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]

I agree.
I'm not a dentist, but anaesthetists spend a lot of time looking in people's mouths and I definitely saw a general upward trend in dental health over my career.
Childhood caries has always been a big problem and it sadly remains so, but part of that is because we see it differently manage it differently now. As a child growing up in a working class but not really underprivileged* *environment in the late 60s/70s having gas to have teeth out at the dentist was just a fact of life for most of us. It was to be expected. I don't think anywhere near as many of the children I grew up with would need teeth out if they were kids today - even flouride in toothpaste wasn't ubiquitous then but I'm sure our parents would have done better with access to modern knowledge and products. The general trend has been up.
Unfortunately however there are still plenty of children needing teeth out and thankfully, safety standards are very different. That's lead to the relevant services becoming over stretched, there are now huge waiting lists and it costs Trusts a lot of money. So in some ways it's a bigger problem than it used to be, but the reasons are complex and multiple. It's far too simplistic to blame parents for not being bothered to brush their offsprings' teeth and certainly not true that everyone used to do it in the past.
Of course many people could do better, but as with many public health messages, just berating them really doesn't work. I anaesthetised for paediatric dental lists throughout my Consultant career and yes, I used to get frustrated when I was seeing sibling after sibling in the same families attending for multiple extractions, and even towards the end of my career, children of children that I'd anaesthetised but I honestly met very few parents who I actually thought were "bad". I met lots who I thought had poor understanding, less than ideal priorities, a general lack of control over their children or indeed their lives as a whole, and plenty who still accepted poor dental health as "normal", probably because in their families it was, but very few who genuinely didn't care. I don't think there's an easy answer, though improving access to NHS dental care and investing in parenting support and education would probably be a good start. I think "nannying" is the wrong word but there are lot of parents who need more support and that needs to be more than a poster or a link to a website which is what seems to pass for preventative medicine now.

One really big point no one has made and I hear every day in London: don’t shit on the poor who work bloody hard by hurling freebies at the latest sob story on the block.

You should hear what the Windrush generation has to say about asylum seekers/economic migrants. (I’m in London where the arrivals are usually fit young guys from safe countries.Not all, most.)

It’s a slap in the face to black Britons that having clawed their way out of poverty by eye-bleeding amounts of work and sent their grandchildren to uni, they’re watching Albanians getting waited on hand & foot in 3-star hotels.

Social justice starts with one rule: don’t make it worse.

"Supporting is not stigmatising. Pointing out differences between parents is not blaming parents for those differences, merely a necessary condition for helping to address them. Schools alone can’t narrow the gaps between children from different families."

I actually agree 👍

That was one of the most pretentious things I've read this week 😂 and all that for an online newspaper that isn't even behind a pay wall clearly not that high and mighty if us peasants can read it with a click of a button

You have my reply above.

If you search my username you'll find me making reference to my work occasionally, if that helps reassure that I'm not some sort of food bank troll. If you're desperate to check me out further I can DM details of the project I run. If you have doubts about the nitty-gritty of what I'm saying beyond that, that's OK with me. MN is a public forum and I'm sure you've raised an eyebrow more than once about the accuracy of what people post on here; it's your right to do so.

I have not accused you of being a troll and I really have no desire to check you out further.

That is exactly my point. The assumption was that by giving all the youngsters degrees, the economy would improve. The two are not nearly so closely correlated.

@EuclidianGeometryFan I don't think that Blair accounted for Brexit and the country voting for economic suicide on the tail end of an international financial crisis.

This was Blair's biggest blind-spot - thinking that inequality could be tackled by improving the outcome for the disadvantaged without tackling unearned privilege and excess wealth at the other end of the scale.

Blair was the most politically astute politician Labour (tbh any UK political party) have had in decades. He knew that politics was won and lost in the centre ground. He couldn't reject the Politics of Aspiration and afford to turn off the broadly centrist middle class of the time. This is why all parties talk of Levelling Up.

IMHO a traditional university system, based on worthwhile research and giving places to the few 5% or so of youngsters suited to a highly academic research-focussed career, is the way to go.

That's a horrendous piece of educational elitism, but I have no idea whether this is an abhorrent philosophy you hold dear or just an opinion based on ignorance. University is not just for academic and research-focussed careers.

Yes, before maternelle was compulsory they generally wouldn't accept children who weren't potty trained but now they have to accept all children born in the relevant year and just deal with the ones who can't use the toilet independently yet. One of the children in my son's class isn't quite there yet (December baby) but she has a derogation for the afternoons and only goes in the mornings.

I don't think your DD is likely to be the kind of immigrant the government tend to worry about, and she'll be fully fluent in no time. What a great opportunity for her. With my kids it's the other way round so I'm trying to find opportunities for them to speak English!

Perhaps university should be just for academic and research-focussed careers?

Because there are better ways of achieving all the other things it does. Ways that don't incur vast amounts of debt (or graduate tax).

