Thursday, 15 February 2007
What are we doing to our children?
I think there are two possible mistakes to make in response to the recent report on the welfare of children in the UK. One is a fatalistic 'we're all doomed' approach, which says that 'young people today' are out of control, worse than in previous generations, and there is no hope. Plato wrote something similar a few thousand years ago! The alternative mistake is to be complacent. Doing what I do, I meet enough families and children who are having an exceptionally hard time - whether through poverty, insecure housing, family breakdown, ill health or bullying. The reasons for this are many and varied and there is no single solution (though I did highlight a few issues speaking to Michael White of the Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2013376,00.html) . I certainly think that the Government should be looking much harder at how some of its policies make family life much more difficult, and also at some of its rhetoric which has regarded bringing up young children at home as somehow a second class activity. We already have a long-hours culture in this country which does little for family relationships, and I'm not convinced that plans to force more lone parents to look for paid work are a step in the right direction.
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2 comments:
Maybe this report will make the Government see sense and drop its plans to "incentivise" lone parents to seek work when their youngest child reaches 12 years of age, by placing them on job seekers' allowance.
Welfare policy should put the interests of the children first. Of course if a lone parent decides to seek work they should be supported to do so. But making it compulsory to seek work, and reducing their income while they search, is wrong and detrimental to the interests of the child(ren).
This Government has done a lot of positive things to support low-income families: the minimum wage, statutory holidays and extensions to parental leave to name but a few. But it undermines much of any remaining goodwill through such an illiberal and ill thought out measure.
How does it meet the interests of a 12 year old child to see their mother (or father) struggling to cope with reduced income, worrying about childcare provision and seeking a job they may not enjoy rather than making a positive choice to work at home and support and bring up their children?
I'm inclined to agree with you Paul, though it is true to say that we are almost unique among Western economies in not placing any work requirement on lone parents until the youngest child is 16. On the other hand, childcare in all its forms is much more comprehensive in most other countries, so the issue of compulsion probably arises seldom in practice in any case.
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