In our report we offer an array of specific proposals to improve the lives of children. For example, we advocate the banning of advertising aimed at children, and the abolition of school league tables. We suggest free parenting classes around childbirth, covering relationships as well as childcare, and the training of more psychological therapists for disturbed children. We urge the elimination of child poverty. But we doubt whether much of this will happen without a fundamental change of values in our society - and indeed whether a set of specific changes would be enough. The change we most need is one that puts harmonious social relationships rather than the pursuit of private success at the centre of our value system. We do not want a society where children are taught above all to look after number one, since we know from psychological research that a life which is devoted to more than yourself is intrinsically more satisfying.
There's been so much impassioned commentary about this - quite a bit of it picking up on the fact that the Children's Society is in fact The Church of England Children's Society, and wondering whether a context of Christian piety guided the report towards certain outcomes (while not denying the veracity of its findings). Also some interesting commentary on how such recommendations feed into a general tendency to 'psychotherapise' problems in social life; how they seek to 'over-protect' children from the necessary struggles of growing up (including the developmental risks of play); and how the emphasis on social harmony can slip into communal intolerance, and blind us to our cosmopolitan advances.
But I'm divided along several intellectual (and personal) lines here. I've objected to Layard's work in the past as an attempt to marshall a whole range of psychological and social sciences to justify a new 'paternalism' in government. (There's no surprise that he was one of the architects of New Labour's welfare-to-work schemes). He's leaned particularly on behavioural economics (also beloved of the New Tories), with its Homer-Simpson-esque view of humanity as always knowing less than it thinks it knows, and thus needing wise rulers to steer it away from irrational behaviour. Thus governed, we'll be happy - or at least, in a situation of "harmonious social relationships".
Yet there's something weird going on here. In his happiness studies Layard wants us to accept that, in the face of our own psychological self-subversions, we have to be guidable children vis-a-vis the state and governance. But in this report he urges parents to be "properly authoritative", knowing exactly when to set limits on behaviour for children. And if they can't manage that - well of course, they can go to parenting classes and learn it, classes devised by Layard and his mandarins.
Can they make their mind up? Are we autonomous, capable adults, or aren't we? Or is there a new sliding scale of human autonomy on offer here - fragile kids at the bottom, deluded-but-trainable citizen-parents in the middle, and effortlessly capable policy czars on the snowy peaks?
I don't want to deny in the slightest the force of the emotional language in Layard's report. I think every parent (beyond those quite evidently in trouble socially and personally), would want to cleave to "the principle of love" as a basis for their own family lives, and the wider society. Opening yourself up to the turbulent winds (and enormous energies) of nurturance, whether man or women, means you're never the same again.
Yet I resist (and I think many would) Layard's suggestion that marriage breakdown is largely a result of "excessive individualism". What most would say is that it was "appropriate" individualism - a sorrowful recognition that the fights and disharmonies that so rightly disfigure children's lives have to stop at some point, and a calmer overall relationship sought.
Secure in his statistical pie-charts, Layard does not recognise the innovation, ingenuity and indeed renewed committment to the "principle of love" that often comes from separated or divorced parents. The efforts to ensure that new partners, friendship networks and extended families are as much sources of affection for the child as existing parents. Or the renewed commitment to being really "present" when you are with your child, rather than sliding into indifference through routine. (Or worse, the emotional constipation resulting from the management of mutual resentment).
I also think, even given the size of this survey, Layard still has something of a tin-ear for how children's sense of society is being fostered by their pop culture and software networks, rather than subverted. Kids in the report - and see the children's version of the report for this - are still putting 'playing with their devices' near the top of their sources of reported satisfaction. And I don't even know whether a ban on tv advertising to children would even be noticed, given how much interactive screen time they're having these days.
But there's one glaring omission from Layard's policy recommendations, if he's really aiming toward a society whose members "are devoted to more than themselves": and this is a general limitation on working-week hours.
We saw a beautiful exemplification of what the effect of wresting more free-time from wage-labour time would mean earlier this week - when the snow fell all over Britain. As Stuart Jeffries's London epiphany described it in the Guardian, this was a glorious moment of togetherness and play. With work inaccessible, and schools closed, parents and children found themselves with the basic materials of fun and community - and made the most of it.
I've written recently about how a three-day week could turn a recessionary response into a civilized opportunity. And I'm amazed, given the levels of self-improvement and activism that Layard expects of the new model parent, that he has given hardly any consideration to working hours in the report. But I suspect that he'd rather we spent any genuinely free time in personal and social education classes, or compelled civic labour, and would otherwise expect that we'd spend our extra hours in wasteful ways.
In his book on Happiness, Layard asks "how can we really exploit the end of scarcity that science makes possible?" Always the right question (it has been for about fifty years, and will pertain even within our new limits of sustainability). But he never seems able to trust "us" - the people - to do the right thing with this basic plenitude. Conceived as players and carers in robust and open networks - rather than good workers but flawed consumer-citizens in a misdirected society - we might well manage it.
We need public policy and regulation to realize this vision. But though I don't doubt Layard is a very well-meaning man, I don't think his vision of modern human character is complex enough to fashion those policies well enough. Give us space, time and resources to love our children, Lord Layard (which might mean "pinning this on capitalism" a bit more than you seem able to do). Rather than send us to classes, and deliver admonitions.
