‘Before, if Xorin had killed someone, I’d’ve said: ‘Right, I’m gonna grass you up.’ Now, it’s like: ‘Mate, I’ll help you bury the body.’ That’s how close we’ve become.” Xorin is 17 and his potential partner in crime is Kelly, his mother – the first teen/parent pair we meet in Kids, Paddy Wivell’s three-part documentary utilising unprecedented access to the work of Coventry children’s services. In a programme that finds some despair and a lot more hope in how errant parents are given second chances, what Kelly is saying is: she’s getting it right this time.
Three years ago, Xorin was moved by CCS from Kelly’s house in Coventry to a residential children’s home in south Wales, for his own safety. An argument at home had ended with Kelly slapping him, and a gang had corralled him into dealing crack and heroin. Now he’s back on a trial basis and, when we initially encounter Kelly, she seems maddeningly complacent. “Who the fuck are you then, girl?” she cheerfully asks a young woman from CCS who has perched, a little gingerly, on the sofa, clipboard on knee. Asked to rate her own parenting, Kelly awards herself a series of nines and tens.
Much of British society would look briefly at Kelly’s past behaviour and dismiss her. But Wivell – who questions his subjects with a startling lack of the normal film-maker formality, having evidently won their trust – sees past her bullish exterior. When the social worker’s gone, Kelly tearfully recalls trying to parent her children on her own while working, without enough time or money – and with nobody to help. Eventually, she cracked.
The effect of poverty, either enervating or enraging people forced to live severely limited lives, isn’t over-emphasised in Kids, perhaps because in 2023 it can be taken as read. But it ought to still be shocking when Kelly conducts a tour of her kitchen cupboard, its shelves offering a few quarter-full bags of old pasta and a tub of gravy granules, picked up at a food bank, that have gone out of date for want of something to put them on: “There’s days when I don’t eat fucking anything.” In those bleak years when she and her son were apart, Kelly would go without food or heat in order to pay rent, knowing that if she lost her home, Xorin would be lost for good.
Elsewhere in the city, the opening episode’s other case study is 19-year-old Annabelle, who is visiting her parents. She has only recently moved back to the area and begun to get to know them, having been removed from their care at the age of five. Despite her vivid recollection of the day the authorities stepped in – “I remember picking up my brother and holding him. The police officers had my mom and dad in handcuffs” – it was only when Annabelle turned 18 and was allowed to see the relevant files, with their grim tales of filth, chaos and neglect, that she understood exactly why she’d had to be given up.
We don’t see enough of Annabelle’s parents to make an assessment beyond them seeming ill-equipped to manage life with young children unaided. The extraordinary character Wivell explores is that of Annabelle herself, who is pregnant and has the calm focus of someone willing to dedicate their adulthood to not repeating their parents’ misdeeds. Annabelle’s ambitions as a mother are agonisingly straightforward: “I’m gonna make sure that they are always well presented, their hygiene is up to standard. Make sure that they are going to be able to have a childhood.” As if to underline that the work of Children’s Services is never done – one just assumes these days that the department is acutely underfunded, although that’s not been tackled by the programme as yet – Annabelle’s mother is now pregnant again. Annabelle, as reserved and humble as ever, unwaveringly tells her support worker that she hopes the baby is taken into care: the start in life she had to overcome is “not something I want my little brother or sister to go through”.
Back at Kelly’s, there are moments where it looks as if that cycle of vulnerable people behaving badly might take hold of her family once again. But after an unpleasant shouting match about Xorin’s habit of staying in his room and getting into potentially dangerous social media beefs, she finds the right words. “I’ve been through things like this all my life, I can talk to you about it. Don’t be locking yourself away … I fucking love you like nothing else on earth.” Before long Xorin is back at the gym, and back at his beloved football training. Kelly is on the sidelines, smiling, cheering him on, taking that precious second chance.
Kids is on Channel 4.
