Tag Archives: Family Breakdown

Commentary

What caused Melanie Phillips to turn away from the left and embrace conservatism?

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Dina tweeted this article from the UK Daily Mail, by famous moderate conservative Melanie Phillips.

She sets up her article this way:

[Leftists] reserve a special loathing for me. This is not just because I refuse to be cowed. 

It’s because I was once one of them, one of the elect, a believer. 

I come from the kind of family in which it was simply unthinkable to vote Conservative. For my parents, the Tory Party represented the boss class, while Labour supported the little man — people like us.

My father was haunted all his life by the poverty he endured growing up in the old East End of London in the Twenties and Thirties. 

His family of six lived in two rooms; he never had enough to eat. He left school at the age of 13. 

As a university-educated young woman with hippie-style hair and an attitude, I, too, generally toed the standard Leftist line in the late Seventies and early Eighties. 

Poverty was bad, cuts in public spending were bad, prison was bad, the Tory government was bad. 

The state was good, poor people were good, minorities were good, sexual freedom was good.

And pretty soon I had the perfect platform for those views when I went to work as a journalist on The Guardian, the self-styled paper of choice for intellectuals and the supposed voice of progressive conscience.

The UK Guardian is the most liberal newspaper in Britain. 

Here’s what turned her around:

The defining issue for me — the one that launched me on a personal trajectory of confrontation with the Left and with my colleagues and friends — was the persistent undermining of the family as an institution.

By the late Eighties, it was glaringly obvious that families were suffering a chronic crisis of identity and self-confidence. 

There were more and more divorces and single parents — along with mounting evidence that family disintegration and the subsequent creation of step-families or households with no father figure at all did incalculable damage to children.

‘Too many children lack a consistent mother or father figure,’ researchers told me. 

Poverty, the Left’s habitual excuse, could not be the culprit since middle-class children were also not receiving the parental attention they required.

For me, the traditional family is sacred because it embodies the idea that there is something beyond the selfish individual. 

But it was being turned into a mere contract that either side could break more or less at will. 

I listened to the evidence of those with no particular ideological fixation or agenda, but who simply spoke of what they saw was happening.

[…]From Zelda West-Meads of the marriage guidance counsellors Relate, I learned that, though many single mothers did a heroic job, it was the absence of the father that did such terrible damage to their children. So I described how fathers were vital to the emotional health of children. 

Fatherless families were also at least partly responsible for a national breakdown in authority and rising levels of crime.

My view was backed in 1992 when three influential social scientists with impeccable Left-wing pedigrees produced a damning report.

From their research, they concluded that children in fractured families tend to suffer more ill-health, do less well at school, are more likely to be unemployed, more prone to criminal behaviour and to repeat as adults the same cycle of unstable parenting. 

But instead of welcoming this analysis as identifying a real problem, the Left turned on the authors, branding them as evil Right-wingers for being ‘against single mothers’. 

Their sanity was called into  question. ‘What do these people want?’ one distinguished academic said to me.

‘Do they want unhappy parents to stay together?’ 

Eventually, he admitted that the authors’ research was correct. But he said it was impossible to turn back the clock and wondered why there was so much concern about the rights of the child rather than of the parents. 

He turned out to be divorced — revealing a devastating pattern I was to encounter over and over again. Truth was being sacrificed to personal expediency. Evidence would be denied if the consequences were inconvenient. 

Self-centred individualism and  self-justification ruled, regardless of the damage done to others.

This article is a long read, but a good one. If you like to read things that are maybe a little longer than most articles I post, then I really recommend this one. You won’t be disappointed.

Fiscal and foreign policy conservatives will be surprised by how important social issues are when pulling someone away from the left. All conservative ideas are testable with reason – not just fiscal and foreign policy, as some might have you believe. I often hear Christians and conservatives trying to win people over with just one issue, instead of knowing a little bit about everything. Well, let me be clear. If I can get Obama out of office by winning someone over on record low labor force participation, then that means no more taxpayer-funded abortion drugs. If I can get Obama out of office by winning someone over on security and stability in the Middle East, then that means no more spiraling national debt. And if I can get Obama out of office on the defense of traditional marriage, then that means we might get a fence build on our southern border so that Hezbollah cannot just walk right in and try to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in New York.

It’s all related, and we need to be persuasive on every issue, not just one issue.

News

China takes children from their families to train as athletes

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From the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

For during recent years its swimmers and coaches have been caught cheating so many times it is difficult to keep count – and it has modelled its draconian training system on precisely that which produced Schneider and other turbo-charged East Germans before the Iron Curtain fell.

It began in the Eighties when, determined to end the nation’s perennial humiliation at major athletics and swimming championships, China’s Communist regime decreed that a generation of future champions must be harvested and honed.

To that end, school teachers were ordered to scrutinise their pupils for signs of natural sporting ability and report any child with obvious potential to regional coaches who would install them in one of 3,000 new state training camps.

According to her mother, Qing Dingyi, as quoted by the Chinese state media, little Ye ‘expressed a wish to become a swimmer at the tender age of seven’.

In truth, she was picked out because she had an unusually masculine physique with extremely large hands and long limbs: attributes at first thought best suited to a career in track and field.

