Editorial: What value do we really place on children?

A glance through recent TV listings reveals a large number of programmes about children and parenting, ranging from Supernanny, Children Behaving Badly, and Driving Mum and Dad Mad, to Blame the Parents, The House of Tiny Tearaways and the sarcastically titled Little Angels. While offering some serious advice, such programmes show parenting as a purgatory, to be escaped from through selfimprovement. Sated with home and garden makeover series, we can now turn the expert treatment on our children. Barbara Woodhouse would have felt quite at home.

The truth, as England's new children's commissioner Al Aynsley-Green has rightly lost no time in pointing out, is that people in Britain do not appear to like children all that much. This ambivalence has a knock-on effect in public policy. Britain is almost unique in the world in the overarching children's policy framework that has been created over the past few years. Yet, within Europe at least, it has a uniquely low age of criminal responsibility, for example. And for all the Government's talk of participation and children and young people's boards, none of Tony Blair's comments about respect have acknowledged that perhaps children might also be entitled to some respect too. The pre-election Big Conversation, carefully orchestrated to include the presence of young people, has been reduced to the Big Lecture.