Parents' Forum

Today I attended a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Children and the Associate Parliamentary Group for Parents and Families (a bit of a mouthful!) which has chosen ‘Children’s Wellbeing’ as its theme for 2008/9. Having already discussed children’s wellbeing in the context of social care and schools (meetings that I unfortunately missed), this final meeting in the series was billed as bringing the topic back to the core of children’s lives – their families. The discussion was introduced by Clem Henricson of the Family and Parenting Institute (FPI), Dr Helen Barrett (FPI) and Elizabeth Young (Homestart).

The introductions all more or less assumed that families need help with maintaining wellbeing (which broadly means educating parents) and that most services should be available universally (even if not taken up universally); the underlying question being asked was how we should conceptualise and measure wellbeing in order to justify to policy makers that it was worth them spending money on this in the context of recession.

Whereas the old goals of intervention in family life such as reduction in poverty, improvements in health, and educational achievement were more easily measured, wellbeing as a motivator for social policy intervention is a very subjective category and therefore outcomes simply cannot be measured in the ‘old fashioned’ way through evidence based research, ‘ticking boxes’ and ‘hard facts’.

Family ‘wellbeing’ is acknowledged as a moral category, the interventions it leads all being based around changing behaviour by helping parents to parent – whether this is through Sure Start programmes, Homestart (where volunteers offer to visit families that are often resistant to social work intervention) or parenting programmes. The desired outcome of these interventions is to change the way that people parent and to bring individual parents into line with perceived best practice in parenting techniques. In line with this, suggested measurable outcomes included the perception of happiness by the families themselves, whether families were healthy and successful, the development of positive social relationships, safety, self-esteem. It was even suggested that we should try to measure the extent to which parents change their behaviour to one of ‘play and praise’ (at least I think I heard that correctly).

The problem for parenting professionals is a genuine one – finding ways to measure the outcomes of their interventions is almost impossible as their intervention is into the very centre of our private lives, and when our private lives are put under such scrutiny, each family is different and each intervention will have a slightly different outcome.  Unfortunately, the lack of measurable outcomes is unlikely to lead to any questioning of the wellbeing agenda. The mood of the meeting seemed to be that those bodies that promote family wellbeing shouldn’t really have to justify their interventions at all – they can just assert that they are morally good.

Parents’ Forum discussion on bullying 15/10/2009

Last night the Institute of Ideas Parents’ forum discussed bullying. As usual the discussion covered many things, and as always was able to really understand some of the nuances that the issue throws up.

I am just going to look at a one of the interesting threads that came up-what is happening in the school playground. One of the points that was raised was that there seems to be an expectation for children to behave in a better way than we expect from adults. At one of the member’s child’s school the policy was to make the playground “pain-free”. How this translated itself into practice was that the children are now divided into friendship groups imposed by the teacher, and they have to play in these friendship groups at playtime.

A primary school teacher described how now children have no room to be on their own, or do their own thing. The dinner ladies now are trained to be playtime mentors; the Year 5 and Year 6 children are asked to be learning mentors of younger children in the playground and they are sorted into friendship groups. Children are being constantly watched, monitored and closely supervised in what used to be their free playground time.

There does appear to be a real fear of letting children have space to be themselves, of children being out of control if not constantly marshalled, and a belief that children can’t sort things out for themselves and adults shouldn’t let them.

However, as one of the group said, no matter how much adults intervene, children will find ways of circumventing this. If forced to play fairies in a “friendship group” the children will designate the child they don’t like as the wicked witch!

There has been uproar about a book that Christina Odone has recently written called “What Women Really Want”. I haven’t read it-but from media reports her argument is that the majority of mothers, particularly those with children under 5, do not want to work at all. Therfore she says this is where government should be concentrating its efforts, not on incentives such as tax credits and “wrap-around schools” which are government incentives for women to go out to work.

One of the reactions has been to say that she is wrong-women are saying they would prefer to stay at home due to the inadequacies of good, affordable social childcare. Therefore what women are expressing is a necessity, not a choice.

