rather meaningless to argue that humans are 50 per cent banana-like, or that goldfish are two-thirds human. One needs to go beyond first impressions and anecdotal evidence in order to establish the differences, and the alleged similarities, between apes and humans. The fact is that the evidence for apes having human-like mental capacities is weak, and getting weaker, as researchers develop more sophisticated ways of investigating what apes can and cannot do. The differences in language, tool-use, self-awareness and insight between apes and humans are vast. So what do human beings have that apes do not? In his fascinating book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, the developmental and comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello puts a persuasive case that the central difference between us and apes is our ability to understand other human beings as intentional beings like ourselves. Tomasello writes: ‘Imagine a child born alone on a desert island and somehow magically kept alive. What would this child’s cognitive skills look like as an adult - with no one to teach her, no one to imitate, no pre-existing tools, no spoken or written language? She would certainly possess basic skills for dealing with the physical world, but they would not be particularly impressive. She would not invent for herself English, or Arabic numerals, or metal knives, or money. These are the products of collective cognition; they were created by human beings, in effect, putting their heads together… It is because they are adapted for such cultural activities - and not because of their cleverness as individuals - that human beings are able to do so many exceptionally complex and impressive things.’ (6) This theory suggests that there would come a stage in children’s early development when their knowledge and understanding of the physical world - in relation to things like space, quantity and causality - would be very similar to those of our nearest primate relatives: the great apes. But their skills in ‘social-cultural cognition’ - such as social learning and communication - would already be distinctly human. To test this hypothesis, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany gave a battery of tests to a large number of chimpanzees, orang-utans and human two-year-olds (7). They found that the young children who had been walking and talking for about a year performed at a similar level to chimpanzees on tasks of physical cognition - such as judging space and quantities and understanding causality - but outstripped both chimpanzees and orang-utans on tasks of social cognition, such as understanding the intentions of others and learning through imitation. In one of the social learning tests, the experimenter showed the apes and human children how to open a plastic tube in order to retrieve a reward inside. The children watched the experimenter and imitated the solution. The apes, on the other hand, tried to smash open the tube, or used their teeth to pull its contents out. Some scientists argue that even by one year of age, children’s performance on imitation tasks goes way beyond that of apes: they are already able to appreciate that other beings have intentions and also that they have particular goals. Researchers at the Institute for Psychology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences showed a group of 14-month-old infants a new way to switch on a light with their forehead (8). In one example shown to the children, the female experimenter’s hands were free when she turned on the light with her head; in the other example, her hands were occupied: she was holding a blanket around her shoulders. The researchers found that the children only imitated the actions of the experimenter if her action was considered to be intentional. So if the female experimenter’s hands were free when she used her head to turn on the light, the infants imitated her actions exactly. But when her hands were occupied - holding on to the blanket - the children did not tend to imitate her actions, instead opting for the more straightforward alternative of using their hands to switch the light on. So rather than simply imitating the actions of a model, pre-verbal children will consider whether there is a reason for carrying out a task in a particular way. If the female experimenter used her head to carry out the task when her hands were free, the infants must have assumed that the use of her head was intentional and therefore that it must serve some purpose; thus they copied the action. In an experiment by Andrew Meltzoff, co-director of the University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, children were shown an adult trying, but failing, to perform certain actions (9). In one example, the experimenter picked up a stick tool and tried, but failed, to push in the button on a box in order to activate a buzzer inside. Meltzoff’s aim was to determine whether children interpreted the model’s behaviour in purely physical terms, or whether they were able to look beyond the ‘literal body movements’ to see the underlying goal of the act. The results indicated that children can indeed infer the adult’s goal by watching the failed attempts: they performed the same acts that the adults had intended to carry out. Young children’s imitation is clearly guided by an understanding of other people’s goals and intentions. Their imitation may or may not involve matching the actions of another person to achieve a particular goal, depending on whether they perceive that person’s action as having been intentional or unintentional. It is this understanding of other beings as having intentions which, according to Tomasello, ‘forms the basis for children’s initial entry into the world of culture’ (10). He writes: ‘The outcome is that each child who understands her [fellows] as intentional/mental beings like herself… can now participate in the collectivity known as human cognition, and so say (following Isaac Newton) that she sees as far as she does because she “stands on the shoulders of giants”.’ Video: Goualougo chimpanzeehoney pounding It is this ability for cultural learning that sets human beings apart from all other animals. Even the most enthusiastic proponent of ape and human equivalence would have to admit that apes’ skills have not led to any significant changes in the way they live their lives. Human societies, on the other hand, have become ever-more complex. In his 1876 pamphlet The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, Friedrich Engels argued that each generation has been able to build on the abilities of earlier generations, so that our work becomes ‘different, more perfect and more diversified’. Engels wrote: ‘Agriculture was added to hunting and cattle raising; then came spinning, weaving, metalworking, pottery and navigation. Along with trade and industry, art and science finally appeared.’ (11) And as the cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen argued in his book The Prehistory of the Mind, since the birth of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, events have flashed past ‘at bewildering speed’. ‘People create towns and then cities. In no more than an instant carts have become cars and writing tablets word processors.’ (12). On the face of it, due to regional variations in chimpanzees’ use of tools, one might possibly put the case for chimps being capable of some form of cultural transmission of behaviour; in other words, learning from one another. Yet this still begs the question of why their tool-use does not progress and improve from one generation to the next. Mithen argues that apes do not have the ability to imitate – and neither are they very good at innovating (13). The fact that some chimp groups do not use sticks to fish for termites does not necessarily tell us anything about cultural transmission, he argues, but instead indicates the limitations of their intelligence. ‘The failure of Tai chimpanzees to use termite sticks is most likely to arise simply from the fact that no individual within the group has ever thought of doing such a thing, or discovered it accidentally, or managed to learn from another chimp before that chimp forgot how to do it, or passed away with his great tool-use secret. This is not cultural behaviour; it is simply not being very good at thinking about making and using physical objects. It is the absence of technical intelligence.’ (14) His argument is persuasive, especially when one considers that primatologists have not found any technological advances in chimpanzees’ tool-use over more than 40 years of observations in the wild. Instead, ‘each generation of chimpanzees appears to struggle to attain the technical level attained by the previous generation’ (15). In an attempt to understand why, if apes really do have cognitive abilities similar to humans they show so little evidence of using these abilities in the wild, evolutionary psychologist Richard Byrne argues that: ‘[One possibility] is that apes know so very much less than humans that even having the rudiments of human non-linguistic cognition does not produce much that we recognise as intelligent.’ (16) While apes are still struggling to crack open nuts, or retrieve honey from beehives, humans have made life-changing inventions such as the internal combustion engine, the harnessing of electricity, the creation of life-saving vaccines and x-rays, and much, much more. While apes are still struggling to communicate in the here and now, humans have invented the alphabet and other forms of written symbols and ever-more impressive means to disseminate the written word, from the invention of paper and ink to the typewriter and the internet. While apes are living in groups the same size as the ones they lived in several million years ago, human beings have created cities, nation states, governments and global economic institutions. Investigations into what apes can and cannot do may provide some insight into the evolutionary origins of our unique abilities. But it cannot tell us very much, if anything, about what it means to be human. Rather, today’s increasingly shrill claims that apes and other animals are ‘just like us’ reveals the degraded view some people have of human beings. The sentimentalised view of animals is very often coupled with a nightmarish vision of human destructiveness. That is why, in Just Another Ape?, I will focus on the differences between human beings and apes - in order to show just how exceptional human beings really are. (1) ‘Armed’ chimps go wild for honey, BBC News, 18 March 2009 (2) ‘Armed’ chimps go wild for honey, BBC News, 18 March 2009; Flexible and Persistent Tool-using