I was in a café the other day and there were some young kids mucking around and being a bit loud. They were laughing, then crying, then being silly.
In short, they were being kids. If you couldn’t have seen what the children were doing but instead had to guess based only on the expressions on some of the childless adult's faces in the cafe, you would have thought the children were torturing a puppy to death.
They looked furious that these children had the audacity to not behave like adults. There were eyerolls that went so far back I thought I was going to see their optic nerve and tuts that would have registered on the Richter scale. It really summed up how our society treats kids - like necessary but nonetheless irritating inconveniences.
READ MORE: 'Why the 20mph speed limit plan for Wales is a fantastic idea'
It is cliché to point out how much more children are welcomed in society on the continent. Their cries are welcomed in restaurants and waiting staff would much rather spend their time fussing over a toddler than asking their parents if they can keep them quiet.
You can judge a society by how it treats it weak and its young and we are utterly failing on both counts. There have been many occasions in recent years where we have collectively shown our disdain both for our young people and their futures. For the latest analysis of the biggest stories, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here
20mph shows we care about kids, but not as much as about ourselves
Let’s start with the 20mph limit. A poll last week found that a significant majority of the Welsh public are opposed to the default 20mph limit in Wales. That same poll also found that the majority of people believe that the change would make roads safer for kids. So basically, we know that this will help children but we still don’t want to slow down. I am not saying you are wrong if you are opposed to the 20mph limit, just that it shows where our society's priorities lay and kids are not near the top.
While we are on the subject of 20mph, let us not forget that hundreds of thousands of people (many of whom were not bots) were so moved by the 20mph limit that they signed a petition against it. However the fact that at the same time just under a third of our young people grow up in poverty doesn’t seem to elicit a peep of protest against the Welsh Government.
Now of course we can go into how the 20mph limit is far more visible in people’s lives and therefore is likely to get more of a reaction, but you have to have been living in a hole for the last decade to not know how much poverty there is in Wales. Still, instead of railing against a Welsh Labour Government for failing young people, it is the fact that they are trying to limit how many of us hit them with cars that we get mad about.
But don’t worry! People who oppose the 20mph limit are fine if it is in place “outside of schools”. Where do you think kids go after school? They are not playing for hours in the immediate vicinity, instead they should be (or would be if it was safe), roaming around. Kids need to roam. Improving the society in which they live will enable this, not empty meaningless platitudes about how 20mph is great arounds schools but nowhere else.
Go on to Google Maps and do a search for every school, nursery, hospital and care home and you will see that they are all over the place. If you really want to have 20mph limits near them then you would be better off simply imposing a default limit to save time (which is what they did).
Children were treated shamefully during Covid
Covid was another example of how children in our society are just one of many competing priorities - rather than the most important thing like they should be. Schools in Wales were closed repeatedly for ungodly amounts of time.
I am not saying that schools shouldn’t have been closed for that first lockdown when we didn’t fully understand what we were dealing with. But we should have moved heaven and earth to get them open before anything else. Whether that is with air purification equipment or other places remaining closed, it should have been the number one priority.
Even when they did open, all the statements coming out was that kids needed to “catch up”. To work extra hours to make up for lost time. This shows such a lack of understanding for what education is and what kids need it is unbelievable. If a footballer had been injured for six months you wouldn’t say that they need to do extra training to make up for lost time - you would ease them back in not immediately make them work harder than ever. So they can get back to their best.
On the subject of school let’s not even go into the fact that at the time in their lives that kids are most primed to absorb knowledge and develop a lifelong curiosity for the world, we decide we are better off testing them into oblivion. Oh, well, at least they can go and run around on the playing field - oh s***, we sold them.
Brexit - sticking two fingers up to the people who actually have to live with the consequences
Perhaps one of the finest examples of our contempt for the young came during Brexit. It is impossible to say exactly how many young people voted remain rather than leave because that isn’t recorded when voting.
However research suggests the amount of 18-24 year olds voting remain was around 75% - a massive figure. Young people also turned out in far higher numbers for the referendum than they typically do for general elections, this was an issue they clearly cared about.
But the UK voted narrowly to leave - fair enough. However the subsequent negotiations and narrative about what exactly that meant in no way took into account that the young, who let's not forget are the ones who most have to live with the consequences of Brexit, didn’t want this. There was no consideration given as to how we could limit the impact on them. Instead we simply chucked amazing schemes like Erasmus (that let students study abroad) in the bin. If young people had the temerity to speak up against this they were painted as enemies of their own country.
A country where they will likely be poorer than their parents, pay five times as much of their income for a house, have the mortgage on that house pushed up by interest rates which help the old not the young and where they will likely be in debt till their fifties to pay for the university education they are repeatedly told by their elders is not worth as much as when they went.
Climate change
But nowhere is UK society's disdain for the young shown more in our attitudes to climate change. For three decades we knew three things:
The world was heating
Humans were making it heat
If we didn’t act now future generations were facing catastrophic challenges
And what did we do? The bare minimum we could get away with. Politicians cast doubt on things which were scientific fact because it was easier and politically expedient for them to do so. Who cares about the younger generations we are duty bound to build a better future for - we will be out of office and possibly dead by the time that bill comes due.
As the Greek proverb goes: “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
But in the UK we don’t plant trees. We cut them down to construct four bedroom new build homes that no young person has a chance of affording. When the young complain that we are cutting down the trees and they have nowhere to play we tell them they are woke snowflakes. We need to change how we treat our young people before they become as selfish as us.
