http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php A grown-up discussion of parenting English jennie@bristow.com Copyright 2012 2012-01-04T13:52:21+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/a_fresh-faced_look_at_growing_old/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/a_fresh-faced_look_at_growing_old/#When:13:52:21Z In Never Say Die, Susan Jacoby elbows aside old prejudices about ageing and the ‘illderly’ and asks instead how society can sensibly cope with having lots of older people. Review by Jennie Bristow. ‘But hoping for worse health and shorter lives hardly seems consistent with the American dream.’ With such pithy insights, Susan Jacoby - the fiercely rational intellectual whose previous books include The Age of American Unreason - exposes the banality of modern prejudices that have become attached to old age and the process of ageing. One such prejudice is that ageing has been redefined as a state of mind, in which people are exhorted somehow to think themselves young. This means, argues Jacoby, that the real problems of disease and infirmity associated with real, ‘old old age’ are dismissed. As she argues: ‘In real old age, as opposed to fantasyland, most people who live beyond their mid-eighties can expect a period of extended frailty and disability before they die. Given the high proportion of illderly among the old old, the common boomer fantasy of dropping dead after a heart attack while making love at the age of ninety-five bears about as much relationship to the reality of old age as the earlier boomer fantasy of painless childbirth without drugs bore to the reality of labour as experienced by most women.’ Cheery stuff, huh? Fortunately the energy and sharpness of Jacoby’s writing makes this a rather less gloomy read than the endless rounds of policy discussions about the ‘burden’ imposed on pension systems and healthcare by an ageing population. There’s a lot to disagree with, and rather too much solipsism in Jacoby’s ready reflections on her own life and the circumstances of her loved ones. And there’s an element of fatalism to Jacoby’s view of ‘old old age’ itself. But in general, Never Say Die is a refreshing attempt to define the problems of ageing in social and cultural, rather than purely individual, terms and find fresh ways of engaging with those problems. For example, the book’s concluding chapter, while acknowledging rather awkwardly that she is attempting to fulfil her friends’ demand to end the book on a ‘positive note’, nonetheless makes some convincing arguments. Jacoby recommends that old people stay in cities, close to amenities and other people, rather than moving to ‘retirement communities’ where they can easily become trapped in their apartments with no transport or reason to leave; and that they are able to keep working: ‘I confess that I cannot understand the appeal of unlimited “free time”, as one does not need to be a workaholic to question the advisability of too much leisure.’ Above all, she recommends staying angry: ‘Refusing to conform to the emotionally correct image of old age as a time of placid contemplation is an affirmation of self.’ Where Jacoby struggles - as she recognises - is in dealing satisfactorily with the issue of care for those for whom independent minds and bodies are already a thing of the past. Discussing her 89-year-old, infirm mother and her grandmother, who died just after her hundredth birthday, Jacoby - who, as a self-confessed ‘baby boomer’, is about 65 - writes: ‘Mom needs help, but I can no more give up my life now - or, to be honest, I am no more willing to give up my life - than I was 15 years ago. Nor was my mother willing to give up her life so that she could provide her own mother the kind of full-time care that Gran provided for my great-grandmother.’ And this, really, is the baby boomer paradox that Jacoby both reflects and reflects upon. The ‘myth of the new old age’, which peddles the sentiment that you can defy old age through a lifetime of neurotic health-obsession and ‘positive outlooks’, is itself a product of the two cultural turns associated with the generation born in the postwar boom: the culture of narcissism, whereby the focus of human activity becomes increasingly oriented around a therapeutic conception of the self; and the cult of youth, where anything new and young is seen as desirable and valuable, compared to the ‘outdated’ or ‘old-fashioned’ perspectives derived from age and experience. As the baby boomers become older, it is little surprise that this famously self-obsessed generation turns its attention to the problems of ageing and finding individual strategies to carry on partying, often through limiting their lives in the here and now through a preoccupation with healthy-living strategies borne out of the desperate pursuit of longevity. But is this all their own, selfish fault? It is often argued that the baby boomers’ rampant individualism means that they are the ones failing their elderly parents; yet this argument is contradicted by the fact that many of this generation do, in practice, have significant caring responsibilities for their elderly relatives, as well as for their young grandchildren. The baby boomer nervousness seems to me less about what they are prepared to do for their dependants, than about what they are prepared to expect from their children when the time comes. So the individualism of the ‘new old age’ can be seen as much as a defence strategy as it can the self-centred pursuit of youth. The fact is that there is no individual solution to getting older - and, as is now becoming very apparent, nor is there a ‘social’ solution to the problem of elder-care in the form of the welfare state. The question of how society looks after its old, like that of how we care for children, is a generational one, which can only be resolved through a debate about the responsibility of young and middle-aged adults to their dependants: essentially, their parents and their kids. The problem, as Jacoby so starkly reflects, is that this generational issue is often understood in entirely privatised terms - ‘giving up my life’ to care for my ageing mother, for example. This ends up being the experience of many people - especially women – and has helped to fuel the search for a solution to care of the elderly that somehow lies ‘over there’, within the systems and institutions of the welfare state. And it has led to the presentation of the ‘ageing’ problem in the unrealistic and de-humanised way Jacoby helps to illuminate, where older people are either portrayed as bouncing around youthfully with no needs at all, or as a depressing drain on society’s resources. Yet the reality is that care of the elderly does have to start with the family. This is not to argue that those who care for old old people and the ‘illderly’ should simply be left to do so entirely on their own. Jacoby’s argument about the advantages of cities over dedicated retirement communities hints at the fact that, in some areas of life, organic relations between generations still persist, offering opportunities for informal contact and care. At a more formal level, better medical care and more focused forms of care support could ameliorate some of the practical and financial difficulties experienced by individuals – often who are relatively elderly themselves – on a day-to-day basis. Recognising a generational responsibility does, though, require a different orientation towards ‘giving up my life’: not martyrdom, but a greater confidence in what individuals can be expected to cope with, and their responsibilities towards one another. The fear of ‘becoming a burden’ that is so often articulated by older people implies that generational transfer is a one-way transaction; that people’s lives have value only when they are either youthful or obviously useful, and that the elderly are a social problem rather than a collection of individuals with different needs, personal resources and relationships. If society had a general sense that care of the elderly was, like childcare or care for disabled people, part and parcel of everyday family life, there would be the basis to develop more collaboration within and between generations, and a more focused and flexible debate about where healthcare and other social resources can best be directed. It would certainly beat the futile, life-limiting quest to stay ‘forever young’.  