Parents claim staff at the Mount Pleasant Sure Start Centre in Darlington have forbidden them from bringing prams into their building, citing health and safety reasons.If you’re wondering how a small, elegant Silver Cross pram of your childhood could possibly be considered so, well, forget that.
There’s a picture of these prams. They are the size of golf buggies (as, indeed, are many of the women pushing them).
Parents say the change is driving people away from the centre and means prams could be stolen or damaged. Concerns include having to place newborn babies into cold prams, disturbing sleeping children and being unable to easily collect older siblings.Oh, the humanity! How can a baby cope with a cold pram? Or being disturbed?
And how very dare anyone put any inconvenience in the way of these women’s busy lifestyles?
The buggy ban means Darlington mother Emma Easterby, 34, is no longer able to take her four-month-old daughter Alexis to use the sensory room at the centre.
She said: “My baby has underdeveloped eyesight and doctors told me to use the sensory room there but I can’t now as I can’t take her pram in.
“I’m really upset about it and she’s suffering as a result – I’ve had to go out and buy sensory things for her but there’s a free room there. ”Quite! Why should you have to spend fags & bingo money on stimulating your spawn, when the state will sequester money from the taxpayer for you? The indignity!
“It’s disgusting, people spend lots of money on prams and I couldn’t afford to replace mine if it was stolen, it’s a rough estate and they could be targeted. ”A rough estate, eh? You could have fooled me…
After refusing to leave her pram unattended, Natalie Henderson claims she was told to take her baby to another centre to be weighed.
The 28-year-old said: “I went to the centre twice a week until they told me to leave my pram outside.
“I’m not putting my baby into a freezing cold pram – it needs sorting, I can’t get my baby weighed.”Have you tried the local zoo? Or Highway Agency weighing station? If baby grows up to be anything like you, you might consider it.
Darlington’s MP Jenny Chapman said the move could put parents off accessing services.Really? Did you not hear them? It’s free, they aren’t going anywhere else, trust me!
Jenni Cooke, Service Director, Children, Families and Learning with Darlington Borough Council added: “We haven’t banned people from bringing prams and buggies into the centre but it is a question of safety for everyone who uses it.
“We’ve asked people to use their judgement (Ed: Well, that was your first mistake!), particularly at busy times, and park their prams and buggies in the covered, on-site buggy park and will provide locks and help people get in and out of the centre if they need help.”What more could they possibly do to ensure that these specimens of the entitlement class are kept happy, I wonder? Answers on a postcard…
10 comments:
"Service Director, Children, Families and Learning"
Without Service Directors, Children, Families and Learning, we'd never have had the Industrial Revolution or the Space Age.
A callous person would say that a Service Director, Children, Families and Learning was attempting to teach the intellectually stunted offspring of intellectually stunted people how not to be intellectually stunted. I certainly wouldn't, and I'm sure that the stellar careers of people who've been helped by Service Directors, Children, Families and Learning will put these disgraceful people to shame.
Modern perambulators are mainly to intrude into the lives of others. It helps you see where your taxes go.
Don't prams fold? And those babies are easily small enough to be carried in slings anyway - though that would mean less opportunity to display the personalised lacy pram covers and matching changing bags.
I'm intrigued by the editor's decision to enhance the story with a sequence of near-identical pictures:
"Oh my God! They're coming towards us!"
WTF is a 'sensory room' ? Great article and some good comments. The entitled class = Chav/underclass. Boiler breaks down they always say something like ...I've got two kids that need bath twice a day .... My kids have autism/asbergers/some other disability or food intolerance ..... I'm disabled / my partner/husband/parent is disabled. Whinge, whinge fucking whinge! The sooner the benefit changes come in the better - with Ed's manifesto we'll up funding a paradise for the workshy, lazy and unentitled - more so than now
Bunny
Somebody's pupped the big one, Jesus wept the props when I played rugby were smaller than that one. The arms on her, like a bricklayers.
Besides that +1 for the other comments.
Darlington has significant economic advantages, it is on two major trunk roads and a main railway line. It should be like Swindon or Crewe, railway towns that have succesfully moved on, but it isn't. Darlo people need to learn that no one is going to help them and they need to sort it out themselves, for example by being able to cope with leaving their prams outside.
There are many good reasons for banning prams from inside areas where children may be playing. Apart from the danger of impeding exit in the event of a fire, there is also the danger of Toxoplasmosis (which can cause blindness in babies) spread by dried dogshit on the pram's wheels.
It's also not an unusual thing to occur and many independent or community run parent and baby groups, not just State run Children's Centres, ban prams from the areas where children may be playing for the good reasons that I and others have given.
