From the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Dina)
Excerpt:
According to the Office of National Statistics, a typical working mother spends as little as 19 minutes a day with her children; working fathers even less.
Time-neglect is what child psychologists call it, and they are studying its effect in middle-class families with increasing concern.
‘We are seeing some of the most privileged and yet in some ways the most neglected children in history,’ says child psychologist Dr Richard House, from the University of Roehampton.
We have some of the longest working hours in Europe and the recession is piling pressure on parents to be the last to leave the office. The guilt parents feel about this has consequences for when they are with their children.
‘Parents are reluctant to say “No” when they need to. They try to compensate by lavishing gifts on them. Neither is good for children’s well-being and healthy development,’ says Dr House.
His warnings follow a Unicef report that admonished British parents for trapping their children in a ‘cycle of compulsive consumerism’ by showering them with toys and designer labels rather than time.
[…]Unicef’s research also shows that what children actually want is more stable family time, as do many of the parents struggling to provide for them.
More than two-thirds of mothers work, and no one would want to see the progress women have made in the workplace reversed.
No one except the husbands and the children, but who cares about them?
More:
Historian Rebecca Fraser, mother of three daughters and author of A People’s History Of Britain, says that while nostalgia for the Fifties is understandable, the progress of women in education makes a return to that model unlikely.
‘In 1951, only one quarter of the tiny British student population (5 per cent of adults) were women, while in 2011 more than half the student population are female,’ she says.
‘With so many attending university, it is probably inevitable that most women are going to continue to want a career.’
[…]Child-care experts warn that time-neglect by high-achievers can have serious consequences on their children.
Professor Suniya Luthar, a world expert in the welfare of children from affluent homes, has just completed research that shows the numbers of teenagers with significant mental health issues can be up to three times higher among those from high-achieving and prosperous families.
‘Traditionally, the view is that these children have it all, but the pressures on them are immense,’ says Professor Luthar.
‘The solution for any parent is to spend time with them.’
They also need clear boundaries, she says, something that ‘uber-working’ parents often are less able to enforce.
Every decision a woman makes has to be based on the plan for a marriage, family and children. Ideologies like feminism and socialism are incompatible with marriage and family. What is the use of a woman crying crocodile tears over her voluntary neglect of her own children when every decision she made prior to marriage and after marriage is based on an anti-family, pro-government worldview?
When a woman votes for government to tax her future family, regulate her husband’s employer, and restrict the family to purchasing government services only (day care, public schools), then she must not complain when she is forced into the workplace and her child is handed to strangers to raise. That is the end result of being taken in by fashionable ideologies. When you oppose low taxes and small government, you oppose keeping money in the family. And that means that the wife will work, and the children will be raised by strangers. Women who vote for socialism, environmentalism, feminism, etc. are forcing themselves away from their future children.
Think before you act – don’t act on feelings and intuitions. If you want a marriage and a family, then vote accordingly.
WINTERY KNIGHT 