Big Society: there’s more to politics than the PTA

Last weekend, like millions of parents across Britain, I attended the summer fair at my child’s school.

And along with - maybe not millions, but surely thousands - of parents across the country, I didn’t just attend the summer fair, but was part of the PTA (Parents and Teachers Association) committee that organised the thing. It was a big success, people had a lovely time, and our school now has more money for the kids to do fun stuff.

Did I feel like a better citizen because of it? No, I mainly felt knackered. When the PTA met for a celebratory debrief, did we discuss how we were empowering ourselves and shaping our community? No, we mainly ate cakes and wondered how to flog the leftover prizes. Did we quote Mahatma Gandhi at each other: ‘We must be the change we want to see in the world’? No - blimey, the PTA is made up of a great bunch of people and all that, and we’re quite ambitious when it comes to beating last year’s profits on the cake bake, but that’s about as far as it goes.

If mentioning Gandhi seems preposterous, it’s only because he has become adopted as the poster-child for the Lib-Con coalition government’s Big Society initiative. Although it’s not a government initiative, apparently: ‘The Big Society Network is an organisation being set up by frustrated citizens for frustrated citizens, to help everyone achieve change in their local area’, explains the website, which is merely ‘delighted’ that prime minister David Cameron has ‘hosted a great event to help introduce the Big Society Network’. (You’ll have seen this on the news, more accurately reported under headlines like ‘Cameron’s Big Society plan’).

The BSN (as it fondly calls itself) wants to ‘create a new relationship between citizens and government in which both are genuine partners in getting things done’ - to which ‘partnership’ it will ‘add a third and fourth leg to its sturdy chair by involving business and the voluntary sector.’

Now I don’t want to nit-pick, but to describe a chair with two legs as ‘sturdy’ seems a bit like wishful thinking - particularly if one of those legs consists of a prime minister, a government adviser and a communications expert, and the other has only just heard that it’s about to be ‘empowered’. More to the point, organising the summer fair at my daughter’s school - or a Big Lunch in the middle of my road, for that matter - is not going to bring about social change. For that, we need politics. You don’t get that in PTA meetings - and you wouldn’t want it either.

My problem with the Big Society is not that I care too little about community spirit, or volunteering. Having kids means that local community suddenly becomes very important: you are at home a lot more, so you see it; you rely on other people to look out for your family, and so you end up looking out for other people, too. I live in a small town, my kids go to a local school, and there is something strengthening and, well, just nice about the way in which people pull together across generations and social classes to make things work.

And I care about volunteering. My daughters go to Rainbows (baby Brownies), which is run by two wonderful, kind-hearted but admirably strong-willed elderly ladies whose mission is to take a bunch of six-year-old girls and give them lots of fun and games while instilling in them a sense of old-fashioned decency and - yes - community. It’s absolutely great, and a task that I would be far too scared to undertake myself. From a parent’s point of view, volunteering means that other adults step into your child’s life to give them a richness and experience that you cannot necessarily buy or provide yourself.

So there’s something about the Big Society agenda that I like. It wants to promote communities and volunteering. And it seems to be inspired, at least in part, by an unease about the way in which people have been pushed, both by previous government initiatives and cultural trends, away from the support of their communities and towards a greater reliance on the state. The undermining of these informal relations is a problem that I have written about both in relation to parenting, and in relation to community volunteering. On that basis, I’m pleased to see policymakers trying to address some of these issues.

But informal relations won’t be rebuilt by the government making them a substitute for politics - and this is what I’m afraid is the logic of the Big Society agenda. According to this new initiative, street parties aren’t about food and fun, they’re about active citizenship. ‘The Idea’ of Big Society is not about kids going camping or the elderly getting out more, but about signing up to some overblown quote from Gandhi.

The Big Society is not about just letting community spirit flourish through getting rid of stupid regulations so that people get on with what they want to do, and, even in our individuated times, what they do anyway. The government seems to have a more interventionist approach, talking about giving ‘citizens, communities and local government the power and information they need to come together, solve the problems they face and build the Britain they want’ through such weird schemes as raiding dormant bank accounts to enable people to build their own old folks’ homes, or something.

In short, the Big Society agenda politicises community involvement. This is a surefire way of thwarting genuine community spirit, which is an informal, cultural phenomenon that suffocates under the instrumental agenda of government. It’s also a cop-out from facing the challenge of political reinvigoration. The PTA is not parliament, and community fundraisers do not remotely resemble politics. These local things are about rolling your sleeves up, pitching in and not arguing with people: there is no scope for ideology, for debate, for the interrogation of wide-reaching social problems that we badly need today. That’s how it should be for the school fair, but absolutely not how we bring about social change.

‘We must be the change we want to see in the world’ implies that we should not aspire to do anything beyond cake baking, and we shouldn’t aspire to be anyone more than the person running the beer tent. To sign up to the ‘Big Society’, you’d have to be thinking really small.

Jennie Bristow is editor of Parents With Attitude. She is author of Standing Up To Supernanny, and co-author of Licensed to Hug. Email Jennie .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

This article was first published on spiked. Read more of Jennie’s articles here.

Sure Start: a fancy new way to police the family

With Britain’s new coalition government ushering in public-sector cuts that will mean ‘years of pain ahead’, Sure Start, the former New Labour government’s flagship policy for children aged 0-5, has come under the microscope.

Hitting back against claims by Labourite mischief-makers that the Conservatives intend to close down Children’s Centres across the country, Tory MPs have reaffirmed their commitment to Sure Start: ‘We want Britain to be the most family-friendly country in Europe. A stronger Sure Start is at the heart of delivering on that vision.’ In May 2010, the UK’s coalition government formally unveiled its plans for Sure Start, which include cutting funding to Sure Start outreach services, but increasing the number of health visitors by 4,200; increasing the scheme’s focus on the neediest families; investigating ways of paying providers by results; and taking Sure Start ‘back to its original purpose of early intervention’.

On one level, the all-party love affair with Sure Start is rather mystifying. On 7 June, The Times (London) published a leading article about the findings of a three-year study, commissioned by the Treasury and carried out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The ONS found: ‘The large sample results indicate that on average attending early-years education had no impact on any of our outcome measures.’

Noting that ‘achieving nothing has not come cheap’ – Britain currently ‘spends £5billion per annum on early-years provision, more than four times the amount of a decade ago’ – The Times suggested that ‘at a time of public austerity, this looks like a clinching case for closure’. Indeed, the existing evidence on how well Sure Start works, from the dedicated £20million National Evaluation of Sure Start (NESS) programme at Birkbeck University as well as from other sources (1), has been highly ambivalent on whether the programme is achieving its stated objectives, as has evidence from comparable schemes in the US, Canada and Australia (2).

Paradoxically, however, for all the obsession with evidence-based policy, and the money and energy that have gone into evaluating Sure Start since its inception in 1998, the lack of proof that this expensive and extensive early-intervention programme actually works as intended seems to be considered irrelevant. This echoes the US debate about Head Start, the programme upon which Sure Start is based. As Gray and Francis note in the journal Child: Care, Health and Development:

‘Despite… periodic concerns about quality, Head Start has been a politically popular programme. This may stem from its apparently irreproachable aims of serving poor children, together with its resonance with popular “deficit” theories about the poor and their supposedly substandard parenting and the strength of American belief in the power of education to achieve social reform. All this has been good for Head Start’s survival, but it has made it difficult for those concerned about quality and evaluation to get their concerns onto the political agenda.’ (3)

This powerful statement clarifies a lot about the lack of criticism levelled at Sure Start in the UK. Whether the scheme works or does not work according to the specific outcomes desired by policymakers, its great success has been the extent to which it has managed to transform the social problem of child poverty – poor children – into an individual problem of poor parenting.

What is Sure Start?

One of the core philosophies of New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ was ‘social exclusion’, and Sure Start was put into action soon after the 1997 election to deal with this newly-formulated social problem. The basic premise of social exclusion was that the most significant problem facing families in circumstances of economic deprivation was not their lack of money or employment, but the negative behaviour that they manifested as a result of being disconnected from official agencies and services.

Policies designed to tackle ‘social exclusion’ therefore sought ways to reach the ‘hard to reach’ through therapeutic mechanisms such as education or advice-giving. By a similar token, the aim of Sure Start was to ameliorate the consequences of child poverty by encouraging better parenting and forging relationships between families in the most disadvantaged communities and the state.

Since its inception, the organisation of Sure Start has undergone a number of shifts. It was initially designed around local schemes, which emphasised diversity and parental involvement; it then became more centrally organised through Children’s Centres offering some combination of childcare services, parenting classes, and healthcare.

There have been a number of problems with the scheme. Originally, Sure Start programmes were developed in economically deprived areas, but deliberately not targeted specifically at low-income families: the aim being both to reduce the ‘stigma’ of such interventions, and to encourage, as if by osmosis, the trickle-down effect of good parenting behaviours from middle-class users of Sure Start services. In effect, this meant that users of the Sure Start services tended to be the ‘wrong people’ – those parents and children considered to be less in need of them – while the ‘hard to reach’ continued to find, in the words of NESS researchers, ‘the extra attention of service providers in SSLP areas stressful and intrusive’ (4).

There was also the problem of Sure Start failing to achieve its stated goals: indeed, as NESS found in 2006, the scheme failed to boost pre-schoolers’ development, language and behaviour, and it actually had an ‘adverse impact’ on ‘children from relatively more socially deprived families (teenage mothers, lone parents, workless households)’.

However, these specific problems were not enough to deter policymakers from their belief in the importance of early intervention. The fondness for Sure Start among middle-class users of its services helped to boost its political popularity. Meanwhile, the National Evaluation of Sure Start has produced later findings, from which they conclude that, in fact, ‘children and their families benefited from living in SSLP [Sure Start Local Programme] areas’ (5).

The difference between these and the previous findings, explains the team, could be accounted for by such families having ‘increased exposure to programmes that have become more effective’. This appears to validate the argument put forward by early proponents of Sure Start, that if the government just kept throwing money at the apparently failing programme, it would all come good in the end.

But does it? The problem with the Sure Start debate, such as it is, is that proponents and critics tend to get caught up in an obsession about whether the scheme works or doesn’t work, and therefore whether it is a good or a bad use of public money. The far more significant question relates to how the success or failure of the scheme is measured – and as such, how the problem of poverty has been skilfully reposed as one of parents’ and children’s behaviour.

The 2008 evaluation studied 14 outcomes of children and their families in Sure Start areas, compared to those in ‘similarly deprived’, non-Sure Start areas. These outcomes were: children’s immunisations, accidents, language development, positive and negative social behaviours, and independence; parenting risk; home-learning environment; father’s involvement; maternal smoking, body-mass index, and life satisfaction; family’s service use; and mother’s rating of area.

In other words, all the things that Sure Start attempted to change were those that related to the health and behaviour of poor people (for example, smoking and refusing to access state services), rather than poverty itself.

On the basis of achieving five of those 14 outcomes, the evaluation was able to claim that ‘early interventions can improve the life chances of young children living in deprived areas’. But all the evaluation actually showed was that children in Sure Start areas showed more positive social behaviour and greater independence, while their families showed less negative parenting, provided a better home-learning environment, and used ‘more services for supporting child and family development’.

So the kids in the study seemed a bit better behaved, the parents seemed a bit nicer, and the families were more engaged with the state. One could conclude from this that children have had their ‘life chances’ radically improved. One could equally conclude that families living in Sure Start areas have merely picked up a clearer idea about how to behave in front of researchers.

As Vimpani notes, ultimately the success of early-intervention programmes in ameliorating ‘the long-term outcomes that are the basis of the current political concern’ would ‘take a generation to determine’ (6). In the meantime, £5billion is an awful lot of money to spend on toddler-taming techniques. So what’s the rationale for Sure Start, really?

Risky parents

For social policy to focus on the consequences of poverty rather than its causes is nothing new. Social housing, the National Health Service, state schools, and other trappings of the postwar welfare state were all designed to address the problem of educational and health inequalities by ameliorating some of their worst effects, and giving all children – at least notionally – an equal start in life. Some policy initiatives, such as the grammar school system, explicitly sought to provide a route for children from poor backgrounds to achieve a degree of social mobility: crudely put, bright kids from council estates could use their brains to become middle class.

Of course, none of these social policies succeeded in eradicating poverty, or in providing equality of opportunity. Middle-class kids dominated the grammar schools, and the poor always had more health problems than the rich. But they were at least ‘social policies’, to the degree that they sought to tackle problems caused by an unequal access to wealth and resources.

What passes for social policy today, by contrast, takes the existence of inequalities as a given, immutable fact, and focuses increasingly upon the individual’s capacity for survival. The question has become, not how to eradicate poverty or how to ameliorate its effects on people’s lives, but rather how to encourage individuals to manage their poverty in such a way that they don’t cause trouble or make themselves ill.

In an excellent critique, Karen Clarke describes how this behavioural focus forms the backdrop to Sure Start (7). She quotes a government review of children’s service provision, which distinguishes between ‘distal’ and ‘proximal’ variables as areas for intervention. Distal variables are described as ‘“demographic variables describing major attributes such as income, marital status or age of the mother”’, and proximal variables as things that may be causally related, and have a more direct impact upon the child: for example, the number of books in the home, and therefore the extent to which a parent reads to a child.

The review concluded that intervention should focus on such proximal variables as a means to achieving change. As Clarke notes, one problem with ‘this emphasis on the micro-management of proximal variables’ is that it sidelines any attempt to address deeper-rooted problems. Furthermore:

‘There is a danger of regarding parents as simply another environmental influence, whose behaviour can be broken down into proximal causes which produce particular effects in children, and which with appropriate modification can produce the desired outcomes. Good parenting then comes to be regarded as a question of technique instead of being fundamentally about quality of relationships.’

Sure Start’s mechanistic focus on particular variables and measurable outcomes, as indicated by the National Evaluation, ultimately presents the problem of poverty as one of bad parenting behaviour leading to bad child behaviour. Again, this is a familiar theme to some extent – there is nothing new about society blaming the parents of teenage criminals, for example, or drug addicts. But what is new is the degree to which ‘good parenting’ is so intimately prescribed, to include reading books and behaving ‘positively’, and bad behaviour among toddlers is seen as a serious problem, both in its own terms and a marker for future catastrophe.

Clarke is critical of the way that one of the Sure Start objectives, to reduce the number of children on the child-protection register, ‘implicitly pathologises parents in Sure Start areas by focusing on their dangerousness to children’. In fact, the scheme’s very focus on ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ parenting practices takes the ‘child protection’ element of Sure Start much further than concerns about established forms of child abuse.

In line with other developments in early-years policy – specifically the Every Child Matters framework that now operates in all schools and childcare institutions – the standard produced is that of the optimal child, who is assumed to be constructed by optimal childrearing techniques. Sure Start’s positive ‘outcome’ is the parent who reads to her child, gives her healthy meals and does not shout or smack – and the assumption is that this will lead to an obedient, slim and literate toddler. A deviation from this standard, in the form of ‘negative parenting’, is therefore implicitly seen as a form of abuse.

In this respect, the risk factor to the Sure Start child in the deprived area is not his poverty, because this is a distal variable that cannot be changed. Rather, it is his parent, whose everyday childrearing practices are to be monitored and manipulated until they accord with the desired outcome measure.

Problem children

If Sure Start’s construction of the problem parent is disturbing, the scheme’s construction of the problem child is equally so. Peter Moss notes that Sure Start is a new programme – nonetheless, he argues, ‘in many ways it embodies beliefs that have been influential in social policy for many years’. These include a belief in the children as ‘redemptive agents who can solve problems in society’, and a belief in ‘the unique influence of the early years’, which includes the “‘doctrine of infant determinism’”, the expectation that powerful human technologies applied to children below a certain age will cure social and economic ills’. From these perspectives, he argues, ‘Sure Start is but the latest in 100 years or more of early interventions’ (8).

Moss is right to note that the idea that children can solve the ills of society is not entirely new. But the extent to which policies such as Sure Start have taken this idea forward should not be underestimated. There is a difference between, for example, investing in primary and secondary education as a means to creating the leaders of the future, and micro-managing a mother’s conversation with her baby in case a sharp rebuke may cause incurable damage to the neurons in the infant’s brain.

There is a difference between the childcare gurus of yesteryear promoting the need for discipline as a way of effectively socialising a child, and a policy that sees the manifestation of a toddler tantrum as an outcome of a particular parenting method, which will lead inexorably to crime and antisocial behaviour later in that child’s life.

Above all, there is a difference between a belief in the importance of the early years that promoted the need for a child to be nurtured by her parents outside of formal childcare institutions and relationships, and one that sees the success of the early years in terms of the child’s and the parent’s attachment to the state.

Before Sure Start, the idea that parents were best placed to care for and socialise their pre-school children was qualified by childcare experts, political ideologies and concerns about child abuse, but it remained an organising principle of the early years. Now, the organising principle of the early years is that all everyday parenting practices constitute risk factors, to be formally managed by parent trainers in children’s centres. Children in deprived areas, meanwhile, are constructed from birth as problems to be managed, with the role of policy situated as mediating between the child and the toxic human relationships that surround him.

What next for Sure Start?

The Times neatly summed up the extent to which poverty as a social problem has become naturalised, to the extent that all policymakers can apparently hope to do is to shield poor children from their inner demons and the people around them. ‘Social policy is battling many countervailing forces: genetic inheritance, parental influence, peer groups’, argued its editorial.

The notion that social policy might engage with problems at any level other than that of individuals and interpersonal relations has disappeared from the political agenda, which is why any criticism of Sure Start in media or policy circles tends to stop at the question of whether or not it ‘works’ in its own narrow terms.

For the Lib-Con coalition, the principles behind Sure Start are not up for discussion. The only question is how to make it ‘work’ more effectively, and with less money. Consequently, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see the shiny, fun bits of Sure Start that the middle classes loved so much gradually disappear as the money dries up. The coalition’s stated intention to draft in an army of health visitors to focus more directly on ‘the neediest families’ reads to me as though parents living in poverty will find their lives more aggressively managed, by individuals with more official clout.

As such, Sure Start will indeed be taken ‘back to its original purpose of early intervention’, but without the veneer of toys, books and voluntary engagement that made it initially so palatable. Stripped of its hype, Sure Start will be revealed as what it always was: another development in policing the family.

Jennie Bristow is editor of Parents With Attitude. She is author of Standing Up To Supernanny, and co-author of Licensed to Hug. Email Jennie .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

This article was first published on spiked. Read more of Jennie’s articles here.

References

(1) J Belsky, E Melhuish, J Barnes, AH Leyland, H Romaniuk, ‘Effects of Sure Start local programmes on children and families: early findings from a quasi-experimental, cross sectional study’, British Medical Journal 2006, 332:1476; J Schneider, A Ramsay, SA Lowerson,‘Sure Start graduates: predictors of attainment on starting school’, Child: Care, Health and Development, 32, 4, pp431-440,k 2006; J Belsky, E Melhuish, J Barnes, AH Leyland and the National Evaluation of Sure Start Research Team, ‘Effects of fully-established Sure Start local programmes on 3-year-old children and their families living in England: a quasi-experimental observational study’, The Lancet, Vol 372, 8 November 2008

(2) Graham V Vimpani, ‘Sure Start: Reflections from Down Under’, Child: Care, Health and Development, 28, 4, 281-287, 2002; Paul Ormerod ‘The impact of Sure Start’, Political Quarterly Volume 76 Issue 4, 565-567 2005; R Gray and E Francis, ‘The implications of US experiences with early childhood interventions for the UK Sure Start Programme’, Child: Care, Health and Development, 33, 6, 2007 pp655-663

(3) R Gray and E Francis, ‘The implications of US experiences with early childhood interventions for the UK Sure Start Programme’, Child: Care, Health and Development, 33, 6, 2007, pp655-663

(4) J Belsky, E Melhuish, J Barnes, AH Leyland, H Romaniuk, ‘Effects of Sure Start local programmes on children and families: early findings from a quasi-experimental, cross sectional study’, British Medical Journal 2006

(5) J Belsky, E Melhuish, J Barnes, AH Leyland and the National Evaluation of Sure Start Research Team, ‘Effects of fully-established Sure Start local programmes on 3-year-old children and their families living in England: a quasi-experimental observational study’, The Lancet, Vol 372, 8 November 2008

(6) Graham V Vimpani, ‘Sure Start: Reflections from Down Under’, Child: Care, Health and Development, 28, 4, 2002 pp281-287

(7) Karen Clarke ‘Childhood, parenting and early intervention: A critical examination of the Sure Start national programme’, Critical Social Policy Vol 26 (4), 2006, pp699-721

(8) Peter Moss, ‘Sure Start’, Journal of Education Policy, Vol. 19, No. 5, 2004, pp631-634

The trouble with family policy

‘[I]t is quite wrong to conclude that families are in decline. This is not my experience and authoritative, independent evidence, some of which is presented in this Paper, shows what I believe most people know for themselves: that all families have their ups and downs, but most people do the best they can to sustain family life for the benefit of their children, sometimes in the face of adversity.’ (Ed Balls, UK secretary of state for children, schools and families, ‘Support for All’ Green Paper, January 2010.)

Just when you think New Labour has lost its capacity for surprise, the children’s minister Ed Balls comes out with a statement so straightforward, humane and intuitively correct that it takes your breath away. Parents are not all rubbish, families are not all breaking down, and most people love their children and do their best to muddle through.

But then he goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid like: ‘This government’s conviction is that it is both possible and necessary to develop policies to support all families without intruding into the privacy of family life.’ Stupid because family policy, to a greater or lesser extent, has always intruded into the privacy of family life. And also profoundly dishonest. The family policy developed by New Labour has been all about making a concerted attack on the privacy of family life. It claims to be about ‘supporting families’; in reality, it tears them apart.

Four questions about New Labour’s family policy

When the New Labour government came to power in 1997, it catapulted family policy to the top of the political agenda. The 1998 consultation document Supporting Families was explicit in its explanation as to why the privacy of the family was a problem, and why the solution was greater government intervention. The foreword, by then home secretary Jack Straw, noted that families are still important – ‘the foundation on which our communities, our society and our country are built’ – but that they are also ‘under considerable stress’. He went on to acknowledge that families ‘do not want to be lectured or hectored, least of all by politicians’ – yet claimed that they did want a friendly kind of intervention by the state:

‘[W]hat families - all families - have a right to expect from government is support… [They] want clear advice to be available when they need it on everything from their children’s health to their own role as parents.’

