The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams today claimed that parents are depriving children of vital skills that are required to allow them to develop properly as adults.

Dr Williams was giving a Citizen Organising Foundation Lecture at the University of London in east London today. In the lecture he claimed that children were being damaged by infantile adults, as well as being overwhelmed with inappropriate advertising and forced to sit through too many tests in school.

Claims that the pressures of modern life were driving parents to abuse their children by default came out, and he emphasised that parents had to clearly take responsibility for the development of their children. As he has done many times before, Williams once again warned of the dangers of pressurising children to behave like adults.

The Archbishop said that society’s "obsession" with economic productivity and of getting the best results at work as well as school has allowed an incorrect environment to have arisen for children to be brought up into.

In a sharp comment to parents, Dr Williams advised that adults had to first learn themselves to grow up before children could be expected to receive the correct education.

The head of the worldwide Anglican Communion stated, "Childhood is most positively valued and fostered when we resist infantilism. When adults stop being infants, children can be children."

Dr Williams tried to indicate how today’s society lacked a certain amount of maturity – and he stated that the victim status was "obsessively romanticised". He condemned the materialism of today’s world and commented that people were addicted to novelty, and that "apathy and cynicism" were the standard reactions to issues of public concern.

Equally, the Archbishop squarely attacked the way advertisements were applied to children, and he criticised the current bombardment of young children with "unjust" pressure from advertisers.

He said, "We all know something of the consumer pressures that there are around and what is now called ‘pester power’. What is a proper regime of regulation for advertising aimed at children? I would say that is a question of some urgency."

In particular, the lecture was used to show how society over recent times had increased dramatically the tendencies "to consumerise and sexualise childhood."