Last weekend I went to Paddington Farm to help them celebrate their 25 years anniversary.  A joyous occasion with visitors from twenty five years ago visiting the farm.  A stark contrast to the rioting cities we had left behind.

Paddington Farm (of which I am chair) is a charity operating as a social enterprise, a journey we embarked on two years ago and which has got the support of everyone including the local farmers who are now taking it more seriously because of the business ethic. It supports a comment I made in the Guardian last week where I argued that charity can actually create an attitude of dependency and lack of innovation because of funding arrangements.

The concept of Big Society was alive at the farm and the messages and speeches from those who have visited the farm or who have volunteered at the farm were heart –warming. Our local MP Tessa Munt was there to hear them but I wish David Cameron had been there to see how important it is that we are helped to build sustainable farm holiday businesses to give poor people a welcome break from their stressful lives.  It has very evident social values.

Children clearly like visiting the farm. Here are  some thoughts from children visiting  from Hackney :

Farmers look after animals, feed and clean them, put them to bed and train animals not to bite people”

Farmers really like the countryside and use less electricity than us as they don’t watch TV

Never walk behind a horse

When the cows come up to you, just sing

When we go back to school we will garden, plant, weed, water, dig and harvest. We will plant in season things like spinach and blueberries.  We will have stalls in the playground and a farmer’s market.  We will find out if fruit and vegetables are British and not transported from far away.

 

Luckily for the children at London Early Years Foundation, we love the farm and intend to continue visiting come hell or high water.  Not so long ago one manager took her apprentice to the farm.  This young person solemnly told me that it was an experience that she would remember for the rest of her life.

In 1819, the Government and communities were ringing their hands in horror because of an outbreak of knife crime and criminality among young people. Parents were asked to take control of their children, society was told to wake up to their responsibilities.  What emerged was the Young Men’s Working Clubs which provided training and opportunities for young disaffected and angry young men. Are we  staring one  answer right in the face?  Young people need work, training and play.

Places like Paddington Farm must be part of the offer to apprentices with the space to learn and volunteer. Mr Cameron, make this part of your plan for National Citizen Programme. It is surely one way to offer young people a different experience which opens their eyes to the greater world and helps them find their place in it.

Organisations that argue for the rights of all children need to fight for the rights of all children and young people to visit farms.  They must shout out loud about why such places are critical to play and learning.  Children need to experience the joy of running free, getting mucky, climbing, feeding animals, collecting eggs, having campfires and enjoying the experiences of being alive at least once. Older children need space, calm, forest schools, cooking real food and learning how to do things like woodwork,  mending fences, repairing buildings. These are transferable skills which have real purpose and build confidence and competence.

In November I hope all our LEYF managers will spend a weekend on the farm. One thing we will be examining is how LEYF apprentices can access the farm so at the end of their training we will all still be singing when the cows come up to us.

Reflecting on the riots leads me to believe that the complexity of the situation which released such behaviour will need substantial intelligence, pragmatism and creativity to resolve. Like many I was struck by the image of a generation of angry, disillusioned and unpleasant young people who demonstrated quite clearly that they had no regard for adults and authority and cocked a massive snoop at us brazenly letting it be seen that they were neither fearful nor respectful of us adults.

Well, one reason for this is perhaps because we have abdicated our communal responsibility to be parents.  We have long since allowed our liberal selfishness to convince ourselves that decisions we made were good even if they had a negative impact on our children.  We indulged ourselves and did things that hurt children but persuaded us all that it was fine. They would be able to cope if we handled it right and gave them space and stuff. So we bought them everything they wanted and created a childhood consumerism that led to competition, self-indulgence and bullying.

To add insult to injury we then allowed cars to drive over their play space and kept them indoors behind the corrupting influence of television and the isolation of electronic gadgets and we pretended that everything was fine as they figured out how to handle their isolating bubbles of consumerism and abandon.  We ignored our role as community parents. Oh yes, we are all guilty, every time we failed to tackle a child in the street for shouting, for failing to chastise them as they litter, for ignoring bullying in schools or denying it, for using spurious reasons to explain away bad behaviour and failing set boundaries.  We then compounded it by intimidating the very institutions that could have supported us and filled them with equally unhelpful attitudes so eventually internal and external boundaries started to unravel. Of course, as ever the poor were first to feel it but now its a foam filing up every space in our heads, in our homes, in our communities and shown writ large across our TV screens.

