In a recent Spiked article, Dr Helene Guldberg quotes Liz Kendal talking about a recent IPPR report about child rearing which she co-authored:
Any government serious about giving children an equal start in life cannot overlook the significance of the parenting role… The lack of practical, social and emotional support for most parents undermines other attempts by government to reduce childhood inequalities.
I think this quote throws an interesting light on the mania to regulate that now sweeps across the world. There is nothing like an impossible task to enable the regulatory process first to begin, and then, once begun, to go on for ever.
Consider. According to Liz Kendal, who emitted the above quote, the government should be “serious about giving children an equal start in life”. Yet think about this. It is impossible. It simply cannot be done. People are different. They think differently and they live in different circumstances. They rear their children differently. How could it possibly be otherwise? It cannot. Yet if this possibility is seriously pursued, as Liz Kendal thinks that it should be, there is no logical end to the process. Suppose that Liz Kendal’s advice is taken, and parents are deluged with advice about how to rear their children better (“practical, social and emotional support”). And suppose, which is not that hard to suppose, that they ignore it.
At this point, the exhorters, angry at being so ignored, emit these fateful words (thank you Mark Holland for the link):
“The current voluntary option has failed.”
Exhortation has failed, as exhortation always fails, and a degree of compulsion must be applied. There must be regulations to improve bad parenthood.
This will not achieve equal starts for all, because nothing can. So then other variables will be identified as causing childhood inequality. And so on, for ever.
Now let me put on my David Carr hat, and speculate about how much worse things might eventually get. There is, if you think about it, another rather scary notion built into this particular attempt to achieve equal starts for all. Regulations will duly be imposed to make, essentially, rather nasty and neglectful parents less nasty and neglectful. These, as I say, will fail. At which point, not only will other regulations be imposed to control other variables supposedly responsible for unequal starts besides parental nastiness and neglectfulness, but the attempt to equalise parental nastiness and neglectfulness may then take a more sinister turn. Parents who are now nice to and who do not now neglect their children will then be accused of cheating, and will be told, with gradually decreasing subtlety, to be nastier and more neglectful.
It will probably start when Conservative MPs accuse Government front benchers of being too nice to their children, thereby giving them an unfair start in life. The more subtle among those saying this will be joking. But the joke will (deliberately or genuinely) not be got, and the idea will spread. Be nasty to your children, and make the world a fairer place. There may even be regulations about it.
Far fetched? I agree, it is. Although what frustrated utopian ideologists do, and what Conservative MPs then say about it, can itself be pretty far fetched.
The answer to this mania for the governmental micro-management of everything is that it has got to be perceived as resembling taxation and nationalisation, which at the moment it is not.
Taxes and nationalisation of business are both now understood to be costly, and a disincentive to doing whatever it is.
But governmental attempts merely to improve things, by exhortation, and then when that fails, by regulation, without actually changing any of the names of the people or institutions involved>, are still regarded by too many ignoramuses as a cost-free way to improve the doing of whatever it is. But exhortations, and then regulations, are in fact very costly.
The exhorters and regulators must be paid their salaries, and must have buildings to work in, but that is only the first item in the real bill to be paid.
The exhorted are liable at least to fret about the exhortations, and when the regulations arrive, the regulated (perhaps parents themselves, maybe existing social workers, maybe some new national task force of parent-minders) must then spend interminable hours filling in forms. Many of the more farsighted victims of this process will see serious trouble coming when the process has only reached the futile exhortation stage.
(I was going to put here that the regulated do not actually part with cash while being regulated. But of course that is wrong. Often, in addition to being subjected to all this interference, they are also compelled to pay for it. This enables interferers to describe themselves as profit centres.)
And in this case, that which Liz Kendal wants the government to interfere with is parenthood. Consider what taxing parenthood does, and/or would do. Think about it that way.
“Far fetched”?
It’s already started – look at recent stories about university admissions quotas, with universities being told they’re taking too many kids from public schools and they need to start discriminating against them (sorry, taking social factors into account) to bump up the number of state school kids. Message to parents – “don’t work hard and make sacrifices to help your kids if you ever want them to go to university – send them to a comprehensive where they’ll get knifed and sold drugs instead and we may deign to help you instead of letting you help yourself”.
RPW
My friends have a four year old boy. They told me that the local edyookashun authorities frown very much on parents teaching their pre-school children to read, since this appears to be a state responsibility. Presumably the opposition comes from the fact that so doing would show up the hideous inadequacies of local state controlled education.
Then again, this is the People’s Republic of Scotland, where people are allergic to self-reliance and consistently vote for socialism for no better reason than that their father did.