The argument behind Supporting Families was that families are in crisis, and that previous governments had neglected their responsibilities by hiding behind the cloak of the privacy of the family. A government wedded to New Labour’s vision of ‘social inclusion’ and models of behavioural conformity intended to play a more explicit role in engaging with families at the level of everyday life, particularly in relation to child-rearing. Parenting classes were the best known of these initiatives, resulting in the creation of a whole new cadre of ‘parent trainers’, given official status in 2007 by the launch of the government’s £30million National Academy for Parenting Practitioners.

The first question to raise about the agenda behind Supporting Families is whether it was parents who wanted ‘clear advice’ from the government on ‘everything from their children’s health to their own role as parents’ – or whether the government had decided that it needed to dispense this advice. Certainly, the provision of parenting classes and the like has not sparked major rebellion amongst parents, and some parents have actively welcomed these initiatives. But New Labour was not elected on the basis that it would really help parents to decide what food to put in their children’s lunchboxes, and desperate mums and dads have not been invading Downing Street demanding clearer parenting advice from the prime minister. Whatever the impetus behind Supporting Families, it cannot be understood in terms of a response to a clear demand from families themselves.

The second question about Supporting Families is where the ‘supporting’ stops and the coercion begins. The support to families offered by New Labour was largely of a therapeutic kind, to do with ‘information’, advice and training in ‘parenting skills’, rather than material provision or financial help. In this vein, alongside the offer of voluntary parenting classes came more directly coercive initiatives such as Parenting Orders and other mechanisms designed to make ‘hard to reach’ parents engage with the state if they did not do so of their own accord. In 2005, as part of the launch of the government’s ‘Respect’ agenda to tackle antisocial behaviour, then prime minister Tony Blair spelt out just how much his government had done to transform respect for the privacy of the family into thinly veiled contempt.

A few years previously, Blair said, the talk of ‘parenting orders and parenting classes and support for people as parents… would have either seemed somewhat bizarre or dangerous, and indeed there are still people who see this [as] an aspect of the nanny state [and believe we are] interfering with the rights of the individual’. But, he continued:

‘[T]he point is this, we need to give people that support, and we need to do that particularly in circumstances where if we don’t give people that support, and also put pressure on them to face up to their responsibilities as a parent, they end up having an impact on the whole of their local community. So it is not something we can just say, well, that is just up to you as to whether you do this properly or don’t do it properly, because unfortunately the way that you do it makes a difference to the lives of other people.’

In seven years, the carrot of ‘parenting advice’ offered by the government had hardened into a very definite stick. Through parenting orders, argued Blair, ‘Parents themselves can be forced… to accept support and advice on how to bring discipline and rules to their child’s life’. And while the government had to accept that some parents really did not want this kind of ‘support’, they were to be forced to accept it anyway for their own good: ‘[W]hile most parents on these orders can resent them initially, I think often they grow to value the support they receive, and the vast majority indeed do comply with the order.’

The speed at which the New Labour government’s insistence that it just wanted to hold parents’ hands morphed into a full-on defence of issuing parents with court orders and locking them up if they didn’t comply shows the extent to which a touchy-feely therapeutic dynamic is the flipside of heavy-handed law’n’order. On one hand, the authorities give us friendly advice on healthy eating for children and tell us that ‘Every Parent Matters’ when it comes to our kids’ education; on the other hand, parents of truanting children are sent to jail, and fat kids end up on the child protection register.

The third question is about the sheer amount of family policy developed over the course of the New Labour government. If, as Ed Balls asserts, families are not in decline and most parents are doing a good job in difficult circumstances, why does the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) obsessively churn out documents that appear to respond to the crisis of parenting and tell us what we should be doing better? When I researched my book, Standing Up To Supernanny, I found that the DCSF website listed 28 new documents published in December 2008 alone – and this was not an atypical month. For the family to be subjected to this avalanche of policy interest implies that there must be a problem.

It could be, of course, that Balls’ positive account of the modern family is merely a rhetorical flourish. After all, when Jack Straw said in 1998 that families did not want to be ‘lectured or hectored, least of all by politicians’, this heralded a new era of politicians lecturing and hectoring all of us about everything. A key component of therapy culture is the way that subservience to ‘advice and support’ is garnered through flattery, and New Labour is certainly skilled in using these techniques, promoting the message that the reason it wants to help parents is because we are trying so hard. It could also be that Balls is positive about the family to indicate just what his government has done to support it: the second paragraph of his foreword is dedicated to detailing the measures New Labour has taken to ‘support children and families’ over the past 12 years, and to dwell on continuing problems would be a fairly stark admission of defeat.

PR techniques aside, though, the statement that the family is not in decline gives an important clue to the dynamic behind family policy today. What has motivated politicians to burrow ever deeper into the everyday ups and downs of family life is not the crisis of the family so much as the crisis of politics. In an era offering no grand political visions or social alternatives, social policy has come to adopt an increasingly individualised focus. Discussions about healthcare focus on individuals’ lifestyles – their drinking, smoking, eating and exercise habits – while any grander vision for sorting out the National Health Service is conspicuous by its absence. Politicians are obsessed with education, but their big idea is one that obsesses over personalised learning strategies for individual children, and engaging these children’s own parents in the project of their education.

It was striking, in the first televised debate between the leaders of the British political parties, that the crisis of care for the elderly was merely recognised by all as a really difficult issue, and the only thing the party leaders could offer by way of a solution was the idea that unpaid carers (that is, family members) should have access to one week’s respite care per year. This paltry policy response indicates the lack of social vision shared by all three party leaders, and also their reluctance to engage in ‘big state’ solutions to issues of care, socialisation and education. This relates to the fourth, and most important, question about the kind of family policy dominating the political agenda today: whether it supports and helps families, or undermines them and corrodes their autonomy.

Explicit family policy

New Labour’s approach to family policy was novel, not because it was the first time a government had intervened in family life, but because of the explicit character of this intervention and the therapeutic form that it took. The position traditionally held by the family in modern capitalist society has been one in which its role has largely been taken for granted. The state has related to the family through other institutions, such as the education system and the health service, and has had the power to play a more directly interventionist role in terms of child protection, through social services. Those families engaged with the welfare system have, for the past half-century, been forced to cede some of their privacy and autonomy in return for financial or housing support from the state.

But until New Labour, the idea that all families should be directly engaged with the state did not have great purchase. From politicians’ point of view, one of the major benefits of the family is that it has historically absorbed and contained many of the pressures that otherwise would be placed upon society at large, from child-rearing to individuals’ ill-health. If the state were to undermine or appropriate the family’s ability to absorb these pressures privately, a huge extra responsibility would be created for the state: as was clearly recognised in the party leaders’ discussion of elder-care. Therefore it was in the interest of society in general to maintain a private sphere of life, which operated according to its own informal rules and relationships, and which had its own dynamic.

Over the course of the past century, the privatised character of the family attracted criticism from a number of sources. As I explain at length in a previous essay, ‘Why we need a parents’ liberation movement’, the left-wing critique of the family focused on the way that privatising childcare and domestic work formed the basis of women’s oppression, and progressive arguments were made about the liberating potential of socialising these activities. As such political ideals waned, a cultural critique of the family came to the fore, heavily influenced by the radical feminist movement, which saw the problem with the family in terms of male power and men’s behaviour leading to the abuse of women and children, and called for greater state intervention in the family to prevent domestic violence and child abuse.

The policy impact of this critique is clear in the landmark inquiries into cases of serious child abuse within the family, from the 1974 Maria Colwell inquiry to the 1985 Jasmine Beckford inquiry to the 2003 inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié. At each stage of this process, the argument was made that the privacy of the family allowed for terrible atrocities to take place ‘behind closed doors’, and that more should be done by the state to monitor and regulate family life.

The child protection dynamic was important in gradually increasing the state’s interest in, and surveillance of, family life in the latter part of the twentieth century. However, this was not a straightforward process. The 1988 inquiry into the Cleveland affair, where over 100 children were removed from their families by professionals on (erroneous) suspicion of sexual abuse, and the 1992 Orkney Inquiry, where children were removed from their homes because of (unfounded) suspicions of organised sexual abuse, turned the spotlight away from abusive parents on to the trauma and injustice caused by an over-zealous state taking children away from their parents.

Revelations about abusive practices carried out in state-run children’s homes cast further doubt on the idea that the state could provide a kinder, safer alternative to child-rearing than could the family. This ambivalence about the ability of the state to protect children from abuse has continued in recent years, starkly indicated by the criticisms levelled at Haringey council in relation to the deaths of Victoria Climbié in 2000 and ‘Baby P’ in 2007.

Unfortunately, the fact that the state has been exposed as an imperfect carer of children has not meant that the family is positively extolled as an alternative. The key outcome of the high-profile child abuse inquiries highlighted here is that both the family and state-run institutions are now viewed as sites of potential damage to children’s wellbeing. The privacy of the family is opened up to question because of what might go on ‘behind closed doors’ – but the state fights shy of directly appropriating the role of parents, for fear of exposing its own weaknesses on this front.

The upshot is a strategy of professionalising parents, in which the authorities play a more directly interventionist role within the family through working with parents on the minutiae of child-rearing. This is expressed through the use of a new, and expanding, vocabulary employed by officials to describe parents: as ‘carers’, ‘edu-carers’ and ‘partners’ with the state in the project of child-rearing.

Many critics of the current trend towards increasing state intervention into family life articulate their concerns through reference to an increasingly authoritarian ‘nanny state’. But the direction of contemporary family policy is better understood not as the authorities trying to direct family life, but as the state trying to insinuate itself into family relationships. It is not the product of over-confident social policymakers who are making a political argument that they can do a better job than parents; rather it is the consequence of policymakers’ awareness of being out of touch and out of control, attempting to connect with broader society through involving themselves in the informal sphere of the family.

‘Supporting families’ – like a rope supports a hanging man

The impetus behind contemporary family policy is not motivated by a crisis of the family, but by a crisis of politics. In the absence of a political vision about how to organise society as a whole, politicians are attempting to get a handle on social policy by engaging with people at an increasingly intimate level, insinuating themselves into pre-political relations of authority and care. This has profound consequences for the family, both at the level of its institutional role and the lived reality of family life.

It should be recognised that family policy does not work. Politicians can try to prescribe child-rearing methods, but the ebb and flow of family life means that, whatever their intentions, everybody ends up just muddling through somehow. So even if it were true that children read to for a certain number of minutes each night by their parents were more likely to turn into high-achieving adults, or that children fed a particular diet were less likely to be hyperactive or obese, or that children disciplined according to ‘firm but fair’ reasoning rather than shouting or smacking were less likely to engage in antisocial behaviour, such practices simply cannot be willed into existence by a policy document and an official helpline. The fact that these deterministic assumptions are not true, combined with the amount of money and energy that has been thrown into creating policy on the basis of such rigid attachments to particular parenting practices, means that we can criticise contemporary family policy for being a shocking waste of public resources.

However, it is not simply a question of wasting resources. Family policy actively compounds the problems it seeks to tackle, by undermining the already precarious foundations upon which family life is conducted. As Ed Balls asserts, it is not the case that families are somehow failing. For all the tensions and difficulties apparent in the modern family, this remains a space in which parents continue to love, care for and socialise their children, and individuals nurture each other. But as the privacy of the family becomes gradually undermined by a policy dynamic aiming to bring individual family members into a more direct relationship of monitoring and accountability by the state, the family’s ability to continue to play its taken-for-granted role becomes gradually corroded.

The form this process takes is one of knock-on effects. For example, parents who are constantly encouraged to question their ability to make decisions about what their children should eat become less confident and more dependent upon official advice and intervention in these decisions. When the state starts providing breakfast clubs in schools on the grounds that it cannot be assumed that children eat a decent breakfast at the start of the school day, this has a subtle effect on the working of the family relationship – both in terms of whose responsibility breakfast is assumed to be, and the way that households begin the school day.

Similarly, when the state incites parents to become ‘edu-carers’, and take on board more personal responsibility for their children’s education, this creates new tensions between parents and the teaching profession, where the responsibility for a child’s literacy levels, or emotional wellbeing, becomes blurred. And on it goes.

The problem is not that, taken one by one and on its own terms, every family policy measure is a bad one. Many families, including my own, have benefited from initiatives such as breakfast clubs in schools or the (small) part-funding of pre-school childcare, which did not exist under previous governments. Nor is this a problem of New Labour alone. While I have focused here on policy developments over the past 13 years of a New Labour government, it should be remembered that many of New Labour’s ideas had been articulated and developed in the US first.

In relation to the forthcoming General Election, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats have no intention of taking a different approach to the family: all parties are fighting over the same terrain of putting families at the top of the political agenda, and arguing for the need to play a more directly interventionist role in the early years of a child’s life. The new politics of the family, pioneered in the UK by New Labour, is endorsed across party lines.

And the problem is not that contemporary family policy is necessarily, or directly, having a negative impact on people’s experience of life with children. It has been persuasively argued by some academics and commentators that the cultural expectation upon parents to conform to ever-higher and more rigid ideals of ‘good parenting’ are resulting in a decline of parental confidence and an increase in anxiety, and that this is not a happy story for parents or children (1). It is also the case that parents often resent being bossed around by politicians.

But just as people are disengaged from politics in general, they are often distant from, and cynical about, the dictates of family policy – and among those who are not, many welcome certain forms of therapeutic intervention by the state. To put it another way: most people don’t go to parenting classes, and many of those who do rather like them.

As an argument against modern family policy, to say that it is unpopular or unpleasant does not work. Moreover, there is a lot about family life today that is arguably much better and more liberating than was the case in the 1950s or 1970s: for example, the rise in material living standards and the acceptance of working mothers. There was no Golden Age of the family, and there is no convincing argument for going ‘backwards’.

All that said, the current direction of family policy poses big problems both for the family as an institution, and for individuals’ lived experiences. The logic of policy developments, from Supporting Families to Support for All to whatever a Conservative government might come up with, is that the family is expected to play its traditional role of raising children and nurturing individuals in a context where this role is continually questioned and undermined. The family is not, as it once was, idealised as a haven in a heartless world: it is presented as the site for all sorts of problems and abuses, and tolerated by a political vision that sees the role of policy in terms of helping families to be less bad.

The lack of an ideal of the family provides for a crisis of meaning at the level of those living through it. This exacerbates the tensions within the family between individuals’ roles, as ‘unpaid carers’ of children, spouses and other kin, and their experiences, where individuals are encouraged to worry about the limitations their caring roles have placed upon ‘their own lives’ - and at the same time made to feel that they are not carrying out their caring roles sufficiently well. People can, and do, absorb these tensions to a certain degree – but it comes as little surprise when they then decide that they want out, and attempt to throw the responsibility for their children’s diets or their mother’s care back upon the state.

The consequence of this dynamic is that the informal relations of family life become gradually disorganised and formalised. Parents are discouraged from following their instincts and relying on their friends and family for support, and are oriented instead towards officially sanctioned child-rearing methods and sources of advice. This creates a sense of dependence upon the authorities, and incites adults to question, not only how they are looking after their children or elderly relatives, but why they should be doing it at all. In this sense, the trajectory of family policy is destructive of the most fundamental of human relationships – that between parents and children.

If politicians genuinely wanted to support families, their best bet would be simply to leave us alone. Or, as the American cultural historian Christopher Lasch put it back in 1997, we should have ‘nothing to do with the official search for a national policy on families. What the family needs is a policy on officials, designed to keep them in their place.’ (2)

Jennie Bristow is editor of Parents With Attitude. She is author of Standing Up To Supernanny, and co-author of Licensed to Hug. Email Jennie .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Many of the ideas in this essay have been developed in recent discussions with members of the Institute of Ideas Parents’ Forum. Thanks to Jane Sandeman and the other forum members for continuing to pursue these issues. This article was first published on spiked.

(1) See, for example, Paranoid Parenting, by Frank Furedi, 2001; The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, by Sharon Hays, 1996); Perfect Madness, by Judith Warner, 2006.

(2) Women and the Common Life, by Christopher Lasch, 1997

Is it OK to leave your baby to cry?

There’s nothing quite so vicious as self-styled parenting experts tearing each other apart. This week, the ‘child-centred parenting’ guru Penelope Leach lays into the ‘controlled crying’ technique popularised by the Queen of Routine, Gina Ford. Leach says that leaving babies to cry themselves to sleep damages their brains. Apparently, scientists using saliva swab tests have measured high levels of the stress hormone cortisol in babies who are left to cry; which according to neurobiologists (according to Leach) are ‘toxic’ to the developing brain.

I’m irritated by the way neuroscience always crops up in relation to child-rearing techniques these days – as though our babies are not little people at all, but blobs of grey matter just waiting to be ‘hard-wired’ by the right kind of parental intervention. This pretends that there is no room for questioning the parenting method du jour, because ‘science proves it’ and most of us aren’t scientists who could dispute the findings. Well, I’m rather glad that we’re not all scientists – and our kids aren’t experiments, either.

Aside from the dubious use of scientific claims, what is the problem with ‘controlled crying’? Admittedly, I never used the method myself, being too disorganised, weak-willed and addled by having a baby – and then another – to do more than stumble blindly from one whinge to another. The result? Five years of sleep-deprived chaos. Those of my friends who practised controlled crying report three days of hell (for them, not the child – nobody normal likes to hear their baby scream), followed by a baby who would will sleep through the night, allowing the parents to regain some time, sleep and sanity. These are loving parents, and their kids seem fine to me. I’m not saying that controlled crying is the best method – I don’t think there is one – but I can’t see anything actually wrong with it.

The basis of Leach’s objections seems to be more philosophical than neuroscientific. Controlled crying is a clear example of parents exerting their authority over their child, in a way that directly opposes the ‘child-centred’ approach. But as parents, we assert our authority over our kids every day of their childhoods, for the very good reason that children do not know what is best for them. Babies want to stick their fingers in electric sockets, toddlers don’t like eating their greens, and school-age kids don’t want to do their homework. Whatever techniques parents use to impose their will on their children, the principle that they should do this is surely right – otherwise children would not survive, let alone flourish. That this basic task of parenthood is being thrown into question is far more troubling than the hypothetical consequences of letting a baby wail.

Jennie Bristow is author of Standing Up To Supernanny (Imprint Academic 2009). This article was first published in the Sunday Herald, 25 April 2010.

The ‘Mumsnet election’ doesn’t get my vote

The General Election has gained this moniker not because it is actually taking place on social networking sites (though it would come as little surprise if it did), but because both the main contenders have young families (David Cameron’s expanding by the day); because both the main parties are obsessed with family policy; because women of a certain age have been targeted as important voters; and because the prime minister, Gordon Brown, has fallen quite soppily in love with the website Mumsnet, describing it as ‘one of the great British institutions’ that is ‘changing the way Britain lives’, and standing at the forefront of a ‘social revolution’.

Given all this, you might think that parents might welcome the chance to be centre stage, and to Have Our Say about the Things That Matter To Us. Given that we spend much of our lives feeling benighted, ignored, and blamed for all the problems of the world - which apparently derive directly from the way that we bring up our children - the opportunity to have an open, political debate about the role of family policy and the pressures facing modern family life would indeed be very welcome. But this ‘Mumsnet election’ speaks to the anti-political character of policymakers’ obsession with the family, and liberating families from some of the pressures of modern parenting culture is not an item on anybody’s agenda.

In an insightful column, Times columnist Libby Purves has criticised the very idea that politicians should be fighting over the mummy vote. Having a young family, she argues, doesn’t make you a better person than anyone else. To the extent that it makes you seem more engaged in social and political life, this is down to what she describes as ‘transferred selfishness’ – the fact that you would do anything for your kids, and therefore fight harder for resources than you might for yourself. Because you’re doing it for the sake of the children, this self-interest takes on the veneer of altruism – as Zoe Williams pointed out in her contribution to Standing Up To Supernanny, the idea that ‘I want the best for my child’ seems kind of saintly and uncontroversial, even though it is really only a way of saying ‘I want the best for myself’.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting the best for your child – or, indeed, for yourself. Historically, this is what has driven society forwards and given politics its vibrancy. But in today’s politically barren culture, the ‘best for my child’ aspiration does not generally lead to a generational optimism, a desire to create the Good Society now and in the future. It tends to take the form of a narrow-minded, tunnel-visioned aggression, as parents fight over getting a place in the good school, a place for their child on the football team, or additional educational resources.

On a personal level, it is understandable that parents find themselves having to play this game. To us, our own children are more special than anybody else’s, and you can’t just sit back and watch in this puppy-eat-puppy world. At the level of a quasi-political sentiment, though, parents fighting against non-parents, and indeed other parents, for limited resources is a pretty scary phenomenon, which exacerbates divisiveness and special pleading. To run society, to create policy, one needs to be able to think more broadly than about what might be immediately good for one’s own family and personal life. The notion of a ‘Mumsnet election’ challenges even this idea of thinking broadly, and engaging in genuine politics.

Gordon Brown hails Mumsnet as creating a ‘social revolution’ presumably because he sees the website as a forum in which people engage with each other around issues that affect their lives. But chatting about products, confessing to dodgy discipline habits, and swapping opinions about the issues of the day, from the perspective of a mother sitting in front of her computer who has come to the website because she has kids, does not provide a means to take parents out of their immediate, everyday concerns. It gives them a space to hang out with each other (a good thing), and elevates these immediate, everyday concerns to the status of political debate (a very bad thing).

I should stress – as a hardened non-Mumsnetter – that the reason for the elevation of the petty and the personal is not the fault of social networking sites. It is the result of the degradation of politics. Politicians’ obsessive focus on parenting, and the manic writing of policy documents designed to engage with the modern family, has not arisen because today’s parents really want and need a daily official update on how to bring up their kids. It is more about an attempt to find a role for policy when large-scale social solutions seem no longer convincing, and attempting to engage with a public that seems increasingly distant and disengaged.

Parents, because they care about their kids, and because they interact daily with public services, have come to be seen as an important focus for political connection. But the form of this connection is self-consciously not political, in terms of a debate about social problems and broad policy objectives. Rather, it increasingly attempts to connect with parents at a pre-political level: to do with direct concerns about their own children’s health or educational attainment, to do with fears about the harms that might befall their children from other people, and keying into parents’ feelings of inadequacy about how they are raising their kids. These are the kind of discussions that have made Mumsnet famous, and they are exactly the kind of discussions that politicians and policymakers want to be having with parents during the forthcoming Mumsnet election.

