I don't know what to think about this - Some parents need to be nannied by the state

[Another2Cats]

An article in yesterday's Times (share token below) with this title. I have thoughts both ways on this.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/d2c38325-db32-4e36-a213-6d84be59a2f0?shareToken=58b28456ef3641836cb2ba7f3f70c791

[redacted by MNHQ for copyright reasons]

Family support workers are a proper paid job and are still employed in most local authorities - they also work for charity run children's centres.

I retrained as a counsellor instead and now work with teens.

My youngest has a disability that means he has missed quite a bit of school time, it is shocking to see how quickly a child falls behind educationally and even more shocking that there is no mechanism for lifting them back up again. We have managed as I have had long periods out of work to support him. Initially he was just pushed into lower and lower sets. But we scrimped for tutors and we could help. Now he is older he can catch himself up.
But for those kids whose parents can't provide that? And the children who start out already behind, how can they ever catch up.

This.

Also on here there are parents and in RL who talk about kids catching up with no support but every child I knew that did had external help of some kind including mine. After a while it morphs to some kids just aren't academic so no reason to support them.

I caught up - dyslexia not diagnosed till Uni - with mix of school and home support but I think those days are gone. Depending where you are support can be viewed as pushy parenting or unfair and heavily criticized - so families stay quiet then get pointed at as examples of kids who "naturally" caught up.

I'm middle class, a teacher, had kids in late 30's. I went to a Sure Start free parenting class (including free crèche and refreshments!) and it taught me so much. The tutors said a lot of techniques used for toddlers would also come in handy when they were teenagers...it was very very true! I also transferred skills I learned there into my teaching.. active listening, giving choices, commenting on good behaviour 10x more than bad. It was fantastic and breaks my heart that Sure Start finished...

Absolutely this.
Many years ago I worked in a supervisory role and an employee came to me for help filling in some DSS forms. She admitted she couldn't write and could barely read, I had never realised, she was the person I left in charge when I was away, very switched on and unbelievable memory - she could remember a huge list of responsibilities, nothing escaped her.
But I wonder how someone like that would fare now, everything is so complicated and internet based, you need to know how the system works and have the tenacity to keep at people in order to get the help needed.
My parents both left school at 14, my Mum who is really intelligent, struggles with everyday stuff being online based, my Dad wouldn't have clue.

This is a good point. I have a child with severe ASD and GDD. I'd like to attend support groups to meet other parents and to chat through with an expert about his behaviour, but they all bloody run in work hours. I have a flexible employer, bit it would be so much more easier if I could just access in an evening or weekend. So many parents of SEN children have to give up work because there just isn't holiday/school clubs, support groups, appointment outside working hours. Most of the information/support groups don't allow kids, which doesn't help working single parents.

If we are going to deliver advice, we need to think about how we can get this to working parents.

Mandatory parenting classes on the basics. Continuing with sure start that is incentivised. An open door policy for support without judgment.

We have lost a safety net and support system in the church, which helped many families and children only a generation or two ago… we need to give our dc the best start possible and that means looking after the parents, especially mothers who mostly carry the bulk of the load even today.

This for me too.

I run a food bank, and while I serve all comers regardless of my feelings towards them as individuals there is a tranche of people who expect someone else to do everything for them practically down to wiping their backsides. I'm not quite sure how one goes about reducing this extreme sense of entitlement without harming people who genuinely need the support, but I find it infuriating and harmful. These people then go on to have children and those children then turn up to school in nappies, needing milk teeth pulled and with behavioural issues, and the parents shrug their shoulders and hold their hands out for the next. (I'm speaking from what I've seen myself at work rather than some concocted Tory fantasy.)

It's really sad to see such nasty, judgemental comments on what should be an open discussion about how we equalise and maximise the chances of all children. You really are a special kind of stupid if you can't understand that this benefits us all and most importantly is the right thing to do in a fair society.

We resent some of the poorest in our country being offered a few coffee mornings and free baby massage sessions but we don't care about the richest few in our country sitting on obscene amounts of wealth, cheating the tax system and earning 6 figure salaries purely through nepotism. That's what's truly depressing about this country.

Couldn't agree more.

If it's an open discussion you have to accept viewpoints other than your own however I don't see anyone here resenting Sure Start, in fact the majority of comments support SS. It was a travesty that it was closed as a scheme.

architecture?

There’s parenting classes now that are only thing offered when you need help, i was offered one as I’m having issue with my autistic child who is now a teenager. They run a course for autistic primary school aged children which they put me on list on as they didn’t have one for older children. Then they tried to get me to go on the one for neurotypical young children, the leaflet said “do you have problems getting your 2 year old to listen or your 4 year old to put their toys away if so this is the course for you”. I pointed out that didn’t sound at all like my issues with my 14 year old autistic child and they said I might pick up some tips. I didn’t end up doing it as it was in work time and I’d have to have taken holiday which I wouldn’t have minded if it would have been useful but it clearly wasn’t aimed at my issues and it would have then given me childcare issues in the hols. Then you don’t get noted as not having accepted offered help

"The more the state (schools) step in then the bigger the incentive is for that minority of parents to continue not to bother."

