Children

Tuesday

Helen Nugent

The Bank of Mum and Dad is now the ninth largest lender in the UK

As lenders’ names go, The Bank of Mum and Dad is rather appealing. There’s instant brand awareness, the prospect of small or non-existent interest rates, and the likelihood that financial negotiations will end with a hug and a few happy tears. I’m a member of this institution. When I moved back up North following 14 years in London, I found the perfect house outside of Manchester. But I couldn’t sell my flat in the capital and was leaking money left, right and centre. A bridging loan was out of the question, as was anything resembling a deposit. So my Dad stepped in, loaned me a sizeable sum, and it all

Rebecca O'Connor

We should teach infants about the value of money

On the one hand, perhaps he should only be thinking about football, Minecraft, his Lego Millennium Falcon and whether he is actually capable of magic. On the other, I can’t let this window of opportunity go by. Being five-years-old is a prime time for learning about the world and how things work. It might seem a bit too young to be dulling his imagination with compound interest, but it’s a lesson he probably won’t get at school (unfortunately) and is one he would do well to get sooner rather than later. That’s why I’ve started giving my five-year-old son £2 pocket money every week for the completion of very minor

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 9 March 2017

Q. Most of my friends have small children and being mostly media types in west London, have given them silly names: Zedechiah, Tiger etc. I’m used to that. What is driving me up the wall is that some of them have begun to use the definite article before referring to their offspring. As in: ‘I’ll bring The Zed to tea, shall I?’ Or ‘I’m taking The Wolf to swimming.’ What irritates me is the implication that we’re all expected to join in with the parents’ (understandable) assumption that their child is special and unique. I see that my irritation is mean-spirited, Mary, and I know that to mention it straight

Monday

Helen Monks Takhar

Think you’d better leave right now? Living with mum and dad

It’s an increasingly familiar scenario: grown-up children moving out of rented accommodation and back into the family home as they save for their first property. For some, the idea of coming together under one roof again conjures the return of family movie nights and getting to know your loved ones afresh. For others, it will be a case of making the best of living in a familial and financial pressure cooker.   So, what are the ground rules for parents and grown-up children thrown together again, and what are the best ways parents can accelerate the moving out date?  To live harmoniously, charity Family Lives suggests agreeing upfront that the ‘child’

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 23 February 2017

Q. I’ve listened to the radio to deal with insomnia for years (Dear Mary, 18 February) and your suggestion of single earphones does not work well. They hurt your ear — when they haven’t fallen out of it. The answer is either a Roberts Radio Pillow Talk speaker (flat, sits under pillow, clearly audible through pillow) or a Sound Asleep Speaker Pillow (haven’t tried myself but has 49 good reviews on sleepypeople.com). Both cost £14.99.—F.C., Newbury. A. Thank you for sharing your findings. Q. Our 15-year-old daughter has, on paper, nothing to complain about. We both love her passionately and have only her best interests at heart. Moreover, we live

Laura Whitcombe

What you need to know before buying health insurance for kids

If you’ve had enough of battling to get the kids a doctor’s appointment, or don’t want them waiting months to be seen by a specialist, there is an alternative. You could take out children’s private medical insurance that will pay for some or all of the diagnosis and treatment your child may require. Such policies come with a long list of benefits. For example, most offer same-day video and phone consultations and can arrange specialist appointments and procedures much faster more than through the NHS. ‘Another valued benefit,’ says Kevin Pratt, consumer affairs editor at MoneySupermarket.com, ‘is the cash payment that is made to the parent for each night that

Frank Field

Brutish Britain

Life in Britain has become much cruder, meaner and more spiteful practically everywhere. It can be seen in people’s behaviour on the street; in those abominable neighbours from hell; in companies piling up the profits with no care whatsoever for the degree to which they are sweating their workers on terms that, until quite recently, would have been unimaginable. The incivility of one to another can be seen most sharply and poignantly in the degree of cruelty to children which, at the beginning of my working life, would have had every alarm bell ringing wildly. Children have to be almost on the point of being murdered before they are taken

Thursday

Toby Young

Can I bear to sack the digital babysitter?

I was astonished to discover in conversation with another dad last week that he and his wife intended to introduce a screen ban over half term. Not limiting their children to something reasonable like two hours a day. But a blanket ban. How on earth will they cope — and by ‘they’ I mean him and his wife, not their two kids? It’s not as if they’re going on a family cycling holiday on the Dalmatian Coast. No, they’ll be spending this week at home in Acton. The poor buggers will be forced to play Monopoly Empire from first thing in the morning till last thing at night. When I hear

Thursday

James Delingpole

My poor Boy. He’s going to end up just like me

Boy is planning his gap year. Every few hours he rings from school to give me a progress report. ‘I’m allowing three days for Denver. Is that long enough?’ ‘We-e-ll, it’s pretty key in On the Road. Maybe five?’ ‘And I’m definitely stopping for a day in Farmington.’ ‘Where?’ ‘It’s where the Horace Walpole library is.’ ‘Oh, of course. Silly me.’ Actually, I don’t much mind where he goes so long as it’s nowhere near where I went for my gap year: Africa. I love Africa. I’ve had some of the most amazing, thrilling, dramatic experiences of my life there: climbing the Great Pyramid before dawn and seeing the graffiti

James Walton

Impaired vision

With the Shannon Matthews story, it’s not easy to accentuate the positive — but BBC1’s The Moorside (Tuesday) is having a go nonetheless. Although touching at times, the result ultimately proves a rather awkward watch. Shannon was nine when she went missing from the Moorside estate, Dewsbury, in February 2008. Her mother Karen made a tearful televised appeal for the return of ‘my beautiful princess daughter’, but ended up serving four years in jail for being an accomplice in Shannon’s kidnapping. With her chaotic taxpayer-funded life, and her seven children by five fathers, Karen was duly turned into a sort of anti-poster girl for the tabloids. The Moorside itself became