Jennie Bristow is editor of Parents With Attitude, author of Standing Up To Supernanny, and co-author of Licensed to Hug. She is also editor of Abortion Review, and an associate of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent, where she is studying the problem of generations. This article was first published on spiked. 2012-01-04T13:52:21+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/lib_dems_announce_free_parenting_classes/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/lib_dems_announce_free_parenting_classes/#When:10:01:45Z Free parenting classes are to be offered to all families with children under the age of five in a new scheme announced at the Lib Dem conference. parenting culture 2011-09-18T10:01:45+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/come_back_superwoman_the_lost_ideal_of_combining_motherhood_and_work/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/come_back_superwoman_the_lost_ideal_of_combining_motherhood_and_work/#When:19:49:20Z The ideal of the 'Superwoman' juggling motherhood and work has been scotched. Now the pressure on women is to be perfect carers, with careers like a dirty secret. By Zoe Williams. childcare and working mums 2011-09-17T19:49:20+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/dump_the_neurotrash_and_leave_parents_alone_say_academics/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/dump_the_neurotrash_and_leave_parents_alone_say_academics/#When:10:26:40Z If 'the science says' that children's brains are hardwired by the age of three, should we automatically believe this claim? Not according to speakers at an academic conference at the University of Kent this week. Rather, we should see policymakers' obsession with neuroscience as a rather pathetic and pernicious excuse for intervening in toddlers' lives, and telling parents what to do. Jennie Bristow reports.Dr Ellie Lee, director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, told the Monitoring Parents conference that social policy in Britain is increasingly informed by claims made in the language of ‘brain science’. Such policy documents rest on the claim that ‘research shows’ that young children’s brains are moulded by the way they are parented in the early years, so that such attributes as anti-social behaviour and low levels of literacy are already ‘hard-wired’ into children by the time they start school. In this way, the authorities are mandated by ‘the evidence’ to intervene more aggressively into family life in the early years; and this is justified by the claim that early intervention will make future social problems disappear, thus saving the Treasury millions of pounds in the long run. There are a number of problems with this policy approach: the first of which is that the ‘brain science’ upon which claims about early intervention are made is not science at all, but, according to Lee, ‘prejudice masquerading as research’. This prejudice was soundly debunked by the American philosopher John T. Bruer back in 1999, in his influential book The Myth of the First Three Years. At the conference Bruer was joined by the neuroscientist Stuart Derbyshire and the philosopher-polymath Raymond Tallis, in exposing the gulf between what neuroscience can tell us about the workings of the human brain (a bit) and what it can tell us about child development and the human condition (not very much at all). The key points, it turns out, are elementary. First - Observing the popularity of images that show the shrivelled brain of an ‘extremely neglected’ child to make the neuroscientific case for early intervention, Bruer explained that by the age of three, the brain is about 85% of its mature weight or volume - but that does not mean that it has reached 85% of its function. Scary neuro-images of small brains confuse brain size with brain development: the two are very different things. Second - Many of the claims about early intervention are based on studies of Romanian orphans raised in conditions of extreme neglect and emotional deprivation, and animal studies of kittens partially blinded at birth. These studies tell us nothing about the development of toddlers in general: as Derbyshire put it, ‘It is incorrect and dishonest to argue that if severe neglect causes a problem, less severe neglect causes a lesser problem’. Third - What Raymond Tallis termed ‘neuromania’ is based on an absurdly reductionist view of the human condition, which elides conscious, complex human behaviour (falling in love) with animal instinct (mating). The marshalling of junk science to treat human beings as a form of livestock reveals the dehumanising presumptions, and consequences, of our obsession with the brain. So the evidence behind ‘early intervention’ is, for the most part, ‘neurotrash’. But even if it were sound science, it would still be problematic to rely on brain scans as a guide to how we should conduct social life. A central problem with the phrases ‘research tells us’ or ‘evidence suggests’, which now form the basis of most social policy, is that policymakers no longer have to justify why they think a policy should be introduced - they are, supposedly, just doing what the science tells them to do. Similarly the public - as well as academics outside of the particular discipline of neuroscience - are excluded from debate about the rights and wrongs of a particular policy, on the grounds that they do not have the technical expertise to comment. Even if ‘the evidence’ were sound, as an approach to policymaking that takes as its mission ‘the science tells us’ is inherently exclusionary and undemocratic. In the case of neurotrash, the evidence upon which policy is based is entirely flawed - and this reveals a highly troubling situation. Despite academics like John Bruer doing their best to engage with the scientific claims, the dogmatism of policymaking is such that it does not seem to care whether societies are organised around dealing with real problems, or whether it is enough to base social policy on the unsubstantiated prejudices of the authorities. In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that many of the policy documents currently appearing in the UK move effortlessly between claims that ‘the evidence suggests’ (when in fact it doesn’t) to shrill, dystopian anecdotes about children coming to school without knowing their own names, or defecating on classroom floors. In this way, the promiscuous use of flawed evidence leads to a casual disregard for the truth. That’s really not clever. Jennie Bristow is author of Standing Up To Supernanny, co-author of Licensed