ATL

Thinking positively

From helping parents control their tiny tearaways to helping Gordon Brown make the internet safe for children, Professor Tanya Byron offers her views on family, technology, mental health and ephebiphobia. Words by Alex Tomlin

Waiting in Tanya Byron's kitchen to interview her, I feel very much as if I'm in a family home. Photos of her husband, actor Bruce Byron of The Bill, and her two children, Lily and Jack, smile out at me while a sign saying "And they all lived happily ever after" hangs on a door.

Family is clearly a major part of the busy psychologist, TV presenter and writer's life, so it's no surprise that she is enthusiastically supporting National Family Week (NFW), a celebration of family life taking place at the end of May. The campaign's positive message inspired her to get involved.

"In this age of broken Britain - we're all going to hell in a handcart, we've got the most overweight, unhappy, pregnant teenagers in Europe - it's like a breath of fresh air," she explains earnestly. "I feel parents get a lot of blame messages and NFW is about enjoying your family and having fun."

Improving family life has obvious benefits for a child's education, she says. "It's a no-brainer, but perhaps it needs to be said. Children who are settled, have routines in their lives, are well looked after, respected and well fed are going to perform better in the classroom."

Speaking from her own experience as a parent and as a clinical psychologist working with families, Byron believes anxiety fuels many parents' relationships with their children's schools. "The anxieties can be very different. Middle-class families worry about results, outcomes and pressure on the child to achieve. More deprived families - some of them very young parents - are anxious about whether their child is going to be beaten up in school."

More collaboration between parents and teachers would be beneficial, she believes, but she acknowledges it's easier said than done. "I think when we have such policy-driven education that is so much about targets and testing, there is such a pressure in the system. Teachers and schools have a really hard time, living in a culture of expectation from all sides. They're not actually supported to meet those expectations and that's where you can get disconnection between parents and teachers.

"There needs to be more provision to support teachers in child protection, for example," she goes on. "My mother was a school nurse many years ago - then it was nits and health checks, now it's all about child protection. That's where there is a lack of resources, and schools are often left in a vulnerable position.

"If you have good, dedicated child development practitioners aligned with counsellors in schools it would make a substantial difference to the mental health of children. By catching it earlier, it would be the most cost-effective way of dealing with child and adolescent mental health." Byron cites organisations such as charity The Place2Be as a way of dealing with these issues while taking the pressure off teaching staff.

"I have a lot of sympathy for teachers," she continues, "because I think there's a lot of initiatives that come down to: 'and the education system will deal with it'." Byron even admits that her own government-commissioned review into risks to children from exposure to the internet and video games had recommendations for teachers.

The leap from presenting parenting programmes to conducting a government review was an unexpected one, starting with a phone call from 10 Downing Street that seemed at first to be a hoax and ended with tea in the garden with Gordon Brown.

"The review was tricky," she recalls, "with many stakeholders with conflicting aims, but I think it was generally well received." One of the major recommendations was to overhaul the age rating system for video games. "If you've got eight-year-olds, whose minds are still developing, playing Grand theft auto and they can win points for running over prostitutes or whatever, then we need to gatekeep more effectively. Some video game enthusiasts were not that impressed by what I said."

Some of these voiced their opinions in no uncertain terms on social networking websites and Byron's 13-year-old daughter, looking up her mother's name, was very distressed to find a group specifically set up to hurl abuse at Tanya Byron.

These sites, such as Facebook and Bebo, are a major part of the technological revolution that Byron believes is creating a 'massive chasm between the over-35s and the under-35s, particularly the younger teenagers."

This divide has its impact in schools as well. "Teachers who didn't grow up with it can feel intimidated by the technology and what the kids are doing with it. There's a sea change in the way we construct relationships, the way we talk to each other, the way we work. Teachers can suffer because they don't understand it.

"Young people are thinking in different ways because of technology," she continues. "It always happens when there are new technologies: the telephone; when Caxton put the first printed word on the page, the Church had spasms and said society was going to be ruined. Young people can now access things that traditionally adults felt they were gatekeepers for."

With such generational divides opening up, Byron says there is now widespread ephebiphobia - the fear of children, particularly teenagers. "Most of the messaging about children is negative, whether it's about them being overweight, violent, disrespectful, and so on. The UNICEF report was important but very negative. These reports can be taken by the press and used in damaging ways, which only compounds people's fears and anxieties and increases distrust and a divide between the generations. The opportunity for inter-generational mixing is limited. You've got the elderly fearing the young, the young fearing each other and parents saying they can't bring up the kids."

Ephebiphobia was the topic of Byron's March lecture at Edge Hill University, of which she is now chancellor - a post she is very proud of. "Edge Hill is the best example of total inclusion. It's an amazing, beautiful place," she enthuses, going on to list its achievements.

"It was the first non-denominational teaching college for women. My robes are green, gold and purple - the suffragette colours.

"We've won awards for our teacher training courses and for our early years courses. We have a fast-forward programme for people who never had the opportunity but have the potential to achieve in education. We see people who have been written off by the education system and they blossom. University education is generally excellent, but it's elitist. I like to say that we do excellence but we don't do elitism."

Switching from higher education to primary, Byron is banging the drum to get more men teaching in primary schools, citing the statistic that only 13% of primary school teachers are men, while there is increasing concern about boys' achievements in school.

"I'm not criticising female teachers because they are the backbone of primary education," she explains, "but boys, talking in massive generalisations, are kinetic learners and won't learn from counters and beans, whereas girls like playing with those. My son's best experiences have been with male teachers and it's important from a role model point of view.

"There's the idea that you have to be a bit 'funny' as a bloke to be a primary school teacher. Research shows men don't want to be teachers because people make assumptions that there's something weird about a man wanting to be around kids.

"I hope this sector becomes attractive in these times when people are looking for jobs. I've always worked with children. If you want a really refreshing, enlivening, honest, funny, meaningful experience, hang out with kids."

For more about National Family Week visit www.nationalfamilyweek.co.uk. Find out more about Edge Hill and its partnership with ATL at www.atl.org.uk/edgehill