Last week the results of research carried out by UNICEF and IPSOS Mori made headlines when it seemed to suggest that UK children are the least happy in Europe because of consumer pressures. Only, that isn’t actually what it said.
Consumer pressure was involved but rather as a symptom, not the problem itself. The study (read it in full) compared children in the UK through video portraits and interviews in schools, to children in Sweden and children in Spain. It followed UNICEF’s 2007 Report Card which placed the UK at the bottom when it came to children’s wellbeing in rich countries.
Sweden was chosen as an example of quite an egalitarian society, where parental leave is shared, and Spain as a more traditional environment, where extended family often weighs in on childcare. In both cases, children were found to be generally better off because they spent more time with family and friends and running around outdoors. In all three cases, children and adults ranked family time as something they considered highly important to them, and also highlighted outdoor activities.
I became aware of the report via a painful BBC Breakfast interview with a UNICEF spokesperson that focussed almost exclusively on a single recommendation to adopt the Swedish ban on advertisements that target under-12s. “But what would a child in Sweden see on the television that a child in England (sic) wouldn’t see?” pressed Susanna Reid. The spokesperson dutifully did their bit to stress that it was one element within a package that crucially included recommendations that parents are paid a living – not minimum – wage so that the UK’s well-known longest working hours in Europe might stop impinging on family life. And really, it’s a recommendation I agree with but it’s hardly the be-all and end-all.
Perhaps because of this kind of reporting, others described the report as an ‘attack on brands’. But actually, brands were not the sole target, or even really a target at all, as UNICEF’s UK Executive Director David Bull explains:
“[The Government] needs to make sure parents earn enough to spend fewer hours in work and more time with their children, protect children’s play facilities from spending cuts and consider reforming the laws controlling advertising to children.”
The report itself actually stresses the complexity of consumer pressure in the UK in particular, saying:
“The role of consumer goods in the lives of children is… complex and multi-faceted and not easily reduced to a single notion of greed or acquisitiveness.”
The problem, in fact, seemed to lie more with how parents felt and reacted to consumer pressures given existing UK work-life culture than with what children actually wanted.
I’m the first to want to have a go at manufacturers when they overstep the line with gender stereotypes and all the rest of it. But here I see them as very much a side-effect of the problem, not the cause; they’ve stepped in to the breach that they see between parents working insane hours and children feeling disconnected and found a role as providing products to assuage guilt. Cynically, for sure, but they did not create the gap in the first place.
What the coverage failed to pay much attention to - given that it seemed to be poised to create maximum outrage and cries of ‘in my day, parents just said NO!’ – was that children in all the countries involved, including the UK, put spending time with family and friends at the top of their priority list. They might be being piled high with guilt-reducing stuff but the good new is that they know that owning things does not make them happy.
And what’s more, parents know it too. And they want to spend more time with their children; it’s unlikely they had them just to ignore them. While I’m sure there are parents who work long hours because they want to, there are many that go well past the standard 35-40 hours just to make ends meet.
Let’s face it, paying working adults – both parents and not - a living wage and making sure there is local authority provision for children’s outdoor activities is expensive; particularly now, as employers and councils scrabble to make savings left, right and centre. Much easier to turn the spotlight on those rich corporations and say ‘they made us want it’. Much simpler to ignore the fact that we have a very different working culture in this country to much of the rest of Europe and not consider that it might be having an impact on families – although at least, at last, we’re starting to see more balanced parental leave.
Parents in the UK, as this report clearly shows, are already dealing with stresses up to their eyebrows. Sensationalist reporting blaming commercialism for our problems and insinuating we just can’t resist cries for an iPod is not helping.
Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein is a mum of one, digital marketer and online community manager who takes any opportunity to blog about parenthood, social media, cats, baking and Disney. Follow her on Twitter @mokuska