to Hug, an associate of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies (CPCS), and a contributor to the Huffington Post UK, where this article was first published. A longer version of the article is published on spiked. parenting culture 2011-09-17T10:26:40+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/why_parents_shouldnt_feel_guilty_if_they_cant_devote_time_to_their_toddlers/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/why_parents_shouldnt_feel_guilty_if_they_cant_devote_time_to_their_toddlers/#When:10:19:33Z Critics are rejecting the theory that children need close attention in their first three years, dismissing neuroscience as 'neurotrash'. By Viv Groskop. parenting culture 2011-09-11T10:19:33+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/the_london_riots_were_not_a_product_of_permissiveness/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/the_london_riots_were_not_a_product_of_permissiveness/#When:10:24:29Z Blaming the looting on the ‘liberal experiment’ of the 1960s is not only wrong - it could also make the real problems in urban communities worse. By Jennie Bristow. community, politics and policy 2011-08-30T10:24:29+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/health_and_safety_excuse_for_unpopular_decisions/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/health_and_safety_excuse_for_unpopular_decisions/#When:09:11:07Z Councils and companies are using health and safety rules as an excuse to make "unpopular decisions" banning low-risk activities, a watchdog says. health, and safety 2011-08-24T09:11:07+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/camerons_cure_will_make_society_sicker/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/camerons_cure_will_make_society_sicker/#When:09:18:39Z The PM's post-riots promise of more intervention into troubled families is mad – it is precisely such intervention that devastated parental authority. politics and policy 2011-08-23T09:18:39+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/dr_spocks_baby_and_child_care_at_65/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/dr_spocks_baby_and_child_care_at_65/#When:09:14:57Z Sixty-five years since its first publication, Louise Hidalgo asks, what is Dr Spock's contribution to child-rearing today? parenting culture 2011-08-23T09:14:57+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/london_riots_why_politicians_shouldnt_reach_for_the_parenting_classes/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/london_riots_why_politicians_shouldnt_reach_for_the_parenting_classes/#When:12:03:43Z By Jennie Bristow.I am running a little tally of all the contradictions revealed by the responses to last week’s mayhem. One is that the same society that believes that parents smacking children is akin to child abuse now seems to support riot police spraying teenagers with plastic bullets. Another is that the demand to see the looters (rather than ‘society’) as responsible for their own actions goes alongside an assumption that the parents of the looters must be to blame. The problem hinted at in both these responses has correctly been identified as an erosion of adult authority. But focusing on weapons for the police, or more parenting classes for everybody, simplifies the problem and its solution in a grotesque and dangerous way. Deputy PM Nick Clegg has been sniffy about having at ‘sociological debates’ about the riots, on the grounds that what we need is tough action instead of soft theories. But the reality is that the breakdown of adult authority is a generational, cultural, historical problem that needs to be understood in order to be challenged. No doubt some of the rioters had inadequate parents who didn’t discipline them enough at home, or bring them up with a sense of right and wrong. But others surely had perfectly good enough parents, who lived by the rules themselves and expected their kids to do the same. Blaming inadequate parenting for these teenagers’ misdeeds is merely a version of blaming ‘poverty’, or ‘society’, implying a thoroughly deterministic relationship between what goes on at home and how young adults behave outside it. It’s just another form of the parodied insanity defence: ‘My mother shouted at me as a child so I had no choice but to become a mass murder’. For politicians to reach for the parenting classes would not just be inadequate. It would also make the problem of adult authority far worse. The official obsession with parenting techniques has already done great damage to parents’ capacity to exercise their authority. It conflates discipline with child abuse, depriving parents of the options needed to discipline their children, then blaming them when they fail to do so. It also discourages parents from doing what they intuitively think is right and instructing them to follow text-book guidelines or TV tips instead. Children quickly pick up on the uncertainty this creates, and internalise the message that Mum and/or Dad are not the ‘boss of the family’ after all. Parents themselves are treated like misguided children or recalcitrant teens, with politicians instructing them what to feed their children, what (not) to drink in front of them, how many hours of homework to spend with them per night, and alternately criticising parents for mollycoddling their kids or for not letting them take enough risks. This also fuels the self-centred character of child-rearing that many are bemoaning in the wake of the looting. ‘Good parenting’ has become far more about ensuring that your children aren’t fat and are happy – criteria on which parents are continually judged by those in authority – than on raising them to be decent, morally autonomous citizens as they approach adulthood. No wonder some kids think the world owes them everything: that’s what their parents have been taught to teach them. Commentators from the ‘hang-em-and-flog-em’ school are having a field day, now they have apparent proof of the sickness created by permissive, liberal values, and carte blanche to bash, in Melanie Phillips’ words, not just ‘feral children, but feral parents’. In fact, it is the profoundly illiberal trend towards parent training that has fuelled adults’ sense of disconnect and powerlessness when it comes their own children. Within days, proponents of ‘early intervention’ in child-rearing were quick to stress how the riots prove the need for precisely this policy approach. It is telling that adult society’s approach to out-of-control teenagers is to focus even more intently on babies, as if the teenagers are already lost to us and they are too big to handle anyway. With this kind of cowardly opportunism in policy circles, why should we assume these ‘experts’ have anything to say about parenting at all? The reasons for the breakdown of adult authority are complex and far-reaching, tied up with wider crises of morality, community, and traditional institutions in modern Britain. Many commentators have noticed this: indeed, the extent to which every element of our society seems to have been labelled ‘sick’ makes one wonder how they will trump the hyperbole when the next riot/scandal/natural disaster comes along. The riots should prompt some tough questions and difficult – even, dare I say, ‘sociological’ – discussions. What we don’t need is fatalism – or more parenting classes. Jennie Bristow is author of Standing Up To Supernanny, co-author of Licensed to Hug, a contributor to the Huffington Post and an associate of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies (CPCS).  