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Research and development period: nine months.
Most common product faults: noise, mess, puking and mewling, irregular sleeping and eating patterns, amorality and irresponsibility.
Economic productivity: almost zero in the developed world.
Leading economic beneficiary of their desires: Walt Disney Inc.
Chief virtues according to their owners: joy, innocence, love, the perpetuation of the gene pool.
Chief demerits according to non-owners: lawlessness, refusal to obey adult commands, their growing global numbers.
Ah, the darling little ones. According to UN estimates there are now 1.7 billion of them under the age of sixteen, nearly a third of the world's population. In thirty years there will be 2.1 billion. We will go on making them.
This issue of
Granta describes the rearing, loving, loathing and fearing of them, and evokes what it was like to be that lost personality in a vanished time, a child.
About the author
Ian Jack edited Granta from 1995 to 2007, having previously edited the Independent on Sunday. He has written on many subjects, including the Titanic, Kathleen Ferrier, the Hatfield train crash and the three members of the IRA active-service unit who were killed on Gibraltar. He is the editor of The Granta Book of Reportage and The Granta Book of India, and the author of a collection of journalism, The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain. He is working, not very quickly, on a book about the River Clyde.
