In DEMOS's typical racy style, with its potted evidence but sustained argument, the authors maintain that children's lives are being constrained and controlled, and consequently impoverished. Paradoxically, it is the wealthy who have been at the forefront of this privatisation of childhood, but its effects have an impact on us all.
If children are to be sustained by the community, what is needed is a new agenda around the quality of life, and renewed attention to a balance between the individual and the collective and between the tangible and the intangible.
The quality of life for children, Thomas and Hocking suggest, is enhanced or undermined by the workings of complex, overlapping systems in which the whole of society is implicated. It is not simply a case of making public services work better or of sharpening the responsibilities of parents.
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