Contemporary issues in childhood and youth: Is childhood in crisis?

• Social media, pressures, bullying, abuse

• Media, Internet and sexualisation

• Exam pressures 

• Food, diet and exercise

• Child abuse and protection

• Lack of outdoor play

• Becoming adult

• Gangs, Crime and Anti-social behaviour

• Alcohol, Drugs and sexual health

• Online safety 

• Thousands’ of knife crime victims aged 18 or younger 

• 22% of girls aged 14 had self-harmed in within the last year

• Child obesity is getting worse

‘A sinister cocktail of junk food, marketing, over-competitive schooling and electronic entertainment is poisoning childhood’

‘Children need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to processed “junk”),real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives'

Extract from open letter to Daily Telegraph signed by 110 experts (September, 2006)

• Sue Palmer on Toxic  Childhood 

• According to Palmer (2006), children are being damaged by aspects of the modern world such as:

               - New technologies
               - Consumerism 
               - Lack of play and places to play in 
               - Pressure of exams

• All of which put children and young people under more scrutiny and greater pressures

• Former Children’s Commissioner for England for England, Sir Al Aynsley-Green (2019) spoke of how:

                - Policies of austerity, social policy and welfare benefits
                - Failures by police and social services to protect vulnerable children from sexual  iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiexploitation 
                - Failures within the criminal justice system
                - Inequalities in the education system 

• Were amounting to the ‘British Betrayal of childhood’

• Childhood and Youth have more rights

• Childhood and youth are better protected 

• Childhood and youth have more access to information and entertainment 

• Alcohol and drug-use is decline

• Better educated and access to Higher Education

• Childhood and youth generally are healthier and live longer 

• Rates of teenage pregnancy is at an all-time low

• Childhood and youth have more leisure time and money

• Are ideas of ‘crisis’ new?

• Is ‘crisis’ part of a media ‘moral panic’?

• Are ‘problems’ just an inevitable result of social change?

• Is it a crisis of Childhood and youth? Or a crisis of adults?