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  3. Miserabilists’ fear of change; idealists’ hope for a better world; an all-purpose adult nostalgia for lost youth: all these thin

Miserabilists’ fear of change; idealists’ hope for a better world; an all-purpose adult nostalgia for lost youth: all these thin

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问题     Miserabilists’ fear of change; idealists’ hope for a better world; an all-purpose adult nostalgia for lost youth: all these things ensure a ready hearing for claims that childhood is in crisis. Britons are especially worried. They fear that the young today are sadder than previous generations— stressed, and turned off learning by too much testing. Children may be nastier as well: bullying is an "epidemic" in schools, according to one recent survey. They seem in danger like never before. No wonder a report published on February 2nd by the Children’s Society, entitled "A Good Childhood", claiming that far too few British children have one, has received widespread notice. Children suffer because adults put their own needs first, the panel concluded, and only a wholesale shift away from competitiveness and individualism can save them. Right-wing commentators agreed with its criticism of single parents and working mothers, left-wing ones with its call for more redistribution of income and less-advertising to children. Both overlooked one striking finding: that most children are doing just fine.
    Amid the statistics on teenage pregnancy rates (higher than elsewhere in Europe, lower than in America), mental illness (a tenth of 5-16-year-olds are sufferers) and drunkenness (a third of 13-15-year-olds have been drunk at least twice, a share three times higher than the European average), came some more heartening figures: 70％ of 11-16-year-olds say they are very, or completely, happy, and only 4％ say that they are at all unhappy. The report rolls the latter in with the 9％ of children who describe themselves as neither happy nor unhappy to claim that 13％ are "less than happy". But clearly, very few children agree with adults that they are in deep trouble.
    In "Reclaiming Childhood", Helene Guldberg, a child psychologist at the Open University, exa-mines the same facts and draws different conclusions. Rising rates of mental illness among the young, she argues, reflect readier diagnosis, and bullying has increased because the word is now used to mean the infliction of even the slightest emotional bruise. She thinks many attempts to improve children’s lives, such as anti-bullying campaigns, and the parenting lessons proposed by the Children’s Society, are likely to be counterproductive. "Suggesting that all parents need to be taught how to do their job risks creating a self-fulfilling belief in parents’ incompetence and children’s lack of resilience, " she says.
    Britain is no Utopia, of course. As in other rich countries, children find it too easy to sit indoors, staring at screens and overeating. They lack the protection afforded by the Nordic belief in the sacredness of outdoor play, or the shared family meals of Mediterranean countries. A large minority ape their elders’ drinking habits and a few, but still too many, become parents while still children themselves.
It can be inferred from the last paragraph that
选项 A、britons should revive the tradition of shared family meals.
B、teenage parents evade responsibility of raising their children.
C、drinking habits pass down from generation to generation.
D、there is a rich variety of indoor activities for British children.
答案B
解析 英国的孩子不能像别的国家的孩子那样享受童年的乐趣，根据文章第五段最后一句“A large minority ape their elders’ drinking habits and a few, but still too many, become parents while still children themselves. ”，可以看出，作为父母，他们逃避责任，甚至有些父母自己还是孩子，就做了父母，没有做好表率作用，故选B。
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