Thursday, February 19, 2015
By Kathy Gyngell for The Daily Mail
Published: 22:11 GMT, 29 June 2012 | Updated: 06:41 GMT, 2 July 2012The number of violent and persistently badly behaved children is on the rise. More pupils are being suspended from school for abuse or assault.
In the same week that Charlie Taylor, David Cameron’s behaviour ‘Czar’ enlightened a House of Commons Select Committee on these facts, Cherie Blair told us that all mothers ought to (go out to) work, that being the best means of being as independent as possible.
There was an irony to this, though I doubt Mrs Blair would recognise it.
Advice: Cherie Blair has said mothers should go out and work Her children may or may not have emerged unscathed from the upbringing she gave them.
But, overall, children have been the losers of three decades of feminist driven family policies that her style of thinking has primed.
The reality of modern ‘family’ life for most people has proved far from ideal and far from happy. For most it is also a far cry from the entitlement, privilege and choice that Mrs Blair and others amongst her fellow feminists have experienced.
Female employment may have outstripped male employment in most areas of Britain and a third of all mothers may now work full time. But is this unquestionably a good thing? For the tax, benefits, gender and childcare policies that have given women this choice, have left them with next to no choice about bringing up their children.
The ‘price’ of motherhood today is work, work which has its price too. It involves a transfer of dependency and responsibility for family life and motherhood, to the state. Tax credits are work and childcare (not home care) contingent; literally billions of taxpayers’ money are poured back into the state-sponsored national childcare system. And these billions have subjected our children to a largely unmonitored social experiment in their upbringing.
Professor Catherine Hakim’s survey of mothers suggests most are a lot less happy about this than Cherie Blair. Few want to work more than part time to make ends meet; only then when their children are established at school. The vast majority (rightly) feel guilty and anxious about going back to work too soon. Many if not most would prefer to be full time mothers had they the chance, a luxury now that appears only to be afforded by the state to career lone parents.
Children are not thrilled by modern family life either it seems. In fact one in eight children in the UK are said to be unhappy. We know that 30,000 children are on the waiting list for mental health services. We know that some 25,000 have drug and alcohol problems severe enough to bring them to adolescent drug services and that many more slip under the radar. 175,000 school children are persistent truants.
Out of control: 25,000 children have drug and alcohol problems 'I have worked in this area for twenty years', one adolescent addiction psychiatrist recently wrote, 'and have seen a rise in the severity of emotional difficulties with increased self-harm and suicidal thinking. I often ask myself why this is and repeatedly come back to the massive changes in society.'
Of course we cannot directly attribute it all to mothers working or to children going into day care. Children have also suffered the collateral damage of divorce, family breakdown and lone parenthood,as the launch of The Marriage Foundation recently reminded us. They are subject too, to changing values about consumption of material goods as well as of drugs, drink; to peer pressure for immediate gratification.
But the seismic change in women’s roles and therefore in the culture and stability of family life should not be underestimated.
Problem pupils: The number of badly-behaved or violent schoolchildren is on the rise Third party, impersonal, non-family childcare is the downside of women working. Though primed to give infants a surer start arguably mass childcare has contributed to, rather than assuaged, a culture of neglect. It has contributed too to a loss of confidence and competence in the ability to parent, sometimes to a denial of children’s basic emotional needs.
The number of small children soiling and wetting themselves in their first year at school is telling.
So too are the findings of a UK study that followed the progress of 3000 infants: Babies who spent long hours in crèche care it found were more anti-social as infants at school. An American longitudinal study also found that more time spent in day-care predicts less sensitive mothering while boys were less tolerant of institutionalised childcare.
Thanks to Professor Belsky’s ground breaking, longitudinal research, we also now know that the number of children entering school from childcare affects classroom behaviour.
There is a tipping point. Enough infants previously in long term day care and the behaviour of a class deteriorates.
Better adjusted infants end up negatively affected too.
Finally the recently published Nutt Brown Review into the country’s childcare system was an indictment of our national childcare project. It reported alarmingly low levels of care and lack of personal contact between staff and children.
You do not have to be an expert to understand that an absence of ‘care’ leads to frightened and bewildered children and that fear leads to aggression.
As Dr Bruce Perry, the child trauma expert has explained: 'Without sufficient calming, soothing and emotion regulating interactions from parents ....., the stress response systems in the infant brain, which are extremely sensitive to adverse post natal experience, can become hypersensitive. An infant can grow up unable to handle stress well and adopt a generally long-term defensive reaction to people and events. He or she can be persistently on the lookout for threat, prone to anxiety, depression and anger, both in childhood and later life.'
This may not be the full explanation for class room violence. But it is without doubt part of it.
Blame can also be laid at the door of the schools and teachers who have given their power and authority away in face of youth defiance. Many schools and teachers would benefit from Ray Lewis’s troubleshooting staff ‘remoralising’ programme and his unerring belief there is not a child you cannot help the right dedicated interest and love.
But that doesn’t change the number of disaffected children coming into school in the first place- children who need special attention. These are children with no rules, no boundaries and often no fathers; children with no identity and no security. It is no wonder they lash out.
Twelve years of a dedicated and expensive 'early years' national childcare policy appears instead of making things better appears to have made them worse.
And now the current government seems to be offering more of it - ever earlier state intervention. David Cameron is planning to strengthen the grip of child care, not loosen it, by extending the current entitlement of 15 hours free early education a week for three- and four-year-olds to 40 per cent of all two-year-olds.
Yet this money would be far better spent on more health visitors, more mother and baby support and education.
For how children behave is a direct consequence of how adults behave. You could argue that over the last three decades adults, including the politicians, have behaved selfishly and thoughtlessly with regard to children, putting their own needs first.
The main finding of Ian Duncan Smith’s Social Justice Policy review was that strengthening marriage, family stability and responsibility is the medicine that is really needed. Unfortunately David Cameron has yet to live up to his promise on the tax and benefits changes needed to get this process in motion. Now would not be too soon.
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