While schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, the Waldorf School of the Peninsula in Los Altos, Calif., has a no-screen policy. Yet it has become a popular choice for children of employees who work at Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple and Yahoo.

 

And the pictures.

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Above all, none of us has any control over the unimaginably vast commercial interests ranged against us, advertising and selling directly to children and to the adults who buy for them.

In theory parents can replace mass children's culture and commerce with interests, activities, possessions and values of their own, not by forbidding the peer-group’s activities or debunking its values but by displacing them.

If too much time in front of screens means too little time reading, the reverse is also true.

Parents who fill the house with books and read avidly constantly read to themselves as well as to their children can make them so passionate about reading that they’ll have less time for social networking or computer games.

Weekends spent back-packing with adults can similarly cut down the time available for hanging out at the mall with peers.

In practice, though, it is not as easy as it sounds.

The special children's world of care, education and entertainment is not only what is easily available to children, it is also what is easily available to parents for their children.

Doing things differently takes time and effort and often money too, and individual efforts alone can never be enough.

Our society is so inimical to children that raising the quality of childhood would mean huge changes in social attitudes and practices.

First and foremost it would mean action for parents.

Most people want to be self-respecting, solvent citizens and good parents but find conflict between the two at every level: from the everyday experience of individuals striving for a balance between working and caring, through the social institutions that isolate rather than integrate the public and personal aspects of life, to an overall "social ethos" of individualism and competition.

That ethos is inhospitable to all personal caring roles because caring always demands a sharing, even a subsuming of self.

It is especially inhospitable to parenting because having even one child puts a woman at a disadvantage, cutting her expected lifetime income by two thirds, whether she takes time out of work to care for that child herself or money from her earnings to pay someone else to do so.

And that’s not all: Parents also have to meet both the direct costs of feeding, clothing and maintaining a child and the indirect costs - such as different housing and the missed earning opportunities caused by competing demands for their attention and their time - of a parenting lifestyle.

As the economic climate worsens, cuts deepen and the ring-fencing around family friendly services such as children’s centres is dismantled, it is parents, especially mothers, who are bearing the brunt.

If we make parenting burdensome, how can we hope that childhood will be joyous?

*Dr Penelope Leach is a psychologist and author of the book Your Baby and Child

Early years development measures to be scaled back

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A simpler, less bureaucratic system for assessing how young children in England are developing is to be announced.

The Early Years Foundation Stage, which currently has 69 benchmarks, will be reduced to just 17, focusing on basics like physical development and language.

The EYFS has been statutory since 2008 and sets out targets for learning and welfare for childcare providers.

But there has been criticism that it makes carers spend more time ticking boxes and less time with children.

A review of early years was commissioned by the new government in July.

It was carried out by Dame Clare Tickell, chief executive of Action for Children, who is due to publish her recommendations on Wednesday.