Parents Who Can't Parent...

[SarahBell]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-32181848

If there are so many parents who can't parent (adequately feed and clothe) their children then should they be left in charge of them?

If letting under 18s play a video game can be reported to the police, then so should the parents who let starving, half-naked children go to school.

[spyguy]

My experience of child protection at my kids school involves teachers hassling some parents over minor things.

Its pretty arbitary - the teachers seem to make up the process as they go along.

Stuff like a kid saying he got smacked by there Dad stuff.

Then there's a couple of kids of kids where they look terrible - underweight, dirty, poor record of turning up.

These don;t seem to get bothered.

I'm not 100% if the the parents just ignore the initial probing/letter, so the teacher cannot be ar5sed to move it along.

Or the teachers look at the parents and think 'Not getting involved there'.

Basically, the kid protection is sh1t as it involves teachers who cannot be arsed and make up their quota by hassling the nicer parents about minor things rather than the bad parents about major things.

[chronyx]

I neither have nor want kids but no doubt at some point this will become my problem too.

[Errol]

The same thing goes for internet use. Children should NOT be on the internet unsupervised. It is the job of parents to manage this - NOT the job of government or of individual ISPs to ban content.

Parents need to take responsibility and stop trying to get other people to do their job for them.

[SpectrumFX]

It's interesting that one of their criticisms is kids not wearing the right clothes for the weather.

It's the 21st century. Most people don't wear the right clothes for the weather, they don't need to as they don't go out in the weather anymore. I'm sure many younger parents don't even properly understand the concept given that they've grown up with central heating and go everywhere sealed in a climate controlled car. Many of my younger friends and acquaintances don't even own a coat that would stand up to more than a few minutes of a light shower.

If you look at it from that point of view, the perhaps schools should end the Victorian practice of making young children stand in the rain while the teachers sit in a heated staff room bitching about only getting 6 weeks off in the Sumner and having to work 'till 3.30 5 days a week.

[spyguy]

It's interesting that one of their criticisms is kids not wearing the right clothes for the weather.

Its called grasping at straws.

[winkie]

If there are so many parents who can't parent (adequately feed and clothe) their children then should they be left in charge of them?

If letting under 18s play a video game can be reported to the police, then so should the parents who let starving, half-naked children go to school.

The best place for children imo are with their parents, unless they are physically or mentally cruel to them....the fact that the kids are at school mean most parents are trying.....parents tend to treat their children how they were treated by their parents, parents problems are often passed to their own kids......they know no different.

Education, Education,Education.

[wonderpup]

If there are so many parents who can't parent (adequately feed and clothe) their children then should they be left in charge of them?

By advocating their being taken into care you seem to be making the case for more welfare intervention,which I suspect is the intent of the article itself.

There is an element of pyrrhic victory in the idea that you can balance the nations books on the backs of the poor- cut home visits for the elderly and they end up in blocking hospital beds- impose a tax on bedrooms and end with 'poor parenting' that requires intervention because you break the family budget.

I'm sure you are right that there are people out there who are not equipped to be parents, this has always been true- but to imagine we can cut billions from the welfare budget without exacerbating this problem is delusional.

Odd how there's no 'laffer curve' construct for the interplay between welfare and the viability of the health service- but there will be a threshold whereby cuts in welfare will translate directly into increased NHS spending- so are these issues being resolved or simply moved around the system?

[Steppenpig]

If there are so many parents who can't parent...

There are educators who can't educate, an there are politicians who can't politic. Where to start?

I assume that people in these circumstances do receive some sort of social help. I can't think of anything else that could really be done. There are probably worse parents who do know how to feed and water their children.

[winkie]

There are educators who can't educate, an there are politicians who can't politic. Where to start?

I assume that people in these circumstances do receive some sort of social help. I can't think of anything else that could really be done. There are probably worse parents who do know how to feed and water their children.

Exactly.....sure there are parents that feed and clothe their children perfectly but physically and mentally abuse them all the same......often the worst treatment is the result of abuse that can't easily be seen......

[StuG III]

Almost one in four of the teachers who responded said they had brought in food for pupils who were hungry, and an even higher proportion had seen the school feeding pupils

Oh... Horse faeces!

