First there was Supernanny telling us how to give our kids time-outs. Now a UK thinktank is giving parents a checklist of things to do with their children every day.
Based the "five a day" healthy eating campaign, the thinktank CentreForum has published a list of five tasks to be performed by parents. The following checklist aims to boost child development:
Read to your child for 15 minutes
Play with your child on the floor for 10 minutes
Talk with your child for 20 minutes with the television off
Adopt positive attitudes towards your child and praise them frequently
Give your child a nutritious diet
CentreForum hopes the guidelines, which form part of a report on improving social mobility, will be advertised on buses and in nurseries. It also plans to make childcare classes mandatory for those claiming benefit payments.
"It is only by taking steps which actively encourage awareness and participation among parents from lower-income backgrounds that engagement with parenting and the home environment can move beyond being a general tool for child development and become a genuine weapon against disadvantage," said the report's author, Chris Paterson.
Far from falling on deaf ears, Paterson's report has support from the highest echelons. Labour MP and author of two government-commissioned reviews on early intervention, Graham Allen told the Telegraph, "a national parenting campaign is exactly what Britain needs".
Do parents need 'classes' on how to parent? Does the checklist strike you as common sense or yet another case of nanny state tactics?
After the notorious "Sixties Scoop" -- when so many aboriginal children were placed in foster care -- it seems First Nations children are doomed again, with more being placed in care now than at the height of the residential school system.
Instead of being at home with their parents and siblings, many First Nations kids are in foster homes, institutions, or living with distant relatives. In 2005, the number of kids in care was around 27,500 -- easily double the number of kids taken from their homes in the late 1940s and '50s. Since 2005, reports suggest that number has risen.
"It's a culmination of decades' worth of social ills," admits First Nations leader, John Beaucage. Social ills being the "disheartening mix of poverty, addiction, history and politics" that caused PM Stephen Harper to apologize to the First Nations.
It's estimated that First Nations children are eight times more likely than other Canadian kids to be in care, and more likely to be on welfare. Part of the problem: First Nations children are routinely sent into care because that's "where the funding is".
The approach is myopic, however, since it doesn't help families deal with their problems, which are mostly rooted in poverty and the legacy of the residential school system which "robbed the parents of first-hand knowledge of how to raise a family".
Studies have shown time and again that neglected children have impaired cognitive development. At least now children in trouble are placed in other First Nations homes where possible, and the majority wind up back at home, so family ties are not being severed as they were in the past.
The federal government is looking to fund a number of child welfare agencies to be run by First Nations themselves.
Why do you think First Nations kids are getting such a raw deal? What can, and should, be done to help them?
While taking part in the BBC genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?, JK Rowling, author of the mega famous Harry Potter books, discovered she comes from a long line of single mums.
It was only during the research for the program, which uncovers the family tree of celebrities, that Rowling learned that her great-grandmother, Lizzie, her great-great-grandmother, Salomé, and her great-great-great-grandmother, Christine were all single mothers. Her maternal grandmother, Louisa, was also supposedly born out of wedlock.
Although she's said to be worth half a billion pounds, Rowling famously wrote the first Potter book in the midst of divorce proceedings. She was living on welfare in a cold Edinburgh flat with her baby daughter -- an experience that, perhaps not surprisingly, left her clinically depressed.
"Between 1993 and 1997," said Rowling, "I did the job of two parents, qualified and then worked as a secondary school teacher, wrote one and a half novels and did the planning for a further five. For a while, I was clinically depressed. To be told, over and over again, that I was feckless, lazy — even immoral — did not help."
A teary Rowling, who married her second husband, Neil Murray, a doctor, in 2001, described taking part in the genealogy series as "humbling" and "strangely reassuring”.
Rowling has previously stated that being a single mother had made her a scourge of the previous Conservative government.
"Women like me... were, according to popular myth, a prime cause of social breakdown and in it for all we could get: free money, state-funded accommodation, an easy life."
Au contraire, Rowling is not only president of Gingerbread, a UK charity for single parents, she is a modern-day heroine worthy of her own fairy tale.
Printer-friendly version