Tag Archives: Nick Clegg

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If we pay women to have children before marrying, will they do it more?

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Dina tweeted another article from the UK Daily Mail about the problem of paying women to have children before marriage.

Excerpt:

Talking about her future, a young woman neighbour told me: ‘Everyone is going to be a single mother in the  end — you just have to find the  right donor.’

Her view was shared by many of those who lived in the various council estates where I grew up. Single parenthood was the normal method of rearing children.

While my own father left our home when I was young, my mother, who has lived in Britain since emigrating from Jamaica with my grandparents, has been devoted to her children.

Although my father was a good dad and maintained contact, lots of my friends were not so fortunate. Few had any involvement with their fathers.

In many of these homes, the State was almost invariably the main breadwinner, with the families in receipt of welfare cheques.

With the State providing unceasing financial support, there was little thought given to the costs and responsibilities of having children.

[…]The welfare state was meant to be a symbol of civilised society, giving support to the genuinely poor and vulnerable. Today, though, it too often acts as a gigantic engine of social breakdown. Costing more than £220 billion a year, it simply incentivises personal irresponsibility and family collapse.

Far from rescuing people from disadvantage, it traps many claimants and their children in the destructive cycle of welfare dependency, where values such as ambition and commitment are lost. It should come as no surprise that in the parts of the country where welfare dependency and joblessness are most prevalent, fatherhood is the exception rather than the rule.

A report published last month by the independent think-tank, the Centre for Social Justice, showed that the number of lone-parent families is increasing by 20,000 every year, with the total expected to reach  two million by 2015. Incredibly, in some areas of the country, such as Riverside in Liverpool or Ladywood in Birmingham, more than 70 per cent of households with dependent children are headed by lone parents.

Children who grow up in these places rarely come across a male role model.

Today, around half of British births take place outside wedlock, while just over a quarter of all families are headed by lone parents.

Despite a wealth of evidence that absent fathers put children at a disadvantage, I find it deeply depressing that the political class is terrified of taking any action to shore up family life.

Leftist political parties in the UK put in place a system in which women were encouraged to have children out of wedlock because they would receive taxpayer money – money taken from high-earning married men – in order to have children before getting married.

There’s actually a reason why the government pays women to have children before marriage. It’s because of an ideology called radical feminism. Radical feminism supports single motherhood by choice, because radical feminists are opposed to traditional marriage. In a traditional marriage, the man typically works to provide money to support the family, and he derives from that provider role the authority to lead the family on moral and spiritual issues. Women typically focus more on raising and educating the children and supporting the husband/father by doing home-related tasks. These traditional rules are suited to men and women respectively, but they are opposed by feminists because they are “unequal” – just because they are different. And that’s why radical feminists want to undermine marriage. What better way to undermine marriage than by paying women to replace the male role in marriage with government?

Now how should we fix this? Is the solution to tell men to “man up”? No. That is a slogan, not a solution – it does not address the root cause of the problem of fatherlessness. One positive change is to remove the welfare that makes it easier for women to have children out of wedlock without needing to choose a man who is proven to be able to perform the provider role. Today, we have a massive problem where women are not even looking to men to provide for them. Traditional male roles are out. Bad boys are in. Many women grow up fatherless and have no idea what a man actually does in a marriage. When selecting men for relationships, their most important criteria is physical appearance – not providing, protecting, moral leading or spiritual leading.

I’ve even noticed a trend lately where women are even claiming that good-looking terrorists like Tsarnaev and murderers like Hernandez are innocent of the crimes they actually committed, just because these men are “too good looking to be guilty”. This is a whole other level of wrong, but it’s not surprising with women who have been taught that men have no special roles that they are supposed to be performing. The faster we cut off the money for women who prefer bad-boys to provider-men, the better off children will be.

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How the UK government penalizes stay-at-home moms and pushes kids into daycare

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Dina sent me this must-read article from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

For years, parents like me who believe that the best place for a young child is at home with a loving parent have been ignored or mocked as smothering, over-protective mothers. Go back to work and put your child in nursery where he can socialise, we were told by ‘experts’ and feminists. Don’t feel guilty.

Unfortunately, the politicians listened — and state-subsidised childcare grew as a result. Between 1995 and 2010, mostly under the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, for children under five years old it grew by 36.4 per cent. It’s been an unmonitored social experiment on a huge scale.

[…][T]he tragic irony is that the plethora of unruly children ill-fitted to school coming out of our nurseries is a direct result of successive governments’ tunnel vision childcare policy.

It’s a policy which, through tax advantages and financial incentives, encourages mothers to go out to work, leaving young children in nurseries.

Under Labour, working mothers were championed and childcare was considered best left to state-subsidised nurseries. It was taboo even to suggest that stay-at-home mothers were performing an equally valid role.

The tragedy is that the Coalition seems to be continuing in the same vein.

[…]The most comprehensive research studies have shown that daycare nurseries breed bad behaviour.

A study in the U.S., which followed 1,000 children from birth to 15, found that those children who spent long hours in early daycare were more aggressive than those who had been cared for at home.

This is because young children are not designed to socialise in large groups of their peers. It may promote a quasi independence — but of the wrong kind.

It leads to children bullying or being bullied for social survival. ‘We let them fight it out,’ is how one helper describe her nursery’s approach.

