I wonder if this is true? A person who commented on the Daily Mail website on the story below, wrote:

In The Netherlands a single mother with a child is not entitled to claim benefits or social housing until aged 22. This makes young women more likely to be careful about teenage pregnancy and get on with their education and lives instead of stuck in a hole of state dependency.

- Adam, UK

If this is indeed true, it casts a different light on the debate on teenage pregnancy in the UK. Usually the argument is all about sex education and I think, if memory serves, it is suggested that the Netherlands has a particularly open form of sex education which, it is suggested, does no harm because the teenage pregnancy rate is lower that Britain's. But if this commenter on the Daily Mail website is correct, it would seem quite possible that in fact any lower teenage pregnancy rate could be due to the benefits system rather than the nature of sex education. It might be that the benefits system is the most influential kind of sex education around.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Parenting • Welfare benefits

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I have just been to a talk given by Charles Murray, the American intellectual who has been so influential in the matter of state welfare and the damage it has done. He spoke about his idea for reform - an idea described fully in his book In Our Hands.

His idea, briefly, is this: that the government should give every person US$10,000 a year in place of all welfare benefits, retirement payments and healthcare. Of this, US$3,000 would have to be used to buy health insurance.

I hope he will forgive me if I misreport some of his remarks. I do not have shorthand.

He said he was not primarily concerned that the welfare state costs too much "though it does", nor that it tends to make things worse "though it does" but that it "drains" the life out of people - particularly the spiritual life and sense of meaning.

He believed that people derive a sense of meaning in their lives in one or more of the following four ways: vocation, community, family and faith. For these things to retain their meaning, it was vital that government should leave them alone.

He offered his sense of how Europeans defined the purpose of life these days. He felt they think that the idea is to have a pleasant time until you die. He felt that they no longer believe that life has a special or transcendental meaning. Their priorities seem to be holidays and shorter working hours. The idea that work can have meaning in their lives has faded. Their belief in marriage, too, has dwindled. They even are no longer so ready to put their children's interests above their own. There has been a secularisation of society. People now think they are a combination of chemicals which, after a while, would "de-activate".

This may be a caricature of how Europeans think but it is not so very far from how a lot of Britons think. His view is influenced, I think by the fact that he is a believer - and believers in God are probably more widespread and fervent in America than in Britain. It is his religion that perhaps makes him more shocked by some of the behaviour in Britain than non-religious people are.

In fact, I would suggest that America's continuing belief in God helped to get through the welfare reform of 1997. Many simply thought that it was wrong, for instance, that there should be special government payments for those having children outside marriage. It was against God's law. (American religion is, perhaps, different from what remains of British religion in that, here in Britain, the church has given up on morality and tends to take a socialist approach, calling for more big government).

He said that if his plan were introduced, behaviour would be affected. There would be 'feedback loops'. I think he implied that a girl would be less inclined to get pregnant out of wedlock if she knew she would get no extra money from the government. She would also be able to get money from the father because his regular money from the government would be paid to a known bank account and money could be taken from it. This would, Murray suggested, affect his behaviour, too. He would be more cautious about making women pregnant.

The idea of 'feedback loops', such as described above, is crucial to understanding how the welfare state has undermined behaviour. The welfare state has, in many ways, taken away the feedbacks which a society without state welfare used to supply.

Among these, Murray emphasised, is stigma. He said "stigma is wonderful" and "it is extremely powerful" and he suggested it was rarely a bad thing except in novels.

My take on Charles Murray's proposal is this:

I am struck first of all by how he admitted that this was a compromise. He said he was making an offer to the Left. They would be allowed to keep big spending - since his plan would continue big state spending. But it would be in a different form that would curtail many of the bad effects of state welfare.

Many times I have been asked, when giving talks about my book, "so what is the answer?" I have always felt it is impossible to give a satisfactory answer. The ideal solution - minimal state welfare - would probably not be politically acceptable in a democracy. But reforms that would be politically acceptable would probably not be radical enough to make a 'good society'.

