And when did you last see your children? Before you both left at the crack for the office?
When they were already in bed? Or do you only see them — let’s be brutally realistic here, given our divorce rate — at alternate weekends?
So we don’t need to ask any more who tucks them up at night, takes them to school, listens to their Homeric summaries of Harry Potter books, buys them Start-rites, takes them to the dentist, finds out they’re upset, do we?
Because it’s not you two, the parents, who gave them life. No, it’s more likely to be Agnieszka from Gdansk, who doesn’t really give a monkey’s.
All this week, the story has been that we have the least nurtured offspring in the world: as Fathers 4 Justice staged a rooftop protest on Harriet Harman’s roof, David Cameron, a father of three, told Relate that families needed support, money, tax-breaks, but above all, time; we are bottom of the UN table for raising children; and the four children’s commissioners this week reported that the UN convention on the rights of the child doesn’t seem to apply in Britain, with one in three children living in poverty, and over a million in poor housing. The dossier documented failures in all areas — asylum, education, learning disability, smacking — but even so, it didn’t say the thing I kept waiting for: that even middleclass families with aspirational graduate parents don’t spend that much time just hanging together, chillaxin’, any more.
I’m not saying that our Jessicas and Bens are swigging alcopops on street corners, in hoodies. Of course they’re not. But there is definitely evidence that the middle classes are producing their own, quasi-feral generation of children (sorry, I simply can’t type kids), only in their own, very different, handwringingly guilt-ridden, overcompensating way.
Let’s look at the economic circumstances first. The reason we don’t participate fully in our children’s upbringing is because we either can’t, or won’t. Back in the old days, 40 years ago or so, or so I am told, a single skilled manual wage could provide for a man, his wife, their family and a roof over their heads. Now, of course, it takes both mother and father in full-time employment to pay the massive mortgage on their rapidly depreciating fixed asset, and meet bills. And it also takes a couple who refuse to take a drop in their living standards and move somewhere more modest (i. e. who don’t want to trade down from the Toast Rack in Battersea to a miner’s cottage in County Durham), parents who both want to self-actualise, realise their potential, pursue careers of course, too, but I don’t want to get into that here.
As Phillip Blond, a don at Cumbria University (whose provocative outpourings can be found on The First Post website) has noticed, ‘Wage earners have coped with this structural shift by taking on unprecedented levels of debt, working more, and asking their partners to join the workforce. Family life has suffered; children see less of their parents than at any time in the last 100 years and since nobody has any free time, civic life has virtually vanished.’ Naturally, I am as in favour of feminism, choice, hairy armpits, equal opportunities, Andrea Dworkin dungarees and so on as the next chick. But I don’t think anyone can imagine that people hark back to the 1950s merely because the kitchens were cutely retro and women all looked like January Jones in Mad Men (i. e. had tiny waists and had the chicken pot pie all ready to go). No, the 1950s causes nostalgia all round because that was the last decade when the family held together, most mothers stayed home, and children had fathers.
Since then, the marriage rate has been in decline, and only around one in ten (according to one new report) is a full-time mother.
As Phillip Blond tells me, ‘After the Fifties, the free-thinking free-loving Sixties destroyed social stability, and the middle classes came upon the idea of promiscuity, and pleasure, and self-interest, and passed on that virus to the working classes, and now they’ve all moved into the BBC and occupied positions of power and it’s ruined our country!’ Well, I wouldn’t go so far as that, but Blond has a fair point, which is that in just 40 years, society has gone from bra-lessness to dadlessness: as a result of family breakdown, lone parenting, selfishness, etc. , it is now predicted that very soon, 50 per cent of children will be born out of wedlock. Not good news by any measure, according to the guru of social dissolution, Iain Duncan Smith.
As Duncan Smith sets out in his report, Breakdown Britain, children of married parents spend on average 11 years in continuous contact with Mummy and Daddy, but children of unmarried parents, who are already less advantaged socially, financially, emotionally, and so on, spend on average about a third of that. So it is self-evidently good for children in every conceivable way that their parents stay together, as set out in Dave’s lecture to Relate.
And so now we have a situation, as they say in The West Wing, where single-parent families and families where both parents work are the norm, and this cuts across all socioeconomic groups. Ergo, we have many, many households where neither middle-class parent is looking after any of their middle-class children.
Information provided by: Findarticles.com
