There was a debate on Radio 4 this morning relating to the headline about childcare costs, and one of the guests (don't know who she was) was using it as an opportunity to bemoan the lack of stay at home parents (surprise, surprise). As part of her argument, she suddenly exclaimed that 'the lack of one-to-one parenting has led to a situation where many children start school unable to even tie their own shoelaces!'.
Now, this is drivel in all sorts of ways that I won't dwell on (I didn't come on here for a debate about SAH vs. WOH), but it got me thinking about shoelaces. More specifically, I would be very interested to know how many of your starting-school-age children can tie shoelaces? I'm a gave-up-my-career-to-be-a-SAHM person of the sort that this woman would no doubt approve, but my nearly four year old son could no sooner tie a shoelace than fly to the moon (admittedly he's not actually starting school this year, but he would have been if he'd been born two weeks early instead of two weeks late). I haven't asked, but I imagine most of his little friends are the same.
It seems to me that the reason lots of (most?) 4 year olds can't tie laces is because a) it's actually quite a tricky skill, requiring considerable dexterity and practice, and b) very few shoes for young kids have laces these days. I was in Clarks today, and I noticed that they didn't have a single pair of school shoes with laces for young boys; the only laced ones were a couple of pairs of hiking-style boots.
So, in a nutshell I thought that this woman's assertion was the kind of lazy, thoughtless and baseless kneejerk criticism of working parents that we hear so much of. But then I got to worrying that maybe my son is unusual, and that other kids his age are busy tying endless Gordian knots with happy abandon. Opinions, please?