Most of the nation’s millions of children will be brought up in a family by one or more of their parents. Sometimes these parents will be adoptive parents or step-parents or grandparents.
Research shows a strong correlation between good parenting and good outcomes for children. The quality of parenting a child receives in the home has a major influence on success in school and in later life. At primary school level, this influence is even stronger than the quality of the school itself.
Inappropriate styles of parenting, on the other hand, are often associated with truanting, exclusion from school and antisocial behaviour, which may lead to substance abuse, crime and domestic violence later on. Parents who are committed to giving their children the parenting they need are therefore a key resource for the nation.
As they hold their first child in their arms, nearly all mothers and most fathers, want to be good parents. Some fail because they don’t know how. Others are defeated by the difficulties of their lives, such as poverty, debt, drugs, alcohol, poor mental health or poor housing. Parenting today is not an easy job, and babies do not come with an instruction manual. One recent piece of research suggests that about 30 per cent of mothers believe that instinct is a good enough guide on how to bring up a child, and another 40 per cent rely on what they learned from their mothers. Sadly today, too many mothers and fathers have not had the experience of a happy, stable home life to learn from themselves.
Parenting in the 21st century is probably more difficult and expensive than it has ever been before. One recent report suggests that to raise a child from birth to 18 years of age, even when taking advantage of the services the state offers, still costs the parents around £140,000. Today, new parenting skills are needed alongside the traditional ones. It is strange that being a parent, perhaps the most important job that most of us will ever do, is cheerfully undertaken with no training at all.
Parents and the state have a common interest in working together to give each child the best possible start in life they can. Most parents would welcome some support, but parents don’t want help that is intrusive or interfering. They want to remain in control and they want to be encouraged.
When the present government came into power in 1997, they were quick to recognise that some families were in urgent need of help. Initially, they addressed this problem very sensibly by setting up the Social Exclusion Unit to study the problems of the nation’s most disadvantaged families. SureStart – originally a trial project – followed for children under the age of five from the most disadvantaged families.
SureStart was based on the principle of listening to the parents concerned first and then working with them to identify and deliver the services they most urgently needed to help their child. Based on this sound principle, the well-funded Sure Start has been an outstanding success. However, it still only covers about a third of the country’s disadvantaged children under five.
Another initiative targeted at the early years was a substantial increase in nursery education. This has been achieved, though at the cost of losing the close links with parents which existed under some earlier schemes for children under five run by the voluntary sector.
Finally, in those early days the government set up the New Deal – a project designed to get parents out of poverty by getting them into work. This was a horse of a different colour, motivated partly by a desire to augment the nation’s workforce, and partly, I suspect, by the belief that qualified child-minders would do a better job of parenting than the parents themselves. Very little was done to give parents who wanted it the help they needed to enable them to become better parents.
Since those early days, there has been a stream of government “initiatives” targeted at improving the education and wellbeing of children and young people. Most, if not all, of these initiatives have increased direct state intervention in the lives of children, and in so doing the role of parents has been sidelined. These new initiatives have not always been supported by an adequate commitment of resources from the central government: the government has relied on local authorities and other “stakeholders” to somehow scrape together the necessary funding. This has meant that, in some cases, in order to fund new initiatives, funding has been reduced or withdrawn from earlier projects which were just beginning to be successful.
In recent years, much of the government’s emphasis has been on the small minority of parents who abuse or fail their children. Little attention, and less priority, has been given to the majority of committed parents who often make sacrifices to give their children the start in life they need. They too need a little help and encouragement from time to time. The trend towards sidelining parents culminated in the publication of the Children’s Bill earlier this year, which purported to promote the wellbeing of all the nation’s children and to “listen to the voice of children”, but made no substantive mention whatsoever of parents. This attitude has coincided with a decline in enthusiasm for parenthood as a lifestyle choice by young women under 35. Is this a coincidence?
Today, family and child support services are seriously overstretched. Shortages of nursing staff and teachers have been widely reported. The number of social workers in some local authority social services departments are well below the level needed to care for even the children on their “at risk” register.
There seem to be only two alternatives ahead: either large new inputs of funding by central government to attract, train and pay more professionals, or the continuing failure of some children’s services.
Could there be a third way? If we build our structures for the care of children on the foundation of parents and families, we are building on a foundation which has already been laid – the instinctive love and affection between parent and child. Even when the parent-child relationship breaks down, there usually remains a residual sense of “mutual ownership”, which predisposes the people involved towards reconciliation and forgiveness in the end. Should we not be aiming to help children by listening to and empowering their parents, instead of trying to take the place of those parents?
Working in partnership with parents would need a change of heart by all concerned. Parents would need to feel valued and to be convinced that we regard good parenting as an important and worthwhile job, perhaps the most important job of all. We need to get away from the kind of intrusive support which stigmatises and demotivates parents. Government officials and professionals would have to learn to listen to parents and to respect and to empower them.
There are those who say “why should we do anything special for adults just because they happen to be parents? Is this not unfair to those who cannot, or choose not, to have children?” That question misses the point. The object of helping parents is to improve the future for us all. It is today’s children, after all, who will pay our pensions and keep the streets safe for all of us in a few years’ time.
First, we must ensure that resources are available to support success. We must support existing initiatives that are working well. Then we shall have to agree more clearly what the responsibilities of mothers and fathers are, and what help they are justified in expecting from the state, from their family and from each other.
Children need continuing love, stability and security. Family dysfunction or the break-up of their parents’ partnership, cause children serious and sometimes long-term emotional distress, which often affects their wellbeing and their future.
We need to think again about the way in which partnerships for rearing children are formed and how they can be sustained – and how they can be ended with the minimum of damage to the child, if necessary. These are crucial issues for children. It is estimated that if present trends continue, 40 per cent of today’s children will see their parent’s partnership break up before they are 18.
Problems between partners often arise from inadequate relationship and communication skills. To be successful, a family requires social skills, particularly communication skills. Such skills used to be passed down from generation to generation. Today relationship, communication and parenting skills can be taught and learned. We should be offering this opportunity to all children in school, as well as to all those parents of any age who want it, when and where they want it, and at a price they can afford. Education for social skills and the ability to communicate, negotiate and compromise are essential, not only for successful family life, but also for most employment.
The number of dysfunctional families in this country is increasing year by year. If we want to reverse this trend, we cannot afford to continue to ignore, or just pay lip service to the importance of parents and families.
Critics will argue that all this will cost a great deal of money now, and that the benefits will only come on stream gradually as today’s children grow up. This may be true. Sadly, we have a debt to pay for decades of neglect since the sixties. If we do not act today, the likelihood is that more and more families will fail their children as the years go by and the cost of climbing back will grow higher and higher.
