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The Nanny State By the time they get to school, it’s

游客2024-02-27  30
问题                        The Nanny State
    By the time they get to school, it’s too late. The realisation that neglectful parenting in a child’s earliest years can ruin its chances for life is shaping a new, expensive and interventionist approach to families in Britain. The government has increased spending on financial support to children by 64%, to ￡ 24 billion( ＄ 41 billion), since Labour came to power in 1997. In the latest splurge, it announced an extra￡ I billion for childcare, advice for struggling parents and cash benefits.
    Intervention in infancy is increasingly popular in America and in Europe, among all shades of opinion. Most leftwingers accept that bad parenting is not only about poverty; most conservatives accept that working mothers are not its sole cause.
    Disadvantage is clearly passed on early, and not just through the genes. There is evidence that, by the time they get to school, many dim two-year-olds from good homes have overtaken bright children from bad ones. Being read to, played with, properly fed and cuddled all hugely increase the likelihood of success in later life. Conversely, bad parenting increases the risk of everything from dropping out of school to illness, and eventually jail.
    The problems are working out what to do and then making it happen. The British approach, under file overall title of Sure Start, has several strands. One, aimed at 400,000 children in the poorest fifth of the country, is, in effect, supplemental parenting: free places in high-quality nurseries and creches, coupled with energetic advice-giving, a new network of children’s centres, and home visits from volunteers. Then there is the general expansion of nursery’ education. Already every four-yearold has the right to 2hours of state-financed nursery care a day. In 2004 that will include three-year-olds.
    Third is the plan to cut child poverty by a quarter by next year, and "end" it in 2020. But poverty, like cruelty, is hard to define. The government’s definition, based on 60% of the median income, is a shifting target: as earnings rise, so does poverty. Moreover, not all cash-strapped parents are bad at raising children.
    Nonetheless, the government has energetically raised family benefits and tax credits. The poorest 20% of families with children, it says, will be ￡ 2,900 a year better off in real terms than before Labour took power in 1997. For single-earners with two or more children, policies are even more redistributive.
    The money and effort that have gone into improving life for Britain’s infants are the government’s proudest boast—especially as other public-service reforms are looking increasingly tattered and battered. But problems lurk behind the determination. For a start, these policies are net necessarily compatible. Generous benefits distort the labour market and may encourage feckless behaviour. Frank Field, an iconoclastic Labour MP, notes that benefits for single mothers penalise those in stable relationships, which are clearly associated with good parenting.
    Encouraging mothers of young children to find jobs is another good thing: it benefits both them and the family budget. But if it means their children are dumped in front of the telly at a cheap childminder, the kids may be worse off than if they were at hone with mum.
    The government’s unwillingness to pass judgment on bad parents also weakens this approach. The rhetoric around Sure Start is swathed with waffle about "inclusivity" and being "non-judgmental".  "I don’t have the right to call someone a bad parent," says Jane Cole, a senior Sure Start adviser. Don’t blame parents, she says, but society. But studies of similar intervention in early childhood in America show it works best when programmes clearly tell parents what to do and why.
    Sure Start has almost nothing to say about the benefits of reading aloud, or the perils of too mnch television. According to a sceptic close to the scheme, there is too much about boosting parents’ self-esteem and too little attention to making a real difference to children’s lives.
    That leads on to the biggest question of all: whether this sort of intervention works. The statistical evidence from well-established programmes in America is at best mixed: the chihtren in greatest need tend to benefit least. A big study duc out in 2006 will answer the question definitively, but Krista Kafer of the Heritage Foundation, an American think-tank, fears that "all it really does is make us feel better as a society". Scandinavian countries have spent heavily on infants for decades, and the inheritance of disadvantage seems to have decreased—though it is difficult to prove that the two are connected. The British government’s splurge on children is based on the hope that they are. [br] The rhetoric around Sure Start is swathed with waffle about"______" and being "______".
选项
答案 inclusivity, nonjudgmental
解析 答案在第九段。
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