The trouble in the uk though is that the vast majority of nursery is done through private nursery. if the child has Sen or suspected Sen often nurseries refuse to take them or will only take them limited hours as the way Sen funding works makes it difficult to make it sustainable for a nursery to take a child who has additional needs. Arguably the children who would benefit most from a development point of view are most likely to be refused by nurseries. Not blaming nurseries themselves it’s the funding model

www.irishtimes.com/ireland/education/2023/09/19/how-to-engage-with-your-guidance-counsellor/

In Ireland, secondary schools have guidance counselors on staff performing a wide variety of duties. In many schools, their primary function is determining interest and aptitude, and providing advice on post secondary options and how to get where students want to go, using a variety of online resources.

In addition, Irish schools do a transition year between the two national exam cycles, Junior Cert and Leaving Cert, where students do a work experience module among other experiences designed to broaden their social and emotional horizons.

@TheWayTheLightFalls I also have experience of working with food banks and charitable groups and agree with what you say about some people and a sense of entitlement. Despite @PandoraSox 's scepticism, I have come across similar cases and, unfortunately, would have to concur that there is a group who will absorb anything given with no appreciation and no improvement in their overall situation.

It's strange that I had almost exactly this conversation this morning with someone, now in his 40s, who went to a private school on an assisted place. His parents had "normal" jobs, think tradesman/nurse, etc and he commented that the pupils from his year who were most successful were the ones who came from more affluent and educated families as they knew the best opportunities and were encouraged into better options.

Haven't RTFT yet but in terms of social mobility and tackling poverty Sweden is in the lead. The state have a lot of control over family life (which is widely accepted) but this would be considered an infringement of human rights in the UK. Eg. all children must go to nursery aged 1, otherwise mothers will lose entitlement to benefits. This means that all children get a fairly equal start in life, and is one of the main reasons social mobility chances are good. I'm on some Universal Credit facebook groups and it's considered against human rights for many that "they're making me look for work" when their child is 3 (and even then it's only 16 hours I think). Tackling childhood poverty starts long before they are born, and if attitudes can be changed before the children are conceived then that is a good thing.
My SIL is a HCP specializing in early years healthcare. Sure Start is still active in our borough, but services have drastically been cut. You can no longer leave your child in the creche (which was very popular) and the only service available is baby/parent classes, in which uptake is very poor. In some ways mandatory attendance wouldn't be a bad thing, the research shows that parental engagement is key for a better childhood outcome. I don't know how that would be enforced though, it's a slippery slope perhaps but too much freedom/autonomy doesn't seem to be helping.

https://www.tiktok.com/@thagigglebox/video/7206116347531611438?lang=en

Dinner is for dinner.

Giving children choice, made me think of this ^

I think the example of Ireland is pertinent here and contradicts your assumption.

In the late 1960s and 70s and up to the 90s, Ireland funded and built Regional Technical Colleges in towns spread around the country in hopes of providing basically a polytechnic third level training with proper certification to people who weren't interested in a traditional school to academic/ university trajectory, filling a huge gap in education. At the same time, staying in school to age 18 was encouraged.

Simultaneously, the government worked to attract industry to the regions, with various tax incentives and the promise of available trained workforce with qualifications in tech areas such as quality control, etc. Joining the EEC in 1973 was tied to the strategy. German and Dutch owned factories were among the first to locate in Ireland.

The RTCs are now redesignated as Institutes of Technology and award degrees, including masters and doctorates, as well as diplomas and certificates, basically a full range of third level awards.

Joined up thinking goes a long, long way.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutes_of_technology_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland

This is a very interesting thread. I was going to make a very similar point to this. My children are in their 30s now so too old for Sure Start, but we did have an excellent state nursery school in the area, which they both attended. I could hardly believe that something so wonderful was free (back in the early 90s by no means every primary school had a nursery class and playgroups were very hit and miss). The intake was very mixed. The school had been built in the 1930s as an integral part of a big council estate so lots of the children were from the estate, but it also attracted all sorts of families from the older Victorian housing a few streets away who wanted this brilliant start for their 3 and 4 year olds. It had a simple admissions policy - you got in on proximity to the school.

The headteacher was a very down to earth woman, not from a privileged background. She had spent her entire career in nursery education. I became a school governor there and I always remember a meeting where she reported that the LEA was consulting about changing the admissions policy to give priority to children from disadvantaged backgrounds. She was very forthright in saying this would be a disaster. She said the reason the children did so well was because it benefited all the children to learn from each other. The children who'd never had a book read to them learned very quickly from watching others pick up books and leaf through them. Children with poor language and social skills improved at a rate of knots when they had to negotiate with other children to get a turn on the outdoor play equipment. Children learned about each other's languages and cultures through dressing up, special cooking sessions and making cards. And so on. She prevailed (then - I hope it's still the same now).

Not enough though: the reason they closed was because they did not benefit poorer parents to the levels they should have despite being in poor areas and part of this was because wealthier people went and often put parents off. In many cases the centres were designed to put poor people off.

