|
"What I've learnt here," says Kimberly, mother of Lucy, 3, and Jaden, six months, "is that it's all about attention and listening, interacting with your children. I've learnt to take time to play with them and help them. Lucy can count to 10 and she knows her colours and shapes, too."
To the average parent this might sound like standard stuff; but to a young girl from an impoverished or chaotic background, without the traditional bonds of family or husband to support her, being taught to cope with the challenges of being a parent can make all the difference to her and her children's lives — and may ultimately make a difference to us as a society by cutting our gargantuan welfare bill down to size.
It has been welfare week, with Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, laying out a new plan to ensure low earners will always be better off in work than on benefits. Ministers, horribly aware that they are looking at a welfare bill for this year of £192 billion, want to end the "illogical" situation where people are effectively paid to remain unemployed because the taxpayer is more generous than an employer.
Meanwhile, Labour's changes to the entry test for incapacity benefit are beginning to bite. The government spends £12.5 billion a year on incapacity benefit. Many of the 10,000 claimants undergoing the new test every week are failing to qualify. Chris Grayling, the minister for employment, said "the majority are being found fit to work".
However, Frank Field, the Labour MP for Birkenhead and welfare guru — who was charged with "thinking the unthinkable" on welfare by Tony Blair and then was relieved of his duties when he did — has come to believe that we will never crack the welfare conundrum as long as we are producing generations of unsocialised, ill-educated children, destined to live off the state.
Now charged with chairing an inquiry into poverty and life chances by David Cameron, he intends to present this government with even more radical thinking, including the idea that we would be better off paying some single mothers not to work — a reversal of the received wisdom of the past decade that has been focused on providing childcare to get mothers out to work as soon as possible.
The welfare mothers Field comes across overwhelmingly don't want to work, not because they are lazy but because they want to bond with their babies and, being the only parent, there is no one else to do so. Having studied child development, we prevent them from doing so at our peril, Field says: "What we've had is a feminist agenda, which is brilliant if you are intelligent, middle class with lots of family support and go out to work at an interesting job. But what I've found is that most mums I meet don't want to work in the early stages.
"They hate the set-up where they have to leave before Baby Bunting's got any notion of time and doesn't know she's going to reappear. And when you think about that — that we're subjecting some kids to the daily torture of being left by the person they're closest to, without knowing whether she's going to reappear ... We've got that harvest to reap in future. We've no idea of the impact that is going to have."
Every family would benefit from flexibility, he says: "Over the life of a child, 19 years, through child benefit and child tax allowances, we as a society invest something like £100,000. If a mum or dad wants to draw down a quarter of that, so they've got £25,000 over two years, tax-free, that allows them to make choices about what to do, shouldn't they be able to do that? It would seem to me to allow a good, natural instinct to operate, then later all those benefits would be reduced by a quarter."
The girls at the Tranmere community project — which is in Field's constituency — are typical of the group who might be expected to produce children doomed to a life of Asbos and unemployment. Instead, they are on a programme aiming to turn them into "five-star parents" who will nurture and rear sociable children who will graduate to the workplace rather than to life on the dole. Some 50-60 girls a year, mainly teenagers, are referred to the project by the maternity hospital when they go for their antenatal checkups.
Their education in parenting begins before the baby is born, with visits to the labour ward and discussions about what looking after a baby involves. Many are woefully ignorant. "I stayed in hospital for three days after Lewis [now four] was born. I didn't want to leave," recalled Paula Chadwick, 23. She was 18 and homeless when she fell pregnant and spent the weeks before the birth in a hostel in Chester, where she knew no one: "I didn't even know how to bath a baby. I was frightened and I resented him."
Jill Quayle, who runs the parenting project, says such ignorance is all too common. Her principal work used to be with teenage boys who were truanting or had been excluded from school, but she could not help getting involved with the listless sisters or girlfriends hanging around with their babies.
"Weaning in Tranmere was dipping a crisp in a cup of tea," she says. "You'd see babies squashed into clothes that were far too tight, or so loose they were cold. One little boy was late in talking because he was never allowed out of his buggy. The idea was these girls would be picked up by Sure Start, but these are the ones who are hard to reach, who don't access mainstream services."
As part of the programme, the girls are taught to think about their emotions and to try to manage their anger and foster a positive outlook: optimistic mum, optimistic baby. They are taught the basics of childcare: how to keep their babies clean and well fed, how to play with and talk to them and ensure they have clean clothes. Most importantly, they try to instil in the children an empathy and respect for others.
It is this that Field believes will be the key to breaking the cycle of deprivation which has seen families disintegrate. "One of the corrosive aspects of poverty is that it undermines your ability to be a good parent," he says.
He recently visited a local school and was told by the head teacher that maybe 40% of the children he spoke to had parents who had never put them first. When Field talked to a group of 15-year-olds and asked them to note down six things they would like to be included in a school contract, he was surprised to see that alongside wanting school to be a safe place and wanting to be taught the skills to get jobs, many said they would like to be taught to be good parents. "They were loyal and never let on they'd been badly parented themselves, but they knew there was something missing," says Field.
Soon after, he was discussing child development with another group of teenagers and showed them scans illustrating the difference in brain development between children of three who have been loved and not loved. "There was a gasp," he says. "They just hadn't realised the impact affection and empathy could have."
An energetic discussion followed that set him thinking: if teenagers were so interested in this — and it was so important in getting society back on the rails — why not introduce it in schools? He intends to float the idea of a GCSE qualification in parenting and life skills, which would bring together the abilities required to be good parents.
The curriculum could be taught as part of existing subjects, with modules pulled out and joined together to form the new qualification.
Brain development could be part of general science, nurturing and forming relationships part of personal and social education, family budgeting part of maths and so on. The sweetener for schools is that it would give them an extra GCSE to add to their league tables for minimal cost and maximum benefit to the taxpayer.
"It would also help the current generation realise how important their own behaviour is," says Field. "One of the other striking features of talking to teenagers was that they had all sorts of dreams and goals for their children, but none for themselves.
They didn't see that your children pick up their aspirations from you, the parent."
The government has promised to protect the schools budget and may well save Sure Start, Labour's network of centres for under-fives. But the rest of the early years budget — some £1 billion — is at risk of being slashed, which Field says would be a disaster.
At the moment our funding for children resembles an inverted pyramid, with the amount per head increasing as pupils move from primary to secondary school. Field believes it would make more sense to turn the pyramid the right way up, with solid investment at the bottom in the early years.
His report is due to be delivered by Christmas, but he must make his case to the Treasury in September. As its mandarins look for savings, he will need to be persuasive. Or a strategy that could save Britain money in the long run could end up, like so many others, gathering dust.
|