[…]As a result of writing about childcare and bringing up children, I hear frequently from mothers who are distraught that they have had to return to work, leaving their children in daycare, because the Government has made it financially impossible for them to remain at home.

Not only has it withdrawn child benefit from households where a single breadwinner earns £60,000, while families in which both parents work and pull in a combined income of up to £98,000 will keep every penny, more recently it announced that families with two working parents will get tax breaks worth £2,000 a year.

The message is loud and clear: neither Cameron nor Clegg genuinely value the role of stay-at-home parents.

Their policies are cruel to mothers and to children, and they don’t bode well for the mental health or resilience of future generations.

Cameron and Clegg should create, at the very least, a neutral tax system that does not penalise mothers for staying at home.

And they should stop ignoring what all studies, mothers’ instincts and millennia of evolution have told us: that the best place for a very young child is with their mother or  father.

I have some pretty strong feelings against daycare, unless it’s a last resort. I think this article is helpful because a lot of people who vote for Democrats are women who one day hope to marry and be stay-at-home moms. They believe that socialism is somehow compatible with a strong marriage, a man who provides for the family, and a mother who focuses on the needs of her toddlers as they grow up. But socialism isn’t compatible with that, because socialism is wed to feminism. Feminism is the idea that women need to act like men in order to be equal to men. And the way that social engineers on the left achieve that goal is by creating taxes and incentives to push women out of the home. A stay-at-home mom has no value to the government because she isn’t paying taxes for the government to spend, too. They want her to work, both for ideological reasons and for financial reasons. People on the left think that society is more “equal” when parents are separated from their children and the children are raised communally by strangers. That’s “equal”. Some of the women in the UK who are complaining now undoubtedly voted for these policies. Maybe they had no choice since the Conservatives are the least bad option. But we have choices here, and we need to think carefully when we have the opportunity to vote.

News

Does science support mothers who leave their young children to go to work?

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Dina is very concerned about the UK’s leftist coalition government’s attempt to punish women who stay at home with their young children. (H/T Dina)

Excerpt:

Under plans unveiled in the Budget on Wednesday, families will only benefit from the generous new deal, which will come into force in 2015, if ‘all parents’ have a job. If one parent works but the other stays at home looking after their young children, they will get nothing.

It is the second time in just a few months that the Government has triggered controversy with its changes to the tax and benefit systems, which appear to penalise stay-at-home mothers.

As a result of the recent child benefit changes, a couple can both earn £50,000 and keep their child benefit, worth £1,752 a year for two children.

But a couple where one parent earns £60,000 and the other earns nothing – but have a far lower joint income – do not get a penny.

Again, this week’s initiative favours those couples where both parents go out to work. It will even benefit parents who each earn a salary of £149,999.

Note that this plan is being put forward by socialist Liberal Democrat Party, as well as the “Conservative” Party.

Dina thinks that the science is pretty clear that children suffer if their mothers leave them at a young age. Take a look at the video above, and then the brain scan below.

Brain scans of 3-year old children: normal vs neglected
Brain scans of 3-year old children: normal vs neglected

Here’s the article that goes with the brain scan from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Both of these images are brain scans of a two three-year-old children, but the brain on the left is considerably larger, has fewer spots and less dark areas, compared to the one on the right.

According to neurologists this sizeable difference has one primary cause – the way each child was treated by their mothers.

The child with the larger and more fully developed brain was looked after by its mother – she was constantly responsive to her baby, reported The Sunday Telegraph.

But the child with the shrunken brain was the victim of severe neglect and abuse.

According to research reported by the newspaper, the brain on the right worryingly lacks some of the most fundamental areas present in the image on the left.

The consequences of these deficits are pronounced – the child on the left with the larger brain will be more intelligent and more likely to develop the social ability to empathise with others.

But in contrast, the child with the shrunken brain will be more likely to become addicted to drugs and involved in violent crimes, much more likely to be unemployed and to be dependent on state benefits.

The child is also more likely to develop mental and other serious health problems.

Professor Allan Schore, of UCLA, told The Sunday Telegraph that if a baby is not treated properly in the first two years of life, it can have a fundamental impact on development.

He pointed out that the genes for several aspects of brain function, including intelligence, cannot function.

[…]The study correlates with research released earlier this year that found that children who are given love and affection from their mothers early in life are smarter with a better ability to learn.

The study by child psychiatrists and neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, found school-aged children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus, a key structure important to learning, memory and response to stress.

The research was the first to show that changes in this critical region of children’s brain anatomy are linked to a mother’s nurturing, Neurosciencenews.com reports.

The research is published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

Lead author Joan L. Luby, MD, professor of child psychiatry, said the study reinforces how important nurturing parents are to a child’s development.

This is why I argue that feminism, which is the ideology that demands that women work outside the home in order to be “equal” to men, is harmful to children. If we really cared about children, then we need to not be subsidizing the child abuse schemes of Liberal Democrats like Nick Clegg. We need to be clear that gender feminism (third-wave feminism) is an anti-child ideology and it should be opposed. The science is settled on this issue. Feminism harms innocent young children. And feminism isn’t just opposed to the rights of born children. They oppose the right to life of unborn children, too.