The trouble is that for politicians, attempting to engage with parents in the way of a therapist, or commercial service provider, or even online ‘friend’, will not revitalise politics – and even as a short-term measure, it will not provide the popularity boost that they seek. Politicians can try to relate to people as individuals, but they cannot satisfy individual desires.

This point was starkly made by Times journalist Rachel Sylvester, complaining about the way that funding has been slashed for the local Sure Start project that her children attend because the uptake of the scheme is seen to be ‘too middle-class’. Current family and education policy is built around the ‘active consumer’ as the ideal kind of parent – one who will engage with services, make a heavy emotional investment and time commitment in his or her child’s education, and so on. But inciting parents to demand more and more for their own family leads to disenchantment, then resentment, when these demands cannot be met by limited public resources.

For parents, the prospect of putting mums and dads even more at the centre of political debate is frankly grim. While we might be flattered that politicians want to talk to us, the past decade or so indicates that our opinions tend to be solicited primarily to find more effective ways of telling us what to do. The more the importance of parents and ‘parenting’ is talked up, the greater the justification is seen to be for policy that highlights our alleged deficiencies in how we love and relate to our children. If it’s a political debate you want, the ‘Mumsnet election’ is not going to deliver.

Jennie Bristow is the editor of Parents With Attitude, author of Standing Up To Supernanny, and co-author of Licensed to Hug. Email Jennie .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Jennie writes the ‘Guide to Subversive Parenting’ column on spiked, where this article first appeared.

The great myth of me-time

Have you ever felt, as you peel the Play-Doh off the sofa for the fourth time in a day, that what you really need, as a parent, is more time for yourself? A little “me-time”: the chance to relax in a bubble bath; catch up on your book, and open a bottle of pinot noir.

While researching my book Standing up to Supernanny, I talked to dozens of parents bubbling with frustration and exhaustion at trying to live up to the expectations of modern parenting — feeding the children the right things, taking them to the right activities, being the “right kind” of mother or father. All of them felt that they needed more me-time. Charlotte, 33, the mother of five-year-old Annabelle and three-year-old Imogen, was typical. “I feel like I’m on a treadmill,” she told me. “We have this ridiculously regimented plan for weekdays. There is an enormous family organiser in the kitchen and planning our lives is like a military operation.”

What’s wrong with our parenting culture that this need for time out has become all encompassing? On 16 February, the sociologist Professor Frank Furedi and the children’s author Anthony Horowitz joined academics and policy-makers at a seminar on Changing Parenting Culture at the British Library in London to unravel this question. Speakers will identify a host of problems with our up-tight, risk-obsessed, parent-blaming culture. The big question, though, is how we might resolve these issues: a tricky task when the plethora of advice on how to deal with the pressures of bringing up children can make things worse.

One consequence is that parents, and particularly mothers, experience a lack of time to be themselves. In response, official literature and the popular media groans with advice about why mothers should carve out space free from the pressures of work and family. The suggestions about how to do that are familiar — have a bubble bath, join the gym, organise a mini-break. As families we are used to being tempted by the ultimate relaxing break, one that keeps children busy and gives exhausted parents time to themselves: a holiday at Center Parcs, for example, might offer activities for the children so that parents can spend a soothing day in the spa. But is more me-time what the modern mother really wants or needs?

It is true that there is a relentlessness to life with young children that, before having children, you can barely imagine. My lovely (demanding, infuriating) daughters are 5 and 3, and I am a huge fan of mini-breaks, long baths and having time when the children are out of sight and out of mind. I am also 100 per cent committed to the idea of having childcare while you work or go out. But there is something disturbing about the way in which family life has become so intensely pressurised that parents feel they need somehow to liberate themselves from its demands — or at least, to be given time off for good behaviour. How has it come to this?

We are continually told that parenting is the most important job in the world, and everyone from Channel 4’s Supernanny to the Government issues a stream of advice about how to do it. We are told what we should feed our children (home-cooked vegetables, not frozen chips), how we should discipline them (naughty step, not smacking or shouting) and how we should spend our time with them (reading stories, not slumping in front of the TV). This plethora of information implies that the “good parent” does not just organise family life according to what seems best for everybody but worries about what is best for the child and works hard to fulfil those needs. And this is done regardless of the effect on the parents’ own time, money or state of mind.

One consequence of this cult of so-called child-centred parenting is a panicky sense of inadequacy. “Much of the time, I feel that I’m just about good enough — a good enough mother and a good enough employee,” says Rachel, 34, a lawyer and mother of Abigail, 4, and Zoe, 1. “Then something happens — one of the children gets sick when I have a deadline to meet at work — and it all falls apart, making me feel like a massive fraud.”

With these competing demands, perhaps it is not surprising that parents are trying to claw back some time and head-space for themselves. Unfortunately, the demand for me-time only fuels the sense that we are at loggerheads with our children. The idea that “I need more time for me” implies a conflict of interest between parents and children: an us and them situation in which time needs to be consciously divided into time “for them” and time “for me”.

Modern parenting culture dislocates us from ourselves and our children, so that we experience parenting as an act put on to live up to a set of expectations that we find increasingly unworkable and bizarre. This has undermined our authority over our children and our confidence in ourselves.

“Our culture infantilises parents, by presenting parenting as a job that is far too difficult and important to be left to mere mums and dads,” says Professor Furedi. “By encouraging parents to try to bring up their children according to expert advice, the notion of adult authority is thrown into question. Adults aren’t trusted to know what is best for their families as a whole — instead they are supposed to second-guess what the rules say they should be doing for the sake of their children.”

In this sense, our tendency to organise our lives around what we think our children want or need seems to be not about the children at all. It’s more about an adult identity crisis, where we have become nervous about saying that, actually, we are the grown-ups in this relationship, and what matters is that we do things that are good for the family as a whole. Or, as Rachel suggests, that we firmly tell our children: “No, we’re not going to the park, we’re going to B&Q, but we’ll try to make it fun.”

Fun or not, DIY, trailing round the supermarket, tidying the house and all those other domestic jobs are things that families need to do to get by; and children need to understand that and take part. But so ingrained has the idea become that we should organise our lives around our children that parents feel guilty about involving their kids in boring chores, or plonking them in front of the TV to give the adults time to clean the bathroom.

Some parenting experts have become alarmed by the excesses of “child-centred parenting”, and are warning that, despite the label, this approach to raising children is no good for the kids themselves.

Concerns about helicopter parents who supervise every activity have added to fears that the risk-averse message of modern parenting culture is creating a generation of cotton-wool kids without the skills needed to manage the physical and emotional challenges of everyday life.

The idea that the best way to bring up children is actively to employ strategies of “benign neglect” is also gaining ground, based on the recognition that some boredom is actually good for children, encouraging them to create their own entertainment and sense of self-sufficiency.

But the big problem with the way that child-centredness is pitched against me-time is its divisiveness. Presenting the interests of children and adults as being in conflict undermines the reality of the family as a unit, in which adults and children have to work together to muddle through life.

Linda Blair, a clinical psychologist, says: “One of the most important things to remember as a parent is that it is from you that children create their picture of what it is like to be an adult. So it becomes about thinking, ‘How do I weave my life into a pattern that is responsible but is also fun, and expresses my individuality?’ Parents need to be able to think not just about, ‘What’s besieging me?’ but, ‘What do I want to do?’ within the bigger picture.”

The trouble is that it is hard to opt out of cultural expectations and practices. When the consensus seems to be that parents should be focusing on doing everything for their children, and doing it on their own, it becomes hard to imagine an alternative. As a result we end up running ourselves ragged, then bursting into tears and hiding in the bath for a paltry hour’s me-time.

Rather than taking everything upon ourselves and then feeling trapped, we could look for ways to share the burdens and the enjoyment of family life. If we are confident that we can and should decide what’s best for our families, there is nothing to stop us from organising our children’s lives around our diaries, rather than our lives around theirs. We should stop feeling guilty about paid-for childcare, and we could be less defensive about sharing our family time with other families and pooling childcare responsibilities.

We do not need to liberate ourselves from our families — we can cope with the practical demands of raising children. What we do need is to free parents and children from the culture of child-centredness and parent-blaming, which sets ridiculous standards for family life and makes it everybody’s business but our own.

We should reclaim the sense of our families as a place where we can be ourselves, warts and all — rather than somewhere that we struggle to be the “perfect parent”, and then have to escape in order to “be me”.

How to take control

Do Look for opportunities to share time and childcare with friends.

Don’t Obsess about “quality time” with your kids — children love having other adults and children in their lives.

Do Recognise that there are some things that are fun for children and not for adults — and vice versa.

Don’t Feel guilty. Family life is about muddling through — and it’s good for children to know that.

Do Be realistic about the practical demands on parents. If mothers need to work, children need to go to childcare. So what?

Standing up to Supernanny, by Jennie Bristow (Societas); £8.95.

This article first appeared in The Times (London), 16 February 2010.

‘We’re afraid of our kids, and we’re afraid for them’

‘A child should be able to make up his or her own mind about an adult they are meeting without that adult having to wave a government-stamped piece of paper. The idea that the government can come in to the most fundamental of relationships – between an adult and a child – and somehow manipulate it or try to keep it safe is abhorrent, it’s an outrage.’

Anthony Horowitz, the celebrated children’s author and creator of the hugely successful ‘Alex Rider’ teenage spy novels, is a passionate critic of the UK’s mass vetting scheme. Alongside Anne Fine and Philip Pullman (the ‘wise elder of children’s literature’), Horowitz has been lambasting the New Labour government for demanding that children’s authors obtain a licence, in the form of a check by the Criminal Records Bureau, before they go into schools to talk to children about their books. And, shortly before Christmas, in a widely reported government ‘U-turn’, the authors won the battle – didn’t they?

‘It is not a U-turn! What they have done is that they have reacted to the most vociferous people – for example children’s authors who won’t visit schools – and said, “all right, fine”. But all the attempts to fix this have only made it worse, because they’ve muddied the waters. Now it’s unclear, for example, if a parent has to be vetted before giving another child a lift home from school. I’m not sure about the answer to that one – are you? Do you know?’

I admit that I don’t – even though I probably should. In 2008, I co-authored, with Frank Furedi, a pamphlet titled Licensed to Hug, which examined the destructive impact of the mass vetting scheme on relations between adults and children, particularly in the context of community volunteering. (‘It’s a wonderful book’, says Horowitz – so there’s a recommendation for you.) Licensed to Hug discusses the way that adults have been tacitly discouraged from volunteering to help raise the younger generation, by the assumption that anybody who wants to spend time with kids should be assumed to be a paedophile until the police check ‘proves’ otherwise.

Furedi and I also found how complicated and confusing the vetting system was for those well-meaning souls who wanted to help out – one young woman complained that she needed five different CRB checks in order to help out with Girl Guides, a rape crisis centre, a music centre and part-time nannying work. But that was before the establishment of the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) with its ‘vetting database’, and the convolutions and contortions introduced by policymakers in recent months about how much time somebody needs to spend with a child under what circumstances in order for vetting to be mandatory. The Manifesto Club does a good job of unravelling all this in its briefing document, here.

People are really confused. And rather than leading to a relaxation of the laws now governing adult-child contact, reported ‘U-turns’ have fostered a situation in which it seems that people are increasingly acting pre-emptively – getting themselves and fellow volunteers police-checked just in case they need to be. It’s like London bus lanes, says Horowitz: ‘nobody ever travels in bus lanes because they’re too unsure of when the lane is active and when it isn’t – it’s that sort of thinking.’ The situation may be better for children’s authors – but ‘the children’s authors who spoke out against this were not doing it because they were more important or special than a dinner lady or a plumber or whatever – we were genuinely upset by all the stuff that went around this.’ And that’s really where things get interesting.

‘It just seemed so insulting’

Horowitz admits that the first impulse that provoked him to speak out against the vetting scheme was ‘a sense of personal outrage – it just seemed so insulting’. Particularly, he explains, as he had spent 15 years visiting schools as part of the attempt to promote literacy. ‘I was even an ambassador for the government on its National Year of Reading [in 2008]. How do you follow that by saying to your ambassador, “actually we need to have second thoughts about you, and check on your criminal background, to make sure that the work you were doing last year wasn’t for other motives”?’

The demand that authors be CRB-checked ‘also struck me as blindingly stupid because, when I spoke in a school to 1,000 children with 10 or 20 teachers around on a stage, the chances of anything untoward happening were nil’. Vetting, he points out, would not have prevented the Soham murders – when in 2002 Ian Huntley killed the 10-year-old girls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman – and it did not prevent the recent case of the (vetted) nursery worker in Plymouth jailed for abusing the children in her care. And Horowitz was livid that Anthony Browne, the Children’s Laureate, ‘on his first public appearance should take the side of the government against children’s authors’, by supporting the case for vetting. Horowitz knows and admires Browne: nonetheless, ‘I thought that was actually disgusting’.

But as the children’s authors’ campaign rolled ahead, Horowitz became increasingly disturbed by the wider context of the vetting scheme. ‘One of my main concerns is the poisoning of how we see ourselves as people, as human beings’, he says. Referring to Anthony Browne’s argument that ‘if a scheme such as this saves the life of one child, then it’s all right’, Horowitz says:

‘But it isn’t, that’s exactly the point. Of course one doesn’t want a child to be abused. But if you get into the way of thinking that it is possible to prevent anything bad ever happening to children you will end up in a society where nobody will ever leave their rooms, because that is the ultimate end of it, isn’t it? You wrap them in cotton wool, you sit them down in a chair, you inject them with vitamins to make sure they’re healthy, and that’s it. That’s the reductio ad absurdum of that particular argument. And that’s what I think Anthony couldn’t grasp – that a) it wouldn’t prevent harm and b) you cannot legislate against harm.’

In this, Horowitz hits on the central contradiction of the national mass vetting scheme. It is motivated by a desire to keep children safe – albeit with an obsessive, unrealisable goal of preventing all bad things from happening, ever. Yet at the same time, the very people who can protect children from harm, simply by behaving like adults, are treated with suspicion because they are adults and discouraged from exercising their generational responsibility. This is the trend that Frank Furedi and I discussed as responsibility aversion, where adults become de-skilled as a consequence of measures that undermine informal trust. Society ends up putting its faith in paper credentials and technical systems, rather than the time-honoured system of human judgement – and this is bound to fail.

‘We are such an incompetent generation’

‘The paper is more dangerous than anything else in the world because it immediately stops you making judgements for yourself’, says Horowitz. ‘All right, you’ve got a paper to prove it, but all the paper proves is that they’ve never been caught, it doesn’t prove that they haven’t got bad intentions in mind. It is better if these decisions are made by children, if they’re made by teachers and responsible headteachers.’ The vetting scheme, he says, is ‘on a par with so much kneejerk legislation, which is that something horrible happens, you try to fix it, but if you don’t think about what you’re doing you end up doing much more damage even than the original outrage’.

The central damage of the vetting legislation is what it has done to informal relations of trust and judgement between adults and children. But why has this happened? Couldn’t some policymaker somewhere have predicted that meddling with this ‘most fundamental of relationships’ between adult and child in such an officious way would be likely to cause great harm?

‘I have this theory that we are such an incompetent generation, and when it comes to looking after the next generation we are utterly lost’, muses Horowitz. ‘We fear for our children, so if they are going to fall over in a playground, that can’t happen; they can’t go on school expeditions for fear that they will fall into a river or off a mountain or whatever. And yet it seems we are also afraid of our children. That’s the other bizarre thing about the society we live in, that so many newspaper stories are centred on children with ASBOs, or this recent case in Edlington; children who are delinquent, who drink, children who are this, who are that – so we have this terror of the next generation. We are afraid of them, and we are afraid for them.’

This is an ‘odd, odd mix’, says Horowitz – but you could argue that being afraid of our children and afraid for them stems from the same impulse. As adults, we have become unsure of our authority and confused about our role. We see ourselves as posing a great threat to children – hence the national vetting scheme, and the recent introduction of a ‘Sarah’s Law’, named after the murdered eight-year-old Sarah Payne, which will incite parents to check whether their friends and neighbours are convicted paedophiles. But at the same time we lack faith in our children, their ability to manage risks and deal with adversity; so we set ourselves up as their arch protectors in matters of everyday life, increasingly trying to control everything that children do and everybody they get to know.

For Horowitz, the crisis of adult authority manifested today is another consequence of the ‘incompetence’ of his generation. ‘Back in the Sixties we simply demolished all the pillars of society, one after the other, for our own self interest’, he explains. ‘So we got rid of the church, we got rid of respect for the government, we got rid of the family – all the things that the Conservatives bank on bringing about again but of course they can’t, because once they’ve gone they’ve gone, that’s the problem.’

‘We tore all these things down - and some of them were right to be torn down – after all, one doesn’t oppose gay marriage, we support that – but we didn’t put in their place anything to prop up society. So having got everything we wanted from society, we didn’t rebuild any fences to replace these things. As a result of that we’re now grappling with the problem of the effects of what we’ve done.’

In this outpouring of baby-boomer angst, Horowitz is classically conflicted about the relationship between the progressive trends of the Sixties and the instability that they caused. ‘There are some good things that we did – it is right that women should be able to choose to have an abortion, but it is not right that children should grow up unsupervised and unmonitored and lost’, he says. ‘So it’s difficult.’

Indeed it is difficult, and it is into this swamp of uncertainty that the attempt to control the minutiae of life, through policy and legislation, has taken off. What is refreshing is that, unlike many others of his generation, Horowitz has not responded with a shrug of the shoulders and an acceptance of social control as a necessary evil. Instead, he wants to sort it out. He wants war.

‘We as citizens have become infantilised’

I ask Horowitz to what extent his reaction against the culture of fear surrounding children is informed by the books he writes. The Alex Rider series, published amidst the swell of interest in children’s fiction that followed Harry Potter, catapulted Horowitz to fame. The central character is an orphan who is recruited by MI6 – a 14-year-old teenage spy who single-handedly battles against a load of evil and / or useless adults. Alex Rider is a savvy risk-taker – is this how Horowitz views children, and why he is so loath to over-protect them?

He laughs. ‘When I do this sort of interview, I always have to remind myself that the most dangerous thing in the world is a children’s author on a soap box’, he says. ‘I’m a writer of kids’ stories, I’m not somebody clever. And the Alex Rider books aren’t deep or meaningful or significant or philosophical or political or anything else. They’re straightforward, fast-paced adventure stories that have clicked and caught on. They’re written just with the passion of wanting to tell a story and with no other aim in mind.’

If anything fits in with his views about vetting, it ‘is my belief in young people – kids – whatever you want to call them, it’s so difficult these days to find the right word’. He talks about his belief in ‘the wisdom of children and the fact that children will basically look out for themselves, that they have great resources. Children are our future, it’s as simple as that, and I think you can’t be a children’s writer unless you vaguely believe that.’ But when pushed slightly further, Horowitz confesses:

‘The Alex Rider books were very much inspired by – and it makes me want to groan to say it, but it’s true – the sense of betrayal from Blair and his government. Why is the head of MI6 in the books called Blunt? Blunt is the name of the biggest traitor in British history. Why are all the adults so duplicitous and untrustworthy? It is because we as citizens have become infantilised, we are the children who cannot make decisions for ourselves and therefore need to be vetted and put under the microscope and put on to databases and generally controlled in every way possible, and the adults have become the government who are nonetheless corrupt themselves in some respect, in their way of thinking, and are making terrible mistakes. And so there is that sense of betrayal and being an orphan and being manipulated, lied to, and all the rest of it, and having to look after yourself.’

‘There’s a chill wind around any debate’

This rather unexpected response adds an interesting texture to the conversation that we have been having about the problem with the national vetting scheme. It may also help to indicate why there has been a particular reaction against this piece of legislation, rather than the countless other government initiatives that seek to meddle with and control everyday life.

Twelve years on from the election of the New Labour government, amidst a cloud of disillusionment with Labour and cynicism about politics generally, there is a sense that things have gone too far when the government seeks to prescribe who can give a child a lift home from school or help out with a children’s sports club. Those, like Horowitz, who have a sense of pride in the role they have played in engaging with the younger generation, and who – crucially – are old enough to remember times when it wasn’t like this, have been incited to speak up and act out.

But, as I gently suggest, this ripple of reaction against legislative mania is still remarkably faint. Despite the extent of the damage already caused by the vetting scheme, most people have taken the arguments on board and offer themselves up to be included in the ISA database. When I ask why we don’t object more, he responds:

‘I would go further. Why is there not rioting? Why have people stood by and accepted this so passively? There hasn’t been a decent riot in this country since Dickens’ time – or before that, the last big riots when London was set on fire. I am puzzled not just about why people accept these things, but why there isn’t more civil disobedience. We have become far too acquiescent in our own undoing, in our own submission, in our own subservience, to people who obviously know nothing – or know very little more than we do. There is a sense of fear now in the land, among people, about what they say – you can’t have a conversation with a straight answer, there’s a chill wind around any debate. There is a sense of pulling up the bedcovers and hoping it will all be over soon.’

It seems to me that we’re a long way from riots – and that we probably don’t even need them. If a handful of children’s authors can put the government on the defensive by speaking out against the national vetting scheme, one wonders what would happen if adult volunteers simply refused to offer their personal details up for checking while insisting on continuing to play a role in children’s lives. Things have gone so far that such a deeply responsible act would count as ‘civil disobedience’ – and given the mess that is the national vetting scheme, it could well throw things into further disarray.

But however we do it, we need to strip back the bedcovers and engage in the fight for adult authority and children’s freedom. We may lose our government-sponsored licence to hug, but we will regain our sense of responsibility towards the next generation and the belief in our ability to act like grown-ups.

Anthony Horowitz is speaking on a panel with Frank Furedi on ‘Changing parenting culture: rescuing adult authority in the 21st century’, at the British Library on 16 February. Click here for more information.

Jennie Bristow is editor of Parents With Attitude. She is author of Standing Up To Supernanny, and co-author of Licensed to Hug. (Buy these books from Amazon (UK) here and here.) Email Jennie .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

It’s not true that children never lie

One of the most pernicious prejudices of our time is that adults, given half a chance, will abuse the children in their care.