Tuesday

Helen Monks Takhar

‘Who gets the kids if we die?’ Planning for the unthinkable

In Oscar-nominated movie Manchester by the Sea, Casey Affleck’s character Lee Chandler is shocked to discover he’s been named in his brother’s will as the guardian of his orphaned 16-year-old nephew Patrick. The boy’s dead father didn’t discuss it beforehand, and Lee has no interest in taking on the mantle of replacement parent. This position is all the clearer for Affleck’s character when the lawyer explains that while the boy’s expenses will be covered from his brother’s estate, Lee will be required to uproot his life and relocate to discharge his guardianship duties, thus setting up the movie’s driving tension and ratcheting up Patrick’s pain. Imagining the children we love

Thursday

Simon Barnes

Save our stables!

There are plans in place to tax horses out of British life. Proposed adjustments in business rates for non–residential properties — increases of up to eight times — could make vast swaths of the horsey world unviable. Life will be tough for top-end enterprises like racing yards and stud farms; it will be the end for the many riding schools and livery yards that exist on the far edge of the possible. This is a disastrous way to carry on. The horsey life should have vast and sweeping tax exemption because it helps people to enjoy life more fully and to endure it more steadfastly. It keeps the blues away

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Amphibious assault

David Spicer’s farce Raising Martha opens with a skeleton being disinterred on a frog farm by animal-rights activists. They hope to force the frog farmer, an ageing dope fiend, to set his amphibious livestock free. Got all that? It’s complicated. And there’s more. The skeleton turns out to be the long-dead mother of the farmer, who alerts his shifty brother and calls in the cops as well. A loquacious twerp, Inspector Clout, arrives to investigate and the tangled narrative starts to unfold. This is an uneven play but the good bits are excellent. Stephen Boxer is amusingly deranged as the hallucinating frog man. The animal-rights activists are wittily portrayed as

Thursday

James Delingpole

Hell is other people’s dogs

I’ve now just about reached that delightful stage in life where you’re no longer exposed to the horrors of other people’s children. This is because my friends’ offspring are mostly either safely away at university or virtually invisible in some far-off room staring at a screen, appearing only briefly to grunt some cursory greeting as they collect their food or drink before retiring once more to their virtual teenworld. But just when I thought it was safe to go back into the water, I’ve discovered that it isn’t, actually, because my friends have started to replace their vanishing children with something much, much worse: their stupid bloody annoying dogs. Like

Monday

Helen Nugent

In an endless sea of financial press releases, there’s always a gem

When you write for The Spectator, it’s tempting to stick to the more cerebral issues of the day. As money editor, this can include tracking the progress of Sterling post-Brexit, ruminating on the downward trajectory of house price growth or reflecting on the merits of equity release. Some days, however, that’s the last thing you want to do – Monday mornings being a case in point. We’re only a few hours in to the working week and already I’ve been invited to breakfast with the Austrian federal minister of finance, Hans Jörg Schelling, to an obesity lecture, a hotel show, and a FinTech launch. Sometimes I wish I’d never gotten out

Thursday

Rose Prince

Food of love

Modern Britain scratches its head over children who are overfed, not underfed, while guilt-ridden mothers stand accused of feeding children badly even if they are not obese. These are not insignificant troubles since childhood obesity is set to cost the NHS many millions in years to come. But as a new exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London will show, infant and child nutrition is not a new science and the challenge of nurturing, not least keeping children alive before the age of five, was taken just as seriously two centuries ago as it is now. Feeding the 400 is the first show at the museum, built on the site

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Not much to smile about

CBeebies Land is a small dystopia inside Alton Towers, a theme park where people sometimes get their legs chopped off by a rollercoaster called The Smiler. There is a gothic mansion by Augustus Pugin, the Nietzsche of cushions, which has been allowed to fall into ruin, because it is less important than the Runaway Mine Train and a ‘ride’ covered in plastic frogs. It broods like Manderley; around it, people play with water cannon and eat sugar until their eyes are dead. I was going to suggest that parliament convene at Alton Towers while the Palace of Westminster is repaired, so they could feel the Pugin; but they might be

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 14 July 2016

When you are recovering from a stroke, you spend much of the time asleep. But when you are not sleeping, you are told that the most important thing you have to do is avoid stress. All doctors agree that stress is the main impediment to recovery. But how can you possibly protect yourself against it? The causes of stress can creep up on you from anywhere without warning, and there is nothing you can do about it; and lately I have been bombarded by shocks. I was one of the ignorant for whom the victory of Brexit in the referendum was itself a shock, but this also set in train

Thursday

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 16 June 2016

Q. My daughters and I were recently taking our seats on an aeroplane. From behind us came the recorded refrain ‘If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands’. Several further verses ensued. A toddler was watching something on his dad’s phone: he was too young for earphones. I turned and asked politely for the volume to be reduced or turned off. The dad replied, ‘Well, if you’d rather hear him screaming.’ I simply asked again that the volume be turned down, and it stopped shortly afterwards. No screaming ensued. But might there have been a better rejoinder to the father’s annoying response? — A.C., London A. Assuming a

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The day that Brexit camped in my kitchen

On Thursday last week, as the baby and I were moving in our usual slow circles around the house, from changing station to feeding station to the place of dreaded midday nap, my husband, Dom, called to say he and all his colleagues were coming over. Dom is employed by Vote Leave, the group campaigning for us to get out of the European Union. He’d been hard at work, he said, sharing his concerns about Turkey with the media, when water had begun to gush from the ceiling. Was this a desperate move by No. 10, intent on sabotage? Nope, said Dom, but we can’t stay here so I’ve invited