Families are havens in a borderless world
An unapologetic defence of an old institution in the face of new threats
Parenting. It isn’t rocket science. It really isn’t. But it is bloody hard.
And increasingly so, in my view. Not only are many of us isolated, with families living apart and communities breaking down, but the kinds of influences to which our children are exposed are multiple and rather alarming. As a parent - a phrase I use too often - it can feel incredibly difficult negotiating the fine line between the worlds of home, work and the online one into which they are inevitably thrown. There are no shortage of critics pointing the finger at those of us who haven’t banned their use of mobile phones and social media. Even if we did this, when time is short, resources limited and the reach of such influences into the school playground unavoidable, it is easier said than done.
I have argued on here before that we parents need to take control over our children’s lives. But the influences on them, despite all the fretting, aren’t just to do with technology. They are ideological too. Kids are constantly being confronted with adult issues and problems in the real world as much as on digital platforms. From the misanthropic assumptions of the environmental orthodoxy, to the confused and confusing tenets of gender ideology; this is taught in our schools, not just available on some dark corner of the internet. While we can’t protect them from everything (and nor should we), parents do need to re-establish sovereignty over the little ones.
We need to do much more to police the borders of their worlds, and patrol the four (fire)walls of our family homes, much as we might do more to secure the porous borders of our country. Of course, we all do this to a greater or lesser extent anyway. You can’t be a parent - which is a scary prospect for today’s closeted adults - without being faced with an enormous sense of responsibility. Every decision you make, rightly or wrongly is associated with a great significance in our children’s lives. And we have to jealously guard that responsibility from those who are all too keen to remake our children in their own image - whether they be schools, activists, media movers and shakers, or policy makers.
For the prolific author and social commentator Frank Furedi, who I have cited before, we need to keep the so-called experts at a distance. We need to trust in our instincts. Be confident. When he first wrote his book Paranoid Parenting, these technologies and ideologies had yet to take hold. Indeed, its title speaks to what then was quite new. The undermining of parental autonomy by professionals, and by state agencies telling us that they know best, has been with us for a while now. That this is combined with a vast number of other influences and influencers, many of them speaking directly to our kids, has only made his advice to parents more urgent. We really do need to assert our authority over them and against the officious pretenders to parenthood with agendas of their own.
Lara Prendergast, in The Spectator, argues young people need to feel in control too:
It’s that sense of agency that seems important to try to preserve for children. We should avoid burdening them with serious problems they feel powerless to fix. Yet, as we bombard them from increasingly young ages with the world’s ills, from racism and slavery to genocide and human rights abuses, is it any wonder that childhood anxiety is soaring? Greta Thunberg’s rallying cry for children to solve climate change is, for all its sincerity, as much a fairy tale as anything you might find by Hans Christian Andersen. In trying to raise activist warriors, we’ve produced anxious worriers.
As I have written before, hostility to the family is rather fashionable in radical circles, and has an influence that reaches beyond. Talk of the importance of the family, not least in defending against this projecting of adult worries onto the naturally immature, can draw all kinds of accusations from ‘progressives’. To endorse the oldest institution of them all is portrayed by some as an attack on those who can’t or won’t conform to heterosexual monogamy. But the vast majority of us were brought up by such families, will go on to form our own, and will benefit socially and economically from them because of their foundational importance for our society. Our tolerance of other lifestyles is made possible by the existence of this more traditional family form.
Far less tolerant are the child-free influencers who apparently embody the anxieties of our age, and can’t think of kids as anything but a burden on adults and/or the planet. Plummeting fertility rates are perhaps little more than an expression of the rejection of the messy, prolonged, self-denying business of raising the next generation, to which they appeal. But, having said all that, maybe they have a point in as far as we parents can be rather too obsessed with the business of being a parent. We go on about it all the time, and buzz around our kids as if orbiting them, when really it should be the other way around. And we are encouraged to do so.
Ella Whelan, writing for The Telegraph, is more than a little dubious about the claims that our future welfare is determined by what happens to us before we can stand up or feed ourselves. And that we should be ‘child-led’ in everything we do with them, pandering to their every literally childish whim. In much the same way as teachers are being elbowed out of the classroom by iPads and bean-counters, parents are being encouraged to downgrade their own role in their children’s lives. No wonder, says Whelan, potential parents are put off if they really do think child-rearing can be reduced to the ticking off of an ‘emotional checklist for their future wellbeing’.
There is, though, something to be said for government stepping in to make family life and bringing up kids easier. To enable families with a pro-natalist policy agenda, rather than constantly intervening and undermining parents authority. But here too, as former MP Miriam Cates has argued, parents and families are far from being encouraged in their endeavours to create new citizens. Quite the opposite. They are being penalised by a tax system that, unlike other similar countries in Europe, recognises them as ‘atomised individuals’ rather than as partners in the joint enterprise of social reproduction.
To put a figure on it, if you compare taxpayers with and without children
… parents pay 70 per cent more tax than the childless couple despite having five mouths to feed rather than two.
A tax break, as advocated by Cates and others, would surely support those bringing up children. It would signify state recognition that being a parent is to do something essential, to perform a service, add value. While we shouldn’t think about raising kids in quite that way ourselves, to the extent that the state should have any role in the raising of our children it should be to create the conditions that allow families to flourish. A recent IPPR (Institute for Public Policy Research) report, The homes that children deserve, is arguably yet more evidence that far from helping us to raise our children, officialdom is actively making harder and penalising parents.
With the decline in home ownership and the increasing residualisation of social housing over a number of decades, 22% of children are currently living in the private rented sector. This is nearly three times what it was two decades ago. And has, as the authors say, ‘given rise to growing instability’ as families have to move more often than they otherwise would. In so doing children have to cope with all the disruption that causes to their schooling and to the ‘friends and support networks’ families leave behind when they move. That is on top of the poor quality, overcrowded housing many families experience when renting in the private sector; the impact of welfare reforms and benefit cuts, as well as discrimination against families.
The authors go on to recommend uplifts in benefit payments and interventions in the rental market to support renters. While there is merit in some of their proposals, and I’m in agreement on the need to divert the welfare spend currently subsidising private landlords to expanding social housing, the report otherwise ignores the already ballooning welfare budget, and the absence of the economic growth and jobs to pay for it. We need to look beyond the status quo and get to grips with the determinants of what is clearly very significant housing need for many families. But, as I say, even if the authors of the report were to grapple with these bigger questions about our sluggish, unproductive, low wage economy, it wouldn’t be enough.
While the circumstances some families endure are incredibly difficult, they are too often reduced to victims of circumstance in need of a bigger state handout or a more favourable tenancy arrangement. For me, the whole point of standing up for families is that we need to assert ourselves as the defenders of our children’s interests, where necessary against the state. While our homes are indeed, as the authors of the IPPR report argue, the biggest cost we face - a cost that is forever increasing in our overheated and under-supplied rental and sales markets - it is not so much our physical homes that are the ‘firm foundation’ upon which our children’s lives are built. We need to speak up for the vital role of families, of which our homes are only a physical manifestation, as havens in this borderless world.
Image: Blackplate
