Are some people just not fit to have children?
Many of this morning's papers report the story of a woman who's had 13 children taken into care.....and is now pregnant with her 14th. It's not the first time the issue of how we protect children has hit the headlines this year.
With so many high-profile cases involving children at risk in the UK - can social workers always make a difference? So much work goes into helping vulnerable parents and children - but are there cases where it's just a waste of time? Are there some people who just can't care for children - and aren't fit to have them?
That's the phone-in from 9.
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Society has changed so much in my lifetime that the stigma of bearing a child without being married has thankfully been erased,however it now is
in many cases a life style alternative for many young women, who find themselves unable or unwilling to work,live at home,save up and find a suitable partner.By trying to be more caring we have made it acceptable
to have a child, have accomadation provided,various cash benefits etc.as the norm.
This template is passed on to their female offsprings and the cycle often continues.The number of abortions has sky rocketed in recent years and this practice,which initially was for extreme cases is now used as an
alternative option, to being responsible.
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The woman that is on today defending the indefensible is one of the reasons why this country is in the mess it is. Nobody can ever be blamed for anything. Of course there are people who shouldn't have children and they should be told so. Steve in Oxford was spot on.
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I have been living outside of the UK for the last 10 years in Denmark where we simply do not have the same obvious problems that exist to this regard back home. I think we should be looking at our neighbours to try and understand where exactly we are going wrong back home? As this trend continues in the UK we are simply compunding the problem as children born to unfit parents continue the trend into their own adulthood.
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I'm struggling to to present an arguement to defend the indefensible. However, I am very uncomfortable with some of the proposed solutions forced sterilisation, means testing of prospective parents and imprisonment of women that exceed their pregnancy quota
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What Steve from Oxford on the programme and those agreeing with him seem to fail to understand is that good/bad parenting is not an absolute. It is a continuum. Nobody is a perfect parent and equally nobody is totally without ability. Presumably these people arguing that some people are 'unfit' to be parents would be outraged if someone else were to say that because they earned more money than them, were better educated, had had a more stable upbringing and had more time and resources to spend on their children made them 'better parents'. Equally it is outrageous for him to believe he is the arbiter of who is fit or unfit. We have a duty as a society to take action to protect children where we can see that they are in obvious danger and this is what the Courts already do perfectly well. We do not have the ability let alone the right to start trying to say who is fit or unfit to have children.
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Zelda - that woman was called Jane-from-Munchester - a social worker. She def. lives in a different world to the rest of us. Her world is full of fluffy clouds, cute 'iccle kittens, sweetness and love etc.
I would have had more time for her if she acknowledged the reality that the caller was telling her; there most certainly are teenage mothers in every High St in Britain abusing the system. To state that isn't so is just being in denial and hardly conducive in solving the problem.
Don't like the idea of deciding who can and cannot breed however, the people who are really against it don't seem to have the same problem in being judgmental afterwards (removing children from parents they deem unsuitable).
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I half-agree with Paul 1948 but half-disagree - personally I think part of it is society's namby-pamby PC attitude about "support" all the time.
Of course we should have a natural, humanitarian requirement to support an innocent child who didn't want to be born to feckless parents.
But when I was growing up, I was terrified of getting pregnant. All the teen magazines were full of shock stories of 15-year-olds getting 'caught' and the stigma it carried for the girl and her family. I used to lie awake every night at 14 worrying about it - and being very naive and at a girls' school, and not even knowing a boy, it wasn't exactly likely to happen to me!!
It's civilised that the stigma has gone in some ways, because there will always be accidents. But on the other hand, it's now become normal for girls to take the unmarried or young mother route as a matter of course when they see everyone around them doing the same and nobody is allowed to go without food or housing or gets slated for where they've ended up.
Some may actually make good parents, and choose to have a family with love and pre-thought. But not all.
I do have some relevant experience. My partner and I (who couldn't have kids) mentor a local 10-year-old who comes from a very sad home. We see him weekly and take him out to quite normal things that he's never done with his own family and try to find out from him why he was expelled from school (for racism and violence - at 10!) and whether he has any future at all. It's part of what they call 'Intensive Family Support' and what's awful is that they see it as absolutely normal that their extended family - which already includes 5 kids, a mother, the father of one of the 5, grandparents (in their 40s) and other various family members also includes several full-time social workers and a well-meaning but inexperienced middle-class childless couple who seem to think they know how to bring up their kid better than they do.
Which, frankly, wouldn't be hard.
It's tricky to entertain a child in that situation. Cinema's out, as a PG film might seem a little tame next to the 'call of Duty' and other games he plays on the PSP till the early hours. But he gets a kick out of kid-things like fairgrounds and walking dogs and going bowling. He's never been to a village fete or gone on a boat on had a family picnic in the countryside.
To me, doing those ordinary things with your children is as much a part of parenting as anything else. It's not about money, it's about sharing. This kid is off the rails only because it's only by being bad that he gets any attention of any kind. Nobody's ever praised him for being good at anything because he's not particularly bright or good at sport or outstanding at anything - but that's what your family's for, for being there for you no matter what and making you feel important.
