Five-a-day parenting 'checklist'? What do you think?

[HelenMumsnet]

Hello. We've just heard about this proposal to give all parents a five-a-day checklist, detailing how they should bring up their children.

Apparently, it's an idea that's winning the support of many politicians.

Would it win your support?

Oh top marks to Xenia for managing to insult SAHMs yet again because they don't follow her money-orientated lifestyle. She's definitely from Mars.

I don't feel insulted-I wouldn't have given up being a SAHM for a top job-it was worth far more to me to be at home with them. Given a choice of the first 5 yrs at home or the first 5 yrs in an office earning school fees I would take the first 5 yrs at home every time.
You need enough money to be comfortable and not to have to worry about emergencies-but beyond that there are so many things that money can't buy that are far more important.

Well said exoticfruits

Xenia - if that post is for real - then you are INCREDIBLY ignorant - & thaats coming from a mostly SAHM who has been on BOTH sides of the fence, so can speak with REAL experience

or are by so insulting to SAHM areyou just trying to justify your own chosen lifestyle & some deep seated niggling guilt that perhaps its not as good for your DCs as it is for you?

buy being - doh losing words again

- I give up - by of course [grin

She is for real and firmly believes it. We are just all different. I don't know what she does, but I suspect that it is a job I would hate-regardless of the pay.

I'm not even a SAHM (and never have been) and I'm offended!

I'd challenge Xenia to live where I do (a beautiful rural area which IMO does a lot for my DC's quality of life) and manage to (a) find a job which earns "a huge amount of money" and (b) find a fee paying school close enough to travel to each day.

So, should I uproot my DC from the freedom of the countryside, or perhaps send them to boarding school at 5?

Exoticfruits - if you don't mind being called a fat idle woman, that's fine by me. I kind of object to it though - is that all right with you?

Sorry, Thumbwitch-I hadn't read that part or I wouldn't have said that I didn't mind.
I was just going by Xenia's stock response that we should have highly paid jobs to pay school fees to get our DCs into a highly academic school so that they in turn can get highly paid jobs to pay school fees. If that is all there is to life think I might want to walk under a bus!!

I want to enjoy my DCs-I didn't have them to give someone else the pleasure of the childcare-I have never been fat and certainly not idle. I want them to mix with all sorts and have a well rounded education. I do not wish to pay school fees, unless my DC wasn't suited by the state school, and if I did I would avoid highly academic schools, unless my DC was highly academic. I would encourage them to follow a career that is interesting and absorbing for them.
I don't need the government to tell me what a DC needs-I suspect that those who really need it won't listen.
I agree that everyone, Xenia included, should be free to do it their own way-but they shouldn't believe it is best or everyone aspires to it-some of us would hate it.

I suspect Xenia lives in London Jemima and wouldn't contemplate anywhere else.

Which goes without saying that you must be a loser if you live in a village in Cumbria-despite the fact you are in your dream situation!

It's sad that it needs to be spelled out to some parents.

I would imagine so too exotic - luckily I wouldn't contemplate London

I am a graduate, and I have always worked (obviously I took maternity leave, but always went back). However I work for a charity, in a job that I love, in an area that I love. I hope that I teach my children to be happy and fulfilled, and that money is not necessarily the route to happiness. That is, in between the reading, healthy food and praising

ah, I did wonder if you'd seen that bit, exoticfruits! That was the bit I found insulting, not the rest of her normal blah blah.
On the "stock response", I agree with you - I wouldn't do her job for anything and pass up on the time I am having with DS - no money is worth that to me.

Sounds perfect to me Jemima-love your name.
I would encourage mine to do whatever they like.
I know people who have been forced down highly academic lines into sensible (i.e high status jobs) and they have eventually found the courage to go and make pots in Cornwall or taught in inner city, started a landscape gardening business etc and been miles happier-just such a shame that it took them so long to throw off parental values and expectations.

