Bad parenting, not lack of money is harming poor kids

"Chinese children from poor families as a group do better than all other non-poor children (except non-poor Chinese children). Growing up in an ethnically Chinese family in England is enough to overcome all of the disadvantages of being poor. This surely has much to do with parental aspirations and attitudes. It would be a betrayal of all our children if we were to say that what this group already achieves cannot be achieved by all British children."

This is a report written by British Labour MP Frank Field, who was commissioned by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition to investigate child poverty.   It has produced a muted response in leftwing circles as he has effectively destroyed the myth that intergenerational poverty can be fixed by increasing benefits.  The report in full is here (PDF).

One of the standards of the left is that one of the biggest issues in modern society is child poverty.  That doesn't mean children who are malnourished (in fact many of them are overweight), it doesn't mean they are homeless, or lack access to health care or schooling.  No, it is about relative poverty, so it means households where children don't get to go on holiday, where they have few choices of clothes, they might not have a Playstation/Wii/XBox, they might not have broadband internet access, there might not be a family car.   In fact, poverty today would have been middle class comfort a couple of generations ago, and positively wealthy for most people on the planet.  

Frank Field agreed to help the government, much to the chagrin of his Labour colleagues, he agreed, largely because he was more interested in getting results than in snarking on the opposition benches.  He has a particular interest in child poverty, but his report also indicates his own increased disaffection with the "more welfare fixes poverty" school of "thought":

Since 1969 I have witnessed a growing indifference from some parents to meeting the most basic needs of children, and particularly younger children, those who are least able to fend for themselves. I have also observed how the home life of a minority but, worryingly, a growing minority of children, fails to express an unconditional commitment to the successful nurturing of children.

The issue about child poverty is not about kids not getting enough stuff, it is about whether being raised in families with low incomes damages their "life chances" and whether the opportunities for children to develop, excel and pursue lives that realise their potential are significantly harmed by poverty.    

The standard leftwing answer is that it is all about money.  Groups such as the self-styled "Child Poverty Action Group" campaign for higher benefits, essentially claiming the solution is simply to give the parents of such children more of other people's money.   In particular they support such money being without conditions, but simply about "fairness" (as if it is unfair to make more money than others).   In other words if only poorer families got more money then their kids would perform as well as families from middle income households.

Field's report disputes this saying that the real indicator of a child's life chances is not money it is quality of parenting.   That factor above all others is critical.  His report makes for stark reading and has thrown the proverbial cat among the pigeons for statements like this:

(This report) questions the almost universal assumption over the last hundred years that increases in income alone will automatically lead to social progress. Over the post-war period we have experienced a considerable increase in the real incomes and yet we still find that too many children now start school who are unable to make the most of their school lives. It is from this group that tomorrow’s unemployed and low paid will be overwhelmingly drawn.


Why should this be so? The Foundation Years argues that the exclusive concern of the adult world about how financial poverty affects children’s life chances has prevented a more comprehensive understanding of why life’s race is already determined for most poor children before they even begin their first day at school.

In other words, despite massive improvements in real standards of living, there is still an underclass of children who grossly under perform at school and then end up being those who end up being the poorest adults (and the cycle repeats). 

Minette Martin in the Sunday Times (subscription only) noted that parental lack of attention and ignorance is a core issue.   Apparently children from poor homes in the UK hear 616 words spoken an hour on average, compared to 2,153 words an hour in more wealthier homes.  She points out that by age 3 this is 30 MILLION less words that the poorer children are hearing, and learning and remembering.   A gap in language and understanding that is almost impossible to get back.   

Field also notes the role that planners and state intervention in housing has had:

Post-war housing policy has also enjoyed more than a walk-on role. Mega developments, sweeping up communities, shaking them around, and scattering them onto new estates, often on the periphery of the towns where they had long established roots, also played a major part in the break-up of the extended, matriarchal family hierarchy and in so doing destroyed the support that this informal network provided for couples as they began the process of starting a family.

He doesn't note that this was driven by the Labour Party, and Conservatives happily went along with the clearance of the poor into estates that were away from their voters.   Field notes how little is done to make fathers pay for their children:


communities have insisted from time immemorial that men who beget children should be made to support those children and the children’s mother, usually by marriage. In a fit of what at best can be charitably described as absent mindedness, or of not wishing to cause a fuss, a whole number of governments forgot that one of its primary duties in safeguarding the wellbeing of children is to enforce the father’s financial responsibility.

Absolutely key is parents being interested in their child's education.  Field's research indicated this is
independent of the parents' own education.  The report noted an effect of the early home learning environment on age five outcomes over and above parental background factors such as socio-economic status, maternal education and family income.







