Parents' Forum

We met on Thursday 27th May 2010 in Central London to discuss SureStart.

In all the discussions around the general election there is one thing all commentators and parties have agreed on – that is that Sure Start is a good thing. This forum will look at why is Sure Start so feted; and what will Sure Start become in the light of who has won the election. Jennie Bristow introduced the discussion.

Recommended reading:

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8665/
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8632/
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/rachel_sylvester/article5309913.ece
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-cameron-is-concealing-his-inner-bush-1958432

Here’s a useful summary put together by Civitas:

www.civitas.org.uk/pubs/familyoverview.php

There’s a thought-provoking article by Minette Marrin in yesterday’s Sunday Times, here. Her basic point is that people with severe learning disabilities should not have children, because of the difficulties involved in raising them and the cost to the state of the necessary care.

I do have a small measure of sympathy for her frustration with the approach often taken by the disabled lobby, which creates this fantasy that disability is in everybody else’s minds and that disabled people have the ‘right’ to have children – I think this approach consistently whitewashes the practical difficulties confronting disabled people, which does not help them at all. But I am more disturbed by the logic of her argument, as follows:

‘There is a growing body of evidence (across the entire population) that children whose homes are talk-poor, whose parents can’t or don’t communicate with them well and who can’t make careful plans and boundaries for them or help them with schoolwork, are children brought up to serious distress and exclusion.

‘It is hard enough to be an adequate parent with supposedly normal intelligence. For someone of very low intelligence it is even harder.’

This seems to me to be Marrin’s own version of the argument that disability is just a version of ability, or ‘normality’ – and hints that the presumed welfare of the child should be used to counter the desire of parents who are not brainy / educated to have children. Personally, I think it’s rubbish that the best parents are the most intelligent ones. Where do we put the balance on this?

By Jennie Bristow

(Reprinted from Spiked Online 16 November 2009)

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 edits the website Parents With Attitude. She is author of Standing Up To Supernanny, and co-author of Licensed to Hug.

Read on:

A guide to subversive parenting

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

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

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.