To think the level of state involvement many posters expect is bonkers?

[FaeryRing]

It seems like there is nothing the state shouldn’t be responsible for any more! Feeding your kids, getting them to school, hiring ‘behaviour specialists’ for every classroom because parents don’t want to discipline their own children, giving you money towards virtually anything you ask for because it’s not fair you have to pay for anything yourself.. I find it absolutely wild and don’t think it’s at all realistic or representative of what most adults believe?

I understand but this example is one of neglect, not necessarily poverty. If a parent has substance abuse issues they will sell anything to feed their addiction. I remember one very bright young boy who had serious potential, he managed to read and memorise the only book in the home - the Argos Catalogue...
(He's almost 40 and okay now X)

With telling people to move away for work or housing. It doesn't solve the issues and just makes things worse.

Increased loneliness, displaced from family, friends, and carers, declining communities. Then people wonder why there's an increase in anxiety and depression and more state dependancy.

People can't afford housing in their area? Told to move somewhere cheaper, so adding pressure on housing there.

Lack of work opportunities in someone's area? Told to move somewhere with more work. Except there's no affordable housing where there's more work (partly because lots of people have had to move there for work). So then they get told to move somewhere cheaper for housing but can't get work, so told to move away for work, and it just goes round and round.

Related note. Re London, which has come up in this thread. I find it bizarre to see some people's attitudes towards people from London compared to people from other areas.

Often there's threads where people from London, or another area where housing has been made unaffordable. They're told to move if they can't afford it (although then there's other threads complaining about 'blow ins').

At the same time there's threads insisting people from some other areas absolutely MUST be able to stay in their communities. London has always had very expensive parts, but it's also always had (established) average and lower income communities same as everywhere else.

Edited to add. Sometimes I've seen threads equally unsympathetic or impractical regarding rural areas. People told to just move if they can't afford housing or get work. The problem of unaffordable housing or lack of opportunity can't be solved by displacing communities on mass. It just moves the problem somewhere else, adds pressure there, and doesn't tackle the actual issues.

Better to have affordable housing especially social housing, good public services, and more work, education, and training opportunities everywhere.

I'm not sure if it seems likely to me that we have more neglectful parents now than ever. I wonder if what we are seeing is that the neglected children who were always around are now doubly exposed because of the atomization of wider family networks?

Previous generations may have seen a grandparents/ aunts/uncles/ cousins step in to fill the gap in a lot of social needs that are now being directly dumped onto teachers?

In our health system, who would pay & provide for this?

We cannot even get a GP appointment, let alone a dentist, 50% of the adults in my home country have not seen a dentist for 10 years or more, any treatment i want i get done in France, costs me 35 euros.

Yes of course Teachers cannot be expected to brush childrens teeth but equally, we ve consistently voted to get rid of NHS dentistry and thats both Lab and Tory Govts, so there is no capacity to do as you might think is a great idea, its not.

We can only afford to focus on the least well off/deprived.

@Desecratedcoconut I agree. But an added issue is that neglected children who got a poor education could get work on leaving school that did not require qualifications. That is no longer the case. People need education to get jobs, which makes life harder for these kids.

Possibly, there is, according to organisations like the Rowntree Trust, more poverty.

Or was it a case that we had health services that could step in and now we don't?

Children dont get to see a dentist and GP video consultations don't pick up on areas of neglect.

But the point is so many children are disadvantaged because they are not receiving proper care and attention from their parents for one reason or another. If they did then there wouldn't be all this need for extra support from schools. People expect far too much to be done for them these days. The nanny state has got a grip in this country.

I think more families where both parents work full time make it harder as well. When people are able to just about cope, good parenting with full time work can be too much to cope with.

Now you see "forcing" people into anything is usually very counter-productive. Hence the saying "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar".

I remember my dear late mother, with whom I got on very well for the most part, lamenting the loss of literal "fear of God" in child rearing. She didn't think it was a bad thing for small children to believe an invisible entity watching their every move to spur them into compliant behaviour on threat of terrible punishment if not now then in the afterlife.

We had a long conversation about it, and she backed off especially when I pointed out that there is plenty of evidence that upbringing like that have contributed to the actions of some of the worst serial killers, not to mention other more general atrocities.

It's all well and good to punish people for their failings but some of them will take out their perceived injustice on the nearest next available target.

Parent gets punished for child's poor dental health, parent blames child and punushes it. Again, accuse me of hyperbole or extreme thinking, but if a vulnerable child is made more vulnerable by punishing the parent, that child has the foundations of poor mental health that carries on down the line.

So something like poor dental health is often part of a bigger picture, but can be overseen reasonably cheaply and effectively by a little intervention in the immediate best interests of the child, freeing up resources and focus to address the bigger, core issues, and hopefully lead to better outcomes for the child and their children.