With no boundaries, children get confused and cocky and fail to realise that they have to adapt to the adult world.  It’s not that world has to adapt to children on their terms but they have to learn to be part of the world and we failed to teach them that as well, confusing them and failing to help them understand their place in society. Finally, and worse than everything we told children they could be anything they wanted to be.  The world was their oyster just watch the X Factor which makes it all possible. We allowed the idea of instant gratification and success to cloud their reality but children are not stupid they soon saw the insincerity in all this promise of equality.  They recognised that maybe we had  dumbed down the school curriculum to help everyone pass but what was the message to all those who could not pass that? You become a mega failure and then begin to shout out in anger at the lies, become a NEET and act like one. There was no promised land.

As adults we have a lot to answer for and we cannot go into blame mode.  We are all complicit in creating the monster that let rip this week. 

We need to change our tack and provide jobs and apprentices and implement an early intervention approach for the next generation. I was glad to see David Lammy MP comment in the Guardian on Thursday that we need to support parents not just until their children go to school but right up to the adulthood. At last someone is listening and getting the importance of a multigenerational approach. I have long advocated a community approach to running childcare which is underpinned by a multigenerational service.  Let’s hope local authorities reflect this in their future contracts and delivery approach.  We need a proper agreed and focused means to early intervention and accept our responsibilities to be parents not just to our own children but across the community. Like the African proverb we have to remember that it takes a village to rear a child.

Chatting to my sister in the car the other evening, we were whished into silence by an indignant five year old in the back seat who, demanding our attention, said

“Remember the Fish Wish and the Government…”

The what? The who?  “Yes,” said Rory with all the authority he could muster, “the Government says to listen to children, not like Elizabeth’s parents in the Fish Wish!”

So, the just issued and widely supported daily checklist (part of a larger report by liberal thinktank CentreForum) had been picked up by a bright five year old – either from CBBC or reading the Times on his way to school.  My sister, rather quietly admitted that she had not been promoting the five a day guide, so he had not heard of it from her.  The Government’s marketing machine is clearly alive and well, and permeating the brains of our youngest citizens!  It also had the secondary impact of getting us both to properly read and reconsider the five a day:

1. Read to your child for 15 minutes
2. Play with your child on the floor for 10 minutes
3. Talk to your child for 20 minutes with the TV off
4. Adopt positive attitudes towards your child and praise frequently
5. Give your child a nutritious diet.

Phew, I thought.  I think I did all those things when they were young and I breast fed them; they should be paragons – but no chance!

However, the checklist is probably a good plan.  It will no doubt annoy the earth mothers and loose women, but actually for many parents (and I meet a lot), it should bring some small but welcome relief; so many of them are desperately in the dark about what to do, not least as mastering the skills of feeding, changing and sleeping takes all their energy.

At LEYF, we often have discussions with parents whose youngest children have reached three months – and they ask, “what shall I do now??”  As a result, we have begun to work with colleagues in Scotland (Alice Sharp and her team) to roll out lovely activities called Tickle and Giggle; proving so popular with parents wanting to learn and do at the same time, especially as many of them have no reference point (having had little or no previous contact with children), and so are a bit lost.

Many people (a surprisingly large number) think all babies need is care, food and cuddles, but no talking or playing: how many parents have you seen pushing their forward facing prams with their mobiles or earphones glued to their heads?  Huge numbers of three year-olds now have TVs in their bedrooms and go to bed to a DVD, lonesome in their little bubbles of consumerist isolation and fantasy; some households turn the TV on in the morning and don’t turn it off again until they go to bed – try competing with that level of distraction!  Is it any wonder then that we have a growing population of children from all backgrounds, classes and creed with significant speech and language problems?

If all it took to solve the world’s parents’ problems was a ‘Five A Day’ checklist, one quietly nudging us into behaving differently, then we could have a big party and get on with preparing the next successful checklist – one for managing the trials and tribulations of coping with teenagers…

So, back to the Fish Wish and that sometimes small, quiet voice telling us to listen to children a little more.  Maybe we should; definitely.