EG
I appreciate RPW’s example, but I’d like to hear more examples of government actively (rather than passively) enjoining poorer performance (viz., how would parents be made to be nasty and neglectful). In America we see lowered standards all the time (called “dumbing down” in the name of “fairness”), but freakish individuals are still free to perform well for their own satisfaction. But examples of mandated lower performance?
And could Brian please explain this line:
what does changing the names of “people or institutions” have to do with it? Examples?
Many thanks,
a right-wing friend of mine recommended your site. its deifnitely thought-provoking for me as a leftie!
i have to say, i do find it interesting that – after Thatcher & Major – governments have intervened less to promote growth and employment and to tackle income inequality. but, they instead have decided to micro-manage parenting and other personal decisions. it seems that the rights of businessmen and companies to do what they like in the commercial field has been promoted by gov’t while the rights of parents/carers to look after children in the way they feel is best hasn’t. the libertarian idea that ‘personal’ and ‘economic’ freedom go together doesn’t seem to have manifested itself here
anonymous coward
Lefties do often already bitch about parents who cheat by advancing their kids education careers with private tutoring, but I admit that this bit of my post was speculative.
As for the name changing thing, well, what I had in mind was the distinction between old fashioned communism, nationalisation etc., where life is micro-managed by the government, and the names of companies (in particular) ARE changed, with the current arrangements where names are left untouched.
It’s the difference between what the Communists did, which is now discredited, with what the Nazis did, which is, I am afraid, very much alive and kicking, although with quite different micro-managerial aims in mind.
I don’t expect the government to openly compel or encourage bad parenting. Instead, look for people who have had good parenting discriminated against by state order in everything from employment to university admissions to credit scoring and lending, etc, etc, etc.
Here’s a really evil twist you might see (hope I’m not giving the bad guys ideas here…):
Instead of progressive taxes on income, we’ll have progressive taxes on ability. They’ll measure the kid’s IQ, the quality of his parenting, and anything else they can throw into the pot. Then your tax bill is computed based on these factors and not according to your actual income. The theory behind this is if you’re able to make a high income, but you’re not making a high income, then you’re depriving the state of tax monies that it has a right to expect from you, and you’ll have to get the better job that you’re capable of whether you like it or not to pay your proper tax bill.
In some states, child support is already computed in this fashion – if the receiving ex-spouse can convince a judge that you’re capable of earning more and choosing not to, the judge can order you to pay child support based on the income that you could be making, not what you actually are making.
My wife is four months pregnant with our first child. We went happily to see the midwife. The usual medical questions were as expected.
Except for one, “What’s your social workers name?”
We don’t plan on having the state interfere in the upbringing of our child and when I protested, (much to my wife’s embarrassment) the midwife found my attitude almost incomprehensible.
VS
What about the IR35 legislation which forces certain companies to pay 95% of their income as salary, instead of how they choose to spend it? It’s another way of sucking more tax out of the hardest working people to pay for legions of Guardianista social activists.
paul d s,
My wife and I just had a child. During the delivery/post delivery timeframe (about 3 days) I got the distinct feeling that we were under relatively tight scrutiny by the hospital staff. I got the notion that if we didn’t cut muster, our child would be whisked away into the warm arms of the State. This certainly wasn’t a market transaction (albeit through a third party insurance company with whom we have contracted) in which we were contracting for services. They weren’t under our purview, we were under theirs, acting as agents of the State.
Luckily we passed the last test by successfully placing our child in the car seat and securing the car seat in our van. State law (Wisconsin) dictates that we would not be allowed to depart unless we passed this final exam.
I’ve got to give them a little due – they pretty much let you know right off that you can expect vigorous State interference in your parent/child relationship. Can’t wait to be sent to the clink for refusing the State the ability to push pills down our child’s throat.
VS, first of all, welcome to Samizdata. We need lots of comments from smart lefties! Please come back.
The late Tory MP, Nicholas Budgen (a very intelligent man), predicted that under Blair, Labour had switched from trying to nationalise business to nationalising people. That exactly describes the sort of oppressive nannying we see all around us now.
Regards
Thanks for the greetings, Jonathan. I can see why Nicholas Budgen might feel that NewLab is nationalising people rather than businesses. But, it sems to me that those who are more keen on nationalising buisnesses [e.g. the left of Labour] are less keen on the repressive aspects of the social legislation the govt is bringing in. Instead, i think Blair’s social legislation/anti-terror legislation etc is more a manifestation of a kind of conservatism. The aim is to _uphold_ the status quo (against islamic terrorists, anti-social yobs etc). The law & order aspect of Blair and Blunkett’s policies is something designed to appeal to small-c conservative people (who are concerned about crime, anti-social behaviour, binge-drinking etc). The authoritian elements of the right would approve of a lot of what Blunkett is doing, although it is obviously anathema to libertarians such as youselves.