What Murray has done is come up with an admitted compromise. But I wonder whether even this compromise would hold. I can imagine some hard luck stories that would be played out at length on TV and radio and would cry out for action by the government. Gradually, the whole thing might fall apart. I fear that in a democracy there is a tendency for people to look to government to sort out every problem. I fear that even in America, the will to say: "let the chips fall where they may - the net good to society will still overwhelmingly come from a low welfare state society" is not likely to be strong enough in the face of such stories.

I have come to fear that all advanced societies are becoming more and more welfare state dependent and that people in these countries are gradually being changed more and more by these welfare states. The welfare state gives you money if you have children out of wedlock, it gives you money if you don't work, if gives you money if you are well but you pretend to be ill and it declines money it would have given you if you have saved. I agree with Charles Murray that the worst effect of the welfare state is on the character of the people it affects (mostly the less well off). I would love to see major reform but I fear that over the long term, reform will not last and that the damage done to society will continue.

If this happens around the advanced world, we are really talking about a whole civilisation in decline. Is this too gloomy? I hope so.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Parenting • Reform

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Alongside this story in the Telegraph was a box of "Family Facts and Figures". One of them was:

70 per cent of young criminals have lone parents

another was

22 per cent of children live with a lone mother.

This would appear to be further evidence that lone parenting makes it more likely that children will become delinquent. It does, of course, have to treated with care since it is possible that children of lone parents are more likely to suffer from some other problem that causes them to be more likely to be criminal. In other words, it is conceivable that the evidence is misleading. On the other hand, there is plenty of well-researched analysis that leads one to believe that this bare statistic powerfully reflects an important truth.

I am very interested in the origin of this 70 per cent figure. Previously the British government, unlike the American, has been reluctant to make any analysis of the family background of convicted criminals. It has been as if it did not want to know. So where does this figure come from? Is it in the Freud report?

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Parenting

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Here is a link to the David Freud report published today that was commissioned by the government.

I was on Radio 5 Live last night debating some of the ideas. One of the other speakers was a woman whose youngest son was 16 and who had been on benefits for the past 16 years.

She objected to the 'demonisation' of lone parents. She said she could not work for various reasons, including ill health. But the crux of the matter seemed to be that, to her, it appeared financially impossible or, at least, disadvantageous for her to work.

She said she could not afford the childcare costs. She had no family to help look after her children. And it later emerged that she feared she would lose her benefits, her house and her housing benefits if she took a low-paid job.

Then on to the radio came several lone parents who said that they had managed to combine lone-parenting with work. One of them revealingly said that her friends did not think of her as a lone parent because she had worked more or less ever since she had children.

Some people get exaggerated ideas of what they would lose in benefits if they took up work. But it is also true that the level of benefits, especially housing benefits, are so high relative to low wages, that they can make it difficult for someone to justify going out to work.

For myself, I do not wish to 'demonise' lone parents. I wish to point out that, over several decades, governments have wrongly reduced the natural incentives to marriage. Men and women both have responded to the change of incentives with the result that we have had a lone parent epidemic with consequent damage to children. The lives of the women and men concerned have also been damaged. To make it worse, we have also brought about one of the lowest rates of work among lone parents. This leads to demoralisation and a culture of complaint rather than one of achievement.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting • Welfare benefits

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Rather belatedly I want to mention last week's speech by John Hutton, the Secretary for Work and Pensions. He flagged up the idea of requiring more lone parents to seek work in order to be entitled to welfare benefits. At present, they are not required to seek work until their youngest child reaches the age of 16. He suggested this age might be reduced to 12.

If this sounds radical, it is nothing compared to the situation in other countries. He mentioned that in Sweden, widely regarded in Britain as the place where welfare benefits are enormous and handed out without question, lone parents are expected to seek work. In America, I believe, lone parents are expected to seek when their youngest children reach the age of three months.

