Rowan Williams also claimed there was now a crisis in childhood because of a combination of family break-up and parents’ excessive reliance on props such as computer games and television.

“The pincer movement of the commercialisation of childhood and fragmentation of the family is now closing,” said Williams, who will tomorrow launch the Children’s Society’s “good childhood” inquiry and unveil the results of a study of 8,000 children aged 14-16, which finds that a lack of family care is the biggest cause of spiralling childhood distress.

“We are talking about ingrained unhappiness among large numbers of children. There are high levels of clinical depression,” said Williams. “If you think of cultures that tried to do away with the family in the past you will find they did not survive.”

The archbishop cited as examples of the commercialisation of childhood tie-ins between cartoon characters and junk foods and the “fetishistic hysteria” of children’s interest in clothing brands.

He said methods of child-rearing had to be changed urgently to prevent the problem becoming even worse in the next generation. He sees “infant adults” as those who shirk their responsibility as parents and, because of neglect in their childhood, lack the emotional maturity to cope with adult life.

“When adults stop being infants, children can be children,” said Williams. “If we go on producing infant adults, we can hardly wonder why different sorts of violence and dysfunction persist.”

Williams is particularly worried about children growing up with a “love deficit” — not being paid enough attention when small and therefore failing to develop as well-adjusted adults. “Research has shown that parts of a child’s brain do not get activated when he or she is starved of love,” he said.

“If we want to give children a chance of experiencing childhood as they should . . . we have to face the demands of being adults ourselves. We have to accept that growing up is about taking on the task of forming other human lives.”

The archbishop’s intervention follows a newspaper letter last week drawn up by Sue Palmer, a former head teacher and author of the book Toxic Childhood, and signed by 110 experts and authors, including the writers Michael Morpurgo and Philip Pullman.

They drew attention to high levels of childhood depression caused partly by a “hyper–competitive culture” and called for children to be given “real food . . . real play . . . first-hand experience of the world and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives”.

On Friday John Hutton, the work and pensions secretary, said children were most likely to be happy in a strong and stable family as the “bedrock” of society.

Williams said that his ideas on the importance of love for a child’s development had been influenced by Sue Gerhardt, a child psychologist and the author of Why Love Matters — How Affection Shapes the Baby’s Brain.

She argues that if a child is not shown enough love and affection, their brain development is physically stunted.

Gerhardt wrote: “Our current situation may be . . . oppressive to babies and toddlers who are being shunted to or from nurseries or child-minding groups, plonked in front of videos, fitting around the parents’ busy lives, which are elsewhere. How are such children learning to regulate their emotions?”

Sir Albert Aynsley-Green, the children’s commissioner for England, who will be on the panel of the new inquiry, said he shared Williams’s analysis. “It is shocking that the UK comes near the bottom of a European Union ranking showing a serious breakdown in the relationship between children and their parents,” he said. “Childhood is in crisis.”

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