This is the prejudice that lies behind the UK government’s out-of-control, increasingly unpopular mass vetting scheme, in which adults who want to spend time with, or take responsibility for, children other than their own must first be issued with a licence showing that they have no record of child abuse. It is also the prejudice that lies behind the ‘professional truism or working hypothesis or mantra that “children never lie about abuse”’: the subject of Pat Sikes and Heather Piper’s bold and disturbing investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct in schools.

Of course, some adults do abuse children. Sikes and Piper, along with myself and other critics of the current ‘stranger danger’ hysteria, acknowledge that some adults do terrible things to children and that society should punish and attempt to protect children from these individuals. But the recognition of the reality of child sex abuse is one thing; the overheated obsession with child abuse that characterises today’s society is a different phenomenon altogether. Researching Sex and Lies in the Classroom is a valuable attempt to emphasise that distinction, and work through the process by which trusted, responsible adults – in this case, teachers – can suddenly find themselves barred from school and forbidden to talk to their colleagues, based on nothing more than an adolescent’s claim that ‘he touched me’.

This is an unusual book, for a number of reasons. Few researchers are brave or dogged enough to pursue such a sensitive subject area, and the chapter looking at ‘ethics review procedures, risk and censorship’ gives some idea as to why. Sikes and Piper describe, with palpable frustration, the battles they had to get their study approved by ethics committees, along with their attempt (and ultimate failure) to acquire funding for this piece of research.

The reluctance of others to engage with a study on this subject could scarcely be because of its lack of relevance or importance. Sikes and Piper situate their analysis within the framework of a ‘moral panic’ about child abuse, which has been gathering momentum in Britain and the US since the 1980s. In this context, fears about teachers abusing children, and teachers’ own fears about being accused of abuse, have come to form a significant element of today’s school culture. Teachers seem to have internalised certain practices as common sense, such as avoiding being alone with individual children and being highly conscious of all (non-abusive) physical contact. They express a wariness about their pupils, even while acknowledging a genuine affection for them and commitment to their job.

To bring into the public domain what all those working in education know to be true – that the mere fact of being a teacher makes you vulnerable to arbitrary accusations of abuse, and that the minute an accusation is levelled your life will fall apart – is an important scholarly endeavour with broader policy relevance. But as Sikes and Piper explain, their attempt to get this study off the ground was blocked time and again by committees concerned about the ‘ethics’ of the undertaking: from whether it was legitimate implicitly to question the notion that children never lie to whether the researchers would be putting themselves at risk from contact with abusers or of sensationalised media coverage. The chapter devoted to the study’s difficult beginnings draws out with chilling detail the way that risk-aversion surrounding academic research in general, and the issue of child abuse in particular, leads to censorship – which is then justified ‘out of concern for our [the researchers’] wellbeing’.

Another unusual feature of this research is the way it has dealt with the question of ‘truth and stories’. Although the authors’ focus is on the consequences of allegations of abuse, rather than establishing what had really happened in any particular instance, the issue of ‘the truth’ cannot be avoided. This is particularly difficult because, as Sikes and Piper note, ‘Either way, someone involved, whether the teacher or the child, was putting forward an account and a self-re-presentation that at least one other person affirmed as untrue and inaccurate’.

Partly because of their desire to avoid anyone using their research as an opportunity to construct an identity as a ‘wronged innocent’, and partly because using anonymous quotes from interviewees would not have protected individuals’ confidentiality adequately, Sikes and Piper chose to represent their findings through fiction. Having interviewed several teachers who had been on the receiving end of allegations of abuse, and having received a number of anecdotal stories about other incidents, the authors have put the accounts together and written them up from a number of perspectives: first-person accounts by male teachers accused of abuse; by the wife of a teacher who has received an allegation; and by a teenage girl who has made an allegation. One story is written in the third person, attempting to give the perspective of other school staff and the headteacher when a teacher is alleged to have abused the child.

Does it work, as a presentation? Yes and no. The stories don’t make for quality fiction – much of the dialogue is clunky, some of the names get muddled up, and some of the characterisation makes you wince. Fictionalising accounts is a difficult endeavour for those who don’t normally write, or publish, fiction. On the other hand, the researchers’ engagement in this topic and their open-mindedness to the co-existence of truth and lies within this issue gives some of the stories a believability and subtlety despite their literary limitations.

Through engaging with those on the receiving end of unproven allegations of abuse as human beings, complete with flaws, families and a personal and professional history, Sikes and Piper reveal the magnitude of this problem – whereby ‘a heightened awareness of abusive behaviour can easily switch into an operational expectation of abusive behaviour’. A culture exists that tacitly encourages children to make allegations of abuse, without really understanding what the consequences of such an allegation may be: so if a teenage girl claims that a male teacher touched her breasts because she is angry with him, the procedure is that he will immediately be suspended and the situation taken so seriously that she lacks the space to back down about her claim.

Once the teacher’s behaviour in its totality is examined, as a consequence of an allegation of abuse, the situation becomes very unforgiving of all misdemeanours – not just the physical or sexual ones that may have triggered the allegation. Sikes and Piper illustrate this with a story about a teacher who insults one of his pupils in a discussion about divorce, and calls her a ‘silly cow’: understandably offended, the girl claims (falsely) that he also touched her breasts and tried to kiss her. In the course of the investigation, the teacher admits insulting the girl but denies sexual assault. The story ends mid-way through the case, but we are left with the suspicion that, even if this teacher is found not guilty of the charges for which he is being tried, the verbal insults are enough to mean that his career is effectively over. And that raises the question: are teachers now to be on trial for every single mistake they make?

Few would argue that it is fine for teachers to go round calling their female students ‘silly cows’: this was clearly an inappropriate and immature reaction. But this should not lead to the destruction of a teacher’s entire professional and personal life. Teachers are not perfect human beings – like all other employees, they have bad days and good days, they have personality quirks and personal problems, they may not like all their colleagues or their students. Unlike many other employees, however, a teacher having a bad day cannot skulk behind his computer or easily pull a sickie – teachers have to perform, day in and day out, in front of groups of children or teenagers who often resent being at school, or in that particular class, or being told that their work is not up to scratch.

In this context, it is not hard to imagine that a teacher might occasionally display some less-than-professional behaviour that creates some real resentment on the part of a pupil. Nor is it surprising that the pupil’s reaction may take the form of a slight embellishment – ‘he shouted at me’ becomes ‘he slapped my arm’; ‘he insulted me’ becomes ‘he touched my breasts’. Then if the specific allegation is unproven (difficult enough, because these are classic he said / she said scenarios), the teacher is nonetheless held to account for all his other imperfections. And we have to ask, is this right? Is this how we reward those men and women who have dedicated their adult lives to educating our children – by putting them in a position of such vulnerability to anybody who might have an axe to grind?

Some children and teenagers do suffer abuse at the hands of their teachers; and when that happens, it is of course right that they are listened to and protected, and that the teacher is disciplined. But we have to acknowledge that much of this discussion is not about ‘what really happened’, because in encounters between one teacher and one pupil, nobody will ever know. This means that a just disciplinary or legal process will fail to convict some abusers because of absence of proof. The alternative to a just process is a process such as we have now, which implicitly accepts that ‘children never lie’ and therefore takes allegations of abuse at their word: launching an investigatory process that, even if the outcome is that a teacher is cleared, is an extraordinary blow to his confidence and relationships with staff and students, and will leave an indelible stain on his reputation.

This culture widens and cheapens the definition of abuse, which does not help those children who are being sexually molested or physically harmed. It also transmits a clear message about who is to be trusted and believed, which puts even the most experienced and popular teacher on the defensive. Teachers deserve better than this. The vast majority are neither paedophiles nor angels, but human beings upon whose dedication we rely. They ought to be able to count on our understanding, respect and support.

Jennie Bristow is author of Standing Up To Supernanny, and co-author of Licensed to Hug. (Buy these books from Amazon (UK) here and here.)

Heather Piper is speaking at the ESRC-funded seminar, Changing Parenting Culture, at the British Library (London) on 16 February 2010. Click here for more details.

Researching Sex and Lies in the Classroom, by Pat Sikes and Heather Piper, is published by Routledge. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

This article was first published on spiked.

There’s more to human character than sharing toys

A new report by the British think-tank Demos has hit the headlines, with its claim that ‘Parents are the principal architects of a fairer society’. Based on research from the Millennium Cohort Study, the report argues that how children are parented has a more significant impact upon their future life chances than just about anything else, including poverty and the social class into which they are born (1).

You might wonder whether the world really needs another report blaming particular parenting styles for every evident problem in late capitalist society. Across the British political spectrum, policy continually seeks to clobber parents over the head with the assertion that the future of Britain rests or falls according to whether they feed their children too many sweets or read to them for the requisite number of minutes at bedtime.

So when Jen Lexmond and Richard Reeves, authors of the Demos report, respond to concerns about interference by the ‘nanny state’ by arguing that ‘if there is one area where government intervention is justified, it is in precisely the area of life signalled by the term “nannying” – the development of children’s capabilities’, they are pushing at doors opened by New Labour, and held open by the Tories. Nothing new there.

However, Lexmond and Reeves at least try to go beyond the emotional blackmail that informs most parenting policy, which simply asserts that if you don’t adopt the right kind of parenting behaviours with your children they will die of obesity or end up on the social scrapheap, with no qualifications and a million mental disorders. Their report, Building Character, is an attempt to wrestle with the problem of how we bring up children with a sense of self and agency, who can achieve things in life and develop a responsibility to people and projects outside of themselves.

This is an important question, and one that preoccupies parents as much as policy-wonks. I have often found myself ploughing through the latest piece of official parenting advice and wondering to what end it all leads. The idea that rearing children is just about maximising their ‘happiness’, or stopping them from becoming fat, or enabling them to take a few calculated risks, might all make some sense on a personal, daily level, but it seems thoroughly inadequate in terms of a generational project.

When we say ‘children are the future’, we don’t just mean that they will outlive us, but that they will be the ones running society and making history. To that extent, it really is not enough that they are happy or that they have high self-esteem – they have to be able to cope with adversity and think outside of themselves, in order to shape the world around them. This is where character comes into play, and where adults’ role in helping to ‘build character’ is crucially important.

Unfortunately, while Demos’ enthusiasm for addressing this issue is refreshing, its narrow focus on parenting styles and outcomes among young children means that the report ends up peddling the same old mixture of common sense and nonsense. On the common sense front, it finds that more authoritative parents have better-behaved children and that more confident parents are more authoritative. On the nonsense front, it speculates that better-behaved children with more confident parents will get to be middle class when they reach adulthood – which leads to the conclusion that training parents on low incomes to be confident and authoritative will magic some social mobility into their children. Or, as Jen Lexmond told The Sunday Times, ‘when it comes to parenting, it is not what you are, but what you do that’s important’ (2).

What is striking about this is not only the blithe assertion that all manner of social inequalities and life problems can be obliterated by parents simply setting a few house rules for their toddlers. It is the reduction of a child’s moral development, the building of character that takes place over the course of childhood within a distinct cultural context, to a particular parenting style that results in clearly observable attributes amongst five-year-olds.

Building Character starts with a discussion of Aristotle; eight pages later it presents us with a table showing how three ‘key character capabilities’ are exhibited by the behaviour of five-year-olds studied by the Millennium Cohort Study. So we find that a child who ‘cannot sit still, is constantly fidgeting or squirming’ shows something about ‘application’, a child who is kind to younger children shows something about ‘empathy and attachment’, and a child who ‘often argues with adults’ shows something about ‘self-regulation’. The child who exhibits the good behaviours is presumed to be a product of authoritative parenting, and will go far in life; the restless hypochondriac tantrummer is presumed to be lacking boundaries and will end up socially immobile.

An expert in survey methodology could no doubt find several holes in this research. I was struck by the admission, in the appendix, that for all the authors argued that confident parents make better-behaved (or more character-ful) children, ‘It is possible that the association between parental perceived competence and child behaviour outcomes is spurious’ – as the data was based on parents’ reports of their children’s behaviour, and less confident parents tend to report more bad behaviour in their children than do more confident parents. It seems equally possible that the report’s entire evidence base is ‘spurious’.

But aside from that, why do we think we can measure something so complex and human as ‘character’ by looking at the behaviour of five-year-olds? Can human agency really be reduced to an ability to concentrate and a willingness to share toys?

As a parent, I worry about the development of my children’s characters. I worry about the impact of a purportedly child-centred therapy culture, which encourages children to think that that they should never be criticised and that their feelings are the most important ones. I worry that children who are over-protected, who are not allowed to take risks or work through problems for themselves, are profoundly ill-equipped to become adults capable of running the world. I worry that the educational direction taken by ‘personalised learning’ and methods that make everything fun and relevant to children limits their capacity to apply themselves to things.

I worry about the way that anti-bullying initiatives actively discourage children from developing empathy, by presenting bullying as the use of certain bad words or particular actions, rather than encouraging children to think about what it means to be kind or unkind, how to roll with the blows and how to maintain friendships. I worry that precisely the model of ‘good parenting’ that is advocated by policymakers is that of the active consumer – the parent who elbows everybody else out of the way to achieve the best for his or her child, who is obsessively anxious about the individuals within his or her family to the exclusion of thinking about what’s best for the school, the community, even other friends and family members. And I worry about lots of other things as well.

But, as the parent of a five-year-old and a three-year-old, I know that their characters are not yet fully formed. There are several years and many experiences left in order to inspire and shape young children into the kind of adults we hope they will become. As children gain the ability to read, reason and expand their world beyond the home, we can engage them in questions of agency and morality, and trust them to work things out for themselves but in relation to other people.

The idea that parents alone can – even should – short-circuit these processes by seeking to ‘develop character’ by the end of five, and that we can measure our children’s worth as moral, responsible beings according to whether they sit still at the dinner table, displays a narrow and deterministic view. Character is not an ‘outcome measure’, and obedience is not what makes us human.

Jennie Bristow is author of Standing Up To Supernanny, and co-author of Licensed to Hug. This article was first published by spiked.

(1) Building Character, by Jen Lexmond and Richard Reeves, November 2009. Download it for free here.

(2) Bad parents kills prospects of working class, The Sunday Times, 8 November 2009

Don’t Touch! The educational story of a panic

Not so long ago, those who sought perversion in the most innocent of actions would be accused of having ‘dirty minds’. Those who found themselves embarrassed, offended or aroused by a picture of a naked baby, or by having a child sit upon their lap, were considered to be abnormal and potentially problematic individuals. The norm was the ability to distinguish between adults and children: not to equate a childish cuddle with a sexual advance, or an image of infant nudity with pornography or erotica.

Piper and Stronach’s excellent critique of the ‘No Touch’ policies ubiquitous in schools and early years settings today reveals how much has changed. Nowadays, the norm – as presented by official policy and institutional practice – is that those working with children should train themselves to be ‘dirty minded’ from the outset. From the practice of nursery nurses wearing gloves to change a baby’s nappy to teachers in secondary schools taking care not to be alone with a pupil at any time, everyday interactions between children and their carers or teachers have become ridden with a sexual subtext. By training adults to view all physical contact with their young charges as something to be avoided, in case it becomes – or might be perceived as – inappropriate, adults are encouraged to apply a conscious check to every spontaneous interaction, as though it is only this formal check on their instinct that prevents them from crossing the supposedly thin line from child protector (teacher) to child abuser (paedophile).

Don’t Touch! is subtitled ‘The educational story of a panic’, and the authors are persuasive in their argument that ‘No Touch’ policies in educational settings have arisen, not because of a major new problem with paedophiles in the teaching profession, or because policies prohibiting touch between pupils and staff would prevent such transgressions, but because of the generalised high-profile anxiety – which some have described as a ‘moral panic’ - about child abuse in society at large. Combined with a risk-averse outlook in modern culture, which often finds expression in the fear of being sued, this, the authors argue, led to an environment in which ‘many child-orientated areas were rapidly becoming “no-touch” zones’. (p1)

Piper and Stronach’s book, which includes material by a number of other contributors, develops the findings of ESRC-funded research. This research, in turn, was prompted by:

‘[T]he impression that the touching of children in professional settings had increasingly stopped being relaxed, or instinctive, or primarily concerned with responding to the needs of the child. It was becoming a self-conscious negative act, requiring a mind-body split for both children and adults, the latter being controlled more by fear than a commitment to caring.’ (pviiii)

The ‘impression’ that something has gone badly wrong in our culture when adults exhibit such awkwardness in interacting with children is widely shared, with extreme examples often reported in the media under headlines such as ‘child protection gone mad’. The power of Piper and Stronach’s work comes from the way that this impression is confirmed through solid research into the practices of educational institutions and the way these are mediated and discussed by teachers and childcare workers, whose quotes run through the book. This enables the authors to untangle the subtleties in the ways that ‘no touch’ policies and practices are implemented. They note, for example, that while many interviewees justified their ‘no touching practices’ in relation to UK legislation, in fact, ‘Nowhere could we locate any formal limitation placed on physical contact and non-family carers’. (p23) Formal child protection policy has played an important role in encouraging the idea that relations between adults and children are fraught with risk, and the authors note that initiatives such as the national vetting scheme, which requires that all those working with children are subject to clearance by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), have done much to exacerbate this risk-averse outlook. However, simply to blame policy developments for the speed and extent to which ‘no touching practices’ have become normalised would fail to acknowledge the power of the more generalised cultural confusion about what is, and is not, appropriate interaction between adults and children.

In this respect, one of the most revealing accounts provided by Don’t Touch! is about the difficulties in conducting research into this area. A chapter by Dr Catherine Scott from the University of Wollongong, Australia, describes how her intention to provide comparative data to the UK ESRC study was thwarted by the demands and objections of the ethics committees whose approval was needed before she could put the research into motion. Recounting how, after many months of wrangling, ‘exhausted and demoralised, I gave up’, Scott draws out the consequences of the anxiety into researching such sensitive areas. There is a recognised concern that the heightened anxiety surrounding child abuse is overblown, and that this anxiety itself is having a negative impact upon children by introducing fear and distance into the adult-child relationship; but this very overblown anxiety prevents research into this question, on the grounds that it is ‘considered difficult and professionally dangerous’. (p21) As Scott argues, in consequence:

‘Silencing those most affected by the moral panic over child abuse prevents us from better understanding the state in which we now find ourselves and makes more remote the possibility of injecting a little sense into the debate.’ (p21)

While such research was permitted in the UK, the team encountered a number of barriers, due to institutions’ evident unease in allowing such issues to be discussed: described by one head teacher as ‘opening a can of worms’. (p96) It is possible to argue that such concerns are not altogether unreasonable. If the problem under investigation is the extent to which teachers and childcare workers have been made hyper-conscious of the ways in which they touch children, holding a discussion about such practices arguably exacerbates their consciousness of such interactions, and risks making the problem worse. One field worker recounts how the ‘generalised confusion’ about touching children is quickly internalised, even in the course of research:

‘I become aware that I’m getting an overwhelming urge to touch some of these children on their cheeks, heads, but stop myself – not sure why. Stopping touching is taking much more concentrated effort than touching would.’ (p75)

However, what is remarkable about the research into touching practices presented in this book is the extent to which interview respondents all knew what was being talked about. The ‘mind-body split’, the extreme consciousness of physical interaction, is recognisable to all those working with children as something that is both very real, and quite new. There was only one occasion where researchers felt that they were attempting to discuss a problem that was alien to their respondents, and this is discussed at length in the case of Summerhill School, a ‘child-led’ private residential school which self-consciously exists outside of the norms of mainstream society, and on the touching question provides ‘The exception to the rule’. (pp 120-134) This was the only instance in which the researchers felt that touching ‘felt a bit “pervy” as a subject for conversation, an attempt to unnaturalise what the subjects regarded as absolutely normal’. (p121)

In a strange contradiction, what makes Summerhill School an exception to many of society’s rules is the ‘egalitarian’ relationship it forges between adults and children, in defiance of the hard distinction drawn by mainstream society. Yet when it comes to the issue of touch, according to Piper and Stronach’s account the school is able to draw that distinction effortlessly: physical interaction between adults and children is not suspected to be sexual, and therefore the problematisation of touch is regarded ‘as a fuss about nothing’. (p134) It seems we really do need, as the final chapter suggests, a ‘bonfire of the insanities’ surrounding child protection policy; we can hope that Don’t Touch! will ignite that discussion.

Why we need a Parents’ Liberation Movement

From politicians issuing statements on how to ‘improve parenting’, to policy initiatives designed to promote better parental behaviour, to countless TV shows and self-help books produced by self-appointed experts, ‘parenting’ has come to be seen as the must-have skill of the twenty-first century. And it is one all parents must learn. But is parenting a skill that can be practised according to the prescriptions of accredited practitioners? Are parents so bad at bringing up their children that they need classes and official support in matters of everyday family life? What accounts for the popularity of parenting advice? Isn’t it really time we stood up for ourselves and our families against the relentless pressure to conform to the prototype of the perfect parent?

At the London Battle of Ideas festival next weekend, Jennie Bristow, author of Alpha Mummy, Tracey Jensen, doctoral candidate at the Open University, and Zoe Williams, columnist for the Guardian; and Jane Sandeman, convenor of the Institute of Ideas Parents’ Forum.

For further information and to book tickets, see here.

Related readings: Do we need a Parents’ Liberation Movement? Jennifer Howze’s entry on the Times’s Alpha Mummy blog, 27 October 2009.

Why we need a parents’ liberation movement. Jennie Bristow’s essay on spiked, June 2008

Call me a bad parent, I’ll still let my kids eat cake

I must be the worst parent in the world. I work full-time, and my two children are given sweeties or chocolate every day. They don’t often walk to school, and while the older one will occasionally gobble an apple (in addition to ‘treats’, never as a substitute), the little one thinks anything spelt with the ‘f-word’ is the work of the devil. My daughters, aged five and three, watch TV, play on the computer, and a trip to the supermarket is rarely complete without a ‘pester purchase’ of some description. And, and … But that’s probably quite enough to send me to the sin bin for the rest of my adult life.