Britain has been amazingly lax about this with the result that we have an enormous lone parent population with millions of children disadvantaged as a result.

The fact that John Hutton is prepared to suggest this reform is a sign that common sense can break through from time to time. He must have been encouraged by the modest objections from the Left. The Guardian clearly did not like it much but did not make a great deal of it.

But the Telegraph points out that David Blunkett suggested something similar two years ago.

Let's see if Hutton goes ahead and puts this through. It would be one of the more significant welfare reforms of this government. It might also pave the way to reducing the age requirement much further.

This is part of the Guardian's coverage:

The work and pensions secretary, John Hutton, signalled his willingness to consider more stringent requirements for lone parents to look for work as part of a package of measures to encourage them back into employment and alleviate child poverty.

"Very little" is currently asked of lone parents on benefit with a requirement to look for work that begins only when the youngest child reaches the age of 16, Mr Hutton said in a speech in central London today.

Mr Hutton cited evidence which showed that when the youngest child reached 16, as many as a third of lone parents moved almost "seamlessly" on to incapacity benefit or made a further claim for income support within the following 12 months, he said.
The UK was at the bottom of the league of major European countries for lone parent employment rates, he said.

Countries such as Sweden and Denmark make "little distinction" between lone parents and other benefit recipients in terms of their obligation to look for work.

Here is some of the text of Hutton's speech with a few useful statistics:

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting • Reform

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More data, again from Harry Benson (see previous entry, on how marriages tend to last much more than co-habitations.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting

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Harry Benson helps couples learn to make their marriages work. He is on the Conservative group working on family breakdown. It is fascinating to hear from someone who is involved with couples regularly on the issue of what makes marriages last longer on average than co-habitations. It all comes down, he suggests, to one thing.

Last month the Guardian social affairs writer Polly Toynbee declared frostily that marriage is no social panacea. She was writing about the much-publicised interim report on family breakdown submitted to the Tories. As a member of the independent group that wrote the report, I agree. Our report makes no such claim. However her opinion that marriage and cohabitation don’t matter is not supported by the social science evidence. Cohabiting parents, rich and poor alike, are far more likely to split up and lead their families into poverty. Selection effects – social or personal background factors – do not explain this adequately.

This reluctance to accept evidence needs to be challenged. In no other area of life do overwhelming benefits and protections get so lightly dismissed. Sceptics are right to argue that family structure cannot be tested like a medicine. No experiment can randomly assign people to marry or cohabit in order to find out who does best. But there are many studies that suggest family structure matters to stability, well-being and behaviour, above and beyond selection effects.

There are also good reasons why it is thought marriage and cohabitation make people behave differently. Ultimately they can be summed up in one word. Attitude. Far from being a good testing ground for a relationship, cohabitation makes it more difficult to leave an unsuitable partner at an early stage. Inertia is one of the current explanations for the relationship quality gap. The arrival of a baby forces couples to think about their expectations of one another. Whereas stability increases amongst married parents, it reduces dramatically amongst unmarried parents. Furthermore, the longer couples cohabit, the less they value marriage and the more they tolerate divorce. So not only do couples start their marriage or cohabitation with different attitudes to their partnership, but these differences in attitudes become more entrenched over time. Behavioural differences between married and cohabiting couples reflect these attitudes, including level of communication skills, management of finances, and division of household roles.

Even if marriage matters, is Polly Toynbee right that nothing can be done in any case? No. If government policy can contribute to social trends in family structure, then it can also contribute to reversing those trends. Contribute, note, not cause. As for exactly how we suggest policy can encourage greater stability, she will have to wait until our final report next June. The only clue I will give is that there is life beyond tax breaks.

This is Harry Benson's website with lots on making marriages work.

The report is here.

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The most important consideration is the well-being of the child. Does anyone really disagree with that?