Strategies in Honey-gathering by Wild Chimpanzees, International Journal of Primatology, 12 March 2009 (3) Chimp who threw stones at zoo visitors showed human trait, says scientist, Guardian, 9 March 2009 (4) ANALYSIS: Chimp with malice on mind, The Times (London), 10 March 2009 (5) Adams, D. (1993), ‘Meeting a Gorilla’ in The Great Ape Project, eds. P. Cavalieri and P. Singer (London: Fourth Estate), p21. (6) How Are Humans Unique?, New York Times, 25 May 2008 (7) Herrmann, E et al (2007), ‘Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis’, Science, 317 (5843), pp.1360-1366. (8) Gergely, G., Bekkering, H., & Király, I. (2002). ‘Rational imitation in preverbal infants’, Nature, 415, 755. (9) Meltzoff, A (1995), ‘Understanding the intentions of others: Re-enactment of intended acts by 18-month-old children’. Developmental Psychology 31, 838-850. (10) Tomasello, M. (1999) The Cultural Origin of Human Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p8. (11) Engels, F. (1982) The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, Moscow: Progress Publishers, p10. (12) Mithen, S. (1998), The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science, (London: Phoenix), p21. (13) Mithen, S. (1998), The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science, (London: Phoenix). (14) Mithen, S. (1998), The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science, (London: Phoenix), p83-p84. (15) Mithen, S. (1998), The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science, (London: Phoenix), p84. (16) Byrne, R. (2006), The Thinking Ape: evolutionary origins of intelligence, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p159. animals, genetics, book reviews 2009-03-19T10:49:49+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/children_report/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/children_report/#When:19:31:58Z We should roundly reject the new UK report which argues that time-stretched parents are producing damaged children.What a shame that the key recommendation of one of the biggest investigations into childhood conducted in the UK is to provide yet more patronising advice to parents about how they should relate to their children. And the unnecessary lectures don’t stop there. The report even makes recommendations on how to ensure that partners relate to each other in an emotionally correct way. A Good Childhood; Searching for Values In A Competitive Age, a report commissioned by the Children’s Society and produced by the Good Childhood Inquiry, provides a gloomy analysis of life for children in Britain. To be published on Wednesday 4 February, after a two-year inquiry, the report claims: ‘The UK fares exceptionally badly in bringing about the wellbeing of its children. In comparison with other EU member states, children in the UK are found to have poorer relationships, to engage in riskier behaviour and suffer from worse health than their European counterparts… While elsewhere in Europe there seems to be some correlation between a nation’s wealth and the wellbeing of its children, the UK is a notable exception.‘ (1) A major part of the responsibility for these problems, according to the report, lies with parents who either don’t possess the skills needed to raise children properly, or are too busy to give their kids enough attention. For example, one of the Children’s Society surveys found that 60 per cent of adult respondents agreed with the statement that ‘nowadays parents aren’t able to spend enough time with their children’. But such results should not be taken at face value. It may well be that many adults feel guilty about not spending enough time with their children precisely because they are incessantly told that they should be spending more time together. In reality, there is no evidence that parents and children are spending less time together today than in the past - in fact, it is likely to be the opposite. Children’s relationships outside the home are also examined in A Good Childhood. The inquiry found that only 43 per cent of British children find their peers ‘kind and helpful’, the lowest proportion in 29 industrialised countries. Is this really so surprising given the way anti-bullying campaigns have encouraged children to assume that their relationships with other children are potentially damaging and therefore to look upon their peers with trepidation and suspicion? This pessimistic portrayal is reflected in the weekend coverage of the report. The Sunday Times (London) summarises the message of the report as: ‘Britain’s cult of individualism, greed and selfishness has so blighted children’s lives that families and pupils need basic training in love and moral responsibility.’ (2) Elsewhere in the paper, Daisy Goodwin writes that the report demonstrates how ‘parental shortcomings are the hallmarks of British parenting’ (3). This assumption that parents are incapable of bringing up their children and so we need further state intervention into family life is a recent phenomenon, which reflects the interests of the state and a variety of academics and campaigners rather than the realities of family life. At a recent conference I attended in Kent, England, a speaker brought up the relatively recent, and rather curious, transmogrification of the word ‘parent’ from a noun to a verb. After all, we would find it rather strange if people started talking about ‘wifing’ their husbands. We don’t tend to subscribe to the notion that there are set ways one should behave ‘as a wife’ or ‘as a husband’. But we are continually told there are set ways parents should behave. A Good Childhood does not only propose further meddling in adult-child relations, but in adult relationships, too. Elsewhere in The Sunday Times, the authors of A Good Childhood, Professor Judith Dunn and Lord Richard Layard, wrote: ‘It is crucial how the parents get on with each other. It is remarkable how many parents do not realise how important this is for their children. In a survey, teenagers and parents were asked whether they agreed with the statement: “Parents getting on well is one of the most important factors in raising happy children.” Seven in 10 of the teenagers agreed, but only a third of the parents did so.’ So what’s the solution? According to Dunn and Layard, ‘The National Health Service should ensure that parenting classes are available free to all parents around the birth of a child, especially their first. Fathers as well as mothers should be encouraged to take courses in “understanding your child”, and be prepared for the strain of sleepless nights… young people should receive proper and culturally sensitive education in the skills of parenting, relationships and child development.’ (4) Given its past record, I’m sure the New Labour government won’t have any compunctions in taking on board the report’s recommendations on the need to educate us all about how to relate to each other as partners in a relationship. But such regulation from on high ignores the way in which even situations that look from the outside like they should have negative and painful consequences for children often prove to be rewarding thanks to the resilience and love of parents and children alike. We should have more faith in adults and children working out family lives and relationships for themselves, rather than relying on academics poring over survey results to teach us all how to speak, act and feel within our families. For example, when I was 16 years old, my parents got divorced and my family was split between Scotland and Norway. This was a tough time for my parents, my four siblings and myself. But my mother, a psychiatrist, did what she needed to do: that was to leave Norway. And a lot of good has come out of it, not least our incredibly close family ties, which I believe are partly a result of having to make that extra effort to see each other. Of course, if you ask children how they feel when their parents argue, they are most likely going to say that they find it very distressing. I remember having sleepless nights worrying about whether my parents were going to split up. But that does not mean that children are emotionally scarred by the experience. In fact, the long-term effect of separation and divorce on children’s development is far from clear-cut. Many researchers in the field of psychology are acutely aware of the difficulty in eliminating subjective influence on research about human beings and human relationships. When looking into the effect on children of parental conflict and divorce it is easy to come up with harmful consequences – if that is what is being looked for. The possibility that there may be positive outcomes is often not considered, and thereby the results are distorted. Having reviewed the research on the effects of divorce, child development expert Rudolf Schaffer concludes that ‘the majority of children experience problems in the months immediately following divorce’, but ‘in the long term children show considerable resilience; they are able to readjust to a large range of new family circumstances’. Although maladjustment is more likely in children of divorced parents than non-divorced parents, the vast majority ‘do not show any severe or enduring problems’ (5). We lost our mother almost three years ago, and what I wish more than anything is to have been able to convince her that despite breaking many of the contemporary rules of so-called ‘good parenting’ she was a wonderful person who gave her children an immense amount: above all an interest in the world and other people, and an aspiration to make a difference. As her obituary in the British Medical Journal stated: ‘Her intelligence, a very special sense of humour, a memorable personality and colourful life [will long be] remembered and treasured by her family.’ But according to the warnings put forward by Layard and Dunn, my mother did many of those things that were likely to damage us for life (as I suspect very many mothers may be ‘guilty’ of doing). The Good Childhood Inquiry’s recommendations are an insult to all the wonderful people who raised our generation, without recourse to the current, officially sanctioned parenting advice. Human relationships are about so much more than saying or doing the right things at the right time. Unless our aim is to raise a generation of robots, I strongly recommend opposing all the recommendations for more ‘expert’ intervention in family life coming out of the Good Children Inquiry. It will not help parents if they are loaded with guilt for behaviours that are as inevitable as they are harmless. And it will do children no good to think that they can for ever blame all their bad behaviour on their parents. The government, media and army of parenting experts should allow children to carry on loving their parents despite their many flaws, and parents to continue loving their children in their own way. It might be awkward, it might be clumsy, but it’s a million times better than the uptight approach advocated by self-appointed childrearing experts. Helene Guldberg is managing editor of spiked. Her book, Reclaiming Childhood, is published by Routledge. