Status Anxiety: Parenting is a moral issue

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.