If it is agreed that David Banda's interests take precedence, there can be no doubt about what is right and wrong.

In the last few days, two possible lives have stretched out before him. In one, he was going be raised in an orphanage in a poverty-stricken country. The average life expectancy for a male in Malawi is 39 years. The average income a mere US$160. AIDS/HIV is rampant and he would be signifantly at risk of dying from it. Both his siblings died of another scourge of Africa, malaria. His mother is dead.

The second possible life for him, that appeared strangely and almost miraculously, is now to be the adopted son of Madonna. I have no particular brief for Madonna. I am not a fan and what I have read of her early life does not cause me to admire her. However I do not, like some people, jump to the rather mean assumption that she wants a black baby as a fashion statement. I have known several women of her age who have longed to have more children. I think it very likely indeed that Madonna, too, has felt this longing and that consequently she will give this child love for the rest of her life.

That will be the most important thing for David Banda - to be loved by her and surely by Guy Ritchie, too. As a result of being adopted, David is likely to do better in his life in every way. Research into the outcomes for children with different kinds of parenting has - as is well known - shown that children brought up by their natural, married parents do better than most. But less well-known is the fact that children who are adopted do best of all.

Why? The research does not tell us. But we can surmise that people who adopt really, passionately want the child and devote a great deal of love and attention to him or her.

It is just a bonus, for David, that his adoptive parents are in a position to offer him myriad other benefits too. He is dramatically less likely to have his life cut short by malnutrition or disease. He will be well educated and travel the world. He will have every opportunity to realise his potential, whatever that may be.

The contrast between his prospects in an orphanage and those with Madonna is so huge that they dwarf the objections. It is said he may grow up to be upset that his father gave him up or that he was 'bought' by a pop star. He might indeed experience some difficulty, when he is older, adjusting to his unusual history. Of course, the situation is not perfect. But he will be undoubtedly far better off with some degree of emotional confusion than going without a mother at all, in poverty. Let not those who resent the wealth and fame of Madonna be motivated by that emotion into wishing a child was not give a better life.

(The above is the unedited draft of an article for today's Daily Express.)

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting

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Many thanks to Phil Taylor for directing me to this article in the Sunday Times eight days ago.

Here is an extract:

The analysis of figures in 14 European countries found that Britain has by far the highest proportion of single mothers in the European Union.

The report says that in 2001, more than 8% of British households were headed by a single mother aged 18-35, while the UK also has one of the highest rates of benefits for single mothers.

In 1994 a single mother with two children who worked for about 18 hours a week could expect more than £2,000 a year in benefits. By 2001 the figure had increased to more than £3,500.

The researchers do not say outright that high benefits accelerate family break-up. Others, however, believe the study shows that generous benefits for single motherhood provide an incentive for women to have children alone.

Frank Field,

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Housing • Parenting • Welfare benefits

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David Blunkett wrote in the Sun last week (august 30,

All too often girls come to my constituency surgery demanding a house for themselves and their baby.

This just isn't on. If the family - and often their mothers are single parents too - can't or won't look after the offspring then we will simply have to go back to the idea of hostel accomodation.

The "give us a house" mentality has to become a thing of the past and be replaced by "give us respect".

It may sound harsh, but blaming the changes in society won't wash.

So there is a former senior minister calling for hostels for unmarried mothers instead of council flats. It is a sign of the changing times. I remember once suggesting to a Daily Telegraph features editor that offering free flats to unmarried mothers had substantially increased the numbers of children born out of wedlock. Out of concern for children, we should cease to do it. Possibly we should offer hostels instead but it was essential that single parenting was an unattractive route for a girl to take (as it naturally would be if the government did not get involved). Only that way would we reduce the number of children brought up in a way that makes them more likely to be unhappy, more likely to be abused, more likely to under-achieve academically and - indeed - more likely to go wrong and suffer in every possible way.

The features editor of that Conservative Party supporting newspaper was shocked. Now a senior Labour Party figure suggests it. It is progress of a sort - but it is painfully slow.