Yes in other words parents who give a damn, who read to their kids, who are involved in their education and help them make far more of a difference than money.   Single parents families are also an issue as:

Fathers’ interest and involvement in their children’s learning is statistically associated with better educational outcomes (higher attainment as well as more positive attitudes and better behaviour) even when controlling for a wide variety of other influencing factors. A number of studies both from the United States and the UK have shown that father involvement has an independent effect from mother involvement and effects have been demonstrated both for younger children and for later educational outcomes.
 
However, this doesn't fit the Marxist monologue that it is all about wealth and if only the rich had more of their money taken and given to the poor unearned, it would all be better. 

Education doesn't get off the hook either:

Most studies also find that schools, and in particular teachers, have an impact on the gap in attainment between the richest and the poorest...Teaching quality was a significant predictor of progress in both reading and mathematics over Key Stage 2. Analysis of the attainment of older children showed that being taught by a high quality (top 25%) rather than low quality (bottom 25%) teacher added 0.425 of a GCSE grade per subject

In other words the fatuous self-serving nonsense peddled by teachers' unions that they can't be paid or judged on performance is just that.   Good teachers make a difference, which means setting their pay by some central government fiat is as nonsensical as setting the pay of chefs by the same means, but far more damaging.

No person who genuinely gives a damn about fixing child poverty would simply reject these findings out of hand and continue with the mindless belief that the welfare state can fix the problems of intergenerational poverty.  It is about parents, it is about education, it is not about money.
 

Frank Field's recommendations are heavy on intervention.  He wants monitoring of children in what he calls the "Foundation Years" (the first five years of life) and a concentration on support of parents and training of parents for those years.   He recommends freezing child benefit (which gives parents money for having children at all income levels, but which the government will be capping at parents who earn no more than £44,000 p.a. (well above the average income in the UK) and redirecting money towards services for children in the first five years of life.   I think far more needs to be done to change the incentives around breeding when one can't afford to do so,  and that education needs to be freed from the shackles of state control and direction.   

Yet what is more important is to finally ditch once and for all the Marxist based myth that the reason children from low income backgrounds do badly is about money (and the solution is to pillage money from other people), when it is about parenting.   If groups like CPAG really gave a damn about child poverty they would cease their obsession with increasing taxes and benefits, and engage in hands on assistance for parents who need help, and encourage people who are in poverty to concentrate on improving their own lives, not on breeding. 

How impartial is Wikileaks?

As interesting as it is for Wikileaks to publish stolen communications from US diplomatic sources, are there not similar communications being made available for Wikileaks to publish from countries that are not Western liberal democracies?

Will it receive such uncritical coverage if it publishes British diplomatic communications regarding strategy with the European Union? How about New Zealand's diplomatic communications on trade access issues?  How about South Korea's diplomatic communications about north Korea defectors?

Would it not be at least as interesting, and indeed more valuable if Wikileaks also gained access to material from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Zimbabwe, Burma, Cuba etc?

After all, what has happened so far has undermined confidence in US diplomatic communications, but not that of others.  

Not that Wikileaks has an agenda, no.  Surely not.  I hope not.  Maybe it is more a factor that Wikileaks is anglo-centric?

Idiot Savant wrong about London student protest

I’m fascinated about the authority Idiot Savant claims to talk about a protest in a city he wasn’t in, based on media coverage he was selective at looking at.  From his post you’d get quite a distorted picture of what happened, but then he couldn’t possibly know.  Not even the Guardian and Independent articles he quotes support his distorted propagandist view of what happened.

He’s either stupid, lying or just wilfully blind.   You see I actually am IN London and SAW the protests.

Let’s start. 

He said “The UK government is currently trying to balance its budget by shifting costs onto the young, through a trebling of university fees. This will prevent many kids from poor families from going to university”.  Bearing in mind this is shifting costs from future unborn taxpayers to current students.  However, he is wrong about it preventing kids from poor families going to university as they can get student loans to pay for fees, that they do not have to start paying back until after they earn the average wage.   A barrier to poor students?  Hardly.  In fact, the threshold to repay the loans is being increased as well, but that fact spoils the tale the socialists are stringing out to justify their protests.   That’s just him swallowing the spin of the Socialist Workers’ Party.

Then he claims that the protest was kettled (when the Police surround a group and confine them) and THEN the students rioted in response.

No.  Quite where he got this from is curious, as none of the major media reported this either.

