Conclusion of Miserable Children

I’ve just read (in the transcript online – I’d got home long before this point) Andrew Brown’s conclusion to the programme:

But what can we change? What should our arrangements be? We can’t disentangle the problems of children from those of adults. The government, too, sends families mixed messages. They are to be, in Gordon Brown’s great phrase, “hard working families”. But do the hardest-working families have the happiest children? The evidence suggests that they don’t and that it’s the family which plays together that stays together. In fact it’s hard to resist a rather heretical conclusion. Most of what we have seen as the peculiar horrors of modern childhood seem to arise from a lack of authority: they can, in shorthand, be blamed on the Sixties. But that was a complicated decade, with good as well as bad; and one of the distinctive attitudes of the Sixties was a distrust of money, and a belief that material success should not be the measure of everything. We’re never going to get away from a society that cares about status. But one in which status is measured only by material success makes us, and our children, needlessly miserable.

That is interesting. It does make Beverley Hughes’ comment doubly ironic. But the dilemma Brown articulates needs to be refused. He’s saying: 60s: pleasure is all, authority is to be shunned, money can’t be trusted. 2007: children believe pleasure is all and authority is to be shunned – therefore they are unhappy. But, the 60s also taught us to distrust money; materialism is another cause of unhappiness. So it’s hard to say whether our problems stem from the 60s or not.

But that makes the assumption that the 1960s (and indeed the 2007) worldview is essentially internally coherent. Therefore our problems don’t need to stem from buying in to the 1960s as an indivisible world view. From the 1960s we’ve adopted a dislike of heteronomy and self-focussed hedonism. From the 1980s we’ve adopted a crass materialism.

If today’s children serve any of those gods, let alone all 3, of course they are unhappy because those are not gods at all. Brown is right to say that measuring success and status in terms of money leads to misery. The only answer is to allow the one true God autonomy, to focus our joys on him, and to store up in heaven.