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Children suffer without 'tough love'

Children have suffered in recent decades as parents have abandoned the traditional “tough love” approach, according to a senior Government adviser.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Frank Field claims that young people do much better in life if their mothers and fathers set clear boundaries for their behaviour as well as bonding with them and reading to them.

The former Labour minister, who is now the Coalition’s “poverty tsar”, believes that the end of old-fashioned parenting has held back the poorest children, preventing them from getting good jobs.

Mr Field believes that the first five years are critical in determining how a child will fare in life, and wants the Government to start supporting families even before birth.

He proposes today that the Foundation Years stage of education, which currently runs from birth to five, should begin when the mother-to-be registers as pregnant with a doctor.

Mr Field also wants children’s centres to be “opened up to competition”, both to cut costs and to encourage more innovation in helping the poorest families.

Earlier this month Mr Field – a former director of the Child Poverty Action Group who has been an MP since 1979 – submitted his second report on Poverty and Life Chances to David Cameron, ahead of a final review due by Christmas.

It has been claimed that the report will be “buried” by the Prime Minister because its suggestions are too radical. In interviews, Mr Field has proposed GCSEs in parenting; holding children back at school if they do not reach targets; abolishing the long summer holiday and paying women child benefit in large lump sums so they can stay at home to raise children. Mr Field was famously asked to “think the unthinkable” on welfare reform by Tony Blair, but resigned his ministerial post after just a year rather than face being reshuffled.

In his article today, Mr Field writes that social mobility has stalled over the past 50 years despite rising incomes.

He claims the “subtle and influential” force affecting life chances for children is the changing style of parenting in Britain.

“The sociologist Geoffrey Gorer asked why England had moved by the 1950s from being a pretty violent and uncivilised nation to one of respectability."

Read the rest of the article at The Telegraph.