The Great Abdication by Alexander Deane

Author:Alexander Deane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Society, middle class, politics, social governance, morality, values, education, moral leadership, government, policy making, culture
ISBN: 9781845406974
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2016
Published: 2016-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

The cost of being effectively cut off from parental and familial influence is great. The current young generation seems to me to be more lost, more separated from the rest of society, than any before it. Children gain more from contact with their peers than from parents and adults more generally. This is not merely a society that experiences a divide between grown ups and children: it also reflects a culture that is lonelier. 60% of 11–14 year olds have no strong sense of family. Over half prefer to spend time on their own. A third never play with other children. [25] 79% of all children have their own television. Shockingly, the majority of children under five have a TV in their bedrooms. [26]

Unsurprisingly, this means that parents have given up control over both how much television children watch, and what content that viewing takes (or perhaps, relieved at the arrival of this glowing pseudo-childminder, parents simply don’t care what’s watched: 68% of children say that they are not forbidden to watch any programme). About half of all children (47% of those at primary schools and 50% of those at secondary schools) watch more than 4 hours of television a day. Programmes with graphic violence and sexual content are not only viewed, but also often preferred. [27]

It is obvious that children are going to be affected in some way by this. If there is an argument that the effect will be positive in nature, what is it?

Even if there is such an argument, the actions of today’s parents haven’t been taken with it in mind. For it’s not as if parents have consciously decided that this constant exposure to adult imagery and themes is good for their children. Rather, this trend is the result of a combination of benign neglect, being ‘too busy’ to properly supervise, and being unable to stand up to one’s own offspring, who demand unrestrained access to TV.

The messages children learn from this medium gain in power because they’re not offset by positive moral lessons imparted by families.

When children do come to learn lessons from people in their lives, they are more likely to learn from their peers than from anyone else. The teaching of adults is generally rejected, as if age is a bar on knowledge or understanding, per se. Educational interaction in society seems more horizontal - intragenerational - than vertical - intergenerational. The logical way to remedy this - to compel more of some types of contact, and limit others - simply seems beyond most parents, who are totally unable to control their children.

Perhaps every new generation seems to exhibit this rudderlessness to the older. But I believe that the ‘tension created by the skewered relationship between the values of our fathers and the world of our sons’ [28] is stronger than ever: the generational gap between those in their 20s today and their parents is near unique because the senior generation has decided not to fill its steadying role, in which ‘values

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