According to two recent studies that have hit the headlines this week, children of working mothers are more likely to lead ‘unhealthy lifestyles’ than those whose mothers don’t work, while children who eat sweets every day are more likely to grow into violent adults than those who do not. The first study found that five-year-olds whose mothers worked part-time or full-time were more likely to have sweetened drinks between meals, to use computers or watch TV for at least two hours a day, and be driven to school, than children whose mums stayed at home. The second found that 69 per cent of people who had a violence conviction at the age of 34 had eaten confectionary every day as 10-year-olds, compared to 42 per cent of those with no violence conviction. The researchers offered several explanations for this apparent link, one of which was that giving in to children’s desire to eat things that they want might push them towards ‘more impulsive behaviour’.

Now, if I were a scientist I could no doubt find a million holes in these studies. These days it seems possible to ‘prove’ anything you like by crunching large numbers, while ignoring the inconvenient fact that correlation does not mean causation – just because violent people ate sweets as children does not demonstrate that the sweets made them violent. But I’m not a scientist, I’m a parent. And the specific ‘findings’ of these two studies are just the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of parent-blaming and guilt-tripping, which use over-stated claims about our children’s health to blame us for every problem under the sun.

Because, come on. Do we really believe that a bar of chocolate in front of the telly is going to turn our children into obese thugs? Parents know that raising a child is not like following a recipe, where you input the right ingredients and can (generally) expect a predictable result. Family life is made up of many things – meals, snacks and treats, some stimulating active fun combined with boring chores and down-time where the kids relax in front of the telly and parents regain some head-space. We don’t relate to our children by ‘doing parenting’ well or badly; we relate to each other as a family, doing what we need to do to get by. If working mothers spend less time on preparing dinner it’s because they are earning money to pay the bills, afford a holiday, or meet some other family priority. That seems far more significant for their children’s overall wellbeing than the consumption of ‘sweetened drinks’.

Yet policy-makers don’t see things like that. Increasingly, ‘parenting’ is presented as a narrow branch of scientific expertise, in which the good parent sticks rigidly to ridiculous, abstract assumptions about the precise ingredients needed to create the optimal child, and accepts being lectured to and patronised by officials in pursuit of that goal. So responding to the ‘working mothers = unhealthy kids’ study, a Department of Health spokesman pontificated piously about the importance of its Change4Life campaign, which uses cartoons and short words to scare the living daylights out of children and their parents about the allegedly dangerous consequences of eating too many chips.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the obsession with children’s food habits itself is becoming entirely unhealthy, encouraging parents to worry themselves into a neurotic heap by the fact that their toddler spurns bananas and inciting children to interrogate the nutritional composition of very meal that their hassled mothers put on their plates of an evening. This undermines our authority as parents, and the enjoyment that we can all reap from family life. We need to stand up to these so-called experts: not only in questioning their pseudo-science, but in challenging the assumption that epidemiologists and policy-makers have the right to write the rule-book on what we feed our children. We’re not making soufflés here, but raising little people whom we love; and what we let them snack on should be nobody’s business but ours.

Jennie Bristow is author of Standing Up to Supernanny, Societas (Imprint Academic), September 2009. Price £8.95. Bristow will be speaking at the London Battle of Ideas festival on 31 October - 1 November on ‘Why we need a parents’ liberation movement’.

This article was first published in the Sunday Herald on 4 October 2009.

Standing up to Supernanny

‘[W]e are adults, not children to be bossed around. We should and must take responsibility for our own families and stand in solidarity with other parents.’

Jane Sandeman’s foreword to Jennie Bristow’s witty, incisive and eminently readable book sums it up succinctly. The book is a clarion call for parents to resist the experts’ persuasion that ‘there is a recipe to be assiduously followed’ that will produce the perfect child.

The tsunami of child-raising advice crashing down on new parents was bound to cause a reaction, and as Bristow points out: ‘Some mothers-turned-writers, or writers-turned-mothers, have reacted to the parenting pressure cooker through advocating sheer rebellion.’ Sure, Supernanny remains must-watch TV for millions, bookshop shelves are cluttered with child-raising manuals and newspapers continue to report a constant stream of advice from the government and official bodies on how to raise children and run family life. It remains true that it’s a rare mum or dad who doesn’t obsess about their child’s safety, diet, educational attainment, social skills and general wellbeing. But it was inevitable that the current level of scrutiny given to private family life, and the social expectation that not only does ‘every child matter’ but that we should always be ‘putting children first’, would rustle up resentment.

And so it has – particularly among many middle-class mums who, while often believing that other people need advice and intervention, resent being addressed themselves in the patronising tones of expert advice. Having been sold a philosophy that the general troublesomeness of children is the product of dysfunctional parenting, they struggle to explain and accept their own battles at bed times, meal times, bath times and more or less any time when something needs to be done. Having been sold a promise that parenting ‘when done properly’ is stimulating, engaging and rewarding, they are bemused and frustrated with the stultifying tedium that comprises so much of domestic life. A domestic crisis becomes a personal crisis of being; it wasn’t meant to be this way.

This mother-malcontent has been reflected in an ever-growing genre of mummy-lit that sticks up two fingers at the orthodoxy of perfect parenting, pokes it in the eye and celebrates the dysfunctional chaos that is normal family life. But while we take to our hearts the fictional mothers who distress shop-bought mince pies to make them look home-made for the school cake sale, and we smile at tales of ‘cocktail playgroups’ serving martinis to mums, we put the books down unsatisfied. However entertaining they might be, they seem shallow; as raucous as a cheap laugh. This is because the reaction is just a reaction, and as full of insight as a toddler’s tantrum. Just as a two-year-old refuses to behave and tears the ribbon out of her hair, so the self-styled slummy mummy refuses to behave and reaches for the Chablis.

For many of these books, motherhood seems a matter of lifestyle choice. There’s the lifestyle choice of whether to be a mother at all, and then the lifestyle choice of what kind of a mother to be. They seem to miss the point that the pressure to ‘do parenting well’ is about more than opting for a style, and that the consequences of allowing all manner of incursions into our lives by the authorities, and failing to challenge professional/expert dictates about our behaviour (all purportedly for the good of our children), have serious implications for parents, children and society at large.

The current social obsession with parenting makes us introspective. It turns us in on ourselves. It sets parents against non-parents by assuming that our values must be so different, and sets individual mothers and fathers apart from their families by exaggerating and fetishising both the tensions and compromises that inevitably come when we incorporate children into our lives. As Bristow examines, it is not surprising that one of the most widely heard appeals from modern mums is for ‘me time’ – a time for fulfilling one’s own needs and desires, separate to the demands on us as partners, mothers and housekeepers. But the sense that we can only be our genuine selves when we are alone and away from our parental responsibilities seems only to endorse a sense that I am only really ‘me’ when I am away from my social roles. ‘Being me’ becomes an escape from parenthood, rather than understanding and embracing parenthood as part of ‘being me’.

Standing up to Supernanny is as engaging as those advocating the ‘fuck it’ philosophy of the Bad Mothers’ Club, but it takes us further, too. It doesn’t just hold up a mirror to reflect the contemporary portrayal of parents as villains or victims (or villainous victims) needing expert advice and intervention to keep the family together. Nor does it celebrate our failure (or refusal) to conform. Rather, it evaluates critically how the parenting culture and its backlash have set parents apart from their children, apart from non-parents and even fellow-parents, and contributed both to the isolation of families and a fragmentation of family life.

Bristow draws on a host of examples from public policy to popular culture to explore just how family life has been transformed from something that was a sphere that was ‘other’ than public life, and where dynamics between parents and children were taken for granted, to something that is assumed to require intervention and deliberate social engineering to make it work.

Child-rearing needs to be reclaimed from those who seek to ‘professionalise parenting’, and re-established as ‘a relationship based on spontaneous affection and authority’, says Bristow. The key to this, she argues, is to insist on the privacy of family life – and to push back against the state’s attempts to insinuate itself into family life in order to facilitate better parenting. Parents are not mere partners of the state in the project of childrearing; rather, our families are our own and need us to ‘live’ in them, to build them around us and ourselves around them.

But parenting, acknowledges Bristow, is a generational, and not simply an individual, responsibility. This requires a breaking down of the ‘us’ and ‘them’ divides between parents and non-parents. It needs us to acknowledge that beyond parental responsibility is a responsibility that all of us have as a community to be interested in the welfare and development of the next generation. The relationship of trust that needs to be developed is between each other.

Bristow observes that the assumption at the heart of policymaking and much media commentary is that most families are dysfunctional: that ‘parents lack the right attitude, they can’t cope, they need advice and monitoring in relation to every little thing they do with their children’. But, she concludes that, while parenting culture treats us like children, we don’t have to act like children, and we can strive to shape family life to nurture the next generation as we see fit, with the values we hold dear.

It’s not so much that as mothers we need ‘me time’ in order to be our pre-parent selves; rather, we need ‘we-time’ with those whom we trust to draw on for support, advice and affirmation.

Standing up to Supernanny, by Jennie Bristow, is published by Societas. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

Jennie Bristow will be speaking about ‘why we need a parents’ liberation movement’ at the London Battle of Ideas festival, 1 November 2009.

Ann Furedi is chief executive of BPAS. This review was first published on spiked.

There’s more to parenthood than egg production

Speaking both politically and personally, I am a big fan of family planning. Women’s ability to use modern contraception to prevent ourselves from becoming pregnant when we don’t want to be, and to access abortion services when we do become pregnant when we don’t want to be, has given us a range of public opportunities and personal freedoms. It is good to choose how many children we want, and when we want them – children are wanted, rather than acquired; and parenthood is sought after, rather than foisted upon us.

But listening to the debates that go on within policy and medical circles, I sometimes wonder whether ‘family planning’ has changed its meaning entirely. Family planning is supposed to be something that women, and their partners, do in order to shape their childbearing choices around their lives. The way the concept is promoted today often implies that the planning should be done for us, or despite us, according to an abstract set of rules; and that we adults should be shaping our childbearing choices around the babies we do not yet have.

A recent conference organised by Parenting Culture Studies (1) discussed the phenomenon of ‘extending pregnancy backwards’ – in other words, promoting the behaviours and anxieties associated with pregnancy to all women, on the grounds that they may become pregnant someday. Rebecca Kukla, author of the excellent book Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture and Mothers’ Bodies, described the growing trend towards ‘preconception care’. This policy idea promotes the notion that the way to ensure the birth of healthy babies is to ensure that all women of childbearing years are treated by doctors, not as individual women, but as potential mothers. This makes them subject to all manner of lifestyle modification advice and lends itself to a situation where women are given medical treatment determined on the basis of what might have the least adverse outcome for a potential fetus, rather than what will work best for the woman herself, right now.

The practical consequences of treating all women as mothers-in-waiting for the healthcare they are given are pretty disturbing. But the broader cultural effect of such ‘preconception planning’ are, if anything, even more disturbing. The notion of women as incubators was supposed to have gone out with the Ark – yet now the new language of health is used to promote the idea that women really matter most in terms of the mothers they may become. Or as Kukla put it: ‘Women’s healthcare is increasingly co-opted by reproductive management – whether or not a child is involved.’

The optimal health of the putative child is brought in to justify controlling more and more aspects of women’s behaviour, and to encourage them to see themselves, not as individuals with needs and ambitions of their own, but as ready receptacles for the someday child. In this sense, notions of ‘family planning’ become a life sentence of health conformity, not chosen by women to make themselves freer, but imposed upon them by officials to keep their behaviour in line and their attitudes suitably compliant.

Hot on the heels of the Parenting Culture Studies conference, I attended an event at University College London (UCL) examining the debate about older mothers and fertility treatment (2). One of the key debating points was the idea, promoted by such medical authorities as the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), that the trend for an increasing number of women to have children beyond the age of 35 represents a problem both for their ability to conceive, their own health and that of their babies, and that women should somehow be made aware of the dangers of leaving procreation too late (3).

Scientific and medical evidence presented at the ‘Motherhood in the 21st Century’ conference at UCL confirmed the fact that women’s fertility does indeed start to fall beyond the age of 35, and this has led to a situation where women are both more likely to seek fertility treatments such as IVF and those treatments are less likely to work. Some critical points were well made by speakers, including fertility guru Lord Robert Winston, who argued that it should not be the business of the medical profession to determine when women should have their children, and Professor Anna Smajdor of the University of East Anglia, who drew out the problematic ethical consequences of fixating on an optimal window of time in which women should be encouraged to become pregnant.

But while the sympathy and flexibility of IVF clinicians for women who want to become ‘older mothers’ was reassuring, the extent to which this debate always focuses on ‘the woman’ is intriguing. It is almost as if women decide to start a family completely on their own, and make such decisions by balancing the rise of their careers against the fall in their egg production. The recognition that starting a family – with or without fertility treatment – generally involves a man, and that women’s reproductive choices might also be shaped by the desire to have a relationship with a man with whom she wants a baby – and the time it might take her to form such a relationship - is remarkably little discussed.

When it comes to contraception and abortion, it is absolutely right that reproductive decision-making is presented as the woman’s choice. It is the woman who has to carry an unintended pregnancy and care for a child whose arrival might have a negative impact on her life. Even here, though, many women make such decisions in discussion with, and with the support of, their partners, who consider the impact of an unplanned child on their lives as a couple.

When it comes to choosing actively to have a child there are obviously some women who go it alone – but most people start families as a result of a decision made with their partner about their future lives together. They don’t count down from the age of 35 in order to diarise their first, second, third pregnancies, and set about finding a man to fit in with this timescale. They start by the search for another adult with whom they want to share their lives, according to much less scientific criteria such as love, companionship, and shared personal goals. Which is how it should be, surely. And if this search takes a bit too long for the biology, it can only be a good thing that new assisted reproductive technologies provide the possibility of assistance.

From the assumptions behind ‘preconception care’ to the handwringing over ‘older mothers’, there is a disturbing prejudice that parenthood is an abstract decision, made by individual women in accordance with what medical advice and the current parenting orthodoxy suggests is the optimal pregnant-person-to-be. This ignores the messy, human aspects of real life and relationships, and reduces women to the status of farmyard hens whose mission in life is the production of decent eggs. You could be tempted to tell these bossy officials to cluck off.

Jennie Bristow’s new book, Standing Up To Supernanny, is published by Societas. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) Jennie will be speaking on these issues at the London Battle of Ideas festival in London, 31 October - 1 November 2009. You can email her .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

This article was first published on spiked.

(1) See Parenting Culture Studies.

(2) See ‘Motherhood in the 21st Century’ conference

(3) Concerns over older mother trend, BBC News, 12 June 2009

This vetting scheme makes strangers of us all

Parenthood can be a very lonely endeavour. Two adults (if you’re lucky) and one or more children, stuck in a house (if you’re lucky) filled by the demands of washing, shopping, cooking, cleaning, often with little sleep or respite from the daily grind, and all the while juggling the pressures of paid work (if you’re lucky).

It has often been said that if the tasks of parenthood were laid out as a job description, few would apply. And most parents must have asked themselves, at some point, why on Earth they chose to embark upon this particular journey, when they could have been spending their free time lying on the beach or hanging out in the pub.

The reason we do it, of course, is that there are all sorts of intangible rewards to raising a family – and many of these come from the fact that we don’t do it entirely on our own. Having children brings with it a different set of relationships, not only with your partner and this brand new person in your life, but with the adults and children around you. Adult friendships develop on the basis of children’s friendships with each other, and vice versa; and a relationship of solidarity develops between parents and the other adults who have a shared interest in becoming a part of your child’s world.

Sometimes, these other adults are professionals – teachers, doctors – but these relationships tend to change when your child moves up a school year or when the doctor moves on. The more enduring bonds are those that are forged on the basis of a common sense of responsibility for children as a group: when adults give something of themselves to your child because they want to play a role in raising the next generation, and you gratefully accept because you know that your own individual skills and resources are limited, and other people have a lot to offer. Not to mention the fact that football coaches, Brownie leaders, other parents organising play-dates, and all those other people out there help provide some relief from the constant Being Home, and from the loneliness and anxiety that comes with feeling that you’re the only person responsible for your child.

If we understand and appreciate the vital role played by other adults that makes raising a family something more than a thankless chore, we should be very clear about the destructive consequences of Britain’s national vetting scheme. This scheme subjects all adults whose paid or voluntary work is seen to give them the opportunity to develop a relationship of trust with other people’s children to a criminal record check, and puts their details into a gigantic database that will constantly ‘monitor’ their status.

The purported aim of this scheme is to prevent convicted child abusers from gaining access to kids. The consequence is a systematic poisoning of the relationship between generations.

It is often assumed that, if you are a parent, you will accept mass vetting as a necessary evil, on the grounds that anything that stops a paedophile from getting his hands on your child must be a good thing. But as Frank Furedi and I argued last year in our report Licensed to Hug, the impetus for the national vetting scheme did not come from parents, or from a rational approach to preventing child abuse: it came from the shameless politicisation of two horrific cases of child murder, by policymakers who were already working towards the goals of a greater regulation of adults’ interaction with children.

It is inconceivable that a system of mass vetting could ever fully prevent child abuse, as it can reveal the crimes for which people have been convicted but cannot foresee anything that people might do in the future. Parents are smart enough to see this bleedin’ obvious point, and to know that, therefore, no amount of vetting can assuage their darkest fears about the worst happening. But having failed so completely in its stated objective, the national vetting scheme has managed to instil in all adults a general unease about getting close to children, either in a physical or emotional sense.

The idea that your child learns to trust other adults, or that other children learn to trust you, has gone from being a taken-for-granted positive in the reality of raising the next generation to a process that sets off a number of warning bells. What if that other person cannot be trusted? What if I don’t want this responsibility? Even if I know that I’m not a paedophile, or that little Johnny’s Scout leader or little Jessica’s daddy isn’t a paedophile, what might people think if they see me / Johnny’s Scout leader / Jessica’s daddy taking a child to the toilet or applying sun-cream to his or her back? In this paranoid framework, looking after children is no longer something that we simply do; we have to think about the consequences of every action and interaction, and balance the practicalities of looking after children with the imperative of covering our backs.

What results from all this is an aversion to taking responsibility, which becomes quickly internalised as common sense. If looking out for other people’s children is seen as a risk, actually doing it becomes an active choice – as opposed to something that we do simply because we are adults and children need our care.

This process of inter-generational estrangement is the result of powerful cultural forces, which impact upon individuals even when they are aware of the dangers inherent in society going down this route. But the national vetting scheme is not just one outcome of a negative cultural turn – it has played an active role in legitimising responsibility aversion, and making things much, much worse.

In a recent briefing document, the Manifesto Club (1), which has campaigned vigorously against the national vetting scheme since its inception, spells out the extent to which trust between adults and children is presented as the key problem to be addressed. The convoluted and arbitrary regulations about who needs to be subjected to a criminal records check, and why, rest upon the degree to which an adult has had the opportunity to develop a ‘relationship of trust’ with the child or children with whom they are interacting.

So, as the Manifesto Club points out, an adult who volunteered once a month for January, February and March will have to be registered with the vetting database, but if that adult volunteered once a month for January, February and April, he or she would not. This is because, apparently, contact over three consecutive months provides the basis for a trust relationship to develop – whereas if the volunteer had a month off in the middle, presumably the kids would forget all about this adult and he or she would become a stranger again.

Anybody who knows children – or understands the bare minimum about human relationships – must see how bizarre it is for civil servants to draw clear lines about the point at which a trust relationship develops or does not develop, as though we are talking here about how long it takes a cake to rise in the oven. But while the essential idiocy (and waste of resources) involved in this scheme might make you chuckle, the principle upon which it is based is no laughing matter.

To view the fact that children learn to trust adults as a danger point, rather than an essential aspect of inter-generational collaboration, codifies the idea that adults’ impact upon children should be assumed to be malign and predatory rather than positive and nurturing. It perverts the profoundly human impulse that adults and children want to care for one another, and seeks to replace the impulse of care with the imperative of distance. This can only dim the pleasure gained from adults and children in their encounters with one another, and reinforce the assumption that bringing up children is something that parents must do alone.

If this is not the kind of world in which we want to raise our families, we should challenge the national vetting scheme and the assumptions that lie behind it. Signing the Manifesto Club’s petition against the vetting database (see here) is a good place to start.

Jennie Bristow’s new book, Standing Up To Supernanny, will be published by Societas in September 2009. (Order this book from Amazon(UK).)

This article was first published by spiked.

(1) Regulating Trust - Who will be on the Vetting Database? Manifesto Club, 31 July 2009 (PDF)

Speak out against the national vetting scheme

How would you feel if Philip Pullman or Anne Fine came to your child’s school to read from their books? Honoured that they had given up their time for children whom they don’t know - or worried whether they’d had the appropriate criminal record checks? I can do paranoia as well as the next person, but the idea that it might be a problem that children’s authors like children and want to talk to them seems quite simply bizarre. So three cheers for Pullman and some other famous authors for speaking out against the “insulting” requirement to be vetted by the new Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), and three cheers too for the Manifesto Club, for continuing to point out just how insulting and ineffective the national vetting scheme is, and launching a new petition against it.

In a briefing document published today, the Manifesto Club attempts to untangle the “convoluted and irrational” rules that will govern who will need to be on the vetting database. There’s no space on AM to give examples of the strange contortions of civil servants’ minds in deciding who may or may not be deemed a potential threat to children - so far as I can tell, it seems that anybody who ever wants to have contact with children will sooner or later end up having to register with the ISA. In other words, as Frank Furedi and I argued last year in our report Licensed to Hug, grown-ups will all be seen as suspicious characters unless they have “a piece of paper showing that they are not likely to be a malign and dangerous influence”. Only it’s worse than a piece of paper - as the Manifesto Club points out, this new vetting database works like Facebook or Twitter, sending electronic updates to interested parties about other individuals’ vetting “status”. And we all know how good the government is at running databases full of sensitive information. As a parent, I feel this insult cuts both ways. Why is any adult who likes children now presumed to be a pervert - and why are our children assumed to be so unlikeable that anybody who wants to engage with them is supected to have a dirty mind and an ulterior motive?

First published on the Times’s blog Alpha Mummy.

Bad mother, good book

‘If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.’

With these words, penned in the New York Times in 2005 (1), Ayelet Waldman launched herself from relative literary obscurity to become America’s most hated, doing battle with the mommy mob on Oprah and wading through the ‘shark-filled cesspit’ of the web. Four years on, she confesses to all her other sins in Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace, a book that can only be described as extraordinary. Love it or hate it, you’ll come away feeling profoundly disturbed – and curiously enlightened.