The CPCS conference Monitoring Parents: Science, evidence, experts and the new parenting culture will be held at the University of Kent on 13-14 September 2011. See here for more information. 2011-08-17T12:03:43+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/the_foundation_years_for_a_new_generation_of_mini-camerons/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/the_foundation_years_for_a_new_generation_of_mini-camerons/#When:08:35:55Z The Con-Lib Coalition has announced its own version of the toddlers' curriculum - with teeth. education 2011-07-20T08:35:55+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/lib-con_family_policy_maggie_meets_mary_poppins/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/lib-con_family_policy_maggie_meets_mary_poppins/#When:10:31:34Z The coalition’s family policy is an unholy marriage of Thatcher-style traditional moralism and New Labour-style therapeutic interventionism. By Jennie Bristow. Having spent years criticising New Labour’s family policy, I was prepared to give the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government a chance. When Lib-Con ministers have talked about the problem of New Labour’s ‘nanny state’ and the need for individuals, families and communities to have more freedom in, and take more responsibility for, their own lives, this rhetoric has seemed like a refreshing counterpoint to a decade of the message ‘officials know best’. But more than a year on from the General Election, the coalition government’s opposition to the ‘nanny state’ intervening in family life seems to be largely rhetorical. Many of the policies currently being developed have the goal of preserving the family; but the only way it is seen to be possible to do this is through more, not less, official scrutiny into the way adults conduct their intimate relationships with one another, and the way young children are raised. In this regard, the coalition government’s family policy is beginning to look more New Labour than New Labour’s. The difference is that while the previous government wore its distrust of the family on its sleeve, today’s policymakers are using the language of ‘family values’ as a way of further undermining the family. ‘Family values’ under New Labour There is a caricature of the Tory approach to family values in Britain, which is summed up in former prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s famous quote, commonly paraphrased as: ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.’ This is seen to encapsulate the right-wing idea of the relationship between the family and the state: namely, that the families should take care of themselves, and in return would be left alone by ‘society’ to make their own decisions about how to conduct their everyday lives. Of course, this idea of the autonomy of the family was always limited in reality. There was plenty of state intervention into the family during the Thatcher years, generally managed through the benefits system; and there was plenty of moralism, often of the traditional churchy, pro-marriage and anti-sex variety. But it became evident that attempts at traditional moralising no longer worked, as highlighted most clearly by the failure of John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign in 1992. It was against this background that New Labour was elected, and began to implement its so-called ‘nanny state’ agenda, which took a technocratic approach to the problem of the family. Moral judgements about marriage, homosexuality and single mothers were junked in favour of ‘evidence-based’ policies indicating exactly which parenting practices were best, and an assertion that ‘Every Child Matters’ when it comes to officials becoming involved in child-rearing. The publication of the consultation document Supporting Families in 1998 marked a watershed with its assertion that all families – not just those considered to be particularly problematic - needed (and indeed, wanted) official guidance in matters of everyday life. This heralded a new decade of explicit family policy, where families were no longer considered de facto to be the authority on raising their children. Policy documents came to discuss parents as ‘partners’ with the state, and parents were presented as being directly accountable to the authorities for what their children ate, how well they did at school, and whether they took part in ‘anti-social behaviour’ within the community. New Labour’s technocratic approach was not always popular; and many of the strides made by the Conservative party in its election campaign of 2010 were made through attacking the excesses of New Labour’s bossiness and calling for greater flexibility and freedom for people to make choices about their everyday life. But the ‘nanny state’ badge always missed what was most significant about New Labour’s approach to parenting and family life. Its trajectory was not so much authoritarian as therapeutic. Political rhetoric used the language of ‘advice’ and ‘support’ and officials took care not to privilege any particular family ‘style’ over another - married or cohabiting, gay or straight, single parents or couples, rich or poor, none of this mattered to policymakers so long as all parents stuck to a particular formula for raising their children and accepted that they should be open to ‘advice’ and ‘support’ from official sources. In this respect, the relationship between the state and the family underwent a profound shift. The family was no longer conceived of as the bedrock of society, which could be left to its own devices except in extreme circumstances, where the state would have to step in. Rather, it was reconfigured as an institution in which breakdown and dysfunction were endemic, and the state was considered to need to play a directly supporting role for each and every family unit. Parents were looked upon less as responsible adults than as trainee carers, who needed educating about child-rearing before they could be let loose on the next generation. It would be tempting to see some of the current government’s rhetoric about the importance of the family and the problem of the nanny state as a demand to ‘go back’ to the days when families were accorded the privacy and responsibility to raise their children as they saw fit. But just as New Labour was not Old Labour, the New Tories are not closet Thatcherites merely biding their time to let the ‘nasty party’ off the leash. The New Tories, with their Lib Dem sidekicks, are social managers in search of an intellectual strategy. Their management style borrows heavily from the technocratic style of New Labour, and their ideas - at least regarding the family - seem to be most heavily influenced by a strand of thought branded as ‘compassionate conservatism’. This combines the therapeutic ethos of New Labour with more socially conservative values, and the upshot will be yet more fiddling with the family. ‘Breakdown Britain’ and the Centre for Social Justice Arguably the most important figure in the creation of government family policy is Iain Duncan Smith, Conservative member of parliament for Chingford and Woodford Green. Duncan Smith was leader of the Conservative Party between 2001 and 2003, when he resigned after he failed to win a vote of confidence from his fellow MPs. He then set up the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), ‘an independent think tank committed to tackling poverty and social breakdown’, which he