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) (1) See A Good Childhood, the Children’s Society (2) Cure for the Facebook generation, The Sunday Times, 1 February 2009 (3) Our children’s blighted lives, The Sunday Times, 1 February 2009 (4) Parents - pull your socks up, The Sunday Times, 1 February 2009 (5) Schaffer, R. H. (2004) Introducing Child Psychology, Oxford: Blackwell, p 98 play, children and risk, parents and kids, book reviews 2009-02-02T19:31:58+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/autistic_children_are_now_seen_as_a_burden/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/autistic_children_are_now_seen_as_a_burden/#When:16:00:06Z Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, author of Defeating Autism, talks to Helene Guldberg about how raising a child with autism can be made infinitely harder – emotionally, financially and practically – by the charlatanic ‘war on autism’.Dr Michael Fitzpatrick’s Defeating Autism: A Damaging Delusion is not only a moving personal account of the challenges faced by parents of a child with autism. It is also a powerful exposé of the damaging effects of the numerous campaigns that promise to ‘defeat autism now’ through various ‘biomedical’ treatments, such as special diets and supplements, detoxification and medication. ‘Parents are fighting the wrong battles against the wrong people at the wrong time’, Dr Fitzpatrick told me when we met in a café in Hackney, London, near his GP surgery. He believes parents are held back from doing what is best for their own children by the false promises of biomedical campaigners, whose ‘rage’ is ‘a divisive and destructive force’. Not only are many of the so-called ‘cures’ for autism that they promote worse than useless – causing discomfort and distress to the children, and even, in very rare cases, death – but the continual drive to ‘defeat autism’ prevents parents from coming to terms with their children’s condition, and can cause them to have a rather negative view of their own children. ‘The unresolved grief of parents of children with autism is a particular problem’, writes Fitzpatrick in his book, ‘because they still have a child though perhaps not the child they anticipated’. There has been a similar experience in my own family. The firstborn child of my youngest brother, Chris, was diagnosed with a severe form of epilepsy at the age of six months. Although there was a possibility that a combination of anti-epileptic drugs or neurosurgery might cure his epilepsy, in retrospect it was clear that his neurological disorder would very likely result in moderate or severe learning difficulties. Facing up to the fact that your child may never develop normally or lead an independent life is very hard for any parent, and will inevitably take time. But at some stage acceptance is necessary, not just for the parents’ own peace of mind, but also for the good of their children. Otherwise, as Fitzpatrick asks, ‘what happens to the child, the human being, who is seen only as a “burden”?’ Of course, raising a child with severe learning difficulties is difficult, but it is a lot more difficult in the absence of acceptance. Parents of children with autism who are bombarded with all kinds of promises of wonder treatments are prevented from working through their grief and reaching the stage of acceptance. All of the emphasis on ‘windows of opportunity’ and the importance of ‘early intervention’ puts an immense amount of pressure on parents of children with autism and other learning difficulties, who often end up running around desperately seeking a ‘cure’, and trying one after another; they can become obsessed with ‘fixing’ their child. ‘At best, [these “wonder cures”] divert and dissipate already over-stretched parental energies; at worst they encourage an enduring rage that is likely to compound family difficulties, to intensify isolation and lead ultimately to demoralisation’, writes Fitzpatrick in Defeating Autism. My brother and his wife spent the first years of their son Magnus’ life trying everything they thought would help; and many of the things they tried were empirically tested treatments that had some degree of success. But there was no ‘cure’ for Magnus, and when my brother was forced to face up to this fact, his grief was intense. Soon afterwards, however, he also felt that an enormous weight had been lifted off his shoulders. As he recently told me, it is then that he was able to stop desperately hoping for a ‘recovery’, and concentrate on developing a relationship with Magnus as a son whom he could love and cherish for who he is. Fitzpatrick touchingly describes the grief he and his wife went through while getting to terms with their son James’ autism – a profound grief that eventually led to acceptance: ‘We have come to accept that James will never lead an independent life and our efforts are devoted to ensuring that he