As a result of missing out on what I would see as normal family activity and love, he sees violence as acceptable. When asked, he expects to have a family himself but doesn't ever see himself working at anything.
Good lord - maybe we SHOULD go back to openly despising the underage and unmarried mother brigade as a shock tactic to stop this pattern before it's all too late!
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Chris - would you deem the people involved in the BABY P case fit or unfit to have children. We worry so much about the rights of the parents, but what about the rights of the children?
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Great post (No. 7) by Rileyrua.
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Zelda - It is impossible to defend them and I won't try to. We are lucky though to have a Social Services system in this country to try to help people who are struggling with aspects of childcare and to step in when they cannot cope even with help or where it becomes apparent that they are deliberately harming their children. The whole system is already geared up to do exactly what you say - look after the interests of the children - and it has lots of safeguards and checks and balances to make sure it is a last resort to take a child away.
Obviously in the Baby P case the system failed. It has previously failed in the Climbie case and others too and will no doubt fail again in the future since the people involved in the service are only human.
However, I think in the most part it works reasonably well. Does anyone have any evidence that there is more child abuse or neglect now than there has been historically as opposed to just more hysteria?
We have a choice as a society: is it better to take a stand-off approach where we try to let people lead their lives as they want and we only interfere when we are very sure that there is a problem, leading as this inevitably will to occasional horrors such as the cases discussed here; or do we intervene early in far more peoples lives?
I don't think being more interventionist would actually prevent all cases of abuse to children - just look at what has happened in the past with foster carers and children homes.
I think society, and the lot of the vast majority of children as a consequence, is far better for the fact that we do not interfere as much in people's lives as some would advocate here.
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How do you define a good parent? True, most cases are clear cut but is a parent who smacks their child necessarily bad. What about parents who allow their child to become obese by simply saying yes all the time to shut the child up. Perhaps a society where people are criticised is the right way - as we learn from mistakes, but we often need someone to point them out. How many times have you seen young children behaving badly and then not being told off? Perhaps if people were to make remarks audibly to each other the parent will be embarassed enough to change his/her ways.
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I have not read about this lady in the paper but listened to comments on the show. I am not sure why she has had her children taken away, I feel sorry for them having to be put in care.
I am appaled that the underclasses have been targeted and that being on benifit is percieved with a lot of negativity again. Everyone's circumstances are different but there all put in the same pigeon hole.
As for how children are brought up and kept safe or not in some cases. I bring attention on how class distinction is made apparent in the case of percieved middle class couple, who go on holiday and leave their children unatended while they have meal with friends. Then to have one snatched from thier bed, which was terrible and to have all the media attention and the child still missing. The point I am making if it was a working class family I think the media attention on that family would have been a lot more negative and made out to be terrible parents.
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I agree with johnmc55 regarding the targeting of the so called 'underclass'. I'm sick of hearing how white working class people living on council estates are portrayed as being; chavy, fat, work shy, smoking, heavy drinking, 50" TV watching, Jeremy Kyle viewing, benefit claiming, baby breeding machines. They are often ridiculed in what I regard to be an offensive way. If I was to make similar remarks regarding asians, gays, disabled people etc, I would be rightly castigated for being racist, homophobic etc. Yet it appears to be acceptable to ridicule this group.
I've worked in such communities and in my experience many people are decent, law abiding, hard working, caring parents, and tax paying individuals. Sharon Matthews and this woman from Luton are no more representative of this group than Harold Shipman was representative of white middle class profressionals
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I agree with the posts about class snobbery if it is to be put bluntly. There are faults on all levels. What about affluent neglect, where the kids are simply given money and left to their own devices because the parents are 'too busy'?
Is it the case that parental responsibility has diminished or is it just more widely acknowledged. Everyone on these blogs talks about when they were young, but in the same vain, I'm a teenager and none of my friends are unhinged because of poor parenting.
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I agree with Hess entirely. We are forever being told that life is getting worse and that society is 'broken'. One example we are given of this moral decay is these girls that 'pop children out' just to get benefits.
It is hard not to feel that it is true when we hear it so frequently - but is it true that our society is in such a desperate downward spiral?
If kids are so maladjusted and the 'underclass' so degenerate then why does our crime rate continue to fall, educational attainment increase and material wealth (recession notwithstanding) rise? And the evidence isn't there that benefits 'scrounging' is increasing either. The amounts of money spent on benefits as a proportion of total government spending rose most dramatically in the 70s and has been flat since around 1989. Teenage pregnancy rates fell from 2002 until a small rise in 2007 - we don't have figures for 08 and 09 yet. But the overall trend is definitely downward.
Yes there are problem people within society, there always have been and always will be. But the people we see in these hysterical stories aren't in any way representative of whole groups of people, as ziplewis points out.
To go back to the original question posed: "Are there some people who just can't care for children - and aren't fit to have them?" The answer is a qualified 'yes' there are a very small number of people who aren't capable of caring for children and shouldn't be allowed to look after them but we have systems to deal with these people which work as well as can be expected.
The answer to the implied question of 'what is to be done', is, in my view, to continue to refine and develop our social services but that there is no major problem which warrants any major changes.
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harriet:
yes, some people are not fit to have children...
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