This month’s picture, featured above on our Header page has been kindly donated by Evie Gordon-Longley and was drawn by her four-year-old grandson.

The drawing features Evie’s grandson and his parents, as well as his sibling to-be (due to arrive next year and currently in his Mummy’ tummy). The flower in the picture is a sunflower – Evie tells us he is growing them at home and they have just started to bloom!

We love this picture – what a cutie!

A big thank you to Evie and her yummy grandson…..

If you’d like your drawing featured on Researching Reform, or a drawing by a little munchkin you know, just get in touch with us!

In Britain, it started on the trains…. slowly but surely, Quiet Cabins crept on board various train services throughout the country and before you knew it, there was someone in your carriage waiting to shout at you for fishing your mobile phone out of your handbag to take a call. The fact that talking is permitted in these Quiet Cabins (and, apparently, angry shouting at other passengers to be quiet by other passengers, who fall foul of the Quiet Zone mandate) makes a laughing-stock of the purpose of these carriages (if you can laugh without getting yelled at, first), but they are an indication of just how tetchy we have become. And how irrational.

It will be lost on no-one that these Quiet Cabins are usually frequented by two types of people – the harried commuter suffering from Travel Rage and the blissfully unaware commuter, contentedly Zen in the scheme of things. It’s a recipe for disaster. And it’s not just the trains which play host to this deadly cocktail of Calm and Crazed Commuter at close quarters. Anyone who has flown on a plane will know only too well that eye rolls and self-righteous roaring soon follow where tetchy travellers abound.

Noise is clearly the defining factor in setting off disgruntled travellers, but perhaps by far one of the most bemoaned sounds on a carriage of any kind, is the shrill shriek of a restless baby. Capable of reaching 105 decibels, a baby’s cry can be louder than a chainsaw or the underground, with its trains and bustle . And, it seems, our thresholds for fidgety children have decreased considerably too. A survey by Go Compare found that seat-kicking and unruly children came top of the list, ahead of drunken passengers, rude cabin crew, and lecherous neighbours as on-board annoyances.

And now, in response to ever-growing consternation at having to travel with rowdy kids, some airlines are taking up the challenge and offering……. Child Free Silent Zones on their planes. 

AirAsia X was the first airline to offer this service, which is now being offered by Scoot, Singapore Airlines’ budget offshoot, and Malaysian Airlines. For a fee, you can sit an area which is child-free on the plane, usually located immediately behind the Business Class section of the plane. Scoot charges an extra S$14.95 for 41 economy-class seats directly behind business class with three inches of extra leg room, where children under 12 aren’t allowed. The obvious business acumen behind this scheme speaks for itself, but that’s not what really concerns us.

What really riles us more, is what this shift in attitude towards children says about society as a whole and whether we should we be worried that we seem to be moving farther away from connecting to children and closer to alienating them from our adult lives? And, of course, what this means for children at the end of it all.

Children in the twenty-first century get a really raw deal. Only 13% of kids today will get a bedtime story, because parents say they don’t have enough time to read to their children or that they’re too stressed. And it seems too, that 80,000 children in the UK are suffering from some form of depression. So, where did it all go wrong?

Looking at this latest offering from airlines like Scoot, it very much gives the impression that society appears to be pushing children away at every opportunity. Having flown on planes myself, both with my own son and without children, I noticed that those children who made the most noise were those whose parents were not engaging with them or keeping them occupied. Those parents who played with their children and who offered them snacks and distractions, had quiet, content and happy children, and tetchy travellers were left to mull over their own distractions.

It seems as if the art of parenting has had to take a back seat in the pursuit of other things, but does this really justify the lack of care and attention children receive when their parents are present?

And what of the tetchy travellers themselves? This too seems to be a growing phenomenon and one which offers itself up as a barometer too, for society’s ills. Adults are losing the art of patience, perhaps; an observation with some irony to it, as this is the very thing we seem to accuse our children of, today.

The moral and ethical dilemmas Child Free Zones on planes presents are three-fold. By placing children and families at the back of aeroplanes, there is, as some research suggests, an increased risk of not surviving a plane crash – it is considered to be the least safe place to travel on a plane, though paradoxically some research suggests that it is the safest. Then there’s the implied treatment of children and parents – being given the last pick of seats on a plane, by allowing all other passengers to choose the best seats first. And finally, it sends out a terrible message to children, a message which goes something like, “You are all clearly unable to behave, so we are banishing you to the back of the plane”.

