In For A Penny, In For A Pound…

The coalition's poverty adviser, Frank Field, will call for all children to be given parenting classes at school when he presents a government-commissioned review into poverty to the prime minister later this year.

*sigh*

The theme of Field's review is "how to prevent poor children becoming poor adults".

Stop them being born to people who see them purely as a meal-ticket? No, too simple...

"Being a parent, apart from running the army in Afghanistan, is the most important thing we will ask anyone to do and we assume people get the knowledge by osmosis – and they don't," the former Labour minister said.

Your party destroyed the social fabric of the nation, Frankie-baby. It's a little late to start holding your hands up in horror, isn't it?

A report by the Sutton Trust charity, published last week, showed that poorer children are twice as likely to start school with behavioural problems, and warned that the gap had widened over the past 10 years.

The past ten years. The past ten years...

Hmmm, something about that rings a bit of a bell....

Field interprets those findings as evidence that although the Labour government was successful in reducing the overall number of children living in poverty, parallel work needs to be done on reducing non-financial inequalities.

'We were successful, but we weren't successful!'. Someone tell me again why this chap is considered some sort of super-genius?

Part of the problem was a decline in people's understanding of good parenting, he said.

"There has been a rupturing of the level of parenting skills in my lifetime. There was a collective wisdom about the beneficial effects of tough love – you set boundaries for your children, but you loved them within those boundaries."

There are no boundaries any more. The progressives saw to that. YOUR party saw to that...

"I think it is more difficult to parent now than it was. The pressures on you are greater. It is expected that people, mothers, should work, and rather quickly after birth, even if they are on their own. Postwar housing developments have split up communities. You are bombarded with demands from television about the things that children should have. It puts a much greater pressure on parents. To add to that you may not have had a good role model yourself," he said.

That's why the grown-ups should be in charge. IN CHARGE! Not whining about 'Oh, the TV, the advertising, the peer pressure...'

In recommendations that he will present to the education secretary, Michael Gove, this week, Field will suggest that parenting should be taught as a theme within other subjects – "not as a separate ghetto subject", so students would look, for example, at the development of a child's brain within their science GCSEs.

Great! I'm sure they can fit it in, somewhere.

After all, they aren't spending much time teaching them to read, write and add up, are they? As we can see from the results...