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LONDON: Dr Williams: 'Let children play'
By Rachel Harden
CHURCH TIMES
THE ARCHBISHOP of Canterbury has condemned a culture of parenting that relies on the use of childcare and putting children in front of videos, while parents get on with their busy lives.
He said that the current work culture offered "active incentives to take carers away from the home", and that the "welfare-to-work" policy was not enough to solve the problems of poverty. Such factors played a part in diminishing the stability surrounding a child's growth, said Dr Williams, in a lecture for the Citizen Organising Foundation at Queen Mary, University of London, on Monday.
"People do not grow freely and courageously unless there are things in their environment they can trust - primary among those things, of course, being people."
He described how, during his time in South Wales, arrangements to allow women to work at weekends were opposed by community organisations, who stressed that weekends were a time when families did things together. "There was a deeply unscrupulous element in that particular case of making the family market-friendly."
He also said that the current emphasis on testing was a sign of an obsession with productivity. "It's a particularly malign one in a context where, if we are trying to educate persons, we ought to be educating in emotional and communicative literacy, as well as in other kinds of literacy."
He also said that the "haste to consumerise and sexualise children" had become "more and more hectic" over the past 20 or so years. He stressed that adults needed to make choices that allowed children to enjoy a childhood. "If we want to give children a chance of experiencing childhood as they should, experiencing as a time to learn, play, grow, in an environment of stability and security; we have to face the demands of being adults ourselves."
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