One of my friends was first criticized by her daughter’s teacher for teaching reading via phonics (and her daughter was told by the teacher to forget what she learned), and then treated as though *she* was interfering when she asked that the teachers please respond to requests to determine whether or not her daughter was in fact turning in her assignments. Her daughter was passed through two grades failing in all her subjects, for no discernable reason. Now they’re doing an electronic at-home school program instead; her daughter’s already getting ahead of where the program says she “should” be, after barely a month (and it appears she now regards her mother as a legitimate academic authority again — for the first time in seven years).
My mother started homeschooling for more basic academic issues, but now she says she won’t have any of her kids in public school no matter what, because she doesn’t want to have the government telling her what her children should know.
in response to Ron’s comments, i would say that – although legislation may force self-empoyed people to pay monies out in salaries they would rather take as dividends etc – they still face less taxes than before 1988. The right has suceeded in reducing the rates of tax facing people (esp. the wealthiest)
Maybe this isnt a plot but just a natural progression – government started subsidizing parenthood with child benefit – then with maternity leave and now with countless tax credits from baby luvin Brown. With all these payment its hardly surprising that the government is now asking for a bit of control ove how “its” money is spent. And its hard to blame in on new labor since maternity and child benefit predates them – all they have done is take the if you subsidizes it youy can regulate it principle to its logical conclusion.
If theres a lesson here its beware of governments bearing benefits.
“They told me that the local edyookashun authorities frown very much on parents teaching their pre-school children to read, […]” –
This isn’t a new attitude. One of my aunts was a primary school headmistress, and told my parents they should not teach me to read. (They didn’t take any notice, thank goodness. And it had consequences for my attitude to authority: when I did arrive at school the teacher ignored my protests–and demonstration!–that I could already read, and set about going through the motions of teaching me.) That was 40 years ago.
I suspect it is back to front to say this is because people think it is a state responsibility.
It is more that there is a demand from interest groups of self-appointed experts (in this case, teachers) that things are best done as they determine, and their interests in exclusivity and pseudo-efficiency are shared by the state, which therefore promotes them. There is an elective affinity that embeds control by the expert in control by the state. “Responsibility” only comes into play as a mechanism for subjugating the subject of control, as part of the suggestion that they will suffer bad consequences if they fail to conform–and it will be all their fault, not that of benevolent expert and state.
“in response to Ron’s comments, i would say that – although legislation may force self-empoyed people to pay monies out in salaries they would rather take as dividends etc – they still face less taxes than before 1988.”
Not true in practice. Very wealthy people are seldom merely self-employed. It is tax inefficient beyond a certain point. Headline marginal tax rates have declined since 1988, yes. But for everyone except the very wealthiest incomes, the proportion of their total earning capacity to be paid in tax has gone up considerably. And worse (particularly for the ordinary self- employed) the system has become more than proprtionately more burdensome and obscure. The gap between net tax collected and the cost of taxation to the tax-payer has never been higher.
“People are different. They think differently and they live in different circumstances. They rear their children differently. How could it possibly be otherwise?”
Of course people are different. However, equality, in this case of the ‘soft’ kind – opportunity – is something that must be pursued by any democratic government, or even a highly de-regulated free-market ‘nation’ (lest either turn into mechanisms of oppression).
Children are not the ‘property’ of their parents. Saying this does not equate to arguing that they are the property of the state. We all, I hope, accept that children sometimes need to be protected from their parents. The previous posters should understand this when faced with questions such as “who is your social worker”, as they are presumably confident that they will not hurt their child.
But harm to a child is not limited to hysical or extreme emotional or mental abuse. I presume, from the tenor of this blog, that most of the contributors would like to see less destructive, anti-social behaviour. But how can we achieve this end? Some might argue that the only way is harsher punishments. But this presumes that there is two kinds of people. I do not behave in a civilised way because I am scared of the consequences. I behave in this way because that is how I want to behave. Do the advocates of harsh punishment as the sole means of building a better society behave well because they live their lives in fear. Well, in that case, the only difference between them and yobs is cowardice.
We, in the guise of the state, need to play a part in childrens cultural and intellectual development. I would argue that the imperative for this intervention goes beyond self-interest, but that imperative is enough. If we don’t accept some state intervention in our lives, how can we hope to reform the environment we see, and despair of, around us?
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