A British Childhood. How Our Children Live Now.

Don’t be put off by its grandiose title; this is a fire-cracker of a book. Writing with an engaging informality the author covers a huge amount of ground. It has been said that the young in the West are over-protected in the real world and under-protected online. But for many British children still living in acute poverty, this book suggests no real protection is in fact on offer either way.

Visiting prisons, where in 2024 some children taken into custody have stayed there for nine months, talking to over-worked health visitors and the problems they face, chatting to infant teachers expected to do social work and primary care as well as provide lessons, Frank Cottrell-Boyce never lets up on the continuing crisis faced by too many young people. But his account is by no means all gloom; he writes movingly about his own childhood and there are also numbers of delightful asides, some celebrating other children’s authors past and present. E. Nesbit and Roald Dahl come off well, but not so much Frank Baum. His chilling newspaper editorial appearing in a South Dakota newspaper in 1891 advocated genocide for the few remaining native ‘Indians’ not already massacred at the battle of Wounded Knee Creek. This was written nine years before the publication of The Wizard of Oz.

A section on children’s television focuses on CoComelon, the second most viewed channel on the second biggest website in the world (YouTube). The author bets – correctly in my case – that most adult readers will not even have heard of it. Daily streaming videos made with 3-D animation software, it has been described as cloying, simplistic and repetitive. It also goes on, and on, and on, with some infants watching it for hours at a stretch. The old have always lamented the passing of particular favourite pleasures and activities from the past. In time such complaints often come to seem quaint, but not always. In these pages, for example, the author makes a compelling case for the excellence once found in many children’s television programmes once but sadly no more.

Frank Cottrell Boyce is an extraordinary man possessed with extraordinary energies. A brilliant and successful children’s writer, he is also heavily engaged in school and other visits while still finding time for the research that has gone into this truly impressive book. His lightness of touch and ever-present sense of humour goes hand in hand with anger about the way too many children are let down by a state too often preferring not to know what is really going on. Reading this book is an education in itself, describing among other social blights furniture, bed and hygiene poverty with the distressing detail they deserve. It would be good if every MP could receive a copy, ideally with an added index. Better still, the government should create a new post for him, with the express purpose of getting urgent change where it is most needed. If only!