The biggest incentive for parents to improve their dental health is that their children are less likely to suffer from a whole range of serious diseases in later life. If parents don't know this then they need to be taught it. If parents know it and still don't support their children with tooth brushing then someone needs to step in and help the children.

Metaphorical finger wagging at poor parenting isn't the solution to improving children's dental health.

In France, infant school starts the year the child turns 3 (so children starting school turned 3 or will turn 3 between January and December of that year, meaning some of them are only 2). The first three years of school used to be optional, and then five years ago the government decided to make them compulsory. So if a child's birthday is at the end of December they will have compulsory school four days a week from the age of 2 years and 9 months old. A lot of children struggle with this, especially the smaller ones who might only just be potty trained, or even not quite there yet. But the government decided to make these years compulsory precisely to narrow the attainment gap between children from affluent backgrounds and those from deprived backgrounds. This means that children from immigrant families who don't speak French, or whose parents are unemployed and don't have a dining table or any books at home, can now no longer start school at the age of six, potentially unable to speak French, sit still during story time or eat with a knife and fork. I'll be interested to see whether they publish any findings about the impact of this policy in a few years' time.

So why do parents nowadays not know they need to brush their children's teeth? Why has that changed over time to the extent that schools now have to facilitate that for whole classes? What has changed in parenting?
If it so vitally needed then why wasn't it 20 years ago?

I suspect France is very much an outlier here.

I think part of the reason for the discrepancy before is that educated professional women in France almost never become SAHMs and there were no real childcare solutions for children over the age of 3. So as soon as the children of working parents aged out of crèche, they had to go to school, meaning it was only the children of stay at home parents (overwhelmingly likely to be immigrants and speak another language at home) who were able to keep their children at home until age 6.

Some people think there is also an element of wanting to make immigrant children conform and integrate better into French society from a young age, but obviously that's not the official reason for the change in the law.

So basically you work in a food bank and pass moral judgement on some of the people who use it.

What is it about people using your food bank that makes you judge them in that way?

That they ask for particular items you don't think they should ask for?

That they don't show enough gratitude and humility?

What do they ask people to do for them that you don't think they should receive help with?

You say these particularly people don't genuinely need help. How do you know they don't 'genuinely need help'?

What are your ideas for improving outcomes for children from dysfunctional families? Other than wagging your finger and judging them? Why do you think some individuals struggle so much with managing their lives and their families? Because they're basically 'bad' people?

Yes I've had the same experience with my SEN child. It makes it so hard to keep a job for people who need support, which is ridiculous when working is obviously one of the major pillars of family stability. It also means DH, who could benefit the most from support, can't access anything at all.

It was though??? I certainly remember kids on my estate running around with brown/black teeth and some of them ending up having most of their teeth out under GA around age 6 or 7. Nothing's changed in that regard except much less access to NHS dentistry meaning problems now get very out of control before they're fixed.

When I was at school a dentist would come in every year and do an assembly on brushing teeth correctly and gave us all a toothbrush and a mirror to check our teeth. I don't think anyone does that anymore.

You think overall dental health was better in previous decades than it is now?

This is from a dental survey from a few years ago:

A total of 69,318 children, aged 5-15 years, were involved, from 1973-2013. Caries prevalence has reduced from 72% to 41% in 5-year-olds, and from 97% to 46% in 15-year-olds in 40 years.

Dental health as improved markedly at a population level over the past 5 decades.

Poor dental health is now concentrated in minority of families from the poorest 10% of society and has got worse since the pandemic, predominantly because this group has struggled more than most to access routine NHS dental care for their children.

What's changed since 1973 is that we now know more about the long term health damage caused by poor dental hygiene, and so there's more of an incentive for society to adopt simple, cheap strategies to address this in early life. Sadly, wagging fingers at parents isn't an effective strategy for improving children's dental health, because it's definitely the cheapest option and the most personally satisfying for people like yourself.

Unfortunately the times article it's self was elitist drivel, Oxford and Cambridge are not the best universities for many subjects and contrary to their beliefs, young people can find out themselves where is best to go for them, I did (Birmingham, best for my subject at the time) and I hate maths so stuff that!

Sure start was good but wasn't available where I lived whatever your income as it was only in cities

Of course the most disadvantaged kids need support but at what point do we say people have to take responsibility for themselves? If the state does everything then where is the impetus for people to do anything for themselves?
Support should be targeted to those who need it.

I thought it was a cargo cult. "Educate them and the jobs will come".
Which might be true to a certain extent in a globalised economy, but as it turns out employers from other countries who provide good jobs usually expect the employee to be mobile and migrate, not to have to open a branch in the UK.

Hence we now have an abundance of graduates in jobs which for the graduate are lower-skilled and lower-paid than they were led to believe.