How the government turns parents into Frodo Baggins

Robert de Vries, a PhD student at Imperial College London, wrote a paper that was selected for its excellence at the recent Battle of Ideas. Here, he writes for Alpha Mummy about how government needs to get over its family-related control-freakery.

As governments go, this one seems particularly intervention happy. We should be fitter, happier, more productive and the government is happy to lecture us on how to go about doing it. This is bad enough as a single person, but it pales in comparison with the interference that parents experience. Becoming a parent these days is like Frodo the Hobbit putting on The One Ring. Suddenly, The Great Eye of government is upon you and your family is the target of its gaze.

There are pre-school education interventions and milestones to make sure your child's social interaction and sentence construction are up to scratch by age five. Then there’s social and emotional training at school to ensure your child doesn’t turn into some kind of freakish recluse. This is alongside interventions to "fix" diet and activity levels as well as more experimental programs like Durham County Council giving fish oil tablets to children to see if their exam results improve.

The problem is, the government seems to see these interventions in (increasingly early) childhood as the silver bullet for every kind of social ill, from anti-social behaviour and knife crime, to obesity and teenage pregnancy. They’re sure that if they can ‘fix’ childhood, then everything else in society will fall into place.

Yet this feeds into a warped perspective that sees every childhood behaviour, missed landmark, or genetic trait as an individual specific determinant of later behaviour. Have a certain genetic marker? Can’t demonstrate empathic reasoning by 3.4 years? Tough luck, because that means you'll end up in prison for stabbing someone outside a kebab shop at 3am. It's inevitable.

A scary example of how this kind of thinking can lead you astray is the government’s suggestion last year that children should be screened for genetic markers indicating criminal tendencies. This idea is based on an extremely naïve interpretation of the complexities of using genetics to predict behaviour, and represents a clear demonstration of the government spectacularly missing the point of this kind of scientific research.

Looking for things in genetics or early life that might predict later behaviour is a complicated business. Finding out, for instance, that having temper tantrums at age two or possessing a particular allele (one version of a certain gene) correlates with criminal behaviour means very little on its own. The tantrums or the allele fit into a huge network of events and life conditions that interact to influence adult behaviour. You can't simply tweak one facet of childhood and expect to see a particular outcome, like straightforward cause-and-effect.

One of the most harmful things about this attitude is that it encourages parents to believe their child's eventual personality, happiness, indeed their every action is directly influenced by them. And if that's true, the child’s life must be micro-managed down to the tiniest detail, lest their future be permanently tainted or even derailed. No wonder parents are stressed.

This serves to make mothers and fathers pretty prickly when it comes to criticism of their parenting skills (after all, it's basically saying, "You're ruining your child"). And ironically enough, it probably makes them more resistant to future government interventions in family life, even ones that work. And to be sure, some interventions in childhood can be a good, even a great thing. Things like free fruit in primary schools can cost relatively little and have dramatically positive effects.

Yet the government needs to understand that every event or intervention in a child’s life doesn’t necessarily result in a specific outcome when they’re older. Trying to harmonize children’s lives, down to the smallest detail, with some imagined ideal is a Sisyphean task, with stress as its only product.

Robert de Vries is a PhD student at Imperial College London, working on how the structure of society can affect people’s health. He definitely isn’t a mother, but hopes you won’t hold that against him.

Comments

[Rathbone]

If Baby P had been middle-class, he'd have been whisked away in a heartbeat. It's the non-workers who get away with bad behaviour.

[Nancy Wood]

Left-wing governments are anti-personal freedom. They see us all -- and especially our children -- as perfectable widgets created to serve the great machine that is the State. In their eyes, we all live to be controlled, punished and taxed, and this PM is worse that TB was on this score. Resist! Resist!

[Whimsey]

Children should be usefully occupied, that's the core issue.
**

Indeed. The trouble makers are the bored ones. THey say so themselves. THere's nothign to do, so they vandalise cars for a lark, etc.

[Josh]

The government needs to grow the hell up, yes punish the bad parents, punish the bad children. A childhood doesn't condemn a child to a certain fate based on the predicaments of itself. More and more they try to control everything without the knowledge how. Honestly how can a politician have any real view on society? Start dealing with the situations at hand and stop trying to kill the pseudo root of bad society.

[Pam]

I guess that too many rules inevitably lead to people stop paying any significant attention to them. Parenting is a tricky issue, but artificially crafted childhood is much of no good. I strongly believe that nowadays people somehow are so prone to being indoctrinated by the cult of science that the normal human experience gives way to some pseudo reality. The best thing the state can possibly do is to provide more facilities for children to be usefully occupied & engaged with the wider world. Constant assessment & 24/7 control or micromanagement would not work. Irresponsible parents would bat an eyelid, while the responsible ones will get more & more stress. Children should be usefully occupied, that's the core issue.

[Vanessa Carr de Elera]

So ... let's get this straight. De Vries is trying to intervene to determine how the government intervenes on parental intervention in the life of the child. Yes?

[Andrea]

It is corrosive for the government to expand intervention to all facets of the family.
Yet, considering children are not the property of their parents, children are entitled to any human rights that an adult should entitled. If the child's integrity is compromised, and considering the fact that the child could not protect himself/herself.
Intervention should be justified....

[Dave]

Baby buggies/prams should face the person pushing them, particularly when the baby is young. It's just common sense to increase interaction between adult and baby.Once the child is older (say 2), the pushchair can face outwards. I've seen mothers taking their children out who are incessantly speaking on a mobile phone and ignoring the child - it's no wonder children are increasingly poorly socialised and anxious.