As for the Mothers excuse about 'not wanting to put a baby into a cold pram' what utter tosh. All you do is take a baby blanket into the centre with you, keep that warm and then put the warm blanket into the pram at the end of the centre and put baby on top of it. It's not a real hardship, it just requires a little bit of thinking ahead.
As regards the 'sensory room', they do seem to be the flavour of the month of things to spend our taxes on by Children's Centres. They are beneficial for children with severe learning difficulties but for normal and relatively normal children I have my doubts about their efficacy, and you can get the same or similar level of stimulation for tiny ones by singing to, talking to or playing with your child.
Speaking as a new parent (and that's a phrase I never thought I'd ever utter - eek!) I find that 'Laughing Boy' seems to be just as entertained by being held up to a window while feeding so that he can see out or watching the flickering flames in the fireplace, as he would be in some expensively designed 'sensory room'. Stimulating your child's mind is not rocket science and it seems that some of the parents in question are whining that they want their own way and want it NOW.
The Sure Start centre in question seems to have made the right decision here and they have made provision for security. If they've supplied some rain-proof area for prams and are offering locks to secure the prams then I can't see what more they can do.
Yes, parenting is difficult, expensive, time-consuming, sometimes frustrating and brings you into contact with all sorts of worthless State prod-noses, but the best things in life are often difficult, expensive and time-consuming. That's life.
Personally, I'd rather see the money that is currently being wasted on ineffective and sometimes malevolent 'Children's Services Departments' and the more faffy bits of the 'work' that children's centres do ('stay and play with input from a healthy eating trainer' is just one example of nonjobbery I found FFS!!!) put into parent-run children's groups or even better giving tax breaks for those who marry and provide a stable home for their children or spent on improving our woeful and cretinous education system.
Off topic: I'm pleased to report that Laughing Boy hates the sight and sound of Ed Miliband on the TV. He cries piteously when he appears. He treats the discomfort of encountering Ed Miliband similar to how he treats the discomfort of a full nappy. Sometimes I feel like doing the same at the thought that this marxist moron who's never done a proper days work in life may all too soon be Britain's Prime Minister.
I hope the centre is discouraging attendees from breeding. Looking at the pics I think the gene pool is not improved by their little contributions.. Also how do two of them pass each other in the corridor even wo prams?
:Anon 09:01 Unfortunately the welfare system does little to discourage men and women from picking the right partners to breed with. It encourages men and women to be irresponsible with regards birth control, because any baby that results will be the States problem not the parents. A brief perusal of the Jeremy Kyle show will give plenty of examples of people who should not be parents.
Twenty Rothmans: I agree that humanity survived and thrived very well before useless non-job holders like Directors of Children's Services came on the scene. How we ever managed to build railways and canals and much else without highly paid handwringers and worthless ornaments like this I'll never know.
Anon 11:24 Yup agree there. In my view a diagnosis of some form of mental disability in a child would be devastating but I've come across chavs who see such a diagnosis as nothing more than hitting the benefits jackpot. It means that your Aspergers (often only really children not properly socialised), ADHD (or in real world words 'out of control chavkid') or food intolerance (unprovable in many cases) diagnosis is a meal ticket.
Yes there are a autistic, mentally disabled children and those with the inability to digest certain foods but I refuse to believe that these conditions are as widespread as we are led to believe.
Macheath: Yes most prams do fold, so fold them it's only common sense. As regards the cost of prams and baby stuff. Buying such things brand new is quite frankly a mugs game. Our lovely pushchair cost £50 second hand and we got loads of starter clothes from about £25 for a huge bundle. I'm sure that for some of these chavmums
the pram is not only for baby conveyance but as a status symbol that can be flashed about in the local dole office/sure start centre/magistrates court. There are very few things that for safety reasons (cot mattresses feeding bottles etc) that need to be bought brand new.
These mums are making a lot of fuss about nothing.
"Without Service Directors, Children, Families and Learning, we'd never have had the Industrial Revolution or the Space Age."
They'll be first on the 'B' ark...
"Don't prams fold?"
Not these juggernauts!
"...with Ed's manifesto we'll up funding a paradise for the workshy, lazy and unentitled - more so than now"
Or 'Labour voters', as I like to call them..
"Speaking as a new parent (and that's a phrase I never thought I'd ever utter - eek!) ..."
Congratulations! :)
A lot of these kids are far too old to be in prams any way. Mum was not pushing me around in one when I was 3 or 4 years old. It's laziness on the parents' part.
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