chaired until the 2010 General Election, when he was appointed secretary of state for work and pensions. Duncan Smith will sit on the new Childhood and Families Taskforce, reportedly to be chaired by prime minister David Cameron and also attended by deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, children’s minister Sarah Teather, science and universities minister David Willetts, health minister Anne Milton, and economic secretary to the Treasury Justine Greening. The Centre for Social Justice grabbed the attention of politicians under New Labour, and has for a few years been a relatively influential voice in policy debates about the family, poverty and crime. It is connected to senior Tories - William Hague, the foreign secretary, is on the advisory council - but also contains some influential figures from the Labour Party, including the former home secretary David Blunkett, and Frank Field, who was appointed as the coalition government’s ‘poverty tsar’ and has been central to pushing for ‘early intervention’ by the state into child-rearing, in order to prevent ‘poor children from becoming poor adults’. And the CSJ has been a prolific publisher of reports, which, taken together, provide a coherence that appears to be lacking in other areas of policymaking. Breakdown Britain, arguably its most influential report, was published in 2006 and highlighted five ‘pathways to poverty’: family breakdown, educational failure, economic dependence, indebtedness and addiction. One year later, it published Breakthrough Britain, a six-volume report that made 188 policy recommendations to the Conservative Party. The first volume was titled Family Breakdown, and built on the 2006 report Fractured Families, both of which were produced by working groups chaired by research consultant Dr Samantha Callan. Fractured Families painted a grim picture of the ‘state of the nation’. ‘[A]dults and children today are increasingly faced with the challenge of dysfunctional, fractured, or fatherless families’, it asserts, before presenting an ‘inclusive use of the term “family breakdown”… which can be summed up in three key words: dissolution, dysfunction and “dad-lessness”’. The report rejected ‘the comfortable mantra that policy can or should be wholly morally neutral’, and states the need for policy to support and encourage ‘marriage and committed relationships’. The document also lays out the importance of policy engaging with both ‘family structure and family process’: that is, promoting marriage over cohabitation, but also engaging with ‘conflict management within families’ as a ‘key consideration for public policy’. The Breakthrough Britain report built on this diagnosis to make specific policy proposals. Family structure would be dealt with through recognising marriage through the tax system: an idea that the coalition government has already floated, with limited success. ‘Preventative measures’ against family breakdown would be introduced, which included ‘a national relationship and parenting education “invitation” scheme for couples and parents at key life stages’, the creation of a ‘Marriage and Relationships Institute (MRI)’, and the promotion of ‘relationship education in schools’. The report also noted the results of a YouGov poll which found that ‘80 per cent agreed that it is better for preschool children to be looked after by a parent at home rather than by a childminder or day nursery’, with only 29 per cent agreeing that ‘we should be trying to encourage mothers to go back to work and contribute to the economy, rather than making it easier to stay at home’. To that end, the report proposed slashing state funding for childcare and ‘freeing up’ Children’s Centres from childcare provision in order ‘to provide more family support’. The policies outlined in Breakthrough Britain ‘pay particular attention to the needs of our youngest citizens, those in the first three years of life where the nurture of their parents is of particular importance’. What is clear from these documents is that this is not a strategy designed to reduce official intervention into the family: indeed, initiatives such as the ‘Marriage and Relationship Institute’ make New Labour’s nanny state look positively laid back. But the form of intervention differs from New Labour policy, in three interesting ways. What is most striking about the Tories’ distaste for sexual freedom is how old-fashioned it seemsFirst, it intends to move away from the ‘politically “safe” emphasis on the parent-child relationship’ to engage more directly with ‘the quality of their parents’ relationship, a crucial dimension of child wellbeing’. This will be done through relationships education and counselling, including - as yet another document, Every Family Matters, explains - ‘strong government encouragement of couples getting married to take part in high-quality, standardised and accredited pre-marriage preparation, delivered in an accessible fashion’. In terms of where the appropriate boundaries for state intervention into the family are considered to lie, this marks a step on from the previous government’s attempt to regulate the parent-child relationship more closely. In the CSJ’s view, adults’ relationships with each other are to be considered a legitimate target for more intimate scrutiny. Marriage is not lauded in the classical sense, as an institution that encourages individuals to take responsibility for each other and their children; it is promoted as a better mechanism for ensuring that people are open to official messages, in the form of ‘pre-marriage preparation’ and relationship counselling offered at key ‘life stages’. The combination of the promotion of traditional family forms - marriage - alongside the more recently accepted mantra that couples need ‘support’ shows how far the terrain has shifted from the traditional family values agenda. This proscribed the form in which people should live their private lives (‘family structure’), but it did so on the basis that how they conducted their relationships within that sphere (‘family process’) was largely up to them. Thus the autonomy and privacy of the family was, to some degree, protected, and people were accorded the right and responsibility to make their own choices. The new family-values agenda promoted by the Centre for Social Justice brings together the most proscriptive elements of traditional moralism and New Labour-style therapeutic interventionism. People are cajoled into marriage, but instructed before and throughout their married lives about how they should conduct their relationships with one another. Mothers are to be encouraged out of the labour force, as childcare provision is whittled away; but their time spent at home with preschool-aged children will be subjected to increasing scrutiny because of the concern that children’s brains can be warped by inadequate care, making them into ‘poor adults’. The second way in which the CSJ’s approach to family policy differs from that of New Labour is in its diagnosis of the ills that apparently afflict modern society. ‘Since the 1960s there has been a constant flow of primary and secondary legislation affecting divorce, sexual freedom, abortion rights, homosexual lifestyles, tax and benefits and more’, notes the Fractured Families report, buried in an appendix on page 147. ‘In combination these laws have undermined the value of marriage as an institution, mainly by elevating the value of other relationship structures now generally considered to lack the longevity and strength that marriage brings to the family unit.’ The report’s appendix laments the ‘de-stigmatisation of abortion’ brought about by the Abortion Act 1967, and states that ‘the availability of contraceptives to unmarried people under the Family Planning Act 1967 further encouraged premarital and extramarital sexual activity’. What is most striking about this distaste for sexual freedom is how old-fashioned it seems - which is presumably why it appears in an appendix, rather than the main body of the report. But it is interesting as it indicates the profound social conservatism of many of the ‘New Tories’, despite their attempts to use language more accepted in the modern world and to develop policies that are pragmatically suited to the times. In this view, the problem with the modern world lies with all the personal freedoms that have been gained over the past 50 years. Because society has ‘broken down’, and families are ‘dysfunctional, fractured or fatherless’, social policy cannot simply turn the clock back and expect people to act responsibly; rather, it has to intervene more aggressively to get them to make the right choices. This bleak vision of modern family life inverts reality. The problem is not the degree of sexual freedom and personal choice encouraged by the ‘permissive’ legislation of the 1960s, but society’s inability to deliver on the promise of these new freedoms. So New Labour could talk the politically-correct talk about the acceptability of ‘diverse’ family forms, while finding ever-more bureaucratic ways of regulating intimate relationships. The compassionate conservative philosophy does the same thing, while junking even a rhetorical commitment to the positive aspects of reproductive choice. If not the nanny state, then what? The third element of Tory family policy that seems distinct from New Labour is the degree to which it positively sees the state as a solution to our dissolute world. One of the defining features of the coalition government’s outlook is its desire to move society away from its dependency on the welfare state and to create instead something called the ‘Big Society’. This concept has been roundly mocked in the press, because of its noticeable lack of coherence; and indeed the jury remains out as to what ‘Cameron’s BS’ is actually likely to mean it practice. But the CSJ’s family policy trajectory provides a bit more of a clue about how policymakers’ ambivalence about the state is playing itself out. On 23 May, Cameron gave a speech that has been widely dubbed his ‘fourth relaunch’ of the Big Society, emphasising ‘the importance of strong families, communities and relationships’, and announcing plans for more than £40million in additional support for the voluntary sector. ‘The building of a bigger, stronger society will not be done by government but by citizens’, said Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude. ‘However, it will not emerge overnight and government has to play a role in supporting it.’ The essence of the Big Society agenda is that it emphasises the problem of society’s reliance on the state and argues instead for people to rely on their families and communities. But because such families and communities are considered so hopelessly broken, the state will work through institutions of the voluntary sector, otherwise known as the Third Sector, to reshape civil society in a more responsible direction. So the 2006 CSJ report Breakdown Britain begins with a discussion of ‘the welfare society’, as a counterpoint to the welfare state. ‘At the heart of the welfare society is the family’, it notes - but ‘an integral and vital part of the welfare society is the voluntary and community sector’, which can ‘offer many damaged people a second chance and operate in a people-centred way that statutory agencies cannot or will not emulate’. At one level, it is hard to see the problem with lauding the role of communities and the voluntary sector. It is certainly arguable that the tendency, over the past couple of decades, to bring more and more informal aspects of society under the control of the state has weakened people’s ability to rely upon each other or to organise things themselves for the sake of their communities. But the philosophy behind the ‘welfare society’ is that people need more, not less, official nudging in matters of their everyday lives and relationships. The practical objective of the Big Society is that the Third Sector gains more, not less, support from the state. Put these two objectives together and you have a situation where people are subject to more interference, by agencies that are, if anything, less democratically accountable than the nanny state we know and hate. These may be church-led organisations, of the kind finding themselves with an increasing voice in policy forums; it may be charities such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which have been built up over several years to act as a semi-official arm of the child protection industry. Either way, this strategy for further professionalising the Third Sector has nothing to do with the idea that voluntary organisations should simply be left to get on with things. And whoever ends up being charged with providing marriage guidance counselling or ‘early intervention’, it seems pretty clear that for families, engaging with these services is unlikely to be a matter of choice. Jennie Bristow edits the website Parents With Attitude. She is author of Standing Up To Supernanny, and co-author of Licensed to Hug. This essay was first published on spiked. 2011-07-18T10:31:34+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/the_new_parenting_catfight_tiger_moms_vs_fun_slobs/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/the_new_parenting_catfight_tiger_moms_vs_fun_slobs/#When:09:01:12Z In the obsession with the relationship between parenting practices and children’s achievements, the very idea of the parent undergoes a terrible metamorphosis. By Jennie Bristow.The latest battle of the parenting tribes pits the Tiger Moms against the Fun Slobs. In one corner growls Amy Chua, proud hot-houser of her daughters, whose book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother extols the virtues of achievement-oriented, ‘Chinese-style’ parenting. In the other chills Bryan Caplan, whose book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids tells us that we could have more fun raising our little darlings if we just recognised that none of this pushy parenting works in any case. Our children’s fate is in their genes, apparently – and nothing that parents do (at least after very early childhood) makes a blind bit of difference to how our children will turn out. Both these authors are American, but as is so often the way, the debate has crossed the Atlantic, bringing waves of anxiety in its wake. Parents balk at the implication, from the Tiger Moms corner, that those of us who do not spend every waking moment chivvying our children along the path to an Olympic gold medal are slobs with an aspiration deficit disorder. But nor are they convinced by Caplan’s let-it-all-hang-out philosophy. Surely making children do their homework, taking them to sporting activities, and pushing them to achieve more than watch TV and ‘be themselves’ cannot be a total waste of time? In their reluctance to side with either Chua or Caplan, it seems to me that parents have got it right. Because in the obsession with the relationship between parenting practices