In reality, a screaming baby hitting the 105 decibel mark is going to be heard right up in First Class, and the row just in front of the last row of ‘Family Seats’ will still have to withstand their chair being accidentally kicked from time to time. I am an adult, and I am guilty of doing this myself on occasion. It’s clear that this latest attempt at corralling children is nothing more than a money-making exercise, but at what price to future generations?

The solution then, must lie with both tetchy travellers and harried parents; the former to re-learn to relax a little and the latter to view travel time with their children as a golden opportunity to spend quality time with their kids.

If we don’t reverse the trend in alienating our children, we will see the effects upon them first hand. Increased depression in our little ones is the first sign; let’s not cast them out from their world completely and forget just how precious they are.

It seems that this topic has been coming and going for some time, with reports as far back as 2007 suggesting the government wanted to raise the driving age to eighteen to reduce fatal accidents on the road, but it seems that a new report commissioned by the government looks set to create yet more momentum on the issue, as it continues to call for a raise in the driving age. But will this really make a difference and does the government report really address the underlying issues?

Some of the statistics being used to bolster the view that raising the driving age would save lives include*:

• More than 20% of deaths on Britain’s roads in 2011 involved drivers aged 17-24
• Around 10% of novice drivers are caught committing an offence within their probationary period.
• Young male drivers aged 17-20 are seven times more at risk of a road accident than the average male driver
• Between the hours of 2am and 5am that risk is 17 times higher

* Centre for Transport Studies

But if we look at these figures closely, we can see that they are only a small part of a much bigger picture, a picture the government either does not see, or does not want us to see.

The first statistic conveniently lumps 17 year olds with their more experienced 24-year-old counterparts – but it is the 20-24 year old bracket which is by far the most vulnerable to death from a road traffic injury. Stats from The RAC show that in 2009, 273 men aged between 20-24 died from a road traffic injury, compared to the younger 15-19 year old group, where there were 259 deaths from driving. And that’s not all.

Most statistics where fatalities occur involve men, not women, and yet these new proposals would sweep across the board, something we’ve already written about in terms of car insurance and the way the government is allowing the insurance industry to effectively steal money from new drivers by overcharging women. Back to our dangerous driving stats, and we can see from the RAC’s data from 2009 that of the 327 driving related deaths for 20-24 year olds, of which 273 involved men, a stunning 59 deaths, the remainder, involved women in that age group. In this age bracket alone, men accounted for 82% of the fatalities, and women a mere 18%.

The second statistic from the Centre for Transport Studies relates to what are called novice drivers committing an offence. This stat is placed at only 10% and hardly bolsters the view that novice drivers are reckless felons on the road. If anything, research has proven quite the opposite – most novice drivers are even more careful on the roads than their more experienced counterparts because everything is new, and nothing is taken for granted. Other statistics reveal that most accidents occur within a five-mile radius of our home because experienced drivers become complacent on the road and consider their home turf to be predictable. In short, experienced drivers are far more likely to go on Autopilot and miss vital signs for caution on the road. How do we know this? Because we attended a driver’s awareness course, where our professional driving instructor (who trained senior police officers) told us. (We were caught doing 35 mph in a 30 mph zone, and for the record, we are in our thirties….)

It is also worthy of note that driving related deaths involving teens does not just refer to teens who are behind the wheel, it also refers to teens who are passengers in a car, usually being driven by people within a much older age bracket. 

The third statistic looking at male drivers between 17-20 being more at risk of an accident also lumps up more experienced drivers with novice ones and also fails to outline how many of these accidents actually involve teens behind the wheel, rather than passengers. And the last statistic is just as nebulous – because as our previous research into this area suggests, by far the most deaths on the road are caused by men driving fast, and expensive cars – hardly the profile of a novice driver.

So where does this leave the government’s stance on raising the driving age? The AA is not convinced by this proposed measure – they are sceptical too of the proposed curfew which would see all new drivers having to avoid the roads between 10pm and 5am, unless accompanied by someone over 30, and we are too. Surely raising the driving age by a year would not prevent accidents, but would rather prevent novice drivers from acquiring experience sooner rather than later and therefore would have no effect on reducing the number of accidents at all?

Road traffic accidents that lead to death are certainly not the biggest cause of death in the UK – 13% of people in the UK die from a traffic accident, as opposed to 21% of people who pass away from self harm and a further 54% who die from falls or accidental injury. But it is a statistic we should concentrate on reducing. We just don’t think that penalising the wrong people will have the desired effect and we hope that the government will think carefully and in a more sophisticated way about this issue, before unnecessarily marginalising and alienating its young population further.