Ayelet Waldman lives in Berkeley, California with her husband, the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, and their four children. The website Gawker has branded Waldman and Chabon the ‘third most annoying literary couple’, and whatever Bad Mother is, it is neither a personal account of typical mummy dilemmas nor a reasoned critique of contemporary parenting culture. As a wise editor once impressed upon me, you can never generalise anything from the experience of Berkeley, where the cultural absurdities of the modern world are taken to every extreme – and when the experience in question is that of a creative writer with manic depression (bipolar disorder), you know you’re not looking at any standard kind of whinge.

But God, how refreshing that is. I have been reviewing the new genre of ‘mummy lit’ since before my own children were a twinkle in my eye, and I have slated most of it (2). Whether the books are novels, personal confessionals or attempts at social or cultural critique, the trend for mothers of young children to write about their lives as though they are the first people ever to have had children – and thought about it at the same time – has resulted in the occasional insight, the odd humorous bout of fellow-feeling, the imposition of a deadening weight of negativity upon modern parenthood and a great deal of wasted paper. When I heard about yet another book by an out-and-proud ‘Bad Mother’, my response was an inward groan. But by the end of the first chapter, I was hooked.

It turns out that Waldman is a really good writer – with, equally unusually, a good editor (her husband, apparently). And by dragging us further into her own peculiar psyche than is either normal or comfortable, she manages to express more about the contradictions of modern motherhood than all those smugly miserable tell-it-like-it-is-ers put together.

The questions that mummy lit thinks it is addressing, but rarely actually does, are: what does it mean when one individual internalises today’s parenting culture, to the extent that your identity – how you live and how you feel – is directly related to the modes of behaviour you adopt in relation to your children? How does the individual product of therapy culture, who has been brought up to believe that the key issue in relation to the world is how she feels about herself, reconcile the conflicting pressures of the desire for meaningful work, the quest for romantic love, and the reality of bringing up children? When there is no social explanation provided that makes sense of mothers’ experiences, what other explanations are brought to bear – and how does this affect the kind of self that mothers both develop and aspire to develop?

Waldman does not answer these questions, or address most of them head on. But she does manage to shine some unexpected lights into the murky, unexplored recesses of how individuals might experience the modern pressure-cooker of parenting.

For example: the maternal crime of loving one’s husband more than one’s kids. The paragraphs of that article in which Waldman details how much great sex she has with her husband are just excruciating, while the idea of making a calculation about who you love most – let alone putting it into print – is quite bizarre. Love is not finite or divisible; it cannot be apportioned among family members like pieces of cake. But Waldman’s article was not controversial because she made that calculation – it was because she apparently came down on the wrong side of the equation.

How is saying that you love your husband more than your kids any more weird than the assertion, baldly stated in much existing mummy-lit as common sense, that you don’t know what love is until you have a child, or that once you have a baby you realise that your husband is no longer the primary object of your love and life? Yet the self-obsessed character of today’s parenting culture positively validates the narcissistic sentiment, masquerading as child-centredness, that once you have achieved ‘your’ baby you should downgrade your adult relationships – even those with the father of your child.

Of course it is possible to have a philosophical discussion about the meaning of love, and to examine such sentiments as ‘I love you more’ as part of a sober analysis of the confusion surrounding contemporary adult intimacy and the symbolic meaning of ‘the child’ within this context. Sociologists Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim did this over a decade ago in their insightful critique The Normal Chaos of Love. Ayelet Waldman is not providing an analysis of any sort: she is writing only about herself, and giving expression to this contradiction in the embarrassing and peculiar form of telling the world about how she has sex with her husband. But in doing so, she forces an emotional engagement with, and reaction to, something that might otherwise be shrugged off as an interesting but unimportant intellectual endeavour. The fact that this reaction, as she recounts, came in one of two forms – ‘Your kids should be taken away from you, you cretinous bitch’, and ‘Right on! That’s how we’ve managed to stay married for 50 years’ – says as much about the levels of public debate today as it does about the limitations of memoir-writing.

Much of the skill in Waldman’s writing comes with her ability to recount the most difficult moments of her life with a devastating combination of humour and honesty. In chapter four, titled ‘Breast is Best’, she tells how her fourth child was born with an undiagnosed palate abnormality that ‘made it impossible for him to suck properly from the breast’. Born ‘a nice, plump baby’, ‘he began losing weight, and by the time, 10 days later, the paediatrician finally made time to see him, he was dangerously thin’ – ‘in short, starving to death’. Telling the story, Waldman recalls:

‘When I couldn’t get an appointment with the paediatrician, I asked the local public health nurse to come by and weigh him. Unfortunately, and for reasons I never understood, she was far more interested in screening me for domestic violence than in evaluating the baby. “He’s fine”, she said absently, ticking off an item from her checklist. “Has your husband physically assaulted you in the past 30 days?”’

Thanks to a bottle of formula prescribed by the paediatrician just in time, baby Abraham rallied – but he still wouldn’t breastfeed. Waldman expressed her own milk into bottles, but remained so desperate to get the baby to nurse that she took him on a plane to the Lactation Institute in Los Angeles, which she had imagined as a medical clinic ‘staffed by white-coated experts spouting the latest in breastfeeding medical research’, but in fact ‘looked less like a doctor’s office than like the headquarters of a Marxist student newspaper circa 1971’. The wise counsellors at the Lactation Institute advised a complicated and time-consuming method of feeding the baby breastmilk through a syringe – a method that Waldman calculated would take 12 hours a day.

‘“But I have three other children!” I wailed … “When do I sleep?”

“Well”, the lactation consultant said, giving my shoulders a squeeze, “it’s really just a question of how committed you are.”’

Waldman returned home and tried to sell the method to her husband:

‘Michael had by now stopped looking at the baby and the syringe. Instead, he was staring at me, his mouth gaping. “Are you kidding me?” he said finally.

“I know it’s really time-consuming”, I said.

“You could say that”, he said.

“But it’s really just a question of how committed we are.”

“You know what?” Michael said. “It turns out we’re not that committed.” He threw the syringe and the pack of replacement silicone needles in the trash.’

Waldman’s ability to laugh at her own absurdities – while continuing to live them out – is not something that you often get in mummy lit, which tends to combine desperate self-justification with thinly veiled self-satisfaction. And while the trend of confessional writing is ubiquitous and deplorable, particularly when writing about oneself is used as a platform for broader statements about the right and wrong ways to ‘do parenting’, there has always been a role in literature for the well-written memoir. Confessional writing cannot provide an analysis of the world as it is, and it generally struggles to do more than tell the dull story of one individual’s life. But the literary memoir that focuses tightly on the extraordinary aspects of an individual’s life or personality can bring a new dimension to understanding the human experience. It can, to paraphrase that old Heineken advert, get to the parts that other academic, fictional or confessional accounts fail to reach.

In Waldman’s book, the chapter that most achieves this is titled ‘Rocketship’, where she tells how she had an abortion in the second trimester of her third pregnancy after discovering that the fetus had a genetic abnormality. The afternoon before a family holiday she rings her obstetrician for the results of her amniocentesis. When she receives the news:

‘In my memory I am hovering by the ceiling watching the scene unfold beneath me. I see myself collapse to the floor. I hear myself scream, my voice hoarse, my wails so loud it seems the windows might shatter. I watch my husband kneel down beside me and pry the telephone from my rigid clasp. I watch him cry.

‘And I think, “A person really does fall on to the ground screaming when she experiences a hideous, shocking pain. Remember that.” This, alas, is part of what it means to be a writer, someone whose job it is to observe closely enough to convincingly turn what she sees and feels into words. A writer stands at a distance and watches her heart break.’

What follows is a harrowing account of the agonising decision to abort the fetus (nicknamed ‘Rocketship’ by their young son), and the intensity of anger, grief and despair that came immediately afterwards, propelling Waldman and ‘a small group of like-minded, bitter women’ to form an online ‘Dead Baby Club’, in which ‘[w]e used to joke that we would take our lunch one day to the obstetrician’s office and tell our stories in the waiting room, just to teach the smug pregnant ladies a lesson. Yeah, maybe you’ll have a baby. And maybe you won’t.’ Then, ‘one by one’, most of the women became pregnant again, and passed through their grief.

Intellectually, you can understand that the experience of women having an abortion following the shock discovery of fetal abnormality can be different to that of women having an abortion because the pregnancy is unintended, or unwanted. You can understand that even for someone like Ayelet Waldman, who grew up committed to the pro-choice cause and, as a young woman, had an abortion because it was not the right time to have a baby – with no feelings of loss or regret – the personal experience of aborting a planned and wanted pregnancy because the baby may (or may not) turn out to have a severe (or less severe) disability is likely to be difficult and unpleasant. But understanding all this is different to gaining an insight into how a woman in this situation might feel: and this is where the distinction between good literature and confessional pap really comes into its own.

From mummy lit to the misery memoir, the cut-price paperbacks that litter bookshop shelves today are replete with discussions about bad things happening and how the author feels about them. When it comes to mummy lit, the self-consciously taboo-breaking phrases often seem to be cut-and-pasted from a central glossary: ‘I love my children so much but sometimes they make me really angry’, ‘I love my job but I cannot bear to leave my baby with someone else’, ‘I love being at home with my baby but sometimes I feel like I’m losing my Self’, ‘I love my husband but I don’t feel like having sex with him anymore’, ‘I love my friends but sometimes they don’t understand me’, ‘I love myself but sometimes I hate myself’, and so on into tedium.

All of this stuff is packaged in the form of emotional honesty, and no doubt many of its writers believe that emotional honesty is what they are doing. In fact, they are using the accepted cultural script of ‘personal feelings’ to recycle banal, commonly held observations about how individuals accommodate to life as it is today. Just as pulp fiction entertains whereas great literature provides insight into the human condition, the only achievement of confessional pap is to empathise with a reader’s sense of feeling a bit crap. It does not challenge any received wisdom, illuminate anything about life, or even tell us all that much about the individual who is telling us his or her ‘personal story’. At most, you gain a sense of how the writer rationalises his or her experiences – you don’t get to know what those experiences are.

Waldman understands this – and also, in a characteristic display of insecure arrogance, understands why her book is different. Reflecting on the well-acknowledged association of madness with creative genius, and that she has manic depression herself, she reasons:

‘Writers who lie, who try to put themselves in the best possible light, who shy away from the ugliest parts of the truth, don’t in the end teach us very much about anything other than their own narcissism. It’s only when you do the bipolar dance on the razor’s edge of brutal honesty, when you are willing to put yourself in danger, that you can move beyond self-absorption to some kind of universal honesty. And yet, at the same time, indulging one’s bipolar compulsion for self-revelation can all too often end up as solipsism. It’s a thin, thin line, one that I spend a lot of my time worrying about, or regretting having crossed.’

It may well be the case that, as Waldman writes, ‘the bipolar inability to resist the impulse to reveal inappropriately intimate details of one’s life is why there are so many bipolar memoirists’. But it may just be that she thought she had something different to say. Justifying her writing through reference to her condition reads to me like a disclaimer, an apology for stepping into what she acknowledges to be the questionable terrain of making public the most intimate details of one’s personal and family life, and daring to go further than other writers in making that mean something. Waldman didn’t write this book, with a skilfully constructed narrative and carefully edited prose, because she couldn’t help the desire to splurge. She wrote it because she thought it was important; and that should be enough.

Bad Mother is not the best book ever written. It is littered with clichés and cheap laughs, and Waldman does, on several occasions, cross the line from self-revelation into solipsism. When she deviates from personal experience to try to make broader comments about contemporary culture, or even when she attempts to judge her own behaviour as a parent, the book morphs from a page-turner into an object you want to throw at the wall. But the good bits are enough to distinguish it from its competitors; and while those are probably not worth reading, this one is. Even if you hate it.

Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace by Ayelet Gilbert Waldman is published by Doubleday Books. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

This article was first published on spiked.

(1) Truly, Madly, Guiltily, by Ayelet Waldman, New York Times, 27 March 2005

(2) See, for example, Playpen world. Jennie Bristow on the cult of mummy lit, New Statesman, 17 December 2001; Why I won’t be joining the ‘Bad Mothers Club’, spiked, 28 December 2006; After Chick Lit, welcome to ‘baby-sick lit’, spiked review of books, October 2007.

Hands off home education!

Speaking personally, I find it hard to imagine a worse way of educating my children than trying to do it myself, at home. I don’t have the patience, inclination or energy for that kind of thing; and I also think state education, in principle, is brilliant.

It is good to have education provided by trained professionals who specialise in their subject knowledge. School is a great opportunity for children to socialise with kids of different ages and backgrounds to their own. The school day provides an opportunity, however limited, for parents to work – or at least to be relieved of their childcare responsibilities for several hours. The fact that all of this is provided by the state means that parents do not have to suffer hefty financial penalties for wanting their kids not to grow up ignorant. The list could go on.

But for all that, I can see why some parents might want to educate their children at home. And the recent UK government proposals to clamp down on home schooling represent a major blow to the principle of parental autonomy (1).

On 11 June, children’s minister Delyth Morgan accepted in full the recommendations made by the Review of Elective Home Education in England, carried out in January by Graham Badman, former director of children’s services in Kent, England. Some of the recommendations seem practical and positive: for example, that local authorities should provide more help with accessing the national examination system, sports facilities, and so on. But the majority of the proposals made by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) in its press release are to do with bureaucratic regulation of home-educating families, with the clear aim of whittling down parents’ ability to make this choice (2).

So what has hit the headlines is that a compulsory annual registration scheme be established, in which all parents who plan to home educate have to inform their local authority. At the time of registration, parents will be asked to submit a statement of their intended approach to the child’s education – including a plan of what they aim to achieve over the following year. Having registered, parents will have to submit to checks by ‘properly trained local authority officials’, who will be given ‘the right of access to the home, following a minimum two-week notification to the parents’. These officials will check the child’s progress against their learning statement, and ‘they will also have the right to speak to the child, to ensure they are safe and well’. A key justification for this increased monitoring is that ‘there are a small number of extreme cases’ in which home education has been used as a cover for child abuse.

It is not surprising that Education Otherwise, the vocal home education support charity, has reacted against these proposals. But why should the rest of us care? Home-educated children are in a minority, and often in unusual circumstances – estimates of the numbers range from 20,000 to 80,000, and a relatively high proportion of these children have special needs that are not easily catered for by schools. By contrast, the majority of parents in the UK access state education, and have come to take for granted that their children’s education and welfare will be closely monitored by the authorities.

Parents and teachers are all too familiar with the regime of fear and conformity that invades state schools every few years when the Ofsted inspector comes to call, and the way that the success or failure of one inspection determines the degree of intervention and regulation to which the school is then subjected. Thanks to such initiatives as the free early years entitlement for three- and four-year olds, and the Early Years Foundation Stage policy framework (the ‘toddlers’ curriculum) introduced in September 2008 (3), private day nurseries and childminders are also targeted for monitoring by the official educational inspectorate – despite the fact that pre-schoolers cannot be said to be receiving ‘education’ in any meaningful sense.

In this context, it would be peculiar if the state decided not to extend its reach to home-schooled children. However, that does not mean that it is right that it should do so.

Education Otherwise has organised a petition against the tightening government regulations. Its author, Roxane Featherstone, argues: ‘The essence of totalitarianism is that the state maintains that it has all the answers to life and that virtually every sphere of human activity: education, the family, child welfare as well as every other area of existence needs the controlling and guiding hand of the state.’ (4) This kind of rhetoric seems unfashionably alarmist: accusations of totalitarianism sit uneasily with a government that poses its interventions in terms of supporting families and protecting children from harm, and in any case most parents do not want to opt out of state education.

But the idea that there should be no opt-out available – that all parents have no choice but to submit to official control over their children’s education – cuts to the heart of the question of parental autonomy. The acceptance that parents can choose to educate their children themselves if they want to is a tacit recognition that state education is a service that parents can access for the benefit of their families. The new proposals shift that balance of power, so that state-monitored education becomes something that all children must receive – and in the case of home schooling, parents are mere practitioners, delivering an officially approved scheme of work. This means that the scope for parents to decide that, actually, the curriculum or teaching practice on offer within schools is not the best for their child, becomes much more limited.

It is not only home schooling that has become subject in recent years to increased state regulation. Ofsted has the independent (private) school sector well within its sights (5), and, as noted above, privately provided pre-school provision is already subject to the myriad regulations of the Early Years Foundation Stage and Every Child Matters. The high-profile legal battle between Ofsted and the famously alternative, ‘child-centred’ Summerhill School back in March 2000 illustrated the state’s determination to bring alternative approaches to education and child-rearing into line (6).

Fortunately, Summerhill won this particular case. But it shows that the issue at stake here is not about home schooling versus school, so much as about how much parents and educators are permitted to deviate from the official orthodoxy. From private childcare to home schooling of disabled children, the clear message is not just that the state knows best, but that even those who profoundly disagree with this sentiment should be dragged along with the programme of state-controlled education. The review of home schooling makes plain how far the authorities are prepared to go in making home-educating parents play ball: those who refuse may find themselves under suspicion of using home education as a cover for abusing their own children.

The irony is that this comes at a time when public and professional faith in state education is at an all-time low. One piece of propaganda produced by Education Otherwise systematically takes apart the claim that ‘school is the best place to educate a child’ by linking to numerous articles from the mainstream press bemoaning the failings of the testing regime, the problem of bullying, the lack of the right kind of provision for children with special needs, the way that increasing numbers of parents are employing private tutors to compensate for the inadequacies of school education… (7). As an argument as to why opting out is better, this doesn’t work for me. But as an example of the worry and disdain that state education today inspires amongst teachers and parents alike, it is extremely effective.

The more ground that is lost in the argument as to why state education is better for children than its alternatives, the more the state attempts to bully families and professionals into compulsory inclusion in its agenda. This is an expression of the state’s weakness rather than its ‘totalitarian’ intentions, but it is no less damaging for that. When the state resorts to bully tactics to make people toe the line, it destroys the basis for positive support.

As for parents: whatever our own views about home schooling, the principle of parental autonomy in relation to education is crucial for all of us, for the simple reason that it provides a clear demarcation between being able to do what we think is best for our children, and having to do what officials decree is best for them. For all the nonsense talked about choice in education, our only real choice as parents comes from the knowledge that if our children’s schooling becomes really bad, we can always pull them out of it.

This article was first published on spiked.

(1) Home educators made to register, BBC News, 11 June 2009

(2) Better monitoring and support for home educated children in England, DCSF, 11 June 2009

(3) See Down with the Early Years blueprint! Parents With Attitude, 27 May 2008

(4) Home Educators’ Petition Rejecting the State as Parent of First Resort Strikes a Chord, Freedom for Children to Grow, 9 March 2009

(5) For example: Private schools warn over ‘rottweiler’ Ofsted, Evening Standard, 1 October 2007

(6) Summerhill’s fight with the UK government. Summerhill School, Accessed 13 June 2009

(7) The Best Place to Educate a Child. Freedom for Children to Grow, Accessed 13 June 2009

Your child’s Body Mass Index is nobody’s business but yours

My daughter is desperately excited by her upcoming fifth birthday – not least because apparently she will ‘look like six’. She’s not daft; she knows that the labels on the clothes that I buy her now read ‘Age 6-7’, and that she is taller and heavier than some of her friends.

My daughter is not fat – although according to recent research from Newcastle University, eviscerated by Tim Black on spiked, as a parent I would be the last person to admit that she was. But she isn’t a skinnymalinks either. I’m quite pleased about this because I think she looks healthy and beautiful, and my instincts tell me that denying children pudding and sending them to bed hungry is neither necessary nor desirable in this day and age.

The trouble is, when you are constantly incited by government campaigns, health professionals and media reports to calculate and then worry about your child’s Body Mass Index, you find yourself doubting your instincts – and looking at your child in a very peculiar way. Will she pass the test? you wonder, when the school weigh-in programme comes around. If I put a chocolate biscuit in her lunchbox, will people think it’s my fault that she failed?

And so it was when, towards the end of last school term, I received a letter from the local NHS Community Services regarding the ‘height, weight, vision and hearing’ screening programme for reception-class children. Parents were advised to complete a form, which asked for basic health information about the child and gave the opportunity to consent – or not – to their child ‘receiving the Health Assessment Service offered’, and return it to the school forthwith. The covering letter was explicit in its advice that parents really should consent to this: we were told the Health Assessment was necessary ‘to identify any unmet health needs that may impact on your child’s education’; and that if we did not consent, or failed to return the form, ‘your GP will be notified’.

Now, I am not the most organised of parents when it comes to returning forms; but in this case, I actively dithered. I have no problem with vision and hearing screening offered through the school, not least because I can see how problems with eyesight and hearing really can ‘impact on your child’s education’. But screening for height and weight is a different matter. This is a political initiative, introduced a few years ago as part of the government’s war on obesity.

The introduction, in 2006, of a national ‘weigh-in’ scheme via schools, through which parents could be advised about how far down the scale of morbid obesity their children were sitting and through which the government could collect statistics to beef up their claims of a rampant fatness epidemic, was all about meeting the political objective of tackling a presumed public health problem (1). It had, and has, nothing to do with education – unless you take into account a fat kid’s ability to shine at PE.

This was given tacit recognition in the early days of the weigh-in scheme, when parents were given the ability to opt their child out of this aspect of the Health Assessment. But it was quickly discovered that the ‘target group’ – that is, children with less-than-perfect BMI scores – were being removed from the programme by their parents, defeating its stated objective of helping parents to recognise their child’s chubbiness and take appropriate lifestyle measures to address this; and the rules changed to make all parents comply with the screening.

The upshot, certainly in our neck of the woods, was that the political height and weight screening became lumped together with the medically more important hearing and vision screening, and parents are forced to ‘consent’ to all of this or face the scrutiny of their GP. The only basis on which you can ‘opt out’ is by refusing to allow your child’s height and weight measurements to be included in the government’s data collection statistics. Which is what, after far too much soul-searching, I eventually did. Not having the ability to register a protest about my child being weighed or having her individually graded on a scale of fatness (both of which I cared about) I took the only available opportunity of registering any kind of objection, by refusing to let anonymous, meaningless figures about my child be included in national statistics (about which I really don’t give a monkey’s).

