In a street where few people work, near a corner where the pushers do their business, I picked up a little girl who’d fallen off her bike in the middle of the road. She must have been five years old, on a bike that was much too big for her, in the rain, clutching a bag of copper coins. Her mum had sent her out to get some things from the local shop. She was in tears.

In a community centre I met a young man of 27 who had never worked, and had spent most of the past 15 years blighted by addiction. “So what went wrong - why did you drop out of school?” I asked. “My parents were just liberal about schools,” he said. “They never made me go.”

The more I see, the more I believe that in too many parts of our society the experience of good responsible parenting is disappearing. It’s not an issue of lone parenting. Many lone parents do a heroic job in the face of all the pressures of family breakdown. The parenting challenge we face is much more complex than family breakdown alone.

In many places, parents no longer know how to bring up children. The parenting style of Frank Gallagher, the main figure in the Channel 4 series Shameless, has become the norm. In these communities, children are increasingly left to their own devices, as they grow up devoid of guidance or ambition for their future.

Most people learn their parenting skills from their own parents; when and how to say no, when to punish, when affection is needed. The problems come when that inherited knowledge simply isn’t there. In many of our most troubled areas, the generations pass pretty quickly; 30-year-old grandparents and 45-year-old great-grandparents are far from unusual in today’s Britain.

And when you overlay the challenges that many people in our most deprived areas face in their daily lives, then good parenting skills can disappear very quickly.

For most of us, it is our parents who teach us about getting up and going to work every day, who push us through school and emphasise the need for a career - but in some places this doesn’t happen. In some communities, a culture of dependency is being passed on from parent to child.

The Health Is Wealth Commission in Liverpool has just published a report on the social challenges in the city. This comment from a local man really struck me: “There is a post-working class culture which wasn’t around when I was growing up . . . my mum and dad and all my friends’ mums and dads went to work . . . there is an issue that is post-that, that’s made benefits the norm . . . and somehow people have to be re-engaged.” He is right.

Last year I spoke to a teacher about the problem. She had asked the parent of a former pupil how he was getting on. “He’s doing really well,” she said. “He’s got himself on the sick.”

I can think of no better example of the poverty of aspiration that exists in so many areas. Small wonder that too many people, experiencing that lack of ambition from their own parents, have so little ambition for their own children. And as the government’s own research shows, parts of our society are becoming downwardly mobile across the generations.

But the problem is far broader than the issue of worklessness. I remember a head teacher in an old mining town explaining the challenge to me starkly. “Many children come here who can barely string a few words together because no one has ever really talked to them. I have children who’ve never had a proper meal, or eaten with a knife and fork, or sat at a table.”

But if you never had a book in your house as a child, how would you know that as a parent you need to help your child start to identify letters or words? If you were brought up never eating meals at a table and having never had a home-cooked meal, how would you know how to bring cooking and family mealtimes to your household?

I met a 14-year-old truant in Manchester who told me his mum hadn’t got up that morning, and so he hadn’t bothered to either. As the generations pass, so the family experience of education and its purpose becomes more and more dissipated - and the chance of social mobility among the most deprived in our society becomes remoter.

In a disturbing number of homes, addiction is a way of life. Much of the family’s income disappears to fuel a drug or alcohol dependency. Any extra money from the benefits system simply finds its way to the local drug dealer.

So how do we break families out of this generational cycle? First, let’s recognise the limits of politics. You can’t just pass laws instructing parents to be good at their job; cash transfers alone cannot end poverty. But we can make a difference, and to start with, we have to end the blight of generational worklessness and the culture of entitlement in our welfare state. We should provide better support for people to get back to work, but deny out-of-work benefits to those who refuse to participate in that process.

Second, we need zero tolerance of truancy and early intervention in schools and by health visitors to help troubled parents and children. Then we need a welfare support and benefits system that protects families’ stability. The tax credits system should not make it more financially attractive for couples to live apart rather than together.

Finally, we need to empower the voluntary groups, like the Home-Start charity, which can do so much to tackle the challenge on a local basis.

Good parenting must be a part of these families’ futures and not just their past.

Chris Grayling is the shadow secretary for work and pensions

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