and children’s achievements, the very idea of the parent undergoes a terrible metamorphosis. The parent is no longer an adult, whose relationship to his or her child is governed by a complex combination of experience, personality, personal morality, responsibility, emotions, needs, desires, practical pressures and other such amorphous qualities that make up the stuff of life. For both Chua and Caplan, the parent is a mere cipher – either of genes (Caplan) or cognitive stimuli (Chua) – which rankles with those of us who consider ourselves to be more than that. Part of the reason why the Chua / Caplan debate has exploded is because it fits so neatly with that old nature / nurture question: can individuals ‘be who they want to be’ or are they just ‘born this way’? This dichotomy was always pretty unhelpful, given that human beings are a fascinating combination of their biology and their experience. But at least people used to try to answer this question through attempting to explore deeper questions of human nature, or the social world. The modern twist is that, when it comes to child-rearing, both the nature and nurture questions have been reduced to their most direct and meaningless components – the genes of the parents or the particular parenting practices used in raising particular children. In this way, the generational responsibility for raising children has been re-defined as a mere question of breeding, with the parent as the sole determinant – one way or another – of the outcome of the next generation. Caplan’s insistence on the importance of genetic legacy has led some to point out the uncomfortable association of such ideas with the tradition of eugenics – the idea that the human stock can be improved through encouraging ‘better’ adults to breed ‘better’ children. But Chua’s apparently nurture-centred focus on parental pressure is not free from these associations either. This notion ties in with the emphasis of current Anglo-American parenting policy upon cajoling parents to raise their children in specific, closely scripted ways, based on the erroneous assumption that kids can (and should) be thus programmed. As Ellie Lee, director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent explains, whereas eugenic ideas historically attempted to ‘breed out’ apparently deficient qualities, today’s parental-determinist approach is based on the idea that it is possible to ‘nurture in’ the kind of qualities that policymakers see as desirable. The effect of this is to present the parent-child relationship in a peculiarly rigid, reductionist fashion, as though the sole contribution parents bring is the direct input they have into their children. This is reflected in the phony war currently being played out between the Tiger Moms and the Fun Slobs, where the disagreement comes down to little more than how, exactly, one can measure the relationship between what parents do and what children become. The truth is that there is a lot more to raising children than this. As adults, it doesn’t really matter if we see ourselves as Tiger Moms, Fun Slobs, or some other category entirely, provided that we are clear on two things. First of all, to the extent that parents can shape how our children turn out, it will not be determined by the number of hours parents put into their children’s piano practice, but by the context of our family lives as a whole. It is simply bizarre to pretend that the impact of particular parenting practices can be separated out from other factors, from where families live and how they earn their living, to their values, relationships and experiences. In any event, there are all sorts of other experiences that children have – through friends and schools, for example – that will have a big impact beyond the realm of the family. Moreover, as they grow up, children gradually start to ‘make’ themselves; they become moral beings in their own right that make their own choices – a process well illustrated by an incident Chua recounts where her 13-year-old daughter very publicly rebels against her mother’s discipline. Secondly, it is up to us – the grown-ups - to shape the context of our family lives. This is not the responsibility of policymakers or so-called parenting experts, and nor should it be their business. If obsessing about children’s daily faults or achievements becomes a way of shying away from making choices about one’s adult life, hot-housing is no less fatalistic a child-rearing strategy than the Caplan approach of plonking the kids in front of the TV because drug addiction is in their genes anyway. To raise children, we have to see ourselves as adults first.  Jennie Bristow is editor of Parents With Attitude, author of Standing Up To Supernanny and co-author of Licensed to Hug. This article was first published on spiked. 2011-06-03T09:01:12+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/a_novel_approach_to_domestic_drudgery/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/a_novel_approach_to_domestic_drudgery/#When:13:46:19Z Christina Hopkinson’s sparkly new novel has been read as a privileged mum’s moan about cleaning. In fact it raises more than a few awkward questions about domestic drudgery. By Jennie Bristow. ‘You and Joel could be asking really interesting questions about what the heterosexual marriage means in the twenty-first century, you could be reinventing the institution entirely. But instead, you’re bickering about the washing-up. It’s so retro.’ So Becky, the lesbian best friend of the frazzled mum-of-two protagonist in Christina Hopkinson’s novel, sums up the central theme of The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs. Society has made major strides in terms of sexual equality, women’s careers, reproductive choice and marriages built more on sexual attraction than social convention. But at the level of domestic work, nothing has changed. It pisses us off, it grinds us down, and nobody ever really talks about it as a major problem.  At a time when the obsession with ‘parenting’ implies that the only task of family life is how you play with your children, Hopkinson’s novel attempts to bring domestic work back into the debate. The main character, ‘Scary Mary’ to her colleagues, works four days a week as a TV production manager. She has two young children, some richer friends, memories of a past life when she had free time and a career that seemed to be going somewhere, and a husband (Joel) who’s a bit of a loveable slob. Mary’s frustration with the constant ‘sweeping, tidying, house admin and wiping’ that consumes her physical and mental energy leads her to create a spreadsheet (‘The List’) where she logs all her husband’s domestic misdemeanours. Her fantasy is that when Joel clocks up a certain number of points, his slobbery will be confirmed and she will have grounds for a divorce. Far-fetched? Absolutely. Totally implausible? Sadly not.  