When the government announced its new £5 million parenting project last week I thought I should offer to help. I have four children, after all, so know a thing or two about the subject. I sent a message via Twitter to the owner of the Parent Gym, one of the organisations involved in the scheme.
‘I’d be happy to donate all my Spectator columns on parenting,’ I said. ‘You could reproduce them as an example of what not to do.’
It was a joke, obviously. Middle-class dads trade anecdotes in the park on Saturday mornings about what crap parents they are, but the fact that they’re in the park with their children — usually playing football or cricket — demonstrates that they’re actually doing a pretty good job.
The trouble with this government scheme is that the sort of people it’s designed to help — let’s call them the parents of the feral underclass, even though that phrase is now verboten — are unlikely to attend the classes, even with a voucher from Boots entitling them to free lessons. Delinquent hoodies who steal cars and mug old ladies don’t end up that way because their dads lack basic parenting skills. It’s because their dads are largely absent from their lives.
The same thought struck me when I heard a senior official from the Department for Education talk about the importance of parenting classes a couple of weeks ago. She said one of the reasons children from ‘workless households’ under-achieve at school is because their parents, being jobless, don’t bother to get up in the morning. That means they’re not around to get their children ready for school, so their children are often late or absent. When they do turn up, they’re not ready to learn because they haven’t had any breakfast. And they’re often wearing dirty clothes.
Now, I’m sure that’s all true. But will parenting classes really help? Surely, even parents in ‘workless households’ are aware that one of your responsibilities as a parent is to make sure your kids get up in time for school, eat breakfast before they leave the house and are dressed in clean clothes? The reason some parents don’t bother to do any of those things isn’t because they aren’t aware that that’s what they’re supposed to do. It’s because they can’t be bothered. They’re lazy and feckless, which is one of the reasons they’re unemployed in the first place.
Most of the ‘solutions’ that members of the political class come up with to deal with the underclass are based on a kind of naive optimism. If only we give them the tools to better themselves, they’ll take them up with alacrity. Problem is, unless those tools are in a canvas bag in the back of a locked white van, they’re unlikely to show much interest.
This naivety reflects the gulf that now exists between those at the top of society and those at the bottom — the subject of Coming Apart, a new book by the American sociologist Charles Murray. He believes the liberal social policies of the 1960s are partly to blame for the emergence of the underclass since they helped convince working-class women it was in their interests to have children out of wedlock, convince men it was possible to get along without a job, and made it easier for poor people to commit crimes without suffering any consequences.
But he also blames the ruling class for not doing enough to promote the virtues that have led to their prosperity. ‘The best thing that the new upper class can do… is to drop its condescending “nonjudgmentalism”,’ he writes. ‘Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn’t hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practises.’
It’s not parenting classes that are required, but a more elementary form of moral education. Murray is not suggesting that welfare claimants should be forced to attend Chinese-style ‘cultural re-education’ camps as a condition of continuing to receive benefits. Only that the more successful members of our society should be less inhibited about pointing out the value of deferred gratification, sobriety and hard work. I’d like to hear more about moral virtue from the Prime Minister and less about ‘essential life skills’.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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