Proposal #23: Improve access to parenting classes and offer them free to those on low incomes

By Brian Barder / @BrianLB

It’s well established that poor parenting runs in families and can have disastrous consequences for the life chances of the children affected. Children ineffectually or abusively brought up by incompetent parents, or often by a single parent who perhaps lives with a stepfather (or much more rarely a stepmother), grow up and have children of their own – sometime when still teenagers – whom they in turn bring up ineffectually with the same likelihood of disastrous consequences for them.

Child abuse, whether violent or sexual or both, notoriously gets practised down the generations; the abused become abusers in their turn. Children of incompetent or abusive parents are likelier than others to play truant from school, to leave school with inadequate or no literacy or numeracy skills and thus to be virtually unemployable except in temporary and unskilled low-paid jobs, to become offenders and to spend time in prison or young offenders’ institutions, to smoke, practise alcohol abuse or take drugs or all three, to become obese through bad dietary habits learned from infancy, and consequently (or independently) to be victims of bad health with short life expectancy, to have several sexual partners and sometimes children by each, and in general to fail all along the line to fulfil their human potential or to lead happy and fulfilled lives. Children in these categories have an above-average likelihood of being taken into care, again with poor prospects for leading fulfilling lives.

There is thus a powerful case for society to try to break into this cycle of poor parenting with its high individual, family and social costs. Education in sound parenting clearly ought to occupy a much more prominent place in all school curriculums, but many of those affected may rarely attend school and will therefore tend to miss its benefits.

The case for the state to provide parenting classes, especially for those from low-income, low education and low aspiration backgrounds, is accordingly strong. It might be possible to make attendance at parenting classes compulsory for parents of young children, or prospective parents, who come before the courts for any reason and are assessed by magistrates or judges as likely to benefit from parenting guidance.

Attendance at classes in suitable cases should be part of the conditions of injunctions, ASBOs, binding over and ordinary sentences, especially if suspended. Compulsory parenting classes should be held for people of parent age in prisons and young offenders’ institutions. Voluntary parenting classes should be offered to appropriate parents by primary and perhaps other schools, with suitable inducements to attend. There should be publicly funded parenting classes on commercial and public service television channels, associated with celebrities from the worlds of football, pop music and television itself, perhaps in a reality TV format with audience interactivity, penalties and prizes. There should be a strong effort to establish parenting classes as normal and useful for parents from all walks of life and social classes, so that no stigma attaches to attendance at them. Wherever possible the classes should be seamlessly integrated with other social, sporting or entertainment activities.

All this would be expensive, but much less so that allowing the cycle of bad parenting and human failure to continue to pass from generation to generation every couple of decades into the foreseeable future.