UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: Digital Impact

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 20th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for initiating this debate and particularly for drawing attention to the relevance of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child for children’s and young people’s online and digital interactions. Although this debate is about securing child well-being in a digital age, it touches on much wider issues, not least in terms of our economy. We have heard it reported this week that the spike in the CPI is mainly due to people splurging pre-Christmas on computer games such as FIFA 15, which the children’s fathers might let them play after they have played it.

My noble friend Lady Shields made a very fine maiden speech and I am going to quote her, as she knows a lot about the subject. She was speaking on Radio 4 yesterday morning and described the UK as,

“the most digital economy in the G20”.

My noble friend also said that we need another 750,000 people with good digital skills by 2017. Children have to be tech-savvy for their own and for the country’s economic competitiveness. But as we have heard today, safeguards are essential because children are breathtakingly vulnerable to the commercialisation and sexualisation of society. Not only are they imbibing values from strangers and learning about relationships from soap storylines and soft porn—or worse—they are also one click away from meeting someone who could poison their childhood or adolescence, sometimes irrevocably.

One of the first actions of this Government to tackle these issues was to initiate the Bailey review, and I thank Reg Bailey and his policy team at the Mothers’ Union for their help in my preparation for this debate. Undoubtedly, Governments have some responsibility to ensure that children and young people are protected from the worst excesses of online culture, particularly if companies and others will not take up their responsibilities, which were clearly identified in Bailey’s report, Letting Children be Children.

My main remarks are concerned with Article 18 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which says that states shall recognise and support the principle that,

“parents have common responsibilities for the upbringing and development of the child”,

and that appropriate assistance should be provided for parents. While parents must shoulder responsibility for their children’s online safety, the Government must ensure that the industry is adequately implementing Bailey’s challenges to them, such as to raise parental awareness of marketing and advertising techniques. Parents can also help each other. Care for the Family’s short pamphlet Pester Power provides tips to cover a range of parenting challenges, including those arising from the internet, and those all came from a survey of parents themselves. However, we must stand back and look at the broader context of the UNCRC. Its preamble recalls that, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,

“the family, as the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of all its members and particularly children, should be afforded the necessary protection and assistance so that it can fully assume its responsibilities within the community”,

and that,

“the child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding”.

It is on this recognition of the importance of growing up in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding that I want to focus. Noble Lords will be as concerned as I was that the Spectator recently pointed out that a young person is more likely to have a smartphone in their pocket than a father at home. Only 57% of 15 year-olds are still living with their own fathers, while 62% own a smartphone. By the time they sit their GCSEs, almost half of young people have gone through some form of family breakdown.

However, it is even more concerning that by the time children in the poorest households are five, almost half of them are no longer living with both their parents. They are seven times more likely to be in this position than children from the richest households. The former Children’s Commissioner, Sir Al Aynsley-Green, stated that children’s biggest fear was that their parents would split up. Stability is incredibly important to children, so I welcome the Government’s family stability review, carried out as part of their social justice strategy, and urge them to publish its findings. That would give local authorities the evidence base that they need to treat family breakdown as a driver of poverty, which can undermine children’s educational achievement.

What has emerged from this research is the sheer scale of family instability in poorer communities, as I have mentioned. Perhaps less well known is the fact that exposure to digital and online influences is also spread highly unevenly across the income scale, according to research carried out by Nairn et al in 2007. Children in poorer families were far more likely to have a TV and computer in their bedrooms, where parents have far less control. Fewer than half of affluent nine to 13 year-olds in the sample had a television in their bedrooms, and just under one-third had a computer in their rooms. However, 97% of deprived children had TVs and two-thirds had a computer in their rooms. Although smartphones will have changed many older teenagers’ access to screens in the seven years since this research was carried out, it is unlikely that these underlying differences have disappeared in this younger age group of nine to 13 year-olds.

The same study found that children who spend more time on screens are more materialistic, regardless of income, and have a toxic cocktail of poor relationships with their parents and lower self-esteem. The more materialistic children are, the poorer their opinion of their parents and of themselves. When considered alongside Rindfleisch et al’s research showing that children who have experienced their parents’ divorce and separation are more likely to be materialistic, this sounds like a recipe for a deeply unhappy childhood.

While the Government have a role to play in strengthening parents’ ability to guard their children’s well-being online, helping more parents to stay together for the duration serves this purpose indirectly but very importantly. Why do I lay such emphasis on that? Mainly, as we have heard in today’s debate, because it is incredibly hard to monitor your child’s online and digital interactions in an age-appropriate way if you are struggling to raise them on your own. There is simply far less time and energy. Two-parent families also struggle with time famine but at least they can back one another up. Resisting a pleading child who always wants that little bit more unrestricted access to the web sometimes requires Herculean reserves of strength. We have to enable both parents to play their role of primary educator and protector wherever possible, particularly when it comes to teaching children about relationships—largely, again, by example.

This is not just about government and parents. Schools should also ensure that all young people get worthwhile relationship education as standard. The biology of sex is already compulsory, but learning about conflict resolution and how to conduct respectful and non-manipulative relationships is also indispensable to a rounded education.

Finally, those writing storylines for soaps should be exploring the anatomy of commitment and why marriage makes a difference, recognising the drama in the effort that many people make day in and day out to sustain relationships because they value them so much.

In summary, we have to see the importance of the family in the fight to keep children safe. It is a fight that parents are playing out daily amid homework, hormones and developing brains. The Government and others must strengthen their hands.