gets the level of support he needs to maintain the highest possible quality of life. And we try to look on the bright side. We relish his enjoyment of simple pleasures, his infectious laugh, his wonderful smile, his curly red hair. We will never have to worry about his exam results or over what time he returns home from a night of clubbing’, he writes. Having come to terms with the fact that James, who now lives away from the family home in residential care, would not ‘recover’ from autism, ‘we try to do the best we can to strengthen his engagement with the world… seeking mutually enjoyable activities that foster social interaction, such as swimming or trampolining, and trips to restaurants and supermarkets’. It is understandable that parents will try anything they think may possibly improve their children’s condition. That is why Defeating Autism: A Damaging Delusion is such an important book. Fitzpatrick shows clearly that parents need to channel their energies into strategies that will benefit their autistic child and their families, not spend all of their time and energy on trying untested, time-consuming, expensive and potentially harmful treatments. ‘I decided to write the book after seeing so many parents go down the rabbit hole, latching on to one idea after another that they believed would offer some hope of a cure’, Fitzpatrick told me. In his book, he painstakingly analyses the available evidence for everything from the ‘wonder cure’ of secretin and detox and immune system treatments to special diets and supplements – and exposes the distinct lack of scientific evidence for their efficacy. There is no evidence that these treatments work, and worse, some of them are potentially harmful. Fitzpatrick writes: ‘Here is another paradox thrown up by the biomedical movement. Its supporters are strident in their demands for trials of the safety of vaccines [but] when it comes to biomedical treatments they reject any suggestion that these should be subjected to proper evaluation. They are outraged by the presence of infinitesimal quantities of mercury in vaccines (which prevent bacterial contamination without ever being associated with any adverse effect), yet they seem quite happy to inject children with a product like secretin, a crude extract of pig pancreas that was developed for the purpose of testing pancreatic function but has never been tested in any way for therapeutic use.’ Fitzpatrick warns that ‘plausible theories and their misguided advocates could deliver desperate parents into the hands of unscrupulous practitioners’, adding: ‘This was confirmed to me one day in [my surgery] when the mother of a boy with autism told me that she had spent the equivalent of his disability living allowance for one year on a course of secretin injections provided by a Harley street clinic. For a single parent reliant on benefits, the outcome of this encounter with a biomedical practitioner was not only disappointment when the miracle cure failed, but financial hardship for the whole family.’ Some may interpret Fitzpatrick’s message as one of resignation. But his book is far from pessimistic. Instead – by exposing the charlatans who take advantage of parents and by trying to help prevent parents from diverting their energies – it could make a big difference to families with autistic children. As Fitzpatrick told me: ‘It is not resignation to accept the current state of science in relation to autism.’ There are no ‘cures’ and most of those who claim to be able to defeat autism are preying on the grief of desperate parents. ‘My aim with this book is to encourage parents to emphasise the positive in relation to their autistic children, to pursue interventions for which there is good evidence of benefit (and some guarantee of safety) and to avoid the diversions and dead-ends offered by the perspective of “defeating autism”’, he writes in the introduction. As Roy Richard Grinker, professor of anthropology at George Washington University and author of Unstrange Minds, says of Fitzpatrick: ‘He shows us that our children are indeed being helped tremendously, not by unscientific autism treatments that falsely promise cure or recovery, but by educators, scientists, evidence-based therapies, and new understandings of what it means to be human, and different, in the twenty-first century.’ Fitzpatrick also persuasively and eloquently demolishes the key plank of the two main vaccination panics: claims in the UK of a link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism, and in the USA of a link between mercury-based vaccines and autism. When I met with Fitzpatrick back in 2004 to discuss his previous book, MMR and Autism, he stressed that any risks associated with the MMR vaccine were virtually non-existent: ‘When 500million doses of a vaccine have been given in 80 countries over more than 30 years, and serious adverse reactions are found to be extremely rare, then it is fair to describe it as “safe”’, he said. And he argued that the case for immunisation is indisputable: ‘Diseases that had caused devastating epidemics in living memory, and had produced a significant toll of death and disability into the postwar period, have virtually disappeared.’ Campaigners argue that there has been a growth in autism cases of ‘epidemic’ proportions in the Western world over the past two decades – due to everything from vaccines and antibiotics to pesticides and diet. But the increased prevalence of autism is better explained by increased awareness and improved diagnosis, along with the broadening of the concept of autism, Fitzpatrick shows. Instead of trying to fight the ‘environmental toxicity’ of the modern world, parents should concentrate on fighting for the best possible education and social care for their children. But above all, they should interact with them, he says. Fitzpatrick argues: ‘Sometimes it is more difficult simply to spend time with our children than it is to pursue investigations and treatments.’ He explains that children with autism may retreat into their own world. They may pursue obsessional rituals and challenging behaviours. ‘The very fact that it is so difficult to engage with children with autism underlines the importance of continuing to try’, he writes. ‘[Acceptance] means parents and others accepting and loving the autistic child as another human being, and it means accepting that the quest for a miracle cure is not likely to be helpful for their autistic child, for any other children they might have, or indeed, for themselves.’ This book should be read, not only by parents of autistic children, but by policymakers, professionals and practitioners working in the field of autism, and by academics and scientists interested in the media and the public presentation of science and medicine. Defeating Autism: A Damaging Delusion, by Michael Fitzpatrick is published by Routledge. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) children and risk, parents and kids, education, mental health, book reviews, interviews 2008-12-29T16:00:06+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/dont_outlaw_boisterous_banter_in_the_playground/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/dont_outlaw_boisterous_banter_in_the_playground/#When:11:00:56Z As Britain launches another Anti-Bullying Week, the author of Reclaiming Childhood says demonising teasing can do more harm than good.This year’s anti-bullying week in the UK – with its theme of ‘Being different, belonging together’ – kicks off today. And it provides a powerful reminder that official fretting over children’s wellbeing, over the supposedly terrible dangers of bullying in the playground, can do more harm than good, stunting children’s developmental growth and harming their social interaction with others. The annual anti-bullying week is an initiative launched by the Anti-Bullying Alliance (ABA), founded in 2002 by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and the National Children’s Bureau. The ABA brings together 60 organisations ‘with the aim of reducing bullying and creating safer environments in which children and young people can live, grow, play and learn’. At the launch event for anti-bullying week, in the Globe Theatre in London, the secretary of state for children, families and schools, Ed Balls, said: ‘When I talk to mums and dads, when I talk to children in primary school and secondary school to ask what is really important about school, often they will say that the most important thing is to make sure there isn’t bullying.’ (1) In last month’s Ofsted survey of more than 150,000 10- to 15-year-olds in England, 39 per cent said they had been bullied at school and over a quarter said bullying was a ‘significant’ concern (2). In preparation for this year’s anti-bullying week, ABA sent every school in England a resource pack to help prepare them for a stream of anti-bullying initiatives and activities. These include an ‘Ideas for pupils’ section, with suggestions such as: ‘Get everyone in your school to wear blue for the day’, and ‘Get all the people wearing blue into the playground to form different shapes or words – for example “Say No”, “No”, “Stop”, “Stop Bullying”, “Be Unique”’ (3). The packs also include a ‘Briefing for school leaders’ explaining that the theme ‘Being different, belonging together’ will encourage schools to ‘open up the central issue of difference in their communities to further scrutiny, and to use Anti-Bullying Week as an opportunity to ask what it is that makes people unique and different, whilst retaining a key focus on what unites and unifies them’ (4). As an aside, surely this slogan sits rather uneasily with the government’s anti-obesity drive, and its plan to weigh all children in Reception and Year 6, to see if they are an ‘acceptable’ size? If anything will make children feel different from the ‘norm’, and cut off from their classmates, it will be something like the government’s top-down shaming of chubby children and its celebration of slim children. This government measure is likely to encourage overweight and obese children to obsess unnecessarily about their bodies, to feel like failures in comparison to other children and as a drain on the nation’s resources. It is striking, and very worrying, that almost a third (32 per cent) of the children in the Ofsted survey said they were concerned ‘about their body’ when asked what worried them most. However, setting aside government hypocrisy over ‘differences’ between kids, surely it is a laudable aim to try to reduce bullying and create a safer environment for children? For a small minority of children, bullying is undoubtedly a profound problem. Every year we read tragic news stories