For example every sure start centre in the town I was in (we had 3) was near a council estate when DS was born but the main entrance was always via the car park. This meant people who walked often had to walk further into the centre than people who drove AND often had to walk through lots of Range Rovers and Jaguars to get there. The parenting classes were advertised at all schools, including private schools, and often you’d have a mix of poor parents trying to navigate fsm asking questions in the same groups that wealthier mums asked about private school / nursery admissions.

There was also the point of classes that were always full because mums like me (middle class, desperate with pnd) had them booked for them by health visitors while poorer mums only got told about them and they often had to book them themselves - the queue of parents who lived in the local council estates was often out of the door.

I spoke to my sister who used to work across Sure Start centres and she said it was the same everywhere. The people they wanted to help were families that qualified for fsm but except for a handful of exceptions they rarely did

Well it was the official reason they closed. So perhaps your centre was one of the very, very few exceptions

’Clever’ kids shouldn’t need uni. With the right support they can go into any career and make a go of it. Marketing uni to poor kids who need to make money immediately is the problem. We need to remove the blockers children have of accessing the support - eg racism, schools not involving small business owners / not helping kids with apprenticeships. Uni is for average intelligence middle class for them to build on their academic knowledge and skills - it never should have become the ‘gold standard’ for every profession.

My parents weren't educated to degree level and took absolutely no interest in my education whatsoever.

When I asked my mum what to study for GCSES she laughed and said 'Marry a rich man.' I managed to scrape 3 GCSES, then talked my way into college and did A levels.

University was never on the agenda but I accompanied a friend to an event at college about university and went home with some information.

I got into university and luckily got a grant as there's no way my parents would have helped with the costs. I went on to get my Bachelors and Masters.

All this was largely down to luck. I think at school the careers advisor said I may be suitable for secretarial work. No one talked about university to me and I wasn't aware of how to get into various professions, which weren't even on my radar.

Well there should be!!!!

I was agreeing with you! It was mostly the middle classes who brought their children to classes etc. Not entirely of course, but they were the vast majority. They then tried “targetted” classes which was a failure. As someone said earlier, no one likes to be lectured.

I have no idea why this poster has felt the need to attack you so rudely. I can't only assume they've never volunteered with the public themselves! I can absolutely believe your story. There are unfortunately absolute piss takers and ridiculously entitled people everywhere. During COVID, our local community centre identifed people in need of food bank help and delivered it to their doors. Most of this was done in the staffs own time outside of normal work hours. This had been going on for weeks when one day a delivery driver turned up whilst a colleague of mine was delivering a food parcel, with a delivery of a hot tub! For someone having all their shopping covered by charity. There were numerous other people who needed those food parcels.

You could literally be me, from what you have said. Although I guess that I'm older as I did O levels and CSEs.

But it was very much the same sort of thing. A good job for a girl in the early 1980s was a "nice" office job. Boys who had done particularly well might get apprenticeships as apprentice toolmakers or engineers.

Although, please don't think that the school was responsible for this gender divide. I went to a school that was in a very mixed area and it was set up to teach practical skills as much as academic ones.

Certainly everybody was required to do metalwork and woodwork; cookery and needlework. However, my attempts at both a wooden aeroplane and a stuffed soft toy were equally terrible.

But, despite this, it was very clear that, when given a choice, boys overwhelmingly chose technical drawing and girls chose typing. (by the way, can you even imagine nowadays a school offering technical drawing and typing as subjects in their own right?).

However, things really changed when I got to university. For the first time in my life I came across people who were extremely focused and driven, they knew what they wanted out of life and believed that they could get it.

What was the difference? Well, a lot of the people I met at university came from much more academically focused schools, private schools or just generally from a very upper-middle class background. They certainly hadn't learnt that a good job for a girl was a "nice" office job and they certainly hadn't been taught needlework or typing at school.

For example, in the Hall of Residence where I stayed in the first and third years there were quite a number of students from the various London medical schools.

The one thing that they all had in common was a belief that any job or profession was open to them if they simply tried hard enough - I think that there were actually more women than men studying medicine, even back then, and it simply didn't occur to these girls to think any differently than that she could and would become a doctor. What they also had in common, was a rather different family and school background to mine.

All very different from the sort of environment I had grown up in prior to going to university.

The sort of expectations and role models that you have when younger really can make a huge difference to believing what you are capable of doing. It really can be hugely difficult to even comprehend going to university when you’ve never met anyone who has.

To be fair - these services' budgets have also been slashed again and again and again since the time period we're talking about.

I am absolutely a surestart fan but I don't remember them doing a huge amount in terms of early intervention. A few people I know from there back then later had children diagnosed (including my eldest) but this wasn't picked up by the sure start support workers at the time. They did help me a lot with his separation anxiety, but when I had concerns about his eating, sleep and behaviour they just seemed to turn it all around on me and assume I hadn't tried really basic obvious things.