Further on, David Blunkett refers to a survey of 13 European Union countries "this week" which "tried to link the increase in lone parents with the rise in their benefits." He adds "it is true that lone mothers here are given more financial help than all but one of the other countries surveyed".

It is no surprise if the survey suggests a link between subsidies for lone parenting and increases in the incidence of it. But it would be interesting if it was actually commissioned by the European Union. And, in any case, I would be glad if anyone knows of this survey and could direct me to it.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Housing • Parenting • Welfare benefits

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The Law Lords have decided two important cases. One commentator said the judgement could frame divorce law 'for a generation'.

It is absurd that something as important as a country's law on divorce should be decided by a little group of judges. They have no mandate to think of the perverse incentives their law-creation might result in. They are not required to think of the impact on society.

The law on divorce in this country should be decided, after national debate, by parliament.

Welfare benefits have previously reduced the proportion of those in the poorer quarter of society who get married. It did this by reducing the natural incentive for a woman to get married. The divorce law may now similarly reduce the proportion of those in the top ten per cent of society who get married. The men will know that in a divorce, they could lose what many of them are bound to regard as an unfairly large part of their money.

If there are few marriages, then few families will stick together and more children will be damaged. The law on divorce is too important to be left to lawyers.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting

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The idea that a step-parent will not love a child as much as a biological parent is common to literature across the world and through history. Today I came across a short speech in "The Alcestis" by Euripides. Alcestis, I understand, has agreed to die in order to extend the life of her husband. She says to her husband,

Do not marry again and provide our children with a stepmother who will not be so kind as I, who in jealousy will raise her hand to your children and mine....For the newly arrived stepmother hates the children born to a former wife - she's deadlier than a snake.

In ancient Greek society, stepmothers may have been quite common since so many women died giving birth. In our society, stepfathers are more common since there is more divorce and separation and the natural mothers tend to be given custody of the children.

But the same influence applies. Evolution appears to have made human beings, both men and women, care far more for their natural children than for the children they get through being married or living with a new partner. This tends to result in children being less happy and psychologically damaged. For more data and analysis on this, and the welfare state's role in it, please see the chapter on parenting in The Welfare State We're In.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting

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I am pasting here a comment which has just been contributed to a previous entry about Lone Parents 'On the fiddle'. I should concede that I cannot vouch for whether or not the contributor genuinely does work for the Department of Work and Pensions. But I have no reason to think otherwise.

I think it is an important view 'from the front' and is an antidote to the assumption of many middle class folk that benefits just go to the needy and do not influence behaviour in a damaging way.

I work for the DWP on the Lone Parent section and am confronted with lone parents quite blatently fiddling the system all the time, unfortunately because the government has cut so many jobs within the sector our fraud section only deals with a minute selection of cases. I have come across people who have had sanctions imposed on their benefits for not attending appts and then a further sanction imposed for not responding to the sanction. This in my eyes would say to me that they are either working or got someone helping them out with money as surely they would've noticed 40% of money gone if on such a tight budget? Another common thing we see quite often is that as soon as the child of a lone parent is about to turn 16 the parent gets pregnant again just so as to stay on benefit. I believe that the government should bring in something so that if a lone parent has another child while on benefit they get little or no benefits with it. I'm not trying to to sound harsh but this would save the government millions and also force parents back into work when their child reaches 16 rather than just sitting back and doing nothing while us tax payers pay them for it!

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting • Welfare benefits

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From the Institute for Fiscal Studies:

The Government thinks it is paying out tax credits or out-of-work benefits to around 200,000 more lone parents than the Office for National Statistics estimate live in the UK, according to an analysis of official statistics by researchers at the IFS.

HM Revenue & Customs and the Department of Work and Pensions together estimate that they are paying income-related support for children to 2.1 million lone parents, even though the best estimate from other evidence is that there are only 1.9 million lone parents living in the UK.