The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs is a disconcerting blend of faintly comic ‘mummy lit’ and a sociological critique of modern family life; the main character is both easy to identify with and uncomfortably unsympathetic. So it’s a tricky book to get a handle on, and will no doubt raise some hackles. But the novel also raises some interesting questions about the culture surrounding modern family life, at a time when ‘parenting’ is a central political preoccupation yet when other aspects of the problem of the family have disappeared from radical discussion. For example, Mary’s obsession with domestic work is borne out of her resentment with the fact that so much of it exists at all, and the unfairness of the fact that it falls to her, as the woman, to do it. ‘Nobody talks about cleaning. Why would they? It’s bloody boring to do and even more boring to talk about, but it’s there’, she rants, in an attempt to justify her ‘hated hobby’. Mary experiences the burden of housework as particularly heavy because she works outside the home as well. But as she admits, ‘I’m angry that I work; I’d be even angrier if I didn’t’. Exhausted by the demands of juggling paid work, young children and domestic work, she would rather like to wish that Joel earned enough that she could stay at home - except that she is mindful of how central her career is to her own sense of personal identity. And, as she reiterates throughout the book (in an accurate reflection of the way mothers really do whinge), of course she does not want to wish away her children. So that leaves the housework. Yes, Mary has a cleaner for a couple of hours a week - which does nothing to mitigate the daily shopping, cooking, wiping and washing that goes with young children. The only way she can see to reducing this burden is by her husband doing more of it; the rage that he doesn’t even see it consumes her to the point of inventing the fated List. Much of the media discussion of Hopkinson’s book so far has focused on the question of why middle-class, career-minded women are so obsessed with having the perfect home. Mary’s obsession with cleaning has been interpreted as a nice problem to have – that is, it’s only the privileged who have the luxury of wanting to keep up with the ideal homes of their glamorous neighbours – or as a retrograde, anti-feminist retreat away from the life of the mind towards an unhealthy interest in scatter cushions. This seems to me to ignore the bigger questions that Hopkinson’s book tries to raise, which are to do with feminism and whether there is any point complaining about a woman’s lot when broader social alternatives are off the agenda. In pitting Mary and Joel against each other on the question of housework, Hopkinson has clearly drawn on sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s influential study of housework, first published in 1989. This showed how among dual-earning couples in the US it was always women who took the lion’s share of responsibility for childcare and housework, resulting in a ‘second shift’ when they got home. From this finding, Hochschild concluded that modern societies are experiencing a ‘stalled gender revolution’ - women’s equality has given us the ability to have careers, even the expectation that we should have careers, but it has not made commensurate gains in encouraging men to do more around the home. So, as Mary says: ‘Nobody talks about cleaning except my mother, and lord how we despised her for it. Jemima and I didn’t do cleaning, you see, because we were feminists. The funny thing about feminism is that it hasn’t actually decreased the amount of washing to be done and surfaces to be wiped, nor does it seem to have increased the amount of time men spend doing it, either.’ A version of Hochschild’s ‘stalled gender revolution’ thesis is widely promoted today among those – British deputy PM Nick Clegg among them – who advocate a philosophy of ‘equally shared parenting’ as the way forward for modern families. In this view, the only resolution to the problem of domestic work is to incite men to do more of it. As I have argued before, such a proposal might be fair – but only in the way that it would be ‘fair’ to make everyone live on two pounds a week. ‘Equally shared parenting’ does nothing to relieve the absolute drudgery of domestic work, and dragging men more into the domestic sphere risks creating an ‘ambitions divide’ between families and non-families, where the only people allowed to have proper, full-time, fulfilling careers are those without children. It was bad enough when only mothers suffered on this front - to push fathers into taking the same four-days-a-week, get-back-for-the-childminder ‘mummy track’ career path is a recipe for increasing resentment. Hopkinson’s novel gets this - but because the only possible solutions to the problem of domestic work are assumed to lie in the way couples negotiate it, the battle over ‘the Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs’ ends with a therapeutic compromise, which is almost as depressing as the war itself. This seems to be a rather accurate reflection of where feminism has got us: being unable to go beyond blaming men for the problem, and forcing them to feel our pain. But does that mean that Scary Mary should just calm down, shut up and get on with it? I find that pretty unpalatable, too. As long as there is the aspiration to do more creative things with our lives than wiping up wee, there is at least the possibility of finding more imaginative solutions to the problem of domestic work than have been concocted by feminists and Nick ‘New Man’ Clegg. If we talked more about cleaning, we might just find ourselves less obsessed with it. Jennie Bristow is editor of the Parents With Attitude, author of Standing Up To Supernanny and co-author of Licensed to Hug.  childcare and working mums 2011-04-01T13:46:19+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/david_willets_feminism_has_held_back_working_men/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/david_willets_feminism_has_held_back_working_men/#When:13:36:34Z The rise of equal rights for women has left working-class men struggling to get on in life, according to David Willetts, the Universities Minister. childcare and working mums 2011-04-01T13:36:34+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/women_denied_epidurals_in_nhs_cutbacks/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/women_denied_epidurals_in_nhs_cutbacks/#When:09:38:12Z NHS accused of tricking women out of having pain relief during child birth as maternity struggle with budget cuts and staff shortages. pregnancy and birth 2011-02-20T09:38:12+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/all_consuming_baby_boomers_are_the_countrys_biggest_polluters/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/all_consuming_baby_boomers_are_the_countrys_biggest_polluters/#When:09:36:11Z With more disposable cash to spend on luxury items like plasma TVs and gas-guzzling cars, are 50 to 64-year-olds costing the earth? generations 2011-02-20T09:36:11+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/modesty_and_low_ambition_keep_women_out_of_top_jobs/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/modesty_and_low_ambition_keep_women_out_of_top_jobs/#When:09:33:28Z A new study suggests hesitancy and self-doubt, rather than overt male sexism, limits the number of women in senior management roles. childcare and working mums 2011-02-20T09:33:28+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/get_involved_you_lad_dads/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/get_involved_you_lad_dads/#When:09:31:15Z Tim Southwell, the former editor of Loaded magazine, is using a well-tried tactic to interest men in school fundraising. fatherhood 2011-02-20T09:31:15+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/slacking_as_self-discovery/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/slacking_as_self-discovery/#When:13:31:57Z The Rebranding of Indolence as ‘Emerging Adulthood’. By Rita Koganzon. generations 2011-02-16T13:31:57+00:00