Three or four years ago, I had a furious row with a friend. She had brought her three children to a birthday party, and their appalling behaviour during the afternoon went quite unchallenged.
During tea, the six-year-old leaned over the table to the uncut birthday cake, scooped the chocolate icing and marzipan man out of the centre with his fingers and stuffed both into his mouth. Then he looked around and giggled, triumphant at his transgression. "Oh, darling!" said his mother, and that was that. The five-year-old was not told that it was wrong - and, indeed, disastrous - to post his cheese and tomato sandwich into the video recorder. The eight-year-old demanded that other children play a hiding game his way; when they didn't, he hit them. Enraged, I told him not to do it again. He burst into tears. At last, his mother reacted. How dare I speak to her child that way? She and her husband never did. "That," I said, "is why your children are so badly behaved that no one wants to spend any time with them."
The friend stormed out, telling me that I had no right to impose my beliefs about child-rearing on anyone else. She wanted her children to express their personalities without constraint.
The class divide
I am tempted to send her a copy of the new Demos report on parenting, Building Character. Demos has studied records of the upbringings of more than 9,000 children, and concluded that tough love - where children are treated with affection, but given clear and consistent boundaries for their behaviour - gives them better social skills, empathy, resilience and self-motivation than any other approach.
These skills are vital for their chances in life. Research from the US shows that children with these qualities grow up to be more successful and contented than those who do not have them instilled early on.
Demos's chief concern is what these findings mean for social justice. Good social skills used to be spread relatively evenly throughout society. Poor children born in 1958 were as likely to develop self-discipline and consideration as rich ones. That was no longer true for children born in 1970, and the gap between the classes is now widening. Better-off families are nearly three times as likely to produce children with these desirable skills than poorer ones.
That puts poor children at a great disadvantage, because just as they are less likely to learn these behaviour patterns, such patterns have become increasingly important in the labour market. The shift towards a service economy has meant a greater demand for soft skills such as teamwork and charm. An insecure jobs market rewards people who can learn new skills quickly and adapt to those around them. And the culture of contracting out means that people cannot make automatic progress at work; they have to take charge of their own careers. Adults who weren't brought up to do any of this are really going to suffer for it.
Demos wants the state to put far more resources into teaching deprived parents how to bring up their children well. It rightly points out that waiting until children start school is far too late, since much of children's capacity to empathise, trust and learn is established by the time they reach the age of three. It wants more help from health visitors, family nurses and Sure Start in the first five years of life.
This is all fine as far as it goes, but the analysis of what is happening in poor communi-ties doesn't go very far at all. Demos is so keen to avoid stigmatising deprived families, or single or step-parented ones, that it keeps emphasising that, even though these circumstances are associated with poorer outcomes for children's characters, that isn't true once other factors are controlled for. In other words, if you manage to be a calm, confident, consistent and reassuring parent, even if you are alone, unemployed, stressed and living in a horrible area, your children will be fine. The problem is, the chances of pulling off all of that in such a situation are just not very high, no matter how much parenting advice you get.
Help them behave
Demos assumes that individuals can transcend their surroundings if they make the effort. In fact, as reports last year by the Young Foundation, the Centre for Social Justice and the Smith Institute point out, deprived communities create their own destructive dynamic, where street culture forces people to behave aggressively and where poverty and family breakdowns create cycles of neglect and mental illness. Only Herculean determination allows people to break away from those norms.
Individuals cannot change their contexts. What poor communities need, and rarely have, are all the socialising institutions that provide alternative models for how to behave. My friend's brattish offspring will be fine in the end: whatever their mother does, they are being forced to behave well and to try hard by the orchestras, sports teams and private schools they belong to. It is frequently the opposite for poor children, whose schools have been encouraged to ignore character development and extra activities in favour of cramming for exams, and who rarely have anything organised beyond it. As one deprived teenager said to me, it wasn't until he met middle-class children that he realised how much learning and self-discipline was being encouraged during weekly piano lessons, cricket training, and gallery and theatre visits. His childhood friends had no structure in their lives, and no role models beyond teachers, parents and street gangs.
Demos's suggestions are a valuable start. However, real change for children also means filling the social vacuum in poor areas with organisations that can positively shape their behaviour and their lives.
Jenni Russell is a commentator and broadcaster
