Tag Archives: Day Care

Commentary

How the Labor Party killed marriage in the UK

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Kathy Gyngell explains in this UK Daily Mail article. (H/T Dina)

Excerpt:

Across its various forms and rules [marriage] is a human universal and with good reason. Marriage everywhere is the bridge between affinal and kin relationships ­ a bond integral to the functioning and survival of human society. It defines social relationships, social and economic responsibilities.

It establishes genealogical connections and confers ‘belonging’ and social identity. It prevents incest­ now more prevalent in our underclass than we know (something of deep concern to the more thoughtful of our politicians and social workers). No other set of relationships or connections ­ whether through friendship, work, sport or volunteering – replicate the function of marriage. The state certainly cannot ­ the failure of communism demonstrated that.

[…]I believe governments (successive ones) are culpable for setting marriage adrift as the sexual/ cultural revolution swept in. This was not the case elsewhere.

Britain silently, casually and progressively abolished the family … first through liberalising the divorce laws; later came the official signal that marriage no longer mattered.

Former Chancellor Nigel Lawson’s reform of personal taxation set in train the abolition of the married couple’s allowance. (He failed, as he had planned in his Green Paper, to balance independent taxation by transferring the unused personal allowance to a non-earning, most likely child-rearing-spouse.)

But it was Gordon Brown’s first budget that did the real damage. It marked, as Harriet Harman emphasized triumphantly at the time, “the end of the assumption that families consist of a male breadwinner and a female helpmate in the home”. Labour’s new measures did not just recognise that women were in paid work and needed help with childcare, they pushed this agenda aggressively with tax incentives and a massive expansion of childcare facilities.

Married mothers at home were indeed marked as second class citizens. What¹s more their families were to subsidise, through their disproportionately burdensome taxes, those families with no breadwinner at all. Frank Field¹s intention to cut back on lone-parent benefits in order to discourage dependency was abandoned in the face of party fury and threatened rebellion.

State support for lone parenthood has entrenched illegitimacy ­ the word no one dares speak. This is our root social problem. It is why we are now Europe¹s pre-eminent ‘transient shack up’ society. We cannot rest the entire blame on the pill per se (available across Europe) or on women’s lib. Betty Friedman and Germaine Greer (both made their way onto most European bookshop shelves) or cultural osmosis, though feminism and socialism have proved a pernicious mix.

The fact is other countries in Europe have done more to support and sustain marriage and married families. They have capitulated less to aggressive feminist ideologues ­ people who viewed marriage as the tool of an oppressive patriarchal regime, if not as prostitution (Jenni Murray in the past) but never as an institution the majority of young women continued to aspire to.

That marriage socialised men, and that women had power in marriage, did not occur to this particular monstrous regiment of women. Nor did men marshal the arguments against this craziness, for fear of falling foul of irrational and strident Gingerbread demands for lone parent economic independence – courtesy of the state of course.

Whatever cost to the state and taxpayer – subsidising lone mothers back to work, putting their fatherless children into state paid for childcare and continuing to mop after what were never viable families in the first place, whether in the form of Louise Casey or Sure Start, remains the mantra of left and most of the centre of politics.

Marriage didn’t just die in the UK by accident. It was a victim of a partnership of big government and militant feminism. Financial incentives were put in place by the secular left with the goal of discouraging people from marrying and have a mother stay at home and raise the children. The mistake that many women made is that they believed that they could keep marriage as is, with men seeking to commit for life, and add to it a government-provided safety net that would catch them if the men they freely chose fail to perform. Instead of getting serious about consulting with their parents, and choosing the right man for the responsibilities of marriage, women followed their hearts, and hoped to transform the wrong men using mystical powers. Somehow, they believed, premarital sex coupled with peer approval and an expensive wedding ceremony could transform a man who was not qualified for marriage at all into the perfect husband and father. When all of this failed, women refused to point the finger at themselves, and instead voted for more and more government social programs to equalize all households, regardless of their decisions about men. After all, men are so unpredictable! And courting intelligently and chastely is “too strict”.

This is why the typical mother in the UK spends 19 minutes per day with her children, and the average father spends even less. If everyone has to work to pay taxes for the welfare state, then there is no money left in the family for a stay-at-home parent. This is exactly what the feminists wanted – the end of marriage, and it’s unequal sex roles for wives and husbands. And the only way to go back to the way it used to be is for women to stop outsourcing the roles of the husband and father to government, and start marrying the right men for those jobs.

News

Typical working UK mother spends 19 minutes per day with her children

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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.

Commentary

Should Christians support social justice? Is wealth redistribution good for the poor?

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Discovery Institute fellow Jonathan Witt pens this article in the American Spectator on the Gospel, business and social justice.

Excerpt:

The third term, social justice, is unlike the other two in its having a justifiable raison d’être. It stretches back to 19th century Catholic social thought and was used in the context of nuanced explorations of law, ethics, and justice. Unfortunately, this nuance and precision usually falls away in popular usage, and the term has been co-opted by the left to imply that ordinary justice is a mere tool of the ruling elite, with the real deal being “social justice.”

This impoverished meaning needs to be addressed. If a society extends justice to the rich and well-connected but allows the poor to be bullied and swindled by corrupt players inside and outside of the government, the problem isn’t unsocial justice but a lack of justice. If the poor in many developing nations can’t get access to credit or the courts because they can’t register their businesses, and they can’t register their businesses because they don’t have the bribe money and connections to navigate a byzantine regulatory maze, the problem is injustice, plain and simple. Such a society doesn’t need a social brand of justice any more than a poor neighborhood without stores needs a social grocery store. The neighborhood needs an ordinary grocery store, and the unjust society needs basic justice. Grocery stores and justice are already intrinsically social.