Food in this country is absurdly cheap. What they actually mean is that a lot of parents cant afford to buy their kids junk food for every meal and lack the basic common ability to actually cook a meal.

[Bloo Loo]

I was permanently starving at school.

Thats after a nice breakfast, a bag of sweets before I got there.

Then dinner, (if I hadnt spent the dinner money)..buy the time I was home at 4.30. I could have polished off a loaf, then dinner at 6 when Dad came home.

Course, there was sport 3 times a week, playing footy in the playground daily, the mile walk to the station then to home/school ( about 2 miles each way daily).

starving. skinny as a rake.

[sPinwheel]

I cant parent. So I'm getting my bits chopped.

[Goat]

Typical BBC, spinning the issue as poverty when the reality is p*** poor parenting of kids born so that their parents can milk The Cretin Brown's benefits system.

Teachers say they are seeing "Victorian conditions" with pupils arriving at school hungry and not wearing the right clothes needed for the weather.

The NASUWT teachers' union says schools and teachers are increasingly having to deal with the consequences of poor housing and poverty.

Housing is made available by the state and in many cases is better than that affordable by working families, in any event poor housing does not obviously result in lack of food and adequate clothing. Food and clothing isn't that expensive so long as mum hasn't spent all the money on booze and fags, or whatever else takes her fancy.

I heard of one case where one such mum sent her girl to school cold and hungry whilst she spent the days riding her horses!!!

Then people wonder how thousands of girls fall victim to sex abuse gangs.

[winkie]

Parents that can't parent......various reasons, one could be a sense of rights and entitlement, always used to getting so much, always expect so much, not their responsibility.... or have other priorities such as fags, bingo and booze.... or not at home in the morning to provide breakfast....make work pay, means kids fend for themselves as mum staring the early shift in order to claim max credits to keep home or at the other end, latch key kids...nobody at home when they get home....lack of know-how or lack of time to shop and cook....or simply lack of a freezer or lack of a conventional oven to cook in......micro oven and fridge only.....not enough money to stock up for the lean times.

Went to a mixed school.......had friends that lived in Totteridge lane and friends that lived single parent council housing......went to both homes after school, one had very little food in the cupboards and a sliced white loaf in the bread bin, the other had a wine cellar, a swimming pool and cavier in the fridge......both friends were nice good friends.....none of them chose their circumstances, they were born into them.

[frozen_out]

I haven't met a parent yet who is actually any good at it. Most are deficient in one way or another - and I include myself in that.

I saw a news report on this nonsense of kids being starving at school and it showed a class where kids were supposedly starving. Two things crossed my mind:

1. None of the kids looked starving. They all looked like perfectly healthy kids to me

2. Imagine being a parent of a kid in that class and seeing your kid in the news supposedly 'starving'.

No doubt there are some horrifically abusive and neglectful parents in this country but most are probably just about OK. I would hazard a guess that the number of genuinely starving and freezing children is vanishingly small.

Now my parent's generation... My dad and his brother recall scouring the market for empty boxes on an evening so they had something to put on the fire. They were aged 5 and 7. And it was the 60s. Genuine poverty in living memory. All we have now is bleeding hearts and entitlement.

[winkie]

[SpectrumFX]

It interests me how smoking fags is now seen as wasteful and profligate because they're such an expensive luxury item that the poor must choose between them and providing for their children. They're cheap dried leaves,that are only expensive because we've chosen to make them so with punative taxation. So we're taking the bulk of a poor persons money in a punative tax on an addictive substance and then calling them amoral because that's left them too poor buy the other shit they need.

[Goat]

It interests me how smoking fags is now seen as wasteful and profligate because they're such an expensive luxury item that the poor must choose between them and providing for their children.

One would hope that any responsible parent would prioritise their children over tobacco.

A pack of 20 today costs £8 - £10 so that's 40p-50p per ciggarette. How much does 2 wheetabix and a splash of milk cost? About 20p. Save the other 20p and you can buy your kid a new coat or a warm hat/scarf/gloves every month or so.

Is that how little these people value their childrens welfare? Less than 1 cigarette a day or perhaps a can of beer a week.