about children taking their own lives after years of incessant bullying. In 2004, 13-year-old Laura Rhodes from Neath, South Wales, took a fatal overdose. Her parents said she had been terrified by the bullying and taunts she endured at school every day. That same year, 12-year-old Aaron Armstrong was found hanged in a hayshed at his family farm in County Antrim in Ireland after being bullied at school. Such stories are heartbreaking – and they are precisely why we need to put the discussion about bullying in some proper perspective. Unlike these tragic cases, much that is defined as bullying today is not bullying at all. It is boisterous banter or everyday playground disputes that could – and should – be resolved without adult intervention. Treating all playground disputes as serious acts of abuse does not help victims of terrible bullying, like Laura or Aaron. Indeed, as I argue in my forthcoming book Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear, it discourages a proper sense of vigilance about real brutality perpetrated by a handful of children in favour of seeing all relationships between all children as somehow problematic. Today’s obsession with bullying is not good for children and it is not good for teachers, either. Teachers are increasingly lumbered with the task of looking after children’s health and wellbeing, rather than being allowed to get on with the task of educating them. And children are encouraged to assume that their relationships with other children are damaging, and are tacitly encouraged to look upon their peers with trepidation and suspicion. As more and more forms of behaviour are labelled as ‘bullying’ – from arguments to group-creation, from name-calling to actual violence – so more and more children come to be labelled as ‘bullies’ or ‘victims’. Professor Dennis Hayes, co-author of the 2008 book The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, believes anti-bullying policies are making mattes worse. ‘The more you talk about bullying, the more it sensitises people to every social slight, and the more it becomes a problem’, he argues. In the ABA’s school resource pack teachers are told that they need to ‘keep the signs of bullying in the forefront of their minds’ (5). But if teachers become involved in every playground spat or squabble, they will both blow incidents out of proportion and, more worryingly still, undermine children’s ability to manage uncomfortable situations. Some childhood experiences are of course hurtful; and for children, a nasty taunt or a fallout with your best friend can genuinely feel like the end of the world. That does not mean, however, that these experiences actually are harmful. Being left out of a playground game may make a child cry for a week, but by the following week he or she is likely to be involved again and earlier antagonisms will have been forgotten. Children are not emotionally scarred by these experiences: they get over them and move on. Once the experience is labelled as ‘bullying’, however, and a teacher becomes involved and makes it an Official Issue, then it becomes an issue of much greater significance, driving a more permanent wedge between the putative victim and that week’s bullies, and making it far harder for the spontaneous dynamics of playground life to resolve themselves. There is a real danger that by focusing on bullying we can end up denying children the experiences they need to develop. American sociologist William Corsaro shows that conflict, especially arguments and teasing, can ‘help bring children together and help organise activities’: ‘Recent research on peer conflict among elementary school children shows how disputes are a basic means for construction of social order, cultivating, testing and maintaining friendships, and developing and displaying social identity… Disputes, teasing and conflict can add a creative tension that increases [play’s] enjoyment.’ (5) If we treat children as if they cannot possibly cope with hurtful experiences, then we will likely undermine their confidence and make them less likely to cope with difficult events in the future. In effect, we will prevent them from growing up. The UK government document Building Brighter Futures, which outlines a 10-year ‘Children’s Plan’, states: ‘Bullying can destroy lives and have an immeasurable impact on young people’s confidence, self-esteem, mental health and social and emotional development.’ This obsession with the long-term effects of bullying leads to a situation where children might become unwilling, and even incapable of, resolving their own problems with their peers – and that could damage children’s development, and their relationships with each other, far more than the odd stone thrown or insult shouted. (1) Stars back anti-bullting campaign, Press Association, 14 November 2008   (2) Majority of youngsters are happy - new survey finds - but many worry about bullying, drink and drugs,Ofsted, 28 October 2008 (3) See the Anti-Bullying Alliance’s Ideas for pupils.   (4) See the Anti-Bullying Alliance’s Briefing for school leaders.    (5) See the Anti-Bullying Alliance’s Briefing for school leaders.    (6) ‘Preadolescent Peer Culture’, by WA Corsaro, in Making Sense of Social Development, M Woodhead, D Faulkner and K Littleton (eds), Routledge, 1999 play, children and risk 2008-11-17T11:00:56+00:00