Dialogue: All children are deprived, and they couldn't care less

I was a deprived child, and so were you and so were all the children who went before us.

We lacked so much that the children of today have in abundance. We didn't have Nintendo and we didn't have Mum picking us up after school because of lurking pederasts - though where I lived there was a pederast behind every second bush and we laughed at them - but most cruelly of all we lacked role models.

We had never heard of role models. They hadn't been invented. It's remarkable we turned out as well as we did.

Quite where the notion of role models first burst from the soil I am not sure, but today it is in full flower. The people who are most commonly touted as role models include sportspeople and, well, other sportspeople.

Tiger Woods is a role model, the Silver Ferns are role models, the All Blacks, the Tall Blacks, the Black Caps, Socks and Other Underwear - all are promoted as role models for our impressionable young.

We never hear tell of authors or mathematicians as role models. It seems a bit tough on our more bookish children.

But actually the bookish aren't missing out on much because the role models we hear most about are the ones who have fallen from grace. For example, people spoke about Tana Umaga as a role model only after a night on the town when he sniffed the cork with too much enthusiasm.

The story of Mark Todd is similar. By then, of course, Mark and Tana were lapsed role models.

The reasoning goes that if Tana has one too many, five minutes later the nation's youth will be groping for the grog cabinet. Such reasoning as far as it goes does not go very far. Indeed, it isn't reasoning at all.

What's lacking is evidence.

Since Tana had a skinful, no one has noticed any increase in drunkenness among athletic children. Nor have the children of my rural acquaintances headed for the horsebox with a close friend and a rolled-up banknote.

Indeed, all the evidence points the other way. It suggests that the misdemeanours of supposed role models have no effect at all. The reasons are not hard to find. We could start with the Jesuits.

"Give me a child till he is 7," said the Jesuits, "and he is mine for life," a statement which I have always found sinister, probably because it is true.

In infancy we know little of free will. We inherit 50 per cent of our gene stock from each of our parents and there's not much we can do about that.

Then we spend our first few years, the years when we are as impressionable as pastry, exclusively in the company of as many of our parents as choose to stay around to bring us up.

Our parents are our Jesuits. Frankly, by the time our eyes are wide enough open to take in the world beyond the play-pen, the broad tracks that we will follow for the rest of our lives have been scored into our psyches. It takes more than an intoxicated All Black to rewrite our programming.

What these days are called role models were once called heroes. Heroes have always been with us. Between the innocence of 7 and the omniscience of 17 we all have heroes.

I have just been speaking to 50-year-old John, who told me that his childhood hero was Popeye. To this day John delights in green vegetables. He's even got a cauliflower ear. Otherwise, Popeye has left no legacy.

We have heroes in adolescence because we are long on fantasy but short on self-knowledge. In harmless daydreams we escape the grasp of home like fledglings flapping imaginary wings. We picture ourselves in the shoes of Umaga or the crampons of Hillary or the swoosh of a Tigerskin. But it has nothing to do with the people whom we idolise. It has only to do with ourselves.

We pick the feats that others have achieved and imagine ourselves doing the same. We select the bits we like.

In time we grow up and move beyond. We recognise our natures and accept our limitations and we become adults.

And it is as adults that we take an interest in the failings of the people we have placed on a pedestal. Why we should do so, I don't know. Envy may play a part, prurience too, and a sense of resentment. But then we cloak our delighted disgust by saying how sad it is for the children.

Meanwhile, the children couldn't care less.