Then a funny thing happened. Three weeks into the new school term, I received a message from my GP’s surgery asking me to get in touch, followed by a phone call from a very nice woman involved in the Health Assessment service. The woman explained to me that they had received my consent form after the screening had already taken place in school, and asked whether I would like them to arrange some separate screening for my daughter. I accepted the offer, although I also explained that if I thought there was a problem I would be happy to talk to my GP. After a brief pause, she admitted that, while my daughter had not been screened for vision and hearing because my consent had not been given, they had gone ahead with the height and weight screening, with the result that I would receive a letter telling me how tall my daughter was and how much she weighed, and that these statistics would have already been passed on for collection in the government’s data.

The woman was very apologetic, and took pains to reassure me that all this data was ‘anonymised’. I explained that I did not actually mind the data being collected, but that it seemed rather strange that my lack of consent could be taken seriously when it came to the medically-important part of the screening service that I did want to access, but ignored when it came to the very bit of the service that I was worried about. I raised my concerns that the height and weight screening was a political measure that had nothing to do with my child’s education, and pointed out that – unlike eyesight and hearing – I was perfectly capable of measuring height and weight myself. The woman agreed with me that the height and weight screening was indeed political, and said that was causing those working in this field a lot of problems with parents becoming upset and confused by the whole thing – the last thing that health professionals want to happen.

So, I asked, am I likely to receive a letter categorising my child as underweight, normal, overweight, obese? The woman explained that no, this year they were not categorising children like this, because last year several parents became understandably very upset on hearing that their child had been awarded a fat grade. Consequently, this year parents would be receiving (as I did) a letter that simply informed us how tall and heavy our child was, along with a general paragraph on the importance of having a healthy weight. But, as she pointed out, this would lead to complaints, too, as parents were utterly confused about ‘what it meant’. In other words, simply being told that your child weighs x kilos begs the question of whether you are then supposed to go and work out their Body Mass Index and its presumed relationship to healthy weights and diets – or whether you just chuck the letter in the bin.

I haven’t chucked the letter in the bin – but only because I want to keep it as proof that I do not require surveillance by my GP. The telephone call from my local surgery, staffed by busy, conscientious people who are brilliant when you are ill, turned out to have been placed because I had not returned the screening form in time, and they just wanted to check ‘whether everything is okay’. As it goes, I am not worried that they might be worried – the GP practice knows my family, and I am confident that they realise that the reason we are not visiting the doctor all the time is because, actually, the kids are pretty healthy. But they, too, are forced to play along with an agenda that forces parents to ‘consent’ to surveillance practices that both parents and health professionals know are based on political objectives rather than health imperatives.

What a waste of everybody’s time, skill and energy this all is. And how bad it is for children, that so many people are scrutinising their bodies for signs of a glitch in the BMI calculation, rather than seeing them as little people with so many more exciting challenges ahead than worrying about what they had for breakfast.

Jennie Bristow runs Parents With Attitude and is co-author of Licensed to Hug: How Child Protection Policies Are Poisoning the Relationship Between the Generations and Damaging the Voluntary Sector published by Civitas, 2008. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

(1) Stop bullying fat kids, by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, 24 May 2006

This article was first published on spiked.

Can the government ever be Mum or Dad?

Last week a cross-party committee of MPs accused the Government of failing in its duty as a corporate parent to abused and neglected children, and has demanded an overhaul of the system of residential and foster care. Barry Sheerman, Labour MP for Huddersfield and chairman of the committee, said that care must become a “positive experience” for such children, but that “this will only happen if the state can better replicate the warm, secure care of good parents for every child in the system”.

This seems like an admirable goal, and one with which, emotionally, many people will agree. But child protection involves some hard questions; and tough as it is we should ask whether it is ever possible for the care system to “replicate” a warm and secure family in the way these MPs seem to be suggesting. Children’s homes have a difficult history, and foster care is far from easy; doubtless, some things could be done to make these experiences better for children and carers. What cannot be done is to make the “corporate parent” into an actual parent of the “looked-after child”, and it would be dangerous to try.

The reason lies in the phrase “corporate parent”. The relationship between parent and child within a family is an informal one, based on a powerful combination of biological relationship, practical care and an emotional tie. People disagree on the relative importance of these things; to me, the most important is bit is the emotional tie, which means that the relationship between parents and children within families is totally distinct from a professional relationship between paid carer and looked-after child.

This is not to say that care workers or foster parents do not genuinely, personally care about the child they are looking after – many of them really do – but the bottom line is that this is a professional relationship, involving wages (however meagre) and formal rules and regulations. At its best, the experience for the looked-after child can be warm, caring, and altogether more positive than the life he or she had with his family. But because it is a formal relationship, the state can never BE this child’s family.

Knowing the difference between a corporate parent and an actual parent is important as a reminder of why taking children away from their families is such a big deal. Of course, sometimes this is necessary, but it should never be done without very good cause. But it is also important that children in care are given a realistic expectation of what professional carers can give them. Paid carers can provide safety, affection, and even love; but they cannot become replica parents, and it is unreasonable to expect them to do so.

This article first appeared on The Times blog Alphamummy.

Good childhoods, ‘bad parents’, rubbish research

As yet another report blames parents for the miserable state of childhood in the UK, it would be easy for us to get a bit spooked. From UNICEF telling us two years ago that British children have the lowest standard of wellbeing in the world (1), to last week’s Good Childhood Inquiry, produced by the Church of England Children’s Society, claiming that ‘excessive individualism’ has resulted in a generation of parents who are too selfish to raise happy children (2), there seems to be a huge market for ‘research’ telling us what rubbish parents we are.

But let’s be clear – it is the ‘research’ that is rubbish, not parents. And if we are concerned about our children’s happiness and wellbeing, the first thing we have to do is to ignore all this stuff, and get on with raising our families in the best way we can.

The Good Childhood Inquiry was a major endeavour, which was conducted over two years and involved talking to children, adults and professionals. Yet despite the significant amounts of money and effort that have gone into this report, its findings are flimsy and its conclusions largely based on prejudice. Critics such as Helene Guldberg on spiked (3), and Daniel Finkelstein in The Times (4), have offered some astute arguments about some of the many things that are wrong with this report.

But The Good Childhood Inquiry is so wide-ranging, and there are so many things wrong with it, that I will have to restrict myself to one of its more objectionable claims: that a culture of ‘excessive individualism’ is leading to family breakdown, brought about by selfish parents who do not care if they make their children unhappy.

Noting that ‘most women now work outside the home’, The Good Childhood Inquiry argues:

‘Women’s new economic independence has made women much less dependent on their male partner, as has the advent of the welfare state. These factors have contributed to the rise of family break-up. As a result of increased break-up, a third of British 16-year-olds now live apart from their biological father. A child’s performance at secondary school, self-esteem and wellbeing as an adult are linked especially to the father’s input. Children, whose parents separate are 50 per cent more likely to fail at school, suffer behavioural difficulties, anxiety or depression.’ (5)

Even coming from the Church of England, this is an extraordinarily reactionary set of statements. It is rare these days to hear people argue that things were better when women were trapped in abusive or miserable marriages simply because they lacked the economic wherewithal to leave. The inquiry kindly notes that parents ‘should not stay together if the level of conflict between them is very bad’ – despite the apparently grisly consequences of separation for their children – but glibly instructs us that ‘people who bring a child into the world should have a long-term commitment to each other and should aim to live harmoniously with each other’ (6).

So we not only have an obligation, as parents, to stay with our partners forever ‘for the sake of the children’ – we also have an obligation to stay happy. Which begs the question, what on Earth does the Church of England think that people want out of a relationship in the first place?

The assumption behind these findings, which set the tone for much of the media debate about the report, is that men and women today break up with each other on the merest whim, shopping for intimate relationships as they do for shoes, without a thought about the impact of their actions upon their children. Of course, we have all heard stories about people who have behaved like that, as well as reading stories about people who fantasise about behaving like that. And yes, we do live in a self-absorbed culture that is troubled by the idea of long-term commitment; we do struggle with the idea that we have to ‘give up our lives’ when we have children. But if we look at the way that people actually think and live in relation to children, the idea that families in general are beset by excessive, selfish individualism seems preposterous.

Compared to the dubious research that informs much of The Good Childhood Inquiry, the respected British Social Attitudes survey of 2008 sheds some light on this question. (7) In their report on ‘tradition and change in modern relationships’, Simon Duncan and Miranda Phillips noted that there is a ‘glaring problem’ with the individualisation theory of modern family life, which emphasises the self-centred pursuit of personal relationships; and that problem is ‘how far it exists in reality is largely uncertain’. Noting that ‘the individualisation theorists themselves are notorious for asserting their almost millenarian scenarios on the basis of sketchy evidence’, the authors argue that ‘subsequent research in Britain has shown that other family forms can provide everyday alternatives to the married couple’.

In other words: while some families live in a different structure to the past, in the sense of not being married or living with step-children, that does not mean that the quality of the relationships between parents and children has become something different to classical ‘family life’. The changing form of the family certainly does not mean that parents have become highly individualised hedonists, aggressively seeking their own pleasure at the expense of their children.

For example, when asked whether ‘Married couples make better parents than unmarried ones’, 40 per cent of respondents to the British Social Attitudes survey disagreed, compared with 28 per cent who agreed. When asked whether divorce should be harder if children are under 16, 30 per cent agreed, 38 per cent disagreed, and 26 per cent were equivocal. The vast majority of respondents (78 per cent) agreed that: ‘It is not divorce that harms children, but conflict between their parents.’ All of these responses indicate a wide acceptance of different family forms.

Yet when it comes to ideas about how people do and should view their responsibilities to their children, there is no sense of taking this lightly. Forty-two per cent of respondents agreed with the statement: ‘The relationship between a parent and their child is stronger than the relationship between any couple.’ And 75 per cent of respondents thought that ‘many couples stay in unhappy relationships because of money or children’. As Duncan and Phillips note: ‘Clearly… most people see the world of families and relationships as potentially involving severe structural constraints to personal choice. This is hardly a case of “choosing one’s own biography”, as individualisation theory would have it.’

There is no doubt that the form of the modern family has changed – although the extent of these changes is often overstated. Even the Good Childhood Inquiry, for all its emphasis on the problem of single parents, found that 76 per cent of its child respondents lived in a traditional set-up, with ‘Mum and Dad’. What is important, though, is to distinguish between the way people view their relationship to social institutions, such as marriage, and the way they view their commitment to their families. People are well aware that families can involve ‘severe structural constraints to personal choice’, yet they still choose to embark on family life.

As for putting their children first: the fact that a significant proportion of people privilege the parent-child bond over the bond between a couple indicates the degree to which the focus on children has become, if anything, too great. As Ulrich Beck and other individualisation theorists have argued, in a culture of uncertain, fluid relationships, the absolute and unconditional love one has for one’s child can seem like the safest option, the only non-negotiable element in one’s personal relationships. In my view, this speaks to a problem, in the sense that it reveals an under-confidence about the ability to find life-long love with another adult, and implies that love within a family is somehow divisible – that it is even possible to answer the question, ‘Who do you love best, your husband or your child?’. But this finding does rather knock on the head the idea that parents privilege finding the perfect new partner over their child’s wellbeing.

Ultimately, the problem with the Church of England’s ‘excessive individualism’ complaint is the extent to which it assumes a breakdown in the emotional relationship within families. It assumes that parents make free choices, outside of the context of real life – so working mothers are acting selfishly, as are couples who have taken the hard decision to divorce, as are single parents who do not retain contact with the child’s father. There is no sense of the financial and social pressures that are brought to bear upon families, which help to define the choices that they make. After all, don’t most people aspire to live ‘harmoniously’ with their life partner as they raise their family? And does it not occur to the authors of The Good Childhood Inquiry that there might be more to this than a mere act of will?

The fact is that family life is, and always has been, messy and imperfect. People make choices, of course they do, but these are choices that are generally grounded in what the family as a whole wants and needs. Are working mothers selfish for contributing to the family finances while they boost their sense of personal identity? Is a mother (or a father) a better person for putting up with downright unreasonable behaviour from their partner in the interests of ‘harmonious’ living? To think that the interests of a family as a whole can be divided into parents’ interests versus children’s interests, or individuals’ interests against each other, is a fundamental misreading of what makes family life distinct from the life of an individual.

One can argue, as the Children’s Society has done, that children do not like it when their parents split up, and that they may suffer as a result. But the cause of these children will not be served by pretending that parents get divorced on a whim, or that cajoling deeply unhappy couples to stay together for the sake of their children will result in a happy outcome for anybody. We have to trust that parents make decisions for the good of their families – and even if we think those decisions are wrong, it is not the business of the church, the state or the chatterati to decide how people should live their personal lives.

The standard Hollywood line spoken by parents to their children when they get divorced is, ‘This doesn’t mean we love you any less’. Now we have the Church of England transmitting the message, ‘Your parents don’t love you enough to stay together, and they have only their own interests at heart’. Constantly bombarded with messages like these, no wonder kids are worried.

(1) UNICEF report on childhood in industrialised countries, UNICEF UK News, 14 February 2007

(2) The Good Childhood Inquiry, Children’s Society, February 2008

(3) The mother of all interventions, by Helene Guldberg

(4) Happily, children don’t have such a hard time, The Times (London), 4 February 2009

(5) The Good Childhood Inquiry, Children’s Society, February 2008

(6) Press release: The Good Childhood Inquiry. The Children’s Society, 2 February 2008

(7) Alison Park et al (eds). British Social Attitudes: The 24th Report. SAGE publications / NatCen, 2008

Ego-stroking dressed up as educational reform

My eldest daughter has recently discovered a passion for computers. We have been duly impressed by her dexterity with the mouse, and her confidence in making the machine do what she wants it to do.

Of course, being aged four, what she wants to make the machine do is to play dress-up Tinkerbell and basic clicky games on the CBeebies website. If she wants to get the most out of computers, and the wonderful world of the web, she will need a bit more knowledge. Learning to read would be a start; learning enough history and science to seek out information, and to sort good information from bad, will hopefully follow on. In the course of this development, she will learn that computers are only as good as the people who use them, and that having access to ideas and resources only makes sense if you know what to do with these things.

I am confident that my daughter will learn these basic truths, as they seem to me fairly obvious. But I am prone to moments of despair; particularly when reading things like the British government’s new proposals to overhaul the primary school curriculum.

An interim report by Sir Jim Rose, who was commissioned by the government to lead a review of primary education, has called to give greater prominence to ICT (Information Communication Technology) in education for little kids, and to replace the teaching of traditional subjects, like history and geography, with something called ‘cross-curricular study’ or ‘theme-based learning’. There should also be ‘greater focus on personal development’.

From an educational perspective, there are many aspects of the Rose review that demand some critical questioning. An excellent leader in The Times (London) has pointed out that the likely consequence of the reforms will be a ‘watered-down muddle’, and argues: ‘The function of primary school is to teach children how to learn. That means knowing enough facts to develop a sensible hypothesis about the world. It means progressively mastering a series of tasks that build up to knowledge. It does not mean the kind of passive downloading that universities have become so concerned about.’

But the educational implications of the Rose review are only part of the problem. As a parent, what concerns me even more than the impact such proposals will have on our children’s brains is the impact they will have on children’s sense of themselves, their peers, and the adults in their lives. When policymakers take as their starting point what children already know, rather than what they need to know in the future – and when they focus on ‘personal development’ at the expense of knowledge of the world – the upshot is a recipe for narcissism and ignorance. Adults, in this view, become the applauding audience in the drama of our children’s lives, our authority reduced to mere flattery.

Now, I think my kids are brilliant and all, but I also think they have a hell of a lot to learn. And for their sake, I demand more of myself, and of their teachers, than ego-stroking dressed up as educational reform.

Take the justification for putting computer skills on a par with literacy and numeracy. The press release on the Rose report put out by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) begins with this bald statement: ‘Techno-savvy youngsters are developing their computer skills faster today, providing untapped potential to boost learning in primary schools.’

As The Times points out, in educational terms ‘it makes no sense to argue that children should be learning more computer skills early, because they are already so competent’. If kids become ‘techno-savvy’ of their own volition, surely the time at school would be better used teaching them about things that they don’t pick up with such ease or enthusiasm? But the spirit of this proposal is precisely that educators should not seek to impose upon children the things they don’t know; rather that they should take their lead from these ‘techno-savvy youngsters’ and find ways to ‘boost learning’ (presumably, the learning of the fusty, technophobic adults who are trailing behind). In the glitzy new world of the ICT suite, the child leads and the adult marvels, contributing such insights as ‘what happens if you click on this? Well done!’

The idea that schools should be transformed into an extended episode of Dora the Explorer is pretty disheartening to any adult who suspects that unlocking the secrets of the universe involves rather more than a familiarity with tabbed browsing. But the myth of the techno-savvy youngster, who is naturally a more gifted navigator of our information society than those of us reared on books and test tubes, is a pernicious one. It has become popular because it speaks to a deep-seated anxiety that adults are really not up to raising children – look how they navigate, where we fumble! Look at their intuition, compared to our pedantry! So it is not really surprising that the DCSF, with its heightened awareness of adults’ shortcomings, has jumped upon this particular bandwagon to promote its brand of child-led learning.

Then there is the question of ‘personal development’. Specifically, the DCSF press release puts it like this: ‘Children should acquire a range of personal, social and emotional qualities essential to their health, wellbeing and life as a responsible citizen in the twenty-first century – getting the right skills, knowledge, understanding and attitudes.’

Schools have always sought to do more than teach the three Rs; and the question of how they can best provide a form of moral guidance for their pupils, and what form this moral guidance should take, has been discussed perennially. But the new focus on ‘personal development’ makes clear that, nowadays, schools are expected to get increasingly involved in the basic aspects of children’s personal and emotional development – yet without even trying to engage with the difficult questions of learning right from wrong, or aspiring to be a good person (as opposed, say, to simply being well-behaved). In DCSF-speak, the idea of moral guidance translates into simply: ‘Getting the right attitudes.’

Parents of primary-school-age children will already be all too familiar with what these ‘right attitudes’ are: recycle your rubbish, walk to school, don’t bully other children. The litany is both vacuous and conformist, demanding that children (and their families) accept that there is only one ‘right attitude’ to have. I find myself trying to explain to my daughter that, actually, ‘telling the teacher’ is only one way to deal with a hypothetical bully, and I relish the prospect of introducing her to the Enid Blyton school stories, in which ‘sneaking’ was the worst thing you could do. But when ideas about right and wrong have already been perverted into narrow and simplistic ideas about acceptable or unacceptable behaviour, it’s all a bit of a struggle.

In the absence of a broader moral framework, the emphasis on ‘personal development’ simply means telling children how wonderful they are. Children are encouraged to focus on their own health and wellbeing, and to demand that adults jump to ensuring that they are optimising these. Through initiatives like the government’s Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning programme, which goes by the cuddly acronym SEAL, kids are encouraged into an obsession with their own happiness and unhappiness, and furnished with morally dubious ideas such as that acts of kindness get you prizes.

Parents and teachers have a nagging suspicion that the upshot of all this self-regarding could well be a generation of brats, who are prepared to take neither advice nor guidance from adults, and are incapable of dealing with the blows to their ‘self-esteem’ that come when other people try to remind them that, actually, they could be better. As a parent, I am bothered by the knowledge that home life, instead of being a place of relaxation and indulgence, will be the only forum in which children’s character flaws are pointed out to them along with the errors in their work, while schools get to put ‘excellent’ over everything and reward them for such ‘virtues’ as telling a teacher about a bully.

The only upside is that, despite the drubbing that parents get in government policy, most of them care about their kids enough to know that moral guidance is necessary, and that children need more than a constant diet of smiley faces. The question is whether we can keep our confidence, or whether we will be fighting for front seats at the Brat Awards.

This article was first published on spiked.

Social censorship

A father is told to stop taking pictures of his own sons playing on an inflatable slide in a public park. A couple is told by a park warden that they cannot take pictures of their baby daughter on a swing. Two pensioners are ordered by council officials to stop taking pictures of a deserted children’s paddling pool ... in a public park. These are stories that have hit the national press in the past year, earmarked ‘Political Correctness Gone Mad’.

If only it were as simple as that. Laying the blame for heavy-handed restrictions on child photography with odd over-zealous council official massively underestimates the cultural change that has taken place. To put it bluntly: 10 years ago, it was assumed that photographs of children were a good thing, and that people taking them had good reason to do so. Now taking pictures of children is seen as a dubious activity, and anybody wanting to take such photographs is treated with suspicion.

Those involved in commercial photography will be familiar with the growing web of rules and regulations. Charlotte Evans, director of the child model agency Elisabeth Smith, talks me through a labyrinthine process, which involves obtaining a licence from the child’s local authority and a letter from their school, as well as parental consent. Photographers working in schools also face a very different environment these days.

De facto rule

‘When I first started working for the education press 14 years ago, you’d turn up at the school and the headteacher would say, “Yes, you can photograph all these kids except for that one, who is under a child protection order”,’ says editorial photographer Neil Turner. ‘Now, there is a de facto rule that you can’t shoot a photo without explicit parental consent having been granted. Things have changed colossally.’

And formal regulations on child photography are only part of the story. New rules and protocols co-exist in which generalised concern about people with cameras in public has an even more censorious effect. In 2007, semi-professional photographer Simon Taylor launched an e-petition protesting against ‘proposed restrictions regarding photography in public places’. The petition attracted 69,000 signatories, prompting the Government to intervene before its closing date to ‘reassure’ signatories that it was not considering any proposal along these lines.

The Government continued: ‘There may be cases where individual schools or other bodies believe it is necessary to have some restrictions on photography, for instance to protect children, but that would be a matter for local decisions.’ But it is precisely such ‘local decisions’ that are causing a headache for many parents, amateur and professional photographers today.

Taylor was prompted to submit his e-petition by an email sent to his local camera club by a couple of photographers, describing how they had gone out for a walk and taken some photos of a rugby tournament in a local park. Some of the players were children and the photographers were approached by officials from the club, who then involved a Child Protection Officer and a policewoman - all demanding to know what they were planning to do with the images.

The problem is the level of ‘paranoia’ about child protection today, where ‘every hobby photographer is under suspicion’, says Taylor. There may be no law restricting photography in public places, but where children are concerned, local and institutional restrictions risk regulating such photography out of existence.