I am not sure-and would like to know what others think. I think it may be really what women want. The key factors here are work is not seen as the site of social usefulness any more (men equally do not want to work full time any more). Social childcare is more and more problematised-the latest story of the nursery nurse abusing children is another plank in that unease. I do think that social policy and every book and article that you read emphasises the importance of the early years on the development of the child and that does have a strong impact on how women perceive themselves and their social role.

So I think the counterposition of Odone’s argument with that of -it’s a problem of proper social childcare is in itself problematic.

(Republished from Spiked, Wednesday 30 September 2009)

Under Brown, New Labour’s obsession with acting in loco parentis for teens has expanded to older parents, too.

Hearing Gordon Brown’s pronouncements on teenage parents from the podium at the Labour Party conference yesterday reminded me of the much ridiculed Peter Lilley, Tory minister for social security in 1992. Readers may remember that Lilley delivered, via an excruciating Gilbert and Sullivan pastiche, a party conference speech promising to ‘root out… young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list’. The subtle differences between Brown’s and Lilley’s approaches tell us much about where the New Labour project has ended up.

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There’s a great feature by Marianne Kavanagh in today’s Daily Telegraph. She really gets the point that there’s something very new about the obsession with parenting today. Though I think the idea that people have had enough and policy-makers will get bored and moved on is a bit of wishful thinking – particularly given Brown’s speech this week!

I was at my local swimming pool on Friday and noticed that they had closed the creche!  A lifeline for me when I was at home on maternity leave, this was a great facility – I would drop off my daughter for an hour while I went for a swim all by myself, using the opportunity to shower and dry my hair in peace afterwards. A little bit of pampering that would set me up for the day.

This facility was fairly unique in my experience of being a new Mum, because it was all about me. All other services I came across in the world of new motherhood seemed to be about the child, or about my relationship with my child – the toy library, baby massage etc. The creche at the swimming pool simply allowed me to go and enjoy a swim.

I am thinking about setting up a ‘bring back the creche’ campaign. What do you think?

It’s been interesting watching the reaction to some classic ‘child protection gone mad’ stories over the past few weeks – specifically, the idea that parents should be vetted before taking kids to Scouts; the sacking of the dinner lady who told a kid’s parents about a bullying incident; and this latest thing about Ofsted telling two female friends (who were job-sharing) that they’d have to register as childminders. These are quite different stories but there seems to be an understanding that they all fit together – as this report from the ST shows. I think they are all part of the same trend, to regulate more closely individuals’ spontaneous behaviour and the informal arrangements they make – that’s why I object to them.  But is that why there is a more general reaction, or are people kicking against something else?

(Republished from the Spiked Review of Books, 25 September 2009)

Jennie Bristow’s new book is as engaging and witty as those rebellious ‘bad mum’ memoirs. But it’s far more important, both explaining and critiquing the tsunami of state meddling in family affairs.
by Ann Furedi.

‘[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.

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I was watching clips of old cricket matches yesterday (don’t ask) with my husband and 10 year old daughter. At the end of the Test Match at Edgbaston in 1981 when England won the match, the crowd invaded the pitch. My daughter couldn’t fathom what was going on – this was so alien to anything she’d ever seen. We told her that was what it was like in the olden days-people did those kind of things.

But it does make you wonder what this means for children. What does it mean that they live in a world where public space and private space is so controlled? Even their first experience of going to nursery is that there are barriers to entering the space.

I sent my two kids to school today, but I ended up getting a call from the school to pick them both up. No sooner had I picked my youngest up, I had to go back to pick the other one up as well.  OK they did both have coughs but they weren’t really sick. 

I was told that my youngest had a temperature and the oldest had a rash that needed to be reviewed by the doctor.  I did my youngest’s temperature before school and after they sent her home and it was 37 degrees. I don’t think that constitutes hot.  My oldest had been scratching her face (hence the rash) and was hoping to come home because lots of other kids get sent home in her class.  In fact when I picked up my eldest there were two other kids waiting for their parents to arrive.

Apart from one of my children needing to go to hospital to have a bead removed from her ear (a childhood experiment gone wrong) my kids only sick days are when the school tends to send them home.  I think schools are creating a culture around kids where they know that if they cough loud enough they will be sent home.  I think the schools should be a little more matronly about children and illness.  Most kids enjoy a sickie and thats not in the kids or the parents interest to entertain.