[KM]

I'm a bit puzzled by the fuss about this article.

I mean, I disagree with its central premise but it seems perfectly well-written and sensible to me.

Or perhaps it's just under attack from grumpy Ph.D students?

[Louise]

According to a report on the today progamme recently my (now teenage and I think wonderful) children have probably been scarred for life because the baby buggy faced away from me....parents have such a struggle using common sense in order not to spend their whole time terrified that everything they do is wrong. But sadly, some do get it wrong and damaged children damage society. Advice on parenting skills for those who need it is good - I read lots of books, others will prefer a mother-and-baby support group or classes, trivia like which way the baby buggy faces is going a little too far and we need to get the balance right

[B]

The article is based on common sense, as was '1984' so it is extremely important nonetheless!

The very fact that a PHD student is impelled to write such an article is worrying; pointing out the desire of government to use its own, ill-educated, naive interpretation of scientific 'facts' that scientists themselves recognise as being only part of the picture, in order to engineer children (who are, after all, humans and the future citizens of the UK, not an alien species!), into some non-specific ideal statistical average. Of course obesity is worrying, as is knife crime and a million other things, but is this type of superficial control and interference really the only option for change?

[Jarrad]

Interesting stuff but a bit obvious, surely?

The last time I checked, The Times was free to employ whoever they wished to write for them, although I do wish they hadn't chosen someone who quotes lines from Radiohead without reference (Fitter. Happier. More Productive.)

[Frank Upton]

Throughout history, "advice to parents" has been a favourite area for quacks and busybodies, nor has this changed today.

[delphine verhaehe]

How come there are so many articles on feral children, on child attacks on adults, on children committing murder and on gang warfare/knife/gun crime.

Because it sells newspapers..... an article on how most kids are perfectly normal realy isn't so intresting

[Claire Hamish]

If a Mother had written this article there's no way all of you would be screaming at her like this.

I thought it was well written...

[Whimsey]

Isn't the problem that the irresponsible parents (the spectrum that ends with the horrors of Baby P) aren't going to pay a blind bit of attention to what the governent, or anyone else, says. They will go their own feckless, selfish way, bringing up children badly, whatever anyone tells them to do.

We also know beyond any dispute that THE worst way to bring up a child is to deny it love, affection and emotional security. And that can be done, all too easily, by middle class parents. I'm thinking of someone I know of, even as I write this. Ironically, the mother is a teacher.....

[Jim]

Err, talk about missing the point.
If the government interferes to much then the parents leave the upbringing to the government/television. This is either due to laziness or fear of being seen as a bad parent for not towing the socially accepted line.
Don't believe me?
How come there are so many articles on feral children, on child attacks on adults, on children committing murder and on gang warfare/knife/gun crime.
The main thing the government has got wrong is taking the power away from the parents and giving it to the kids.

[MadnessHamster]

Hold on, aren't these comments getting a tad personal? It's clearly an opinion piece and not a report. I got the impression that this piece was written to tell us parents to chill out a bit, I know I certainly need to (but thats another matter). I personally choose to ignore the interventions I don't like and get involved in those I do (my kids get free fruit and school and love it). But I do agree there is a fine line.

[Jenny]

Isn't Frodo mostly famous for throwing his 'precious' into a volcano?

[Andreas]

Wait this report was from a PhD student of Imperial College? And he got the PhD? Has he actually lived in society or fathered a child? i think not! University education and the Times must be desperate!

[Piffle]

But if everyone sees indicators that a child is seriously disturbed and doesn't intervene then when they turn into a juvenile delinquent the public cry 'Everyone saw this coming - why did no-one do anything???'

[Kit]

Great article!

Keep writing so that everyone is informed and they can protest against bringing in any of these crazy ideas.

[Fred Bloggs]

Watch the film "GATTACA" it is as important a story as 1984.

In it the government takes your genetic code and determines what you will do in life (a bit like minority report).

They predict your age of death and then based on your genes and your check out date you don't get a job.

Consequently people when they have children have them engineered.
This leads to two classes those who have engineered kids (good little consumers) and god babies who unless genetics are VERY lucky to them cannot get jobs since they manage to find some genetic trait wrong with them.

The story centres on a god kid who pays a geneticly enhance person who is crippled for genetic samples and they live together fooling the authorities who will do anything to obtain genetic samples of you illegaly.
The god kid was predicted to die at 40 but didn't.

This is an example of science enslaving us rather than liberating us. This is happening today.

[Marc Sheffner]

Of more relevance than this article, perhaps, is Adam Curtis' documentary, The Trap. See especially Part 2, The Lonely Robot, about how Labour fell in love with numbers and quotas. And the rest of us just fell in line. Kinda late to be feeling uneasy now. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJU1dzc5kM

[Marc Sheffner]

"As governments go, this one seems particularly intervention happy". Governments are about control of their populations, and have been since they were invented. The American experiment was the first one to suggest that the purpose of government was NOT control/manipulation of the population, an idea that did not go down well with the elites who run things, needless to say, and they have been working hard to thrust this down the memory hole - successfully, it seems. Friedrich Hayek warned about the evils of central planning way back in 1944. "The Road to Serfdom" is just as relevant today, particularly because, according to de Vries, "ironically enough, it probably makes them more resistant to future government interventions in family life, even ones that work." The more resistant, the better, I say; people aren't anywhere near resistant enough! Freedom, anyone? If only the only fault of this article were its shallowness... Fortunately, readers seem more intelligent and alert than The Times.