Although there are other possibilities, it is highly likely that fraud or error explain much of this disparity. After analysing
data from the latest Family Resources Survey (FRS), IFS researchers have concluded that a portion of the tax credits or out-of-work benefits which HMRC or DWP think they are paying to lone parents are probably being received by cohabiting couples with children, whether through deliberate fraud or errors made by claimants or the government. If one disregards the threat of fines or penalties, it is often financially worthwhile to pretend to be a lone parent, rather than a couple, when claiming tax credits or out-of-work benefits.
“We already know that the tax credit system is subject to fraud from people using stolen identities. The latest figures provide powerful – albeit circumstantial – evidence that the system is also subject to fraud from families not being honest about their circumstances.

The full press release (released on 12th March) is here.

An insight into the nature of the possible fraud comes from the television programme on benefit fraud commented on here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting • Welfare benefits

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Andrew Roberts in his Saturday Essay in the Daily Mail today:

In 1938 only 3.8 million Britons paid income tax; by 2003 this had mushroomed to 30.07 million.

In his ground-breaking book 'The Welfare State We're In', James Bartholomew points out how most wages used to fall below the income tax threshold:

"The typical working man and his wife in 1950 lived an income-tax-free existence.

"They could keep every penny they earned. This simple fact made the two-parent family eminently viable. It was just left alone."

The benefits for society of this system were inestimable. Today those with well below average earnings are caught in the tax net, and as Bartholomew shows:

"The State has even brought about a situation where, in some cases, two parents are considerable better off living apart than together."

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Twenty per cent of families in Sweden are headed by lone parents. But in Italy, the figure is only 0.5 per cent. (Britain is in the middle with 9 per cent.) These 1999 figures are quoted in Family Policy, Family Changes a valuable new book by Patricia Morgan and published by Civitas.

Teenage pregnancies in Sweden are similarly much higher than in Italy. They run at 24 per 1,000 females aged 15-19 compared to 8 in Italy. (Britain is the easy winner of this race with 45.)

Divorce is also much more common in Sweden with 47 per cent of the 1981 cohort having divorced compared to a mere 8 per cent in Italy (Britain's rate was 42 per cent).

Given the emotional suffering experienced by people as a result of lone parenting, teenage pregnancy and divorce, it is perhaps not surprising that the suicide rate in Sweden is 20.3 for men per 100,000 and 8.4 for women. These figures are far higher than in Italy, especially for women. Only 8.4 men per 100,000 men commit suicide and only 3.2 women.

But why have lone parenting, divorce and teenage pregnancies been so dramatically more widespread in Sweden than Italy? How has Italy managed to avoid the damage done to children on the whole (detailed in The Welfare State We're In) by a high incidence of lone parenting?

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting

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Another step forward: a six-part BBC series on benefits and how they got wrong. The first one, tonight, appears to be about benefit fraud. According the Telegraph,

David Street, the series' producer, said: "These are just a few of the cases that are prosecuted every year. The scale of fraud in disability living allowance claims is just staggering.

"I have made a lot of programmes about fraud and I have to say I was stunned by the size of this problem."

The full article is here.

The programme is on BBC1 at 8.30pm tonight and is called 'On the fiddle'.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Media, including BBC bias • Parenting • Waste in public services • Welfare benefits

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Newspaper articles don't get much more important than the Daily Telegraph one below. It goes to the heart of how and why the character of British people has changed. You see in it incentives not to be married. Through that, you see a major cause of the increasing number of children not brought up within a family with married, committed parents. That, in turn, tends on average - though not always, of course - to lead to alienation and delinquency among more children. That is a pathway to uncivil behaviour and crime. And then there is also the incentive to fraud - making lying and cheating a normal part of the way people lead their lives.

By Sarah Womack, Social Affairs Correspondent
(Filed: 16/12/2005)

Thousands of couples with children may be choosing to live apart because they can cash in on benefits.