I see Xenia's name Thumbwitch and read what I expect to see! I couldn't bear to go off and do Xenia's job and give someone else the really fun job of looking after the DCs. I count myself very lucky that I was able to do it.

I don't see why Xenia should hijack this into being about SAHMs-it's a list of what kids clearly benefit from, with the suggestion parents act on it. I work in a school doing this for others' kids, then at home doing it for my own in the hours I have. Doesn't make it more or less a good idea because it's not 'full-time'. In fact, I feel much more able to devote four or five hours solely to my kids each working day because I have other outlets than I did when I was a SAHP. Even Xenia's said this on occasions-that she gave her kids three or four hours quality time each day (by which, I assume, she means doing stuff like this).

I am quite pissed off by the stress on class and outcomes here. As I've tried to be a remotely competent parent, I've drawn much inspiration from some teenage single Mums who do all this. There is an idea here that parents are to blame-address how they parent and all is OK. But the kids of teenage single Mums (apologies for accepting this implicit target) round here aren't suffering because poorly fed or parented, they'll suffer because in the long and medium term any parent can only impart what they understand-which is often how to be a loving and brilliant unemployed Mum, but one unable to support with academic work or know about work and educational opportunity. It is general support for good parents with poor prospects that transforms, allowing them to use their parenting skills in combination with new knowledge, not changing parenting and leaving those educational and economic barriers in place.

It has nothing to do with WOHM or SAHM or class. All it means is taking time to communicate with your DC, you can still do this if you work.
I would have thought it common sense, but unfortunately if someone has been poorly parented themselves they may need help to break the cycle.

@exoticfruits. I agree, was annoyed at how the thread developed on WOHM thing.

But it is about class, because (just as with SureStart) the reasoning is that improving parenting will increase social mobility, that supporting parents intrusively is basically OK if you can create a picture of them as lost little scummers whose kids have poor outcomes.

It reminds me of a Telegraph article a few years ago on protecting women and children by asking mothers who had recently given birth about DV, in which a midwife said 'well, we're not going to be asking the Bank manager's wife are we?' and got a furious response form a woman battered by her Bank manager husband. Ultimately, this will target the poor because that is why it is being proposed, and will further increase a rhetoric in which they are responsible for their lumpen kids.

I think that we should always keep off WOHM/SAHM it just sidelines discussion.

Xenia my DC go to a grammar school.S should I earn pots of money to pay for them to go to an independent school that gets worse results?

Yes spiderpig-didn't you realise that you need to network with the 'right' people.

Well arguably move to near a private school in the top 20. Plenty of parents seek a rural idyll which means they don't have mcuh money and their primary childre like the mud etc but come teenage years they are adopting awful accents and hanging round the village green bus shelter because there's nothing else to do in the supposed idyll. however that is all off my main point. I said (a) best thing women can do is earn more, move class, ensure children are from a better off home as that is the best in dicator of childhood outcome (the money point) but secondly and more importantly (b) the list is being described as saying "be middle class" (today's Times I think it was , was it Giles Coren summarising it as such).

Actually you can have neglect by all kinds of parents single, wedded, poor or rich, working or at home. That's my genuine view. I have at heart much more in common with parents who interact a lot with their children whatever their parental income in terms of my beliefs in what is best for children than those who ignore them or are nasty to them all the time.

Sometimes we have had over the years children in the house where you can tell either (a) if they are loved an d given enough attention or (b) something seems wrong at home just by how that child is and what is does and says. Also some studies show housewives sometimes are pretty useless mothers rather than Golden Angels of expert parenting. indeed I've argued here before that the clever high earning s mothers understand psychology and bring up children much better than those who were never much good at job, haev a low IQ and the only thing they could do was clean the house and child mind - ergo working mothers make better mothers and probably do the stuff on the list best of all. We rule.

Well I grew up in a rural idyll, but managed to avoid hanging around bus shelters - instead I was busy getting the set of good grade A levels which got me a place at a half decent university. Most of my friends were doing the same. Not everyone in the country are straw chewing yokels you know