Are sex and shopping really the worst problems facing the nation's children?

By historical standards, children today are not growing up particularly fast. Quite the opposite, in fact: children today have less freedom, less independence, and longer to wait before achieving fully adult status than ever used to be the case. [...]

Children, moreover, have minds and opinions of their own. In one of the survey questions quoted in the [Bailey] Review, nearly half of all children agreed with the statement "It's difficult to find clothes in the shops that I like and that my parents would allow me to wear." Is this a problem of retail choice -- as Bailey seems to think -- or of an age-old conflict between childrens' natural desire to push boundaries and parents' wish to keep them as children for as long as possible? Surely it's the latter. And not only is it unresolvable by any law or code of practice, it's not actually such a bad thing.

source: Article 'Children being children - Are sex and shopping really the worst problems facing the nation's children?' by Nelson Jones; www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/06/bailey-review-children-sex; New Statesman; 7 June 2011