Selfish adults damaging kids

The BBC reports a new study demonstrating just how bad for children our contemporary culture is. Despite increasing affluence and levels of education, kids in the West today face ever more difficult childhoods.

The number one factor cited is selfish adults. It cites research suggesting that three times as many three year olds living with lone parents or a step-parent have behavioural problems compared with those living with married parents. Well who would have guessed it.

It also dares to name the problem of families where the mother works rather than looks after the kids. It talks approvingly about the increased 'autonomy' of women: by which presumably it means the degree to which they have become wage slaves, and prone to abandonment by their husbands or lovers, and notes that even this has a bad effect on children.

At least this stuff is beginning to get an airing, but nobody is expecting the government, which commissioned the study, to act on it...

The truth is, of course, that the traditional model of a stable maried couple raising kids, with one of them (normally the husband) the bread-winner and the other (normally the wife) staying at home to nurture the family, is by far the most effective in creating a good environment for kids. Of course one can find exceptions, and of course we must be charitable to those who are in difficult situations; but to normalise (in the name of de-stigmatising) illegitimacy, lone parenthood, divorce, co-habitation, and both parents going to work etc has (predictably) increased the levels of all of them, and has been profoundly damaging to our children.