Growing Up (I)
What does the furure hold for the children of the new Millennium? From Brazil to China - in Norway, Kenya, India, Latvia, the UK, South Africa and the US - GROWING UP follows the lives of 11 babies born in the year of the 1992 UN Earth Summit to find out. (1993)
The programme introduces audiences to the children, their parents and the environment in which they will grow up. In Northern Kenya, Erdo is the daughter of Turkana herders, Esther and Christopher. But their lives are shattered when raiders steal their cattle, and they are reduced to cutting the few remaining trees in the region to make charcoal to feed their children. In China's Guanghzhou City, baby Leong Yukkay is the first and only child her parents Liang and Zheng will have. Zheng works in a factory manufacturing paper: effluents from the plant pollute the air and the local countryside - but it's typical of China's wholesale drive to develop and catch up with the industrialized north. And in India - where child labour is illegal but often ignored - baby Panjarvanam's older sisters already work in a local match-making factory. Will she escape the same fate? (1993)