[Goat]

Of course there is some spin here. It's pretty real though.

....

Maybe it's just poverty...or withdrawal of benefits these families were previously 'entitled' to...maybe the money is being spent in other priority areas...who knows.

I suggest a trip to entitledto.co.uk http://www.entitledto.co.uk/

Plug in a few hypothetical numbers for your area and see if you think you could feed and clothe a child on that.

For my area, assuming 16 hours minimum wage work, a single parent with 2 children (age 5-9) gets £10,000 tax credits, £8,200 housing benefit and £1,800 child benefit: thats a total of £20,000 benefits plus approximately another £6,000 earned income i.e. a net take home of £26,000 or £2,166 per month, which is equivilent to a job paying £34,000 a year.

To put it another way, if we assume that the HB covers the rent, you've got just shy of £1,500 p/m left over to pay for light, heat, water, food and clothing. I'll estimate that the first 3 come in at maybe £150 p/m so you're left with just over £300 per week for food and clothing.

Seriously, is there anybody on here who couldn't feed and clothe a couple of kids on that?

[Goat]

Worth remembering some people will have benefits stopped/cut off for being naughty boys and girls. Not unheard of round these parts.

Sorry, but I don't buy it.

It's just about plausible from a food point of view but clothing is a different matter. Worst case scenario for a short term benefit stoppage is you're wearing last year's coat, which is a couple of sizes too small; no coat at all is a different matter entirely.

Edit: And of course anyone's definition of 'Priority areas' may differ...fags, drugs, booze, holidays, sky TV, playstations for the kids, hire purchase sofas, historic debt repayments...no judgement just people have different ideas about the things they can't live without...

But surely this is the point. No matter how hard up you are nothing is more important than feeding and clothing your children.

[Riedquat]

When the parents themselves are children of cretins who weren't brought up to be able to deal with the real world this is pretty much what you expect to happen. People obsess over the trivial and the distractions (which considering how crap everything else is is somewhat understandable, even if it's what permits everything else to get crap).

[Goat]

When the parents themselves are children of cretins who weren't brought up to be able to deal with the real world this is pretty much what you expect to happen. People obsess over the trivial and the distractions (which considering how crap everything else is is somewhat understandable, even if it's what permits everything else to get crap).

Agreed 100%, but we're no longer talking about income or poverty, just parenting.

So why is it that people who can barely remember to breathe in and out are s***ing out children like there's no tomorrow?

[frozen_out]

When the parents themselves are children of cretins who weren't brought up to be able to deal with the real world this is pretty much what you expect to happen. People obsess over the trivial and the distractions (which considering how crap everything else is is somewhat understandable, even if it's what permits everything else to get crap).

The interesting thing is how the first generation of cretins came about. As I mentioned earlier people in the 60s still saw genuine poverty in the UK, they had to work hard for everything. Yet their kids turned out to be mollycoddled idiots, and their kids are the cretins of today. How? Personally I think there was a large media and government effort to allow this to happen.

[Greg Bowman]

The same thing goes for internet use. Children should NOT be on the internet unsupervised. It is the job of parents to manage this - NOT the job of government or of individual ISPs to ban content.

Parents need to take responsibility and stop trying to get other people to do their job for them.

No ? So why not have a knocking shop on every corner and let 6 years old gamble and why not let them get p***** as well.

A coherent working society means everyone working together, I am a passionate believer in individual freedoms but the problem with a Laize fair attitude to everything without some sort of moral code is I am left to pick up the pieces as a member of society and an individual.

You are probably in the majority but only just. There are millions who need protecting from themselves not for their sake but for decent people's sake. They are low IQ, ignorant and at worse violent. Porn, alcohol and drugs destroys what vestiges of moral compass they had.

NOT all truths are equal. The easy access to porn is fundamentally damaging to our children's view of human relations and particularly young men's view of women.

Frankly it's horrible and if you can't see that I feel sorry for you. The requirement that an authenticated 18 year old has to add a code or password before they access their w*** bank is neither an attack on your personal freedom or the thin edge of the wedge.

It is a sensible measure to protect our young from depravity and exploitation.