More than accurate semantics is at stake here. Often the popular call for “social justice” boils down to an ill-conceived call for coercive wealth transfers — for instance, getting rich countries to transfer more of their tax revenues to the governments of poor countries as foreign aid. It’d be nice if this approach actually helped the poor, since we’ve been using it for the past 60 years. Unfortunately, the statistical and narrative testimony on this strategy hovers between mixed and scandalous.

The reasons for this are complex but not so complex as to excuse the status quo. Much of the aid money gets quietly funneled into the pockets of corrupt politicians. In other cases the aid money reaches its intended target but, since the aid money is fungible, it still supports bad actors. It does so by freeing a regime of the political necessity of paying for the schools, road projects and emergency relief already covered by the foreign assistance. This, in turn, allows the regimes to spend more of their tax revenues for enhancing their own wealth and power.

Worse, the small fraction of aid money that actually reaches its intended destination often puts indigenous producers out of business, since it’s difficult to compete against free goods from abroad. Haiti’s rice farmers, for instance, once exported rice, but today their livelihoods have been all but wiped out by subsidized U.S. rice dumped on the country as foreign aid.

Add to all of this international “social justice” the devastating cultural effects of America’s welfare state. The neighborhoods flooded with 50 years of this domestic “social justice” now face far higher levels of criminal injustice and anti-social behavior than before the justice arrived.

Much of the problem stems from welfare’s effect on the institution of the family. The percentage of children being raised by both of their biological parents in America’s poorest neighborhoods used to be low and fairly comparable to what was found in middle and upper class neighborhoods, but the Great Society programs of the 1960s changed that.

As George Gilder put it in Wealth and Poverty, the underclass husband and father was “cuckolded by the compassionate state,” a violation which has incited “that very combination of resignation and rage, escapism and violence, short horizons and promiscuous sexuality that characterizes everywhere the life of the poor.”

Yale University sociologist Elijah Anderson put it almost as bluntly in a 1989 journal article: “It has become increasingly socially acceptable for a young woman to have children out of wedlock — significantly, with the help of a regular welfare check.”

The plain testimony of history is that the left’s strategy for saving the poor has been a tragic failure. It has stifled development in poor countries, bred a fatherless underclass in the United States, and all but bankrupted the European Union. Cloaking all of this in the guise of “social justice” serves only to perpetuate the tragedy.

It turns out that the very people who cry the loudest about wanting to help the poor – by redistributing wealth from those who produce to those who don’t – are the ones who incentivize people to make decisions that will make them poorer and expose them to more violence. Sure, there is a certain amount of uncertainty in life, but when you reward failure and punish success, you get more takers and fewer makers. The alternative to taxation and redistribution is to leave wealth in the hands of the individuals and businesses and trust them to make the decision about sharing. When businesses pay less in taxes, they expand – and more people start up new businesses, because they are attracted by the chance to make higher profits. Although letting individuals and business keep their own money is frowned on by the secular left, that’s because they themselves project their tendency not to give to charity and create jobs onto everyone else. They don’t understand charity and entrepreneurialism, that’s why they take money away from people who work and who create wealth.

I do want to say one other thing. I find it troubling when Christians present themselves to me as being social conservative, and fiscally liberal. There is no such thing as a social conservative and a fiscal liberal. If a person demands that the state provide cheese sandwiches to the children of single mothers in public schools, then  it creates more of an incentive to become a single mother, and less of an incentive to marry. That redistribution lowers the cost of single motherhood and raises the cost of marriage. It has been shown that single motherhood is the leading cause of child poverty – so why would we put into place incentives that encourage people to not make good decisions about sex? Why subsidize people who refuse to exercise self-control in sexual matters? Why make it encourage people to inflict fatherlessness on their own innocent children? Marriage is correlated with increased safety for women and children. Lowering the moral standards and paying people to make mistakes isn’t good for them. And it’s not good for their children.

The more you tax those who produce, the fewer of them you get. And the more you subsidize those who collect, the more of them you get. When men see themselves as slaves of the state – working only to be plundered – they stop working and they stop marrying. Why would a man work to feed the children of someone who could not even bother to get married before having babies? Why would a man get married knowing that half of what he earns will go to the state? Let families keep more of their own money, so that families are empowered – and not government. Let families keep their own money so they decide how to spend it, instead of depending on government. Let single mothers have to face the cost of their decisions. Let them ask charities for help, not the government. When people have to ask their neighbors for help, they know that they have done wrong, and that the money they get came from someone who worked for it. That is not there when government taxes and writes them a no-guilt check. Then it’s an entitlement, and they don’t learn their lesson.

Instead, let individuals and businesses make the decision to help those who they think are truly willing to try to improve their lot in life. Those are the ones who need support. When you leave wealth distribution to the government, no one is there to make those moral judgments. And it’s worse than that. When government takes over industries like health care, they are often supported by naive pro-lifers who think that wealth redistribution is compassion. But a secular government has no interest in women who stay home to raise their children – they want women to get out into the work force and pay income taxes. A single-payer health care system is always going to be pro-abortion for that reason. And any pro-lifer who votes “with their heart” for single-payer health care is a fool. They are, in effect, pro-abortion. Think before you vote.