Labour’s contempt for parents becomes clearer by the day. Listen to its MPs and you get the impression that mums and dads are either so incompetent they cannot get their kids to brush their teeth or so evil that only the law stands in the way of children being routinely beaten. This depressing diagnosis leads invariably to the same course of treatment: more state intervention into family life, which has the terrible side effect of undermining the authority of parents.
Last week, the Labour government launched its flagship campaign to improve the dental hygiene of the nation’s children. Despite the near-impossibility of finding an NHS dentist in many parts of the UK, this campaign did not involve stumping up for more dentists. Instead, hundreds of thousands of children will be given supervised toothbrushing lessons at nursery or school.
In what could easily be confused with an advertisement for toothpaste manufacturer Colgate, which sponsors the government’s campaign, UK health secretary Wes Streeting promised to ‘get England smiling again’. Thanks, Wes! But let’s not forget that getting children smiling was, until two minutes ago, the responsibility of parents, not government ministers.
The initial focus of the toothbrushing drive is on ‘deprived areas’ where, apparently, ‘a third of five-year-olds… have experience of tooth decay’. Much has been made of the fact that tooth decay is now the ‘leading reason’ children are admitted to hospital. Given the difficulty in seeing a dentist, this is perhaps unsurprising. And in light of far more serious reasons why children might need to go to hospital, the fact that such a comparatively trivial matter as tooth decay tops the chart is actually good news. Something has to be the ‘leading reason’, after all. More importantly, as Christopher Snowdon has pointed out on spiked, rates of tooth decay in Britain’s children have not only fallen dramatically since the 1970s, but they are actually continuing to fall, too.
So what problem is the government actually trying to solve with its Colgate partnership? The focus on ‘deprived areas’ is revealing. Let’s be blunt: it’s working-class parents who government ministers perceive to be deficient. The way they see it, the state has to step in and teach children how to brush their teeth because parents are supposedly not up to the job. This is a slap in the face to the millions of parents in ‘deprived areas’ who do manage to get their children to clean their teeth each day.
Worse than just insulting, schemes like this only ever exacerbate the problems they try to solve. As I recently explored in a research paper for Civitas, teachers have been tasked with an increasing number of responsibilities that used to fall to parents. From supervising children brushing their teeth to checking the contents of packed lunchboxes, from monitoring how children get to and from school to safeguarding children’s mental health, every new responsibility given to teachers means less time for education. More seriously, the message this sends to parents is that they cannot be trusted to care for their own children and that child-rearing should be left to the professionals. Infantilised parents are reduced to following other people’s rules. Often this means that they struggle to enforce their own authority in the home.
Worse still, some Labour MPs clearly assume that parents aren’t just incompetent but also wicked. With the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill currently making its way through parliament, Labour MP Jess Asato has spied an opportunity to further her own pet cause. She has tabled an amendment, signed by 26 other Labour MPs, that would end the legal defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’ and effectively criminalise parents who use physical punishments such as smacking. Similar laws are already in effect in Scotland and Wales, which outlaw smacking even within the home.
A smacking ban has long been pushed by campaigners and commentators who assume parents are too stupid to know the difference between smacking and beating. But there is no evidence to suggest this is the case. Despite what many campaigners say, appalling examples of child abuse and even murder, such as the killing of Sara Sharif, would not have been prevented by new anti-smacking laws.
Smacking might not be the parenting experts’ first choice for disciplining children. ‘Gentle’ parents steer clear of the old-fashioned word discipline altogether these days. But for a great many mothers and fathers, bringing a wayward child in line with a smack is a quick and effective way of regaining control of a potentially dangerous situation (or indeed an annoying situation).
Posh parents with all the time in the world to spare can appear saintly by issuing sermons and sending children to the naughty step as a punishment. For stressed-out mums and dads trying to get a toddler fed and dressed, while also looking after a baby or before getting to work on time, smacking is a last resort. New laws won’t change this fact, they will just make parents feel guilty and ashamed. This will, yet again, undermine mums and dads in the eyes of their own children.
Labour’s attacks on parents have not come out of the blue. They come at a time when everyone, from the Princess of Wales to Instagram influencers, from neuroscientists to celebrities, insists on telling parents how they should raise their children.
Mothers and fathers deserve a break. The most helpful thing the government could do is to leave parents alone.
Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. She is a visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary.