Sporting life

These restrictions affect parents taking pictures of their own kids as much as any other photographer. At municipal swimming pools it is now commonplace to see a ‘child protection policy’ on display, banning the use of cameras and mobile phones. In youth sports, lengthy policies are produced detailing who may take photographs of what. UK Athletics, for example, instructs photographers to ‘only use images of players in suitable dress’ and to ‘try to focus on the activity rather than a particular child’.

The body also recommends that parents who wish to take photographs are registered with the event’s organisers, because of the possibility that ‘certain individuals’ may take ‘inappropriate photographs’. All this marks out photographers as dodgy characters, and cameras are viewed as instruments of harm - but the basis for this belief is far from clear.

The increasing regulation of child photography is motivated primarily by the fear that paedophiles will get hold of images of children and use them to identify and track children they can abuse. But as the fondness for the phrase ‘PC gone mad’ indicates, many people - including parents - suspect this scenario has been blown out of all reasonable proportion.

The fact is that parents generally like taking photographs of their kids, and having such images taken by professionals, such as Cardiff-based photographer Hazel Hannant. She says clients never raise issues about taking pictures of children at weddings or informal family settings - but she feels she has to be tread carefully.

‘I am very aware of the situation and if I’m out with my camera taking pictures for fun, in a park or on a beach, for example, I do feel slightly awkward,’ she says.

This generalised sense of unease when carrying a camera in public has been described to me by many photographers. It leads, as Steve Forrest of Insight-Visual suggests, to a kind of self-censorship - photographers don’t want the possibility of a fight, so they don’t take the picture. Consequently, there is a grudging acceptance of the notion that photographing children is a no-go area, so regardless of what rules exist, photographers are culturally conditioned to steer clear.

What is far from clear is who will gain from this stand off between photographers and their most photogenic subjects. But a climate that makes people feel dirty for holding a camera represents a great loss.

This article was first published in the British Journal of Photography, 10 December 2008

‘Baby P’: don’t turn this tragedy into a policy

From the moment the story broke, the media filled up with stories about the heart-rending case of ‘Baby P’. The 17-month-old boy’s mother had already pleaded guilty to causing or allowing his death, but was cleared of murder on a judge’s directions. Yesterday, 11 November, her 32-year-old boyfriend and another man were convicted at the Old Bailey in London on the same charge.

The computer-generated photograph of this poor baby’s battered head that has accompanied some of the news reports is surely unnecessary, when reading about a catalogue of abuse that included eight fractured ribs and a broken back. What makes the story more awful is that the little boy was already on the London council of Haringey’s ‘at risk’ register, yet ‘over eight months of abuse, during which he was seen 60 times by health or social workers, the boy suffered more than 50 injuries’ (1).

Recriminations are already flying, as are comparisons with the landmark Victoria Climbié case in 2000. Eight-year-old Victoria suffered horrific abuse at the hands of her guardians, finally ending up in a hospital intensive care unit where she died with 128 separate injuries to her body. Here, too, it was Haringey council that failed to intervene in time. The Climbié case prompted an inquiry, headed by Lord Laming, into how the council had failed to act upon such a clear case of child abuse; and a chain of policy measures was put into motion to stop a case like this from ever happening again.

Now it has happened again, and guess what? The government’s response has been (again) to announce an independent review of child protection services across the country. But if anybody wanted to learn one lesson from this case, and from Victoria Climbie before it, it should be this: when governments politicise such tragic events, the outcome is worse than no good.

Victoria Climbié and the aftermath

Lord Laming’s report into the circumstances surrounding Victoria Climbié’s death was released in January 2003, and he was uncompromising about the failings of the child protection authorities. He noted that there had been ‘no fewer than 12 key occasions when the relevant services had the opportunity to successfully intervene in the life of Victoria’ – yet none did. ‘The extent of the failure to protect Victoria was lamentable’, he wrote. ‘Tragically, it required nothing more than basic good practice being put into operation. This never happened.’ (2)

The failure of the child protection authorities to follow ‘basic good practice’ goes a long way to explaining how professionals charged with preventing child abuse can miss severe malnourishment, cigarette burns and the other multiple injuries that Victoria sustained. A further explanation was provided by Helene Guldberg on spiked at the time of the Laming report: ‘It was not the absence of a highly visible, vigilant and centralised child protection industry that allowed Victoria to die a lonely drawn-out death. It was the lack of two basic human instincts: compassion and common sense.’ (3) If those many individuals and agencies who had come into contact with the little girl had exercised more human judgement, the outcome could have been very different.

Unfortunately, what the government wanted to learn from the Climbié case was a rather different lesson: which was that her death should be used as a springboard for the national reorganisation, not only of child protection services, but of the principle of child protection. To that end, it set in motion a major policy that essentially reorganises how all adults – parents, teachers, doctors, social workers and members of the community – relate to all children. This was the blanket policy banally called Every Child Matters.

Every Child Matters

How could an inquiry that began with a case of extreme cruelty and murder end up with this:

‘The government’s aim is for every child, whatever their background or their circumstances, to have the support they need to: Be healthy; Stay safe; Enjoy and achieve; Make a positive contribution; Achieve economic wellbeing…’

…as though Victoria Climbie’s suffering came from eating too much chocolate and not being read to at home?

And how could the failure of trained social workers to spot signs of extreme abuse that were right under their noses lead to this:

‘[O]rganisations involved with providing services to children – from hospitals and schools, to police and voluntary groups – will be teaming up in new ways, sharing information and working together, to protect children and young people from harm and help them achieve what they want in life…’

…as though the personnel who came into contact with Victoria simply lacked the right volume of notes?

As a result of the inquiry into Victoria Climbié’s death, all children are to have their details registered on a national database (called ContactPoint), just in case they need some kind of state protection in the future. From childminders and nurseries through to secondary and tertiary education, teachers and other childcare workers are tasked with worrying about all aspects of a child’s wellbeing – healthy eating, staying safe, and so on. In case parents should worry that they are being sidelined, there is also a document called Every Parent Matters, which sternly reminds us of our duties in helping children to read and not smoking during pregnancy. I could go on – but you can read it all in breathtaking, mind-numbing detail for yourself here.

In short, the government politicised Victoria Climbié’s death, using this tragedy as a springboard to reform the relationship between parents and the authorities, and reducing parents to mere ‘partners’ in the child-rearing process. This policy was never going to prevent the rare but dreadful cases of abuse that really are a cause for concern – indeed, it is possible that a policy that teaches all practitioners to look for the most minor signs of potential abuse in every parental oversight, be it a failure to provide carrots for lunchtime or fruit for breakfast, makes the job of child protection workers harder, by distracting them and burying them in bureaucracy. When social workers are trained to consider every parent suspicious, and all sorts of parenting techniques as potentially abusive, they may become distracted from the task of spotting real abuse. What Every Child Matters has done is to institutionalise the idea that all families should be placed under greater scrutiny by an expanded group of professionals, in order to ensure that they care for their children enough, and in the appropriate kind of way.

By shamelessly taking advantage of the outrage caused by rare and terrible cases of abuse, the government’s policy presumes that there is some connection between children being denied their five-fruit-and-veg-a-day and babies having their heads beaten in. In contrast, by setting in motion official investigations into the failings of the state to intervene when families really are failing, the government has presumed that there is no connection between its demand that social workers and others spot child abusers everywhere, and their failure to see and deal with real horrors on their doorstep. So after ‘Baby P’, please, let the government get real. The last thing that will help is a policy called ‘Every Child Really Matters’.

This article was previously published on spiked.

(1) Investigation called after child murder case with echoes of Climbie, The Times November 11, 2008

(2) The Victoria Climbié Inquiry, January 2003

(3) The missed lesson of the Climbié inquiry, by Helene Guldberg, 31 January 2003

Parenting debates at the Battle of Ideas

The Battle of Ideas 2008 will be a two-day festival of high-level, thought-provoking debate organised by the Institute of Ideas and hosted by the Royal College of Art.

The ‘Battle for the Family’ strand on Saturday 1 November contains three important debates.

10.30-12.00: Professionalising parenting

Parents, apparently, are a bunch of amateurs. No wonder all the youth of today are binge-drinking, obese, antisocial yobs. What is needed, we are told, is constant monitoring of parents, and learning and development support where necessary. How did parenting become the big idea in the 21st century, and why have so many social concerns come to be understood through the prism of parenting?

Speakers

Zoe Williams - columnist, the Guardian; particular interest in feminism; and babies. 
Christina Hardyment - writer and historian with special interest in family and domestic matters; author Dream Babies: Babycare Advice from John Locke to Gina Ford
Dr Ellie Lee - lecturer in social policy, University of Kent; co-ordinator of Pro-Choice Forum
Nancy McDermott - journalist; member of the New York Salon; chair Advisory Board of Park Slope Parents, second largest parenting group in the USA
Chair: Jane Sandeman - convenor of the Institute of Ideas Parents Forum

13.30 - 15.00: The problem with families

The ‘problem of the family’ has long been a pet subject of social commentators. In the past, critics worried about the threats posed by single parenthood, homosexuality and permissiveness. But with the rise of therapy culture and the mainstreaming of the view that your parents ‘f*** you up’, the policy focus has shifted from a concern about a few ‘problem families’ to the assumption that all families are essentially problematic. What can we expect for the future of the family, when its very existence gives policymakers sleepless nights?

Speakers

Jennie Bristow - writer on parenting issues and intergenerational relations; author Guide to Subversive Parenting; columnist, spiked; editor, Parents With Attitude.com
Yvonne Roberts - senior associate, The Young Foundation; writer and broadcaster
Erin Riley - executive producer, documentaries, BBC Radio; created and produced Bringing Up Britain (presented by Mariella Frostrup); series 1 was broadcast March 2008; series 2 begins New Year 2009.
Jennifer Howze - lifestyle editor, Times Online; manages and blogs on Alpha Mummy.
Chair: Sally Millard - founder member, Institute of Ideas Parents Forum; opinionated mother of two.

15.30 - 17.00: Is ‘poor parenting’ a class issue?

Whereas the welfare state attempted to counter the problems facing low-income families through financial assistance, the therapeutic state pursues these families with a relentless programme of emotional support and childrearing advice. From the war on junk food and youth binge drinking to the pressure exerted on parents by schools to improve their own literacy levels, recycling habits, and compliance with healthy lifestyles, the orthodoxy of ‘good parenting’ often seems to be a thinly-veiled attack on the way adults live their lives – often with a heavy dose of snobbery. Are a child’s life chances really determined more by parental behaviour than by family income? Is it right to use children as a conduit for attempting to change the behaviour of ‘hard-to-reach’ adults? What makes a ‘poor parent’ anyway?

Speakers
Val Gillies - senior research fellow, ESRC Families and Social Capital Research Group, London South Bank University; author, Marginalised Mothers: Exploring Working Class Experiences of Parenting
Suzi Godson - columnist, Body and Soul, The Times; writer on sex, relationships and the family; author, The Body Bible: Every woman’s essential companion
Dr Jan Macvarish - researcher and lecturer in the sociology of family life and intimate relationships; author, Teenage Parents’ Experiences of Parenthood, What is ‘the Problem’ of Singleness?
Dr Dalia Ben-Galim - senior research fellow, Social Policy, Institute for Public Policy Research
Chair: Beverley Marshall - Institute of Ideas Parenting Forum; working mother (senior product manager, publishing; mother of three children under five).

See more information here.
Book tickets here.

Licensed to Hug

Published in June 2008: Licensed to Hug, a report by Frank Furedi and myself about how the national vetting system is damaging relations between generations.

Read Frank Furedi’s cover story in the New Statesman, or the introduction to the report on spiked.

See the storm of media coverage here.

Licensed to Hug is published by Civitas.

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Media coverage of ‘Licensed to Hug’

The report Licensed to Hug, by Frank Furedi and Jennie Bristow, generated considerable press interest.

The following appeared on 26 June 2008.

A quarter of adults to face ‘anti-paedophile’ tests. Daily Telegraph - front page

Time for sanity in the vetting of volunteers.  Daily Telegraph - leader

Government will crack down on unnecessary CRB checks, Phil Hope says.  Daily Telegraph

Are we overprotective of our children? Daily Telegraph - discussion

Has vetting damaged trust? Today, BBC Radio Four

Adults ‘scared to go near kids’. BBC News Online

Is our response to child sex abuse in proportion? BBC News Online - Analysis by Mark Easton

Child safety laws mean adults ‘scared to approach children’. Guardian

Child protection laws are ‘poisoning the relationships between adults and children’. Daily Mail

Quarter of adults must be CRB checked under new rules. The Times (London)

Paedophile label scares off adults. London Metro

Child protection measures ‘increase risk to children’. Inthenews.co.uk

Adults Scared Of Children. Raising Kids
New report explores the damaging effects of child protection policies. innovations report, Germany

Escalation in child protection measures make adults ‘afraid to interact with children’. 24dash.com

The following appeared on 27 June 2008.

An obnoxious brat in the street, a chilling leaflet… and my 14-year-old son who chants ‘Childline’ when I try to hug him. By Tom Utley. Daily Mail

This child protection hysteria deflects attention from a real, and growing, danger. By Dominic Lawson. The Independent

Protecting kids is far from child’s play, by Tim Gill. Guardian - Comment is Free

Acting on instinct, by David Wilson. Guardian - Comment is Free

Are we overprotective of our kids? Guardian - news blog

Parents banned from ferrying children to sports matches. Daily Telegraph

Baby photos that fall foul of the PC police, by Lesley Thomas. Daily Telegraph

‘I was treated like a paedophile’, by Julian Joyce. BBC News Online.

Londres multiplie les contrôles antipédophiles. Le Figaro (France)

Esther Rantzen’s fury over kid check. The Mirror

Welcome for record check on volunteers. Dorset Echo / Daily Echo

Letters to the Telegraph, including from Meg Hillier MP, Home Office Minister

The following appeared on 28 June 2008.

John Pinnington sacked after CRB check reveals unsubstantiated abuse allegations. Telegraph

New Report Explores The Damaging Effects Of Child Protection Policies. Medical News Today

Letters to the Telegraph

The following appeared on 29 June 2008.

If we can’t learn to trust each other, we will lose ourselves and our children. By Tim Lott. Independent

Parents are kidding themselves over child protection. By Rod Liddle. Sunday Times

There is no law against photographing children. By Jemima Lewis. Telegraph
The following appeared on 30 June 2008.

We’re all victims in Meg Hillier’s mad world. By Philip Johnston. Telegraph

Letters to the Telegraph

Further coverage

How magic might finally fix your computer. The Red Tape Chronicles, MSNBC, 7 July 2008

I launched Childline to protect the most vulnerable - but unleashed a politically correct monster. By Esther Rantzen. Daily Mail, 9 July 2008

Bureaucrats killing future British tennis stars. By Jim White. Daily Telegraph, 9 July 2008

Paranoia has taken over child protection, by India Knight. The Sunday Times, 13 July 2008

Dad rules, by Andrew Clover. The Sunday Times, 6 July 2008

The Damaging Effects of Child Protection Policies. Children Webmag, 1 August 2008

Why are teachers scared of learning to give pupils First Aid? By Alexandra Frean, Education Editor. Times Online (London), 10 November 2008

Baby P: how does society best protect its children? Daily Telegraph, 12 November 2008

Also see:

Thou shalt not hug, by Frank Furedi. New Statesman, 26 June 2008

Now you need a licence to interact with children, by Frank Furedi. spiked, 26 June 2008

Childcare: child’s play is now a minefield, by Frank Furedi. Daily Telegraph, 26 June 2008

Licensed to Hug. Civitas blog, 26 June 2008

Down with the Early Years blueprint!

The Independent Schools Council (ISC) has complained to children’s minister Beverley Hughes that the government’s Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) framework violates parents’ human rights by denying them the freedom to choose how they educate their children. I don’t know about human rights - but the point about parental choice is a very good one.

The EYFS has been criticised already, by educationalists who object to the prescriptive, didactic character of its aproach. Children develop at different paces, it is argued, and professionals should have the autonomy to choose which method of childcare or education that works best. I agree with this - we are talking about little kids here, from birth to five, and it is extraordinary that the government thinks a blueprint for developing the ideal child is possible, necessary or desirable.

But my big concern with the EYFS is that which the Independent Schools Council has brought out - the impact on families’ privacy and parental autonomy in child-rearing. The EYFS casts parents in the role of ‘partners’ in raising children, the clear implication being that professionals know best. The fact that professionals are then denied the opportunity to make use of their own skills and experience, instead being told that they need to dance to the tune of government policy, makes it even worse!

As the ISC also points out, parents who don’t like the way the EYFS operates cannot opt out of it through choosing private daycare (as they could with schools), as the government, through Ofsted, inspects all childcare for the under-5s. This seems to me an absolute racket: the state does not provide childcare, expecting parents to pay through the nose for it, yet reserves the right to make every private daycare organisation adhere to the misguided standards laid down by a policy framework that undermines both parents and childcare professionals equally.

It’s great news that some people are causing a stink about this. I wonder what parents can do to make their objections known? Any ideas, please post at the parents’ forum!

What’s youth binge drinking all about?

Dire warnings about young people suffering from increased rates of liver disease provide the latest instalment in the ongoing British panic about teenagers binge drinking. And yes, I believe that this is largely a panic. The young generation are not all going to end up dead before their 30s because of having one crate too many of beer; and the policy pronouncements brought in by policymakers (and supermarkets) to try and stop young people from drinking are only going to make for a more illiberal climate for all of us.

But there is something about the amount, and the way, that young people drink today that makes me a little concerned - not about their health, so much as the state of their lives. An interesting comment by Melanie McDonagh in today’s Times argued that ‘fixing the price won’t fix the problem’, and concluded:

‘The truth is that there are graver reasons than price for why young people are drinking to nihilistic excess. It may be a product of social deprivation, it may be that drink is a stimulant for lives that lack much love or meaning.’

Without sharing what appears to be McDonagh’s assumption that teenage drinkers are all poor and unloved, it seems to me that she does have a point about the ‘meaning’ of life for today’s teenagers. Specifically, what it must be like to live for over a decade in the netherworld between childhood and adulthood - old enough to drink, but not yet considered responsible enough to hold down a job, start a family, live a fully adult life.

The process of infantilisation that is trapping young people in education for years on end and encouraging them to behave like kids when in their twenties must, I imagine, be quite frustrating for the young people concerned. And whereas adults pride themselves on being able to hold their drink, for young people with no responsibility or anchor in grown-up life, why not just get off your head one night and spend the next day sleeping it off?

The problem is probably nothing like so straightforward as this. But McDonagh’s right: it’s certainly not as straightforward as simply stopping kids getting their hands on lager.

By Jennie Bristow

What do you think? Continue the discussion at the parents’ forum.

Do responsible parents have to be boring?

Last week I wrote a defence of parents getting drunk on holiday - and then wrote a longer version in my ‘Guide to subversive parenting’ on spiked. The spiked version immediately generated some stern emails.

‘It really encapsulates the hippy generation that’s now “grown up”,’ said one. ‘Everything plays second fiddle to adults enjoyment and fulfillment, it seems. Personally, I don’t believe the slogan ‘the interests of the child are paramount’, but your degree of dissociation from responsible parenting really takes the biscuit.’

‘The comments in your article illustrates so clearly the British love affair with alcohol, where getting pissed in public is never frowned upon, but rather treated as a harmless bit of fun,’ said another.

These emails made me think a bit - because I am often arguing about the need for parents to behave like grown-ups, and be treated like grown-ups. Is there a contradiction between that and getting really drunk on holiday (which, as I noted, is not advisable, though it is not the end of the world)?

It seems to me that ‘responsible parenting’ these days has become synonymous with leading a boring, conformist life - starting with cutting out all partying behaviour pre-pregnancy, and continiung right through until your kids leave home. In fact, this is a denigration of responsibility - being a responsible parent involves far more than being safe and healthy: and not least, it involves refusing to live your life solely through your children. In today’s conformist times, people seem to get the point about growing up meaning living an anxiety- and safety-ridden healthy lifestyle - which is probably why people are so reluctant to grow up! What is more difficult is accepting that being an adult means taking risks, making mistakes, and living a fully-rounded life.

OK, so a fully-rounded of life might not mean several pints of lager in Portugal, but it does mean being able to enjoy yourself. The fact that parents seem to experience having children as a trap that prevents them from living the life they want is more of a problem in my view than individual parents occasionally having too much fun.

By Jennie Bristow

What do you think? Let off steam at the parents’ forum.

A storm in a Sangria glass

It’s a shocking story. Two British parents get very drunk in charge of their three children on the first day of their holiday in Portugal – and end up paraded through the European media as an ‘example’ of parental fecklessness on a grand scale. I cannot be the only parent to have contracted the jitters from this. Is there no refuge from the dictates of Totally Responsible Parenting Behaviour – even when you spend hundreds of pounds on a family holiday in the sun?
The facts, such as they are known, are these. Eamon and Antoinette McGuckin, from Northern Ireland, allegedly collapsed in a ‘drunken stupor’ in front of their three young children at their Algarve hotel in the early hours of Saturday morning. The couple were taken to hospital and their children to a children’s refuge overnight. Accusations and denials are running thick and fast, with the Portuguese authorities considering charging Mum and Dad with abandonment and negligence, while Mum is demanding blood tests after claiming that she only drank three lagers.
The facts of this bizarre case are far from clear. One obvious question, though, is how has the story so quickly reached the Portuguese and British media? It cannot be a coincidence that this latest fable on parents behaving badly has cropped up on the anniversary of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, and the degrading, parent-bashing circus that ensued. While the jury may still be out on the question of whether it is OK for a middle-class couple to leave their kids asleep in a room while they go out for dinner and a glass of wine, getting paralytic in front of your children (on lager!!) makes for an easy moral outrage. So the McGuckins quickly cease to become people, and are held up as photo-fit examples of how British parents quite typically behave on holiday – uncivilised binge-drinkers who put their kids at risk.
I find this view far more sickening than anything the McGuckins might have drunk on their first day in Portugal. Parents are quite entitled to enjoy themselves on holiday, and drink something a little stronger than lemonade. And parents should be allowed to make mistakes. If you get too drunk in a hotel bar, you should be able to rely on people to help you out: not to send in the authorities and splash your humiliation across the international media. It’s enough to make the back garden look attractive as a holiday destination.

By Jennie Bristow

What do you think? Let off steam at the parents’ forum.