Children

Monday

Alec Marsh

Bring back the big family

As a species we are richer than we’ve ever been before. We live longer. We have more food to eat than is good for us. We have abundance in all things. And yet we are no happier than we were. In fact, many of us are downright unhappy. Among our woes is an epidemic of loneliness. Some 8.4 million of us are now living alone in Britain, and more than 3.8 million report being chronically lonely. We lock up more people in our prisons than ever and we can see for ourselves the signs of friction in our society, one which is clearly not entirely at peace with itself. So

Friday

Alec Marsh

How to survive Florence with your family

There are many destinations which spring to mind when considering the options for a weekend away with a young family. There are beaches by the dozen, theme parks and glamping opportunities galore. But there is only one Florence. And I cannot say this strongly enough: when it comes to the kids, the Center Parcs of the Renaissance will not let you down. It begins with Tuscany itself, a place so beautiful that you can get Stendhal syndrome on the bus on the way from the airport. And even if your children are glued to their screens, eventually motion sickness will force them to look up and they may glimpse its

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

How to raise a patriot

‘Good news for patriots,’ said one of our most celebrated national newspapers this week: ‘Your numbers are likely to swell.’ This was on the editorial page, where the opinions of the paper are laid out, and it referred to a poll conducted by ‘More in Common’ which had found, to everyone’s surprise, that British teenagers are pretty patriotic. About half of all 16- and 17-year-olds feel proud of their country, it found, which is more than their parents. It was an interesting poll for anyone considering the rise of Reform and how that might interact with the incoming slew of teenage voters. Interesting too for those of us in liberal

Wednesday

Calvin Po

A gallery that refuses to dumb-down

The DNA of Dulwich Picture Gallery is aspirational, in the sincerest sense. Opening in 1817 when private collections were still the norm, it’s the world’s first purpose-built public art gallery. (It’s also a credible contender for inspiring the design of the red telephone box.) After a significant reworking, and the addition of a new children’s space and sculpture garden, the Gallery is again hoping to redefine what it means to make art accessible. The Grade II*-listed building was Sir John Soane’s utterly original embodiment of the dying wish of the founders: for their collection of old masters to ‘go down to Posterity for the benefit of the Public’. There’s an

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

The painful truth about foster care

The foster care system in this country is collapsing. There are roughly 80,000 children who’ve been removed from violent or neglectful parents and need homes, but there’s a catastrophic lack of people prepared to care for them – a shortfall of around 6,500 foster carers. The rate of decline is terrifying. Every year the small pool of available foster households shrinks and those who do apply to be carers are increasingly elderly. Perhaps you assumed that a generation with ‘Be kind’ tattooed on their wrists would leap to look after the worst off? Not a chance. ‘Be kind’ is an instruction to others, not a memo to self. Neither my

Rosie Lewis

Phone-addicted yummy mummies are neglecting their children

As a foster carer and an adopter, I know what neglect looks like. I’ve looked after children who didn’t know what a bed was. Children who arrived at my door with matted hair, rotten teeth and eyes that scanned every room for danger. Neglect smells of mildew and unwashed clothes. It is chaotic, desperate and tragic. But there is also a different, quieter kind of neglect. One that doesn’t look like crisis at all, but it has a profound effect on the children at the receiving end of it. Teachers have been sounding the alarm for years – children starting school unable to speak in full sentences or sit still

Thursday

Philip Womack

The tragic decline of children’s literature

The other day, leafing through T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, which enchanted me as a child, I was bedazzled all over again. This time, though, it wasn’t the plot and characters that gripped me, but something better: vocabulary. ‘Summulae Logicales’, ‘Organon’, ‘astrolabe’, ‘metheglyn’, ‘snurt’, ‘craye’, ‘varvel’, ‘austringer’, ‘yarak’: all appear, exuding magic, within the first few pages. Ten points if you know what ‘yarak’ means. The Once and Future King (1958) is a masterful retelling of the Arthurian cycle, both comic and tragic, following the young Arthur, known as ‘Wart’, as he grows into the legendary King; and these fascinating words are not pretentious, but appropriate. The ‘Summulae

Thursday

The Spectator

The cult of safetyism harms us all

Last month, the government announced that 16-year-olds would be able to vote at the next general election. If these new voters had wanted to inform themselves about political issues over the weekend, they would have found it strangely difficult. Take, for example, a recent speech about the rape gangs made by the Tory MP Katie Lam in parliament. It was blocked on X, alongside transcripts of the trials of the perpetrators. X users also discovered that they were unable to watch videos of protests against illegal immigration, unless they could prove they were over 18. Even if 16-year-olds are now wise enough to vote, the government believes there is information

Tuesday

Arabella Byrne

The competitive cult of the summer camp

‘Before you ask, Mummy, the answer is no.’ While this could be any number of conversations that I have with my seven-year-old daughter, this one has a particular tang. It is the thrice-annual bargaining round that I do in the run-up to any school holiday in which I try to get her to go to a kids’ camp. An executive at Goldman Sachs in equity sales does not work as hard as I do to seal the deal – but I fail every time.  For a brief, prelapsarian period when she was five and more biddable, I had some success. I managed to get her into all manner of summer holiday camps in Oxfordshire: activity camp, Shakespeare camp, tennis camp, even God camp. You name it, I signed

Monday

Alec Marsh

Let’s slash the school summer holiday

There are three little words that strike horror into the heart of every parent of school-age children. They are the words that cause you to break out in a cold sweat or let out a moan in your sleep in the dead of night – even in the middle of winter. They are ‘school summer holidays’. Hear those three words and you may very well envisage jubilant children spewing from the school gates and then remember the dim, distant sun-kissed summers of your own youth. But mention them within earshot of a parent of appropriately aged offspring and you’ll see the light go out in their eyes. Oh yes, the

Sunday

Naomi Firsht

Why shouldn’t we call children ‘naughty’?

