I AGREE wholeheartedly with Jennifer Wilson (letters, July 22) that family life should be the major component in the development of a child, a viewpoint I recently expressed when I suggested that parents should be paid to raise their own children rather than the state funding for collective care while parents go out to work. That is not to say that a support network is not needed or appreciated. We need to accept that a small minority of parents lack the environment or the skills necessary to raise a child especially those without an extended family to help them or those who frankly lack the level of intelligence and common sense to do it on their own, but this should not be used as a justification for unnecessary intrusion by authority in how we as a community raise our children . Perhaps our Government which has decided to practice eugenics by means of child-support welfare cuts has already embarked on a means of reducing this source of under-productive worker-bee larvae.
It is counter-intuitive to believe that despite the level of enthusiasm, skills and training of those involved in the business of looking after other people’s children that the child benefits to the same extent as he/she would were they in a one-to-one situation with a parent for the same period. By the same token it is debatable if plonking a child down in front of an endless loop of Peppa Pig or watching hours of Minecraft interfacing with a screen rather than a human will produce a rounded individual and create an improvement in the cognitive skills that research suggests the younger generation lacks to its detriment.
What is lost in the mire created by politicians, educators, charities and others is that man is an animal in a suit and that in most other species parents concentrate on raising their own offspring, simultaneously passing on the collective knowledge and experience gathered from previous generations. Some, the ostrich for instance, go for the collective route with one adult supervising a mega creche of hatchlings while the rest of the parents scarper but that, just like some of our own ideas, is bird-brained and we don’t use that expression as an compliment.
I am convinced that most parents can raise their own children perfectly well if they are given the time and resources to do it. What society does not need is a system that essentially treats children as an unnecessary temporary complication which prevents parents from working full-time. Apparently it is not cost-effective to pay parents to look after their own kids yet it is to pay somebody else to do it. It is all part of the “work sets you free” philosophy that underpins the consumer society which treats us all as a resource to be controlled and harvested; no matter how you dress it up that is the template that the Establishment and Government actually want society to conform to and I believe at some point we have to say enough is enough.
David J Crawford,
Flat 3/3 131 Shuna Street, Glasgow
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