An official report by one of the Government's former leading experts on the family shows that as many as one million couples in a committed sexual relationship live most of their time at separate addresses.

Family campaigners seized on the findings, saying women who lived apart from their child's father or a new partner were rewarded with higher levels of state benefits.

The research, contained in a politically sensitive report published yesterday by the Office for National Statistics, has prompted politicians and family campaigners to question Government policy. They say changes to the tax and benefits system could encourage women to wait until they are married before having children.

The ONS report, Living arrangements in contemporary Britain, has been surrounded by controversy for some time.

Last year there were claims - strongly denied by the ONS - that the Government was suppressing a draft version because the findings could be seen as embarrassing.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Parenting • Welfare benefits

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In my search to update various statistics in the book, I came across the following in the Department of Education website. I very much doubt that anything the Department of Education has done or will do will have any effect on the teenage pregnancy rate. What is more likely is that the benefits, referred to below, are a key influence.

In the 1970s, Britain had similar teenage pregnancy rates to the rest of Europe. But while other countries got theirs down in the 1980s and 1990s, Britain’s rate stayed high. The latest available figures show that Britain’s teenage birth rate is five times that in Holland, three times higher than in France and double the rate in Germany. Other English-speaking countries such as Canada and New Zealand have teenage birth rates higher than ours. In the United States the rate is more than double that in the UK.

In 1999 the Government published a Teenage Pregnancy Report from its Social Exclusion Unit. It acknowledged there was no single cause, but pointed out three major factors: first, that many young people think they will end up on benefit anyway so they see no reason not to get pregnant. Second, that teenagers don’t know enough about contraception and about what becoming a parent will involve. Third, that young people are bombarded with sexual images in the media but feel they can’t talk about sex to their parents and teachers.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting

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When the riots in Paris are reported, the most commonly mentioned factor is race. The implication is that this is a cause of the violence. No doubt racial conflict adds to the problem. There is also mention of people being poor.

But I suspect something different lies behind it all. The report in the Telegraph on Thursday by Henry Samuel referred several times to the places in which the riots took place:

The riots first broke out on the Chêne-Pointu council estate. Last Thursday, two adolescents from the estate died when they scaled the 8ft wall of an electricity substation to dodge police and were electrocuted.

....Chêne-Pointu typifies the problems of many of the urban ghettoes that surround Paris and other large French cities: a high immigrant population, soaring unemployment and drug dealing.

...."We're not dumb. Sarkozy has declared war on suburban youth," said Karim, 23. "Unless he apologises for the way he has treated us, then he can expect 40 nights of violence," he said.

But others around the estate back Mr Sarkozy. "What he says may be crude, but he's right. Drug runners and petty criminals have had it good too long around here.

....In the neighbouring Bosquet estate, Traore Gounedi, a 27-year-old worker in a local social centre, is incensed. "Ten years ago, Clichy was a real no-go area. But in recent years we had built up sports clubs and other associations and it had become calm...."

As night fell at Chêne-Pointu, sirens heralded the approach of two fire engines that positioned themselves in front of the estate awaiting the flames.

Notice the appearances of the word

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Housing • Parenting

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Despite the best efforts of the Government to push mothers into buying in childcare from outside the family, nearly half of working mothers depend on grandparents for childcare, according to a report by Shirley Dex at London University's Institute of Education. Only 37 per cent paid for childminders or nurseries.

Of course child carers can be very good. But in resisting the inducements offered by the government, mothers show a great deal of sense. There is continuity with a grandparent that the child is less likely to enjoy with professional child carers.

There is a report on this in the Daily Mail today but unfortunately I cannot locate it on the Daily Mail website. If anyone can help trace the Daily Mail coverage or any other coverage, I would be grateful.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting

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The most worrying words for the public to hear are "I am from the government and I am here to help you." This is not very far from what Alan Johnson, the Trade and Industry Secretary, has been quoted as saying: "We need to do more to help hard-working mothers and fathers balance their work and family commitments so that they can give their children the best possible start in life".