After being whisked away from her modest two-bedroom apartment, in Hangzhou, a city of 6.2 million, and installed into the Chen Jingluin sports school, however, it was decided she would be best suited to swimming, and by 11 she had won her first major junior championship.

Her mother insists she and her husband, a manual worker, had always impressed on her that ‘results are not important, but you should always enjoy the taking part’. One doubts she dares voice this opinion in the presence of her daughter’s coaches.

In swimming, as in most other Olympic sports, they enforce a regime so relentlessly harsh that it has been compared, by those few Western observers who have managed to penetrate the obsessive secrecy with which it is guarded, to that in some 19th-century prisons.

Indeed, after being shown how China’s child gymnasts are trained some years ago, in his capacity as an Olympic observer, Britain’s Olympic gold-winning oarsman Sir Matthew Pinsent – a man who knows a thing or two about pushing the human body to its limits – pronounced it a ‘pretty disturbing experience’.

Children who our own sports authorities would deem far too young even to countenance focusing seriously on one sport, let alone be taken away from their parents and billeted in these boot-camps, had been driven so hard that they wept, and one claimed to have been beaten by his coach.

The International Olympic Committee promised then to investigate his claims but seven years on there is no evidence that anything has remotely changed.

Only last January harrowing photographs were posted on the internet showing Chinese children crying in pain as they were put to work.

In case they had forgotten why they were there, a large sign on the wall reminded them. ‘GOLD’ it said simply.

What a tragedy. This is why I boycott the Olympics. To me there is nothing more important than having everything child welcomed into the world by his or her biological parents, and then having a stable loving environment to grow up in. I reject both the selfishness of adults and the fascist ideologies of socialist states. There is nothing more important to children than their parents. Children are more important than anti-family ideologies like feminism and socialism.

I recommend clicking through and reading the full article, and look at the pictures, too. This is what happens when the state takes precedence over individuals and families. We need to make sure that secularism and socialism do not dominate here, like they do in China.

Commentary

The conflict between the state and the family

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A book review by Raymond J. Keating. I just ordered the book.

Excerpt:

Sympathy and compassion help make humans caring, moral beings. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, understood that, as illustrated by his emphasis on sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Often, however, sympathy and compassion are transformed from tools of moral judgment and action into weapons of blind ideology, irrational emotionalism, and cynical politics. They particularly serve as the bat with which opponents of the welfare state get pummeled. After all, the argument goes, if you oppose an extensive network of government income, housing, healthcare, employment, and child-care assistance programs, you must be severely lacking in sympathy and compassion. To truly care, you must support big government.

That assumption, unfortunately, has long clouded the debate over welfare policies, especially when it comes to government programs affecting family life. The big-government crowd has pushed blindly for government to play an ever-larger role as financial provider for households, thereby contributing critically to the undermining of traditional families. Meanwhile, it should be noted that some who argue against such programs have tried to make their case without fully acknowledging the important economic and societal roles played by the family.

[…]Part of the problem is the failure to apply economic analysis to the family’s role in the economy and to the impact of government policies on the family. That has been remedied to a degree in The War Between the State and the Family: How Government Divides and Impoverishes by Patricia Morgan. Published initially by the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, it mainly deals with the programs and realities of Great Britain, but the discussion and analysis obviously apply elsewhere, including the United States.

Morgan pulls together overwhelming evidence and data showing the benefits to adults, children, and society in general of marriage and intact families, and the problems of non-marriage, single parenthood, and divorce. And she illustrates how the welfare state subsidizes and encourages family breakdown.

For example, Morgan shows that marriage boosts personal responsibility and employment among males, while single males are far more likely to be jobless and receiving government assistance. She also makes clear that government benefits have a strong impact on marriage and childbearing decisions and responsibilities among both men and women.

She notes the varying ways in which government policies affect such critical decisions: “By rewarding some behaviours and penalising others, tax and welfare systems affect the preference and behaviour of individuals not just through hard cash calculations but by (unavoidably) embodying and promoting certain values and assumptions. . . . The generous subsidisation of the lone-parent household cannot but reinforce the belief that it is quite acceptable for men to expect the state to provide for their offspring.”

Morgan sums up the implications of all this on the size and intrusiveness of government: “Growing family and household fragmentation” drives government spending and taxes ever higher; increases the “number of clients of the state”; “displaces existing institutional and private arrangements”; places the government in the role of parent and provider to children; allows for increased government intrusions into family life; and generates “an increasing mass of legislation and regulation of provisions for custody, access and financial support.” For good measure, child development is inevitably hampered due to the loss of “private investment in children,” which can never be matched in substance or quality by government programs.

She’s like a British Jennifer Roback Morse, and I mean to read her book.

What I find puzzling is that I keep running into young people who aspire to be married and to have children, but who are going about their plan in ways that seem to be counterproductive – at least to me. I see a lot of young people voting Democrat, for example. I find this confusing, because voting Democrat means that there will be fewer jobs, higher taxes, more debt and more crime. That’s just a start. So why are people voting for Democrats when Democrat policies undermine the feasibility of marriage? Probably because they saw Republicans being mocked on Comedy Central and cannot tell the difference between comedy and news.