Last year my 13-year-old daughter and I were in Tate Britain, looking at some harrowing paintings by Paula Rego of women who had had abortions. What was shocking about them was not just the pain and anguish expressed in every line of their bodies, but the fact that one was a schoolgirl, still in uniform.
“How much do you think you know about my life at school?” my daughter asked, suddenly.
“About 50%?” I guessed, hoping it was more than that.
“No. I’d say all parents know only about 25%,” she said. She was off school, having broken her arm. Had she had needed an abortion, like the girl in the painting, neither her school nor her doctor would have been obliged to tell me.
What parents know and, as importantly, have the right to know or act upon, has never been more pressing, more bewildering and more contradictory. Last week we had the story of a 17-year-old pupil at a fee-paying school in London, caught trying to use a photocopied travel pass. The school knew that she was prosecuted, and indeed provided a teacher to accompany her to court, where the girl pleaded guilty to theft and was fined £100.
The first her parents knew about it, however, was a year later, when their daughter was being threatened with the bailiffs over non-payment of the fine. They have now publicly expressed their fury with the school for not telling them of the girl’s plight.
As a result of the unpaid £100 fine, their daughter has a criminal record that could blight the rest of her life.
In a world in which parents are not only rung by many schools to ask for permission to put a sticking plaster on a cut knee but also increasingly held responsible for their attendance, this withholding of information — from the people most concerned with a child’s welfare — is alarming and astonishing.
It may, however, be legal thanks to two pieces of legislation. The school asserts that, under the 1988 Data Protection Act, the girl had the right to confidentiality and that even if it had wanted to tell the parents, it was prohibited from doing so. The girl did not want her parents to know about the case, and was what lawyers call “Gillick competent” (after the court case originally lost by Victoria Gillick in 1983 in which doctors were directed not to tell parents if their under-16 daughters were taking contraception).
In the Gillick case, Lord Scarman later argued that parental rights only existed so long as they were needed to protect the property and person of the child. He said: “As a matter of law the parental right to determine whether or not their minor child below the age of 16 will have medical treatment terminates if and when the child achieves sufficient understanding and intelligence to enable him to understand fully what is proposed.”
Attempts by medical professionals to clarify the law further were specifically discouraged by the courts. It became a matter for the doctor to judge whether a child under 16 was “Gillick competent”.
Parents now do not have the right to bar their children from having sexual relationships even if they are minors; and as Sue Axon from Manchester discovered in a High Court ruling last month, parents also do not have the right to ban their children from receiving confidential advice on contraception and abortion.
It seems even more extraordinary when you consider that, while parents are having crucial information about their children’s health, behaviour and wellbeing denied them, they can now, thanks to Tony Blair’s Respect agenda, be sent to prison for their children’s misdemeanours — such as bunking off school or breaking Asbos.
In the early years of this government Gordon Brown said that “all new rights will be matched by new responsibilities”, but instead we have a situation in which children have new rights without responsibilities and parents new responsibilities without rights.
Parents have been rendered as powerless by the state as Plato would have wished in his Republic, even if they are still allowed to bring up their children. The attitude of the state seems to be that parents can never do as good a job as professionals — whether these are doctors, lawyers or head teachers.
Privatisation makes your case weaker, not stronger. As Chris Woodhead’s column in this paper has revealed, only the parent who is paying the fees will have the right to information about their child’s academic progress at a private school.
Even if a child is known by a school or university to be suicidally depressed, as in the tragic case of a 19-year-old, Michael Chan, who jumped to his death as a student at Imperial College in London last year, parents are not given the legal right to be informed.
Keeping adolescents in a state of childlike innocence and dependency is a recent historical phenomenon; 200 years ago, children were not only dressed as miniature adults as soon as they could walk and talk but expected to work, and to marry in their teens.
Now, though many children do not even leave home until their twenties, they regard themselves as grown up and entitled to keep secrets from the moment they become teenagers. Not telling your parents anything about your life at school, your friends or your feelings has become an act of self-definition.
“Children need to keep secrets from parents because as they grow up they move increasingly towards independence,” says Ruth Coppard, a child psychologist and the founder of www.helpmehelpmychild.com. “That’s right and proper.
“However, a lot of parents are not very good at allowing their children independence. It’s partly because parents always feel guilty about not doing well enough at bringing up their children, and partly that they don’t have as much time for children as before.
“And more than in the past, people protect their children from all kinds of things they regard as dangerous. In the Brownies, children of seven are expected to be able to make a cup of tea, but the world is full of people who won’t let a child go anywhere near boiling water at 11.”
We have unprecedented means to spy on our children through their mobile phones, which can not only keep track of where they say they are but, as was revealed last week, can be used in conjunction with the internet to pinpoint exactly where they are on a map.
Not that this is likely to do much to reassure parents: the law has ensured that we can look, but have no means of intervening in what could most affect our children’s future.