As we approach the final countdown to the school summer holidays and I am faced with the prospect of lots more quality time with my almost-five-year-old, and absolutely no idea what I will fill the days with, it seems a good moment to evaluate my style of parenting and seek out some advice to help the family get through the summer with our sanities intact.  These days, there is a whole animal kingdom of parenting styles to choose from: could I be an elephant mother? A panda, a jellyfish? Or the better-known tiger mum – usually associated with parents pushing their children towards over-achievement. This year my son has learned

Thursday

Matthew Parris

The real reason birth rates are falling

Last week the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) released its State of World Population report. According to the Guardian: ‘Millions of people are prevented from having the number of children they want by a toxic mix of economic barriers and sexism, a new UN report has warned.’ Dr Natalia Kanem, executive director of UNFPA, said: ‘The answer lies in responding to what people say they need: paid family leave, affordable fertility care and supportive partners.’ Nonsense, of course. Does Africa (4.1 births per woman) have better family leave and fertility care and more supportive partners than Sweden (1.4)? The reason for UNFPA’s counter-intuitive findings is simple. They have not ‘found’

Monday

Alec Marsh

Are you tough enough for the school run?

Nothing in life prepares you for the school run. In theory, on paper, it ought to be idyllic. What could be better than feeding a nutritious breakfast to your nine- and five-year-old, before scrubbing their cherubic upturned faces and combing down their buoyant hair, and then helping them get dressed and out to the car for the short drive to school, whereupon they can skip through the gates happily to education-land? Instead, it’s a Thursday morning – by which point the week has taken its toll – and you find yourself shouting ‘GET YOUR SHOES ON’ for the 30th time at the sort of level that would be a serious

Thursday

Hannah Moore

My hunt for the perfect ‘mum van’

I spent my childhood being ferried around in my mom’s minivan, a hunter green Ford Windstar. Compared with most family cars on the road today, it was like Air Force One: magisterial and bigger than was strictly necessary. I loved that minivan. It was roomy and comfortable, with a two-seater half-bench in the middle row to allow access to the full three-seater third row. The Windstar saw my two sisters and me through our primary years, to twice-weekly basketball and volleyball practice. In the summer, we would head to the lake, all the kit housed neatly in the back. Apart from the handful of times I threw up in the

Thursday

Arthur Mann

Middle-class parents are creating a new breed of brat

I recently reconnected with an old friend; I went to his house and met his children for the first time. One of them looked up from his screen as we entered the room, faintly curious about the intrusion. The other, with his back to us and his face obscured by a hoodie, didn’t bother. My friend announced their names as if that was sufficient introduction, but it felt weird that the children did not say hello and that one of them did not even show his face. Was something wrong with him? It was a bit creepy. Obviously I let it go. Maybe he was chronically shy or autistic, or

Friday

Arabella Byrne

Why I’m a pro-screen parent

Have you ever looked after a child that doesn’t nap from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m.? I have. Just to be clear, I’m talking about a 14-hour day with no relief whatsoever from grannies, nannies or DHs, the ghastly acronym that Mumsnet uses for fathers to signify ‘darling husband’. Next question: have you ever looked after a child for the standard 14-hour shift and not turned a screen on? Don’t lie, because no mother on this planet will ever believe you. Seasoned mothers know that the only way to make it to the business end of the day – 5 p.m., give or take – is to fill chunks of

Thursday

Judi Bevan

I was told I was too middle-class to adopt

Too many books? Yes, we had too many books. That’s what our social worker told us when we were being assessed to see whether we were suitable parents to adopt a baby from China back in 1996. It seemed to us, a middle-class, well-educated couple, an extraordinary statement and so it appeared to our friends and acquaintances. But that was, and is still to some extent, the credo at work in assessing potential adoptive parents. A significant number of social workers continue to believe that a child should be matched as closely as possible with the social class and ethnic background of the adoptive parents, even if that means children

Saturday

Theo Hobson

What happened to children’s hobbies?

Do kids still have hobbies? Maybe hobbies isn’t quite the right word. What I mean is a passionate interest in something fairly adult, something more than playing with toys. For example, a child might get precociously into theatre or birdwatching or medieval history and have a first taste of adult enthusiasm for something. I was into magic, meaning conjuring tricks. This seemed the most interesting thing about the world, the clear pinnacle of its complicated cultural array. Why wasn’t everyone fascinated by the fact that it was possible to perform acts of seeming wizardry? The magic bug bit me when I was about 11 – who knows why. Maybe it

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

The dark reality of surrogacy

I was a twin when I was born, but this was in the days before decent scans and proper neonatal intensive care, and we were more than two months premature, so not long afterwards, my twin died. As a child, I thought nothing of it. It simply wasn’t relevant. But when I was drifting around America in my early twenties, the subject came up one day in conversation. A Texan friend asked me: ‘Do you miss your twin?’ I turned to her, meaning to laugh at the daft question, but instead, embarrassingly, I cried. And I’ve known ever since, whether I like it or not – and I really don’t,

Wednesday

Sebastian Morello

My son was born in the passenger seat footwell

A few days before Christmas, I was gently woken by my wife telling me that while I’d been sleeping through the night in blissful ignorance, she had been writhing in labour downstairs. At the last moment, she had decided against giving birth at home and now wanted to go to the hospital. I hadn’t known a home birth was even on the cards – clearly, my wife and I need to work on our communication. Moreover, it was a week before the due date, so I had gone to bed thinking there were still days remaining before the great panic. Within minutes, we were in the car and racing to