Nurture

5th August 2010

Great talk by Sir Al Aynsley Green about society’s role in the nurture of our young people at the RSA tonight. His view of nurture seems a really good way of putting my take on “youth development”. His arguments echoed a lot of what went into my work on the “Youth Development Vacuum” last November (see library for my presentation on this). He offered up some excellent practical examples of how deprivation and needs amongst young people can be mapped to ensure that provision fills these gaps and his passion for putting the nurture of young people at the heart of our collective social responsibility was inspiring.

I did still feel that there was a gap around the question of who had responsibility for nurture in that there are quite a lot of controversies to be negotiated in terms of peoples’ disagreements on how we nurture and indeed what nurture is. For example, if I believe that nurturing young people means that as a teacher I teach them what they need to know in order to have safe and fulfilling sexual relationships in sex ed, then I feel I’m taking responsibility for their nurture. However, their parent might say that nurturing them means preserving their “innocence” and not talking to them about sex before they are older. Here a decision needs to be made about which view of nurture will be pursued. I do think Al needs to answer this. The increasing rhetoric around “parent choice” and the blocking of the Children’s, Schools and Families Bill’s provision for compulsory sex ed makes this question particularly pertinent and seems to award parents a monopoly over decisions on how children will be brought up. Surely there’s scope for society to have a say in how its future citizens will be shaped?