Government on a "lets fix the parents" gig again
Apparently the answer to all our problems now lies in a GCSE in parenting !
Frank Field (the government
poverty tsar) believes Parenting skills should be taught in schools to address a "vicious downward spiral" of broken families in the UK.
The Labour MP for Birkenhead, fears many children are being dragged down by what he calls "toe rag parents". His solution, outlined in his first report to the Prime Minister, is to place parenting at the heart of the national school curriculum.
Writing in the Daily Mail on Tuesday, the MP said Britain was facing a social crisis because of the huge number of families who "live in a state of permanent squalor, chaos and hostility".
"I was knocked sideways when I asked a group of 15-year-olds in Birkenhead what would they most want from their school if they were setting the school curriculum, and every one of them said they wanted to know how to be good parents," said the MP. Mr Field argued that Britain became a "respectable nation" during the Victorian era, when parents brought up their children within a very clear framework of how they should behave.
I read this with a sigh and a heavy heart not because I don’t think teaching parenting is a bad thing at school, but because I don’t think it is THE answer. Nor do I think going back to the Victorian era is a good thing.....how can going back ever be good, particularly when we are dealing with a different type of child now, different situations and different circumstances.
I agree with some of his comments; yes, some of the problems we have in society are because we have parents who really don’t care, but they are the minority and I still think this only skims the surface.
You can only be a good parent if you are a good person; you can only effectively manage another’s behaviour if you manage your own and you can only teach another responsibility, resilience and respect if you exhibit these in yourself.
If we could help parents, think better about themselves, act better, behave better and reach for personal aspirations and goals then perhaps teaching them parenting could help. Otherwise, it is like giving someone a dress that will never fit.
So it’s not just about parenting, it is more to do with who you are as a parent and how you feel about yourself. If I act and feel like a victim, I will shout at my kids, be an unhappy parent and always expect and get the worse. If I feel great about myself then I tend not to take things personally, expect better of others and stay calm in conflict.
However I do think that just focusing on parenting and blaming the parents for this problem, or at least saying it is down to bad parenting, is only part of the problem, So many things impact the way that someone behaves. The expectations they have of themselves and others have of them, the environment that they live in, the habits they have in their daily lives, to name such a few.
If people hold low expectations of me, I hold low expectations of myself, if my environment is uninspiring I feel uninspired and if all I do all day is eat junk food and watch junk TV, junk comes out.
This behaviour is systemic in our society and requires us to look at the problems at a much deeper level. Things I think that can only be fixed by us looking at cultural legacy and constructive cultivation, two things I mentioned in an earlier article about education. As a nation we need to challenge the attitudes and perspectives that we have towards these areas and ask not how we can fix the problem, but how can we change the attitudes of the nation towards this issue. We would do better teaching our children how to challenge the cultural legacy they have grown up in and teaching them how to constructively cultivate themselves, those around them and any children they may have in the future. I feel this would be far more beneficial.
This is a culture issue, not a parenting issue and we shift the blame by saying that. If government blame the parents then it lets them off the hook, so to speak. While I do not know all the answers, I simply wish to start the conversation with questions for Government, Education and people who work with youth to ponder.
1. What assumptions are you making that may not be true?
2.What systems are your using that may not work ?
3. Are you willing to accept and challenge cultural legacy, even if that means changing the way we think about children?
4. If parents are not cultivating their children, then how should we step in to take on that role?
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