By Brian Barder / @BrianLB
It's well established that poor parenting runs in families and can have disastrous consequences for the life chances of the children affected. Children ineffectually or abusively brought up by incompetent parents, or often by a single parent who perhaps lives with a stepfather (or much more rarely a stepmother), grow up and have children of their own - sometime when still teenagers - whom they in turn bring up ineffectually with the same likelihood of disastrous consequences for them.
Child abuse, whether violent or sexual or both, notoriously gets practised down the generations; the abused become abusers in their turn. Children of incompetent or abusive parents are likelier than others to play truant from school, to leave school with inadequate or no literacy or numeracy skills and thus to be virtually unemployable except in temporary and unskilled low-paid jobs, to become offenders and to spend time in prison or young offenders' institutions, to smoke, practise alcohol abuse or take drugs or all three, to become obese through bad dietary habits learned from infancy, and consequently (or independently) to be victims of bad health with short life expectancy, to have several sexual partners and sometimes children by each, and in general to fail all along the line to fulfil their human potential or to lead happy and fulfilled lives. Children in these categories have an above-average likelihood of being taken into care, again with poor prospects for leading fulfilling lives.
There is thus a powerful case for society to try to break into this cycle of poor parenting with its high individual, family and social costs. Education in sound parenting clearly ought to occupy a much more prominent place in all school curriculums, but many of those affected may rarely attend school and will therefore tend to miss its benefits.
The case for the state to provide parenting classes, especially for those from low-income, low education and low aspiration backgrounds, is accordingly strong. It might be possible to make attendance at parenting classes compulsory for parents of young children, or prospective parents, who come before the courts for any reason and are assessed by magistrates or judges as likely to benefit from parenting guidance.
Attendance at classes in suitable cases should be part of the conditions of injunctions, ASBOs, binding over and ordinary sentences, especially if suspended. Compulsory parenting classes should be held for people of parent age in prisons and young offenders' institutions. Voluntary parenting classes should be offered to appropriate parents by primary and perhaps other schools, with suitable inducements to attend. There should be publicly funded parenting classes on commercial and public service television channels, associated with celebrities from the worlds of football, pop music and television itself, perhaps in a reality TV format with audience interactivity, penalties and prizes. There should be a strong effort to establish parenting classes as normal and useful for parents from all walks of life and social classes, so that no stigma attaches to attendance at them. Wherever possible the classes should be seamlessly integrated with other social, sporting or entertainment activities.
All this would be expensive, but much less so that allowing the cycle of bad parenting and human failure to continue to pass from generation to generation every couple of decades into the foreseeable future.
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The bigger danger, I suspect, is that a low standard of teachers ends up getting recruited and it becomes a box ticking exercise like many training schemes.
Can i ask or just say my view , We have two problems , The first is education , not for the children but the parents , That then goes back to there education , What i belive is a strong family is the best way to teach a child to blossem .
This is not a straight forward piece , I have said before that i think sex education should be taught at home by the parents . But with alot of children falling through the net , through the care system and unhappy homes we must find a way to bridge the gap .
ricki
I began doing some literacy work with prisoners and young offenders, and was really shocked by how many - some people say 70% - had their lifetime of trouble begin with abuse at home and then drug use to dull the pain of that. A frightening thing about these people is that they tend to be convinced that what they went through wasn;t really unsual and that "everyone's been abused by somebody".
The trouble is that in their immediate home environments this tends to be true, so things tend to reinforce the cycle.
I'm still usually sceptical about the state getting directly involved with families, and there is no denying that as Katherine says there would be plenty of people in the classes refusing to participate etc. But in this case there must be a real case for the state intervening to bring some objective reality in. Whether parenting classes specifically are the answer I don't know - but there must be some way of addressing that cycle of abuse.
If wage-earners in 'ordinary jobs' were paid a proper wage to enable them to pay for all these 'free things' that higher wage-earners currently pay for through re-distributive taxation, there'd be no need for re-distributive taxation in the first place.
You can't have it both ways : either accept decent wages at the lower end that enable people to pay for the present-day necessities of life, and hold their head high, with dignity, or pay the low wages and accept the burden of taxation to re-distribute income.
David Ricardo lives!
Its creating a entire class of lazy, unthinking takers that will simply pass on this crap to the next generation until it spreads and spreads. Oh sorry, it already has.
You say that these classes should be compulsory, how would this be policed and the punishments would be what?