In Whitehall a group descended on an unused Police van and vandalised it, others vandalising bus shelters and ticket machines, Transport for London reported objects had been thrown at buses carrying passengers at Trafalgar Square, smashing windows.   Buses were diverted away to avoid further incidents.  Some spray painted slogans on buildings.  To be fair a handful of schoolgirls who were skiving off school tried to stop some of this, but to no avail.

The kettling happened after this as the group descended on Parliament.  The Police responded appropriately to protect property and the public, and it isn’t surprising why.  There are reasonable grounds for opposing kettling, but to keep a protest contained when it has become violent is quite acceptable.  However, Idiot Savant is painting a picture of students surrounded, kept confined and THEN lashing out - which is completely wrong.  He should know better, but he isn't driven by reporting the facts, but by his own socialist agenda.

You see he completely ignores what happened on the last protest, when students ran amok, vandalised the Conservative Party headquarters, occupied the roof and one threw a fire extinguishers onto the Police below narrowly missing them (that person has since been charged).   Does he really think the Police should stand by and let private property be destroyed and peaceful citizens be threatened and intimidated by a mob?

No.  He wasn’t there.  I have seen both protest marches and the aftermath.   I know what the policy is (and I didn’t vote Conservative or Liberal Democrat) and it isn’t keeping the poor out of university education.  This is largely a group of naïve middle class students who are bemoaning the fact that when they start earning above average incomes, partly due to their education, they might have to pay the majority of the costs of that education.   These protests are hijacked by violent criminals (anarchists who don't recognise property rights).  The Police acted appropriately.  

Maybe Idiot Savant should concentrate on protests on cities where he is actually there, or maybe he should either report what actually happened rather than undertake a Gramscian reworking of the facts to fit his political agenda.

Oh and if students want something to protest about, how about that university education in Scotland has no fees, that this is funded from Westminster and on top of that the European Union demands Scotland offer the same education to students from any OTHER EU Member State.  That does NOT include England, because England is deemed to be in the same Member State as Scotland (which is true).

So English taxpayers subsidise free Scottish tertiary education so that Bulgarians, Romanians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Poles, Finns, Swedes, Danes, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Austrians, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, Cypriots, Maltese, Portuguese, French, Belgians, Luxembourgians, Dutch and the Irish can get a free tertiary education - but they can't.


That's a serious reason to be pissed off with the European Union, the Scottish government and the whole devolution experiment.   However, socialists love the European Union because they think it can help make everything "free".

Sue Kedgley says your diet is not your responsibility!

Frogblog has this astonishing post from Sue Kedgley where she damns a new UK government policy because:

"The idea is to shift responsibility for health and improving diets from the state to society and to convince people that public health is all about personal responsibility"

Yes you read it right. Sue Kedgley does not think people should be primarily responsible for their own health and their own diets.  She wants responsibility to be held by the state.  Not only that, she also thinks you all agree with her, you want to be treated like children, because she follows her comment with:

"And no, this isn’t a joke, it is for real. And since its happening over there, we will probably see a version of it happening over here soon."

You mean New Zealand might see an end to finger pointing joyless control freaks using force and regulation to control people's diets, smoking, exercise (or lack of)?  Speed the day!!  

The question is, how does Sue get up in the morning without having the state organising her meals for the day?  Maybe she simply uses Bellamys and other state owned eating houses to get reassurance that she is eating correctly. 

You see, not having had much attention lately, she has turned her attention to events outside New Zealand (because being an elected New Zealand MP means you should comment on what are basically internal policies of other liberal democracies).  She is having her perennial panic about consensual collectives of multi-ethnic adults seeking to make a living out of investing in capital and selling goods without regard for borders, race, nationality, religion or background - in other words multinational corporations.   Those despicable evil companies that sell people want they want, at prices they can afford at conveniently located stores.

Her concern is that the British Conservative/Lib Dem coalition government has invited the food industry to develop policies to encourage healthier eating or as she describes it "will focus on persuading –or ‘nudging’—people to make healthier choices without force or regulation"

This is when her synapses short circuit.  One shouldn't persuade people to eat healthier now, she disapproves of persuasion when there are the glorious tools of state "force and regulation" to compel people to eat healthier.  Presumably she wont take this as far as it has gone historically, when the Khmer Rouge had communal kitchens and cafeterias for the hard working proletariat (no disparities of wealth or inequality!) to eat the same rice gruel every day. 

Though why should I be surprised, Sue is legendary for being the greatest proponent of the use of force in Parliament.   Her dismay at the UK government not wanting to use force is because:

Apparently it’s all part of a wider Conservative agenda to replace state intervention with private and corporate action!

Her beloved Nanny State is threatened, and the exclamation mark shows how outrageous she thinks it is!

