The Institute for Fiscal Studies yesterday
published a report that found that there was no positive influence of marriage per se on child outcomes. However, children of married people seem to develop better, which can be explained by differences in characteristics of those parents who choose to marry and those who don't. The most important characteristics are education, occupation, income and housing tenure. It is not hard to guess the correlation correctly. If you have a higher education (both mothers and fathers), higher occupational level (fathers only need to apply – career women seem to be less likely to get married), you are on a higher income and live in your own home you are more likely to get married. Those characteristics also make you a better parent. So there is a correlation between marriage and being a good parent, but that doesn't mean that being married makes you a good parent (and I should know).
If politicians would like to see more people getting married (and being better parents) they should make sure people get a proper education, a job that is paid well enough and make it easier for people to get on the housing ladder. No surprises here. This is the way forward to deal with the causes of bad parenting which as been high on the agenda as a cause for almost all evils in society. Government should help facilitate people to develop those characteristics that makes them more likely to be a good parent. Which would also make them more likely to get married. Two birds killed with one stone.
David Cameron has
argued that it is “warmth not wealth” that counts for the outcome of children. According to him, encouraging parents to be good, warm parents is more important “than lifting people out of poverty”. Surely, neither he nor one of his advisers has ever tried to raise his children on a run-down council estate, money worries hovering over his head everyday. As
I argued in a previous blog blaming the parents is an easy way out for politicians, but nothing more. However, I would say that everybody living in affluent conditions who doesn't manage to be a proper parent clearly has only themselves to blame. But everybody who raises their children with love and respect and giving the age appropriate boundaries and doing all this in adverse conditions such as poverty, damp housing, unemployment, ill health deserves a medal. So, politicians, do blame the bad parents but keep it to those who should know better and are more equipped to make the right choices (in case they don't know better already without an anorak know-it-all politician telling them what to do).
Looking at parents and how they are being portrayed in the media I am bored (and sometimes annoyed) by the ongoing discussion on who is doing a better job at being a parent (in most cases this reads mother). Apparently it is
a competition or even a war out there. Come on people! There is more to life than bickering over what your neighbour does. It is not a war of working mothers versus stay-at-home mothers, married parents versus cohabiting one, single parents versus….I don't know what. Everybody knows it is not clear cut, so stop pretending that it is. Stay-at-home mothers can be brilliant or mediocre or simply no good, the same is true for working mothers, married mothers, single mothers, foster mothers, and yes, fathers in all shapes and sizes, too. And because ‘parenting' is not a competition where the best parents wins first prize, as a consequence there should not be a competition between different policies designed for different groups of people. A recognition in the tax and benefit system of married parents is justified as it recognises the family as a unit – which it is – and not some individuals living together in a flat-share, as
I argued in another previous blog. A recognition in the tax and benefit system of a single parent family is equally justified as it acknowledges this family's particular circumstances. But these two do not compete with each other. To claim that a benefit for one would discriminate against and disadvantage the other is the same kind of bickering as the one mentioned above on who is the best mother.