Once again, it's a bigger picture. Focusing on punishing parents doesn't necessarily help the child, even if it seems like the right response.

The vast majority of parents want to do the best for their kids, for those that don't there will be wilful neglect and thats what SS should be dealing with but for many its often just a complete lack of knowledge.

So i remember an initiative in an inner city area to get would be and new mums to cook, one of the workers involved told me "its not a lack of an oven or even utensils, its that many of the women cannot read.."

So what good is it pointing them to a cookbook? or as one pp said "they could look up teeth brushing on the nhs website"

You might say thats a tiny minority but its not:
It is estimated that more than 7 million adults in England are 'functionally illiterate', lacking basic skills beyond a primary school level or below

Againname · Today 16:22

Thanks for your detailed reply making good points - but I think what you say, and what I say, still indicates that a discussion needs to be had by politicians about social housing in the 21st century. Our society is totally different to what it was in the immediate post-war period when many s.h. schemes were built.

My point is: before we start bulldozing, we need to know exactly what to build and why (learning from the mistakes of the past with the horrendous, Brutalist architecture), whom it will be for and how the allocation system will work. Lots of good points have been made on this thread, including the fact that people without children seem to have no chance of getting social housing.

I agree with what you’re saying but as a society there needs to be a way to stop people having children they aren’t going to look after. That’s the real issue at hand

I would be very curious to see the breakdown of this 7 million though. I don’t understand how people can be having children in a first world country and not be able to even read in order to support them. Or how we live in a country with free schooling and 7 million can’t read.

There is. Enforced sterilisation isn't a new concept. Of course, the who and the how of that sterilisation is a cautionary tale about sticking it in the good idea pile.

Currently listening to a YouTube video by Evan Edinger.

It's called "Are housing developers creating future slums by converting old office buildings".

Synchronistically eye opening, given the discussion about housing and points raised in CoffeeCantata's post.

But this is also an issue. They are “too busy”. And I sympathise; but then they should not have children if they can’t cope with the basic realities of what that entails. And I do get circumstances change but in many cases these families have several Children so they knew and kept going

Well yes, it would be good if you had to have a licence or go on a course before having children but pretty hard to enforce without drastic measures

I have been thinking about this thread and like PPs said it’s about the children, however the root cause is the parents.

Just imagine instead of schools being involved, the police would have to write reports on someone’s ability to have children? Could go via the courts etc - alcoholics, drug dealers, criminals etc -

People would never suggest this but fully expect ‘schools’ to take ownership of the problems.

I can't think of any system that wouldn't look totalitarian and dystopic. I thought the main thrust of this thread was to suggest that the state was too big, it seems a little counter intuitive if you intend for them to extend their role so far into the private shere that it acts as a fertility arbiter?

No. Absolutely not. We have the lessons of history for that and it's a vile, lazy, reductionist concept rooted in dehumanisation and othering. Because it won't stop with that. It will lead to all sorts of reasoning around expansion of the concept for the "greater good."

Its not "Can't Read" its that their reading skills are that of a primary school child.
I in 4 child leave primary school below the basic standard, 20% of school leavers cannot read with confidence.

We cannot go around sterilising people, i'd have thought the 1930s and 40s would have taught us at least that.

All we can do is try and break the cycle of poverty/literacy/deprivation, possible too late for the parents but we can intervene in their children's lives, if we don't, we just condemn another generation.

@CoffeeCantata
@Againname
I live on a very mixed housing estate in outer London, built in the late 1970's. There's a small proportion of social housing (around a sixth) but most of it is privately owned and always has been though there are also many private sector rentals now. Initially the properties were pretty affordable and many people have lived here since the estate was built.
It looks like a very well-kept brutalist style council estate and there is very little vandalism, partly probably because we have a Security office. The lifts are mended quickly because we have a management office on-site. The gardens are well tended and the outside of the buildings are maintained. We have central heating from boilers in the centre of the site. All in all it is a lovely place to live.
Setting aside the huge initial cost of building an estate like this, it all comes at an enormous ongoing cost, with very high service charges paid by owners themselves and for the social housing tenants by the local authority. Sadly I think that the dream of building new, properly planned, built and run mixed estates like this would probably not be viable for any local authority today, either in terms of building or running costs. It also means, unfortunately, that you have to be pretty well off to buy here now which is changing the mix of the inhabitants.

We cannot go around sterilising people, i'd have thought the 1930s and 40s would have taught us at least that.

No but the alternative is just ever increasing and expensive ‘support’ to avoid societal collapse which has only small effects so more and more and more money is thrown at the situation. It’s depressing

So which is it, do you want a smaller state or a bigger state?

if it stops children being raised in unimaginable circumstances then I support it.