What makes an acceptable parent?

Utopian Dreams
Unpicking parenting plans in a semi-rural paradise.

Prince Harry is still on page one of most papers this morning. The Mail has picked up on the fact that he is in many ways typical of his kind. It suggests a lack of general education. Yet I have observed that the first and second world wars have a disproportionate amount of time spent on them in our glorious National Curriculum for history. The fact is that the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, in Blair’s brave new Antisocialist England. The rich grow more arrogant and disdainful. Their attitudes to ethnic minorities is deteriorating.

The other big story today is the manslaughter of an adoptive child by its prospective parents. The mother is reported as having a great desire for a child to call her “mummy”. This recalls to me a very competent therapist and student of mine who had the same desire, and also failed to succeed with an older adoptive child. I detect a powerful infantile wish-fulfilment here, which is at bottom narcissistic and not maternal. This immensely wealthy couple had been approved by the new brand of Social Services. It is immensely hard to tell whom to accept as an adoptive parent. But this kind of attitude should give off a clear warning signal. The best judge will always be the child. Only G has passed the terrible tests set by my daughters. I am so glad that J and C took to me so easily.

Another student of mine taught Social Work at a local University. She was convinced the Profession would no longer exist in ten years. Already, the role has changed from worker to Care Manager. I suspect the practitioners of today are better at accountancy and form filling, but are less good at interpersonal assessment skills than when my ex-wife worked as an adoption and fostering officer 25 years ago. This poor child was punished for its unappealingness, and refusal to eat what was offered, by being force fed salt. The adoptive mother went back to work leaving the child to die in hospital.

All this happened in Bromsgrove, the promised-land my parents moved to in 1949. The bakery and shops my father owned have all gone now. The main street is pedestrianized. The pond at the bottom of our garden has become a car park. A big shed for shopping sits where our garden once lay. The swans we hand fed on icy mornings like today’s, when the pond was frozen over, have long flown away. A new road cuts through the fields my brother and I built our tree houses in.

In spite the beauty around me, I still hated Bromsgrove for its stultifying fifties provincialism. It provoked into being members of the awkward squad, like Jeremy Paxman and I, like grit in an oyster. We both hated the petty tyranny of its schools.

Now I live in another possible spot for Utopian dreams. My parents always hoped I would live in the Cotswolds. The hills are gentle and caressing. The honey coloured stones of its small towns and villages are folded into houses in the valleys in a way that makes them seem a part of nature. A publisher friend in our town likes to remark that England is the best country in the world in which to live, and C…….y is the best place to live in England. Various cultural surveys have confirmed this assessment.

At the heart of the town is its only school. It had a secondary school once, but that has long gone. The Anglican church membership has recovered under the guidance of the muscular (if not quite brainless) Christianity of a woman who everyone swears was the model for the Vicar of Dibley.

But the real heart of the community is now the school.

Yet around the school, for our family, dreams of Utopia begin to be replaced with a Blairy distopia.

I was idyllically happy here for the first few months after arrival in 1992. The view from home onto ancient forest land was stunning. The magic still remains in the countryside, the buildings, the friendliness of people in the street, the gentle climate.
But the underlying social dynamics are very disturbing. The Neo-conservatives are becoming the dominant group.

To the outside world the town is only well known for being home to the failed fairy-tale Prince who romanced the people’s Princess, as Blair’s spinmeister in chief dubbed Diana, Princess of Wales. A century ago the local people rioted against the imposition of vaccination. A past MP called its people an awkward bunch. Local radio presenters hang onto this description. A group of us marched against Blair’s illegal invasion of Iraq, and held up our banner proudly in Parliament Square.

I wrote recently about the power of the Child Care Professional to inflict shame and humiliation on parents who make use of their services, without good cause. Once the intervention is done it cannot be undone. There is a permanent scar on one’s record as a parent, which hangs around like a bad smell. More of this stuff another time.

The other item in today’s news that catches my eyes is the decision by the “Fertilisation and Embryology Authority” to consult us about vetting parents, before they can be offered IVF.

What concerns me about this is the assumption that we can now assess what makes a good parent. I have offered parenting classes to couples during pregnancy, since there is so little good information available on the babies early life and giving birth.
I have studied a parenting book for children 5-15, which I found immensely valuable, and attended lectures, seminars, and even National Parenting Conferences. What really worries me is that people are starting to teach parenting as if it was any other sort of school subject. Increasingly, the courts are ordering parents to attend such parenting classes or face worse punishments.

Much of the modelling of such parenting courses comes from the work of the great Humanistic Psychologists. I applaud their creative work. But most of how we influence our children comes from who we are, rather than what we know, our values not our skills. Understanding and addresssing this means a depth psychology training of many years. Once the state starts to intervene at this level of society we are creeping towards tyranny.

What a good thing that our free press enables us to take a look at the outcomes of parenting as demonstrated by our magnificent heroic leaders, such as those mentioned in yesterday’s article.

First lesson in New Labour Parenting classes, “Do as we say, not as we do.”