The article I read said children need warm engaged parents and boundaries.Not exactly rocket science.Don't call that 'tough love'myself It seems to have been a journalist who coined that.
Also lots of facts about how children living with both MARRIED parents did much better than those in single parent,step or cohabiting families

How could empathy be bad? How can self-regulation be bad? How can application be bad?

Everybody should be empathetic to a degree, every one should be able to exercise self-control, everyone should be able to apply themselves. They encompass attributes like determination, self-belief and confidence.

How is empathy "not always a useful skill"? Why does it have to be a "skill" instead of a helpful part of character which is there when available?

The researchers tried to take away factors like economic status. They didn't blame disadvantaged parents for poor parenting, they said poor or rich, good "parenting" (ghastly verb) is what counts. So good parenting can overcome disadvantages of status, and bad parenting can undo the benefits of birth and class status.

I agree that it is useful to examine the study in detail for the techniques, criteria, confounding factors and so on. Trying to say the qualities they found positive are in fact negative is stretching it too far.

I've only read the Observer article and didn't think it told me anything. There was no definition of "tough love" or of "discipline" which mean very different things to different people. It then featured an interview with a woman who had changed her parenting style to include the naughty step and felt that her child had improved, but it didn't say if this was the parenting style that the demos report was supporting. Be interesting to read the report itself to see if it is any more enlightening...

True.

But only goes to highlight how tricky all this stuff is, and how it exceeds a press release.

But, you know, to take "empathy", for example. I see in an earlier post you highlight "empathy" as a skill/behaviour that is "good", with an inference that it is an "absolute" and not "relative" good. Is it? I'm quite sure that empathy is not always a useful skill. It's also one of those things that people discuss as coming into its own in our current modern age; which implies it has not always been regarded as necessarily that great. It really is all a bit relative.

And who is it who has to do lots of empathising, and why?

In defense of Demos, I suspect they are making a case for the continuation of Surestart, so I am prepared to cut them some slack on that one.

that is so simplistic cherry!

<applauds> cherry.

Side-issue, but if I can defend journalists for a mo re. Stuffit's post, I'm confident the BBC and Times stories are based on reading the study itself, as well as interviewing various interested parties.

It's not clear from the articles whether the Demos report contains any original research - they refer to an analysis of lots of studies going back to the 1950s. Not sure how relevant anything that old will be, tbh, given the massive social change since then.

Meta-analysis is really hard as you have to find a way of adjusting for the different design of each individual study. It's entirely possible that you will magnify any flaws. It's hard enough in medicine, much harder I would have thought in social research when you are dealing with things that you can't really measure, such as behaviour.

children's.

That apostrophe s is one of the things that limits life-chances too. And access to that is limited in our unequal society.

Single-parents and low-income oarents: You thought that it was the massive inequalities in wealth distribution and the attendant social effects of this that were limiting your childrens' chances?

Wrong.

It's their behaviour. And that's down to your (crap) parenting.

Today's workforce requires the model worker to be co-operative, able to show initiative and be flexible.

These are things that middle-class people do best!

You thought that their employment prospects were being limited by their access to good-quality education and transport, which (some might say, bizarrely) is often linked in a very concrete way to income, safely out of reach of the gulags of poverty that our first-world country has erected for those on a low-income (though they live there by "choice - you're free to move - if you can afford it, ho ho.).

You're wrong. It's your chilrens' behaviour - it's just not "nice" enough. If you want a middle class job - you have to act in a way the nice people giving out those jobs recognise as nice.

You've been told. No more bleating about social inequality, you lot.

Looks like the ful report is due out tomorrow.
www.demos.co.uk/blog/children-of-character

Is that me doing the insinuating?

Sorry. No, i thought "low income", in the article, was being used euphemistically. The article is the place where those on a low income are being targetted as being in need of "help" with a "better" parenting model.

I just wanted to highlight some of the problematic assumptions in that, albeit short, article.

No, low income does not = dog eat dog.

But I think that article is v. confused. There is, firstly, the obvious point that income does not determine either parenting styles OR behaviour/personality.

There is then the weird thing about it being used to suggest the increase of ... parenting classes for low-income parents.

So ... there is, clearly, quite a large bundle of stuff being said.

I homed in on one thing, only, the idea that, actually, what they have in mind is the behaviour of the "unruly poor" ie. they have a problem with a certain, "difficult" section of those on a low income (note, the article says "low-income" - why?) whose behaviour they take issue with.

And it just is sooo problematic. I really do wonder, what behaviour do they want? Why?

I really would like to know exactly what behaviours are being labelled as problematic. And I read it with suspicion. Problematic for whom? And aren't many behaviours actually expressive? And constructed relationally? so that there will be a certain element of "chosenness" in behaviour, which is meant to express class/social identity, relationally, in opposition to other forms of behaviour?

I think I'd like to see the whole report, rather than just a press release. I'm sure it's all reasoned a little more thoroughlly there.