How does Mr Johnson propose to enable parents to give children 'the best possible start in life'? By giving fathers the right to six months paternity leave - unpaid except for two weeks.

We will come to whether or not this will actually make any difference to children later. First let's first mention what ministers never quite get round to describing:

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting

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I went up to the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool on Thursday on Tuesday to speak in a a fringe event organised by the Freedom Association.

During this short visit, one unexpected subject came up three times. I was alongside the MP Ann Widdecombe trying to sell copies of my book while she, rather more successfully, was trying to sell copies of her novels. She told me about her novels and said the latest one was about a man who was suddenly left by his wife and, in addition to the normal misery of such a situation, suffered at the hands of the Child Support Agency - the government agency which requires men to support children when the man is no longer with the mother.

Not long after, a man who was buying a copy of my book mentioned that he had asked an MP what were the subjects that were raised most often at his 'surgeries' for his constituents.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting

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From the Office for National Statistics yesterday:

Between 1996 and 2004, the number of cohabiting couple families increased by over 50 per cent to 2.2 million, while the number of lone-mother families increased by 12 per cent to 2.3 million.

The Office for National Statistics gave this and other information the headline, "Married couple families still the majority". It was as if the Office was trying to follow a government line of "Don't panic!", emphasising that most people do still marry. This is all spin. The news is obviously that a larger and larger proportion do not marry. A rise of a half in the number of cohabiting couples in only five years is a massive and very rapid change. The governemtn is presiding over the major reduction in the incidence of marriage which all the evidence (see The Welfare State We're In) suggests will inevitably have damaging effects on children and ultimately, through the least fortunate of these children, on the levels of crime and incivility. A further social decline in Britain with yet higher levels of criminality seems very likely.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting

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The Government spends a huge amount of our money on social research. This research is one of the main sources of data for independent analysis, too. But the Government deliberately avoids researching things when it might discover things that are inconvenient. It does not analyse convicted criminals to find out their family backgrounds - particularly whether or not their parents were married and stayed together throughout their childhood. In America, 32 per cent of all adult criminals were found to have lost one parent before the age of fifteen. At the time, only eight per cent of the population at large had a lost a parent in this way. And in Britain? We don't know. The Government does not want to know. It might interfere with the politically correct pretence that all kinds of parenting are just as good.

Here is an excellent excerpt from an email newsletter by Harry Benson on another way in which the Government is avoiding the truth. He ends with a call for people to join in fighting this "see no truth" attitude to social research. The more who respond to his call, the better:

At the end of June, the government released its latest findings from the Families and Children Study (FACS). FACS is a superbly designed panel study that has followed the progress of several thousand families for five years.

The latest study found that lone parent families were more likely to work less, earn less, save less, be unemployed, be deprived, be on benefits and suffer poorer health than couple families. The finding does not tell us much that is new but adds to a large body of existing research.

What is especially striking is the way the study completely disregards marriage. For the second year running, FACS combines four different family types into one super group called “couple families”. Yet there is a great deal of existing research showing that these four types – married and unmarried families, as well as married and unmarried stepfamilies – do not have the same outcomes.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Parenting

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I attended a talk by Professor Larry Mead at the Institute of Economic Affairs the night before last. He gave his talk in a scholarly, methodical way - quite different from the more openly partisan talk given by Ron Haskins last week. But the message was mostly the same. The big fact is that welfare rolls fell by 60 per cent in America following the 1996 reform package. It was an awesome result. Of course, people like Professor Mead knew very well that such a thing would be attacked as cruel and bad. But one of the impressive things about the American Right is that it arms itself with plenty of facts to counter such assertions:

He gave Federal Poverty Rates for whites, blacks and Hispanics in 1994, 2000 and 2003 respectively: