Scotland is in the grip of an epidemic, according to last week’s headlines. It’s not bird flu or winter vomiting bug but an outbreak of “poor parenting”. It hit this household on Thursday with the force of the ebola virus, as my six-year-old can testify. There are days when my children would be better off raised by wild animals. They would be less likely to have their heads snapped off.
According to the reports, 54,000 children — almost 6% of all children in Scotland — were referred to the Children’s Panel last year, with “poor parenting” identified as the single biggest cause of referral; and 13,000 children are now in local authority care.
These figures seemed vaguely familiar so I hunted out my notes of an interview I did five years ago with the then principal reporter to the children’s hearing system. And guess what? In 2000-01, 60,162 children passed through the Children’s Panel, almost 6% of all the children in Scotland.
Epidemic it may be but new it is not. Since then, however, the government has appointed a children’s commissioner, introduced anti-social behaviour orders, pumped millions of pounds into “children’s services”, drawn up a “children’s charter”, tinkered around with the youth justice system, changed the law on physical punishment, set up parent councils, bribed pupils to the tune of £29m a year to stay on at school, launched the risible and deeply patronising “parenting zone” and given its backing to a raft of charities with dubious credentials. If ever there was an object lesson in policy failure then this is it.
It gets worse. In 2002 the core number of persistent young offenders was put at 900. The Scottish executive set a target of reducing recidivism in this group by 10% over three years. At the time it seemed less ambitious than Annabel Goldie’s wardrobe. We are talking about 30 yobs a year: you could stick them in a class with one teacher and achieve the goal. Last week we learnt that the core number of persistent young offenders had risen to 1,388, a rise of more than 50%.
At the heart of this policy failure is a euphemism of Henry McLeish proportions. The 17,901 vulnerable children who were referred to the Children’s Panel last year were not experiencing “poor parenting”, they were experiencing criminal neglect.
Poor parenting is about losing patience. It is sticking a frozen pizza in the oven when there isn’t the time or energy to make a Jamie Oliver-inspired meal. It is dozing off while reading a story or caving in to pressure at the pick’n’mix counter. It is something most of us are guilty of at one time or another but it is not something that needs direct government action.
Criminal neglect, on the other hand, requires urgent intervention. Three years ago one third of local authorities delivered a service on time to children following a hearing. Since then the situation has worsened.
Earlier this year the principal reporter of the Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration implied that she had no alternative but to ignore most of the cases being referred to her department by the police, such was the strain on the system. Yet in June the Scottish executive announced that the long overdue overhaul of the children’s hearing system would be further delayed.
You cannot accuse the executive of doing nothing, however. A raft of ineffectual initiatives has been launched, most of them targeted at entirely the wrong people. I went to see one in action on the Pilton estate in Edinburgh earlier this year. Outside the community centre a mob of foul-mouthed, drunken, abusive parents and children were swigging from bottles. Inside a well meaning bunch of charity workers were handing out leaflets and giving smoothie-making demonstrations to a handful of polite but bewildered parents.
The so-called experts outnumbered the parents by about 10 to one. The speech made by one self-appointed parenting guru was among the most rambling and embarrassing I have ever heard. Not a single person engaged with the foul-mouthed parents, yet the organisation is funded by the taxpayer to the tune of £140,000 a year.
Most parents have their children’s best interests at heart and most can be relied on to act on those interests. They do not need parenting zones to tell them “children learn a lot at school” or public information broadcasts telling them to remember to play with their kids. What they need is government action to create the kind of society conducive to the raising of children.
Parents need local authorities to prevent chip vans peddling their disgusting wares outside schools; play parks free of used needles and condoms; action to deal with the lack of science teachers. They need drunken yobs off the streets.
When shops and pubs are caught selling alcohol to children, there should be effective penalties. The law at present is rarely acted upon and when it is, the courts give minimal fines. Parents need the government to overrule Ofcom when it announces, as it did last year, that television programmes no longer have to conform to standards of “taste and decency”. They need action to deal with internet porn.
There is no point in politicians putting the onus on parents and then removing the few remaining structures and sanctions which make doing the job possible. You cannot expect parents to maintain standards that the rest of society is determined to flout.
If your standards are different from those of every other parent in your child’s peer group, you inevitably risk alienating your child. If 80% of 12-year-olds are allowed to watch I’m a Celebrity or eat sweets daily or stay up late or have mobile phones, maintaining a line of resistance becomes increasingly difficult. As a parent you have to pick your battles. If you are not careful, the lowest common denominator becomes the norm.
At the same time, modern parenting requires a degree of negotiation unthinkable to previous generations. Children, who are constantly being reminded of their rights, have more power within the family. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it simultaneously places a burden of choice on children and makes it harder for parents.
The authorities increasingly target the majority who are doing an adequate job while ignoring those in need of urgent intervention. That is what I call criminal negligence. This “epidemic” has more to do with poor governing than poor parenting.