Now I have a beef about governments getting involved in this at all.  Producers of healthy foods are able enough themselves to promote their products.  Consumer and health lobby groups are also able to pay for campaigns to promote healthier eating.  The state shouldn't even be doing this.

However what is astonishing is that the Green Party thinks you shouldn't be responsible for your own health - you should be like a child, who guzzles what it feels like, on a whim, and needs the carrot and stick of the Nanny State to force you to do what is right.

She thinks the lumpenproletariat are stupid little people who need the state to force them (she doesn't like persuasion according to that article), like gullible children, to eat more fruit and vegetables, stop smoking, exercise more and get strength through the joy of being healthy.

Kedgley and her health bureaucrats wet themselves with excitement at being able to control how people live their lives, in the name of "public health" because to them, personal responsibility is a failure.  Personal responsibility means some people don't do the "right thing", and so only the state can make sure they do.  She can't stomach that lots of people LIKE McDonalds, LIKE chocolate, LIKE smoking, LIKE getting drunk, LIKE high fat high sugar food.  

Of course there is something even more sinister behind this.  Like a patronising imperial empress, she and other health busybodies, treat Maori and Pacific Islanders as children, because they disproportionately tend to eat less healthily etc, she wants to help because she thinks she should be responsible for people's lives.  Sadly she hasn't picked up that the hectoring she has advocated fails, and that people by and large know what are the healthier things to do, but don't always want to do so.  Their lives though, NOT Sue's.

Go to hell Sue, the sooner New Zealand sees the back of joyless, finger pointing, busybodies like you from Parliament, the better.  Go peddle your hectoring bullying, force people to do that, regulate this, philosophy somewhere where it is warmly welcomed - Rangoon, Pyongyang, Ashgabat or Minsk.  

DPRK anoints Kim Jong Un with some murder and vandalism

That is my explanation for the murderous and vandalous assault on Yeonpyeongdo (do = Island) (37°40'N,125°41'E), by the Korean People's Army.  Yeonpyeongdo is an island well north of the 38th parallel and is far closer to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)  mainland than the Republic Of Korea (ROK).  So it was an easy target.  The Korea Herald reports one marine is dead and four seriously injured, but also there have been 60-70 homes damaged of what is largely a community of fishermen.  Chosun Ilbo (in Korean) is reporting that 1772 residents of the island are in shelters, with others fleeing on fishing boats south towards the mainland.  Certainly the destruction has been overwhelming and overshadows the usual occasional skirmish of gun fire that is the DPRK's means of "practicing".

There is little doubt that the DPRK will claim it is a response to the military exercises started on and around the island in the weekend, which the DPRK threatened would not go without a response.  Typically the DPRK response would be the odd shell falling well short just to send the signal that the "military demarcation line" is nearby, although the exact location in the two seas either side of Korea is always disputed.   This time it is real, perhaps the greatest incident in Korea since the war, in terms of sheer damage.   It may well be simply part of the process of demonstrating to the people that Kim Jong Un is a great general (he was anointed the status of 4-star general in September), fending off the "provocative" imperialist forces.   Yet it also shows the tension in that regime, as recent rhetoric and activities have been far more peaceful, with exchanges between families and a toning down of DPRK rhetoric.   The truth being that the Korean People's Army has some leaders who see no interest whatsoever in a reduction in tensions, as transformation of DPRK-ROK relations could only result in a lowering of military expenditure.

The only appropriate response is to respond militarily to this response in kind and then freeze aid and further discussions.  The DPRK deserves to be condemned forthright not only by the ROK government, but by the US, Japan, China and other countries.   Hopefully the rather lackadaisical attitude of many ROK citizens will have been shocked open by this to realise the real threat from the north.  Sadly most in the DPRK either know nothing about the news (the story of which is being carefully crafted for the Korean Central News Agency as I type this) or will have the usually manufactured story about the DPRK having been the victim of provocation, and responding boldly to a threatened attack under the wise guidance of General Kim Jong Un.

It would be funny if it didn't cost lives. 

However, in the spirit of "if you can't shoot 'em laugh at them" you too can create a DPRK propaganda insult with the DPRK Random Insult Generator you "half-baked philistine".

By the way, if you want the latest and best intelligence on the DPRK that is published, you will find it hard to beat North Korea Economic Watch.  It is responsible for by far the best overlay of detail on Google Earth of the country called North Korea Uncovered.   Bear in mind that much of that overlay shows what 99% of citizens of the DPRK do not know, and think of how much it irritates the DPRK that it is known by everyone else.

UPDATE:  The Korean Central News Agency does its job with typical "unique" use of language.  Merciless strikes that don't quite note the destruction of the homes of families on the island.