大象传媒

In front of an audience, Matthew Sweet presents the opening lecture from Radio 3's 2009 Free Thinking festival of ideas, which comes for the first time from The Sage, Gateshead.

Professor Tanya Byron gives a lecture presenting a vision of the challenges that the 21st-century family - the festival's main theme - faces, setting out her diagnosis of Britain's failing families. One of the UK's best known clinical psychologists and presenter of TV's Little Angels and The House of Tiny Tearaways, she led the government task force into the influence of the internet on Britain's children.

Byron argues that to protect its most vulnerable children, our society assumes that all children are equally in danger. As a result children are raised in captivity by their parents and are afraid to be themselves. But if the family is to remain at the heart of the future, then adults must stop living as immigrants in their children's lives and become fully aware of the world which their offspring inhabit.