What's Wrong With Children In The UK?

A 17-year-old boy who filmed a 'hero' grandfather as he lay dying on the street before sharing the video on social media has avoided jail.

Is that even surprising anymore? And of course, it wasn't his sole transgression: 

The boy pleaded guilty to sending a grossly offensive, indecent or menacing message at Worthing Youth Court, West Sussex, yesterday. He also admitted possessing cannabis and was given a 12-month Youth Referral Order following the incident on Gladonian Road in Littlehampton, West Sussex.

This incident appears to be yet another case of killer 'children' (for that is how the justice system will treat them): 

Another 17-year-old boy, from Bognor Regis, has been charged with manslaughter. He is scheduled to appear in court again on October 6 for a pre-trial preparation hearing.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

A 16-year-old girl and two boys, aged 14 and 15, have appeared in court charged with the murder of a man in a seaside resort. Kent Police were called to the Warden Bay Road area of Leysdown-on-Sea, on the Isle of Sheppey, shortly after 7pm on Sunday, following an altercation involving a small number of people.

Alexander Cashford, 49, was confirmed dead at the scene, with the force saying multiple injuries to his body were reported.

What the hell went wrong with our society? 

They Will Never Stop Until They Are Made To Stop...By Parents

Primary school children aged just four are being taught about surrogacy when they learn where babies come from for the first time. Reception classes are told that children can have a ‘tummy mummy’ as well as a ‘mummy and/or daddy who will be their parents’ when learning about the basics of reproduction.

 They are four. At four, most children have a hard time learning more important concepts, like not sticking everything they are offered up their nose!

Among ‘key vocabulary’ four and five-year-olds must learn are ‘surrogacy’ and ‘donated sperm or eggs’ in a module titled: ‘Where do babies come from?’

That seems a bit harsh, until you remember that one four year old in class who could pronounce all those dinosaur names correctly. And that had more value to their future life than this nonsense!  

Parents and campaigners say it is ‘highly inappropriate’ to teach these topics to such young children, saying it is only likely to confuse them. They add that the concepts should be introduced only to much older children ‘as part of lessons on thorny ethical issues such as euthanasia and abortion’.

Ball's in your court, parents - take an interest in what's being taught and pull your children from school if you find it's something you don't agree with. 

Helen Gibson, founder of Surrogacy Concern, said she is ‘appalled’ to see surrogacy being taught to such young children and has written to the Department for Education (DfE) to raise concerns.

A letter they will throw straight in the bin. 

The DfE said the teaching material was developed by a private relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) provider and is not compulsory in all primary schools, adding: ‘The RSHE guidance is clear that where schools choose to do so they must make sure they teach age-appropriate topics.’

A very modern response - 'it's not our fault, big boys did it and ran away'. 

I Suppose Watching Your Offspring Like A Hawk Isn’t An Option?

The news that a child damaged a £42m Mark Rothko painting at a museum in Rotterdam last month had me wondering how I’d feel if my toddler was the culprit.

Probably delighted to have material for yet another tedious 'Look, I've reproduced, worship me!' column... 

This story has brought out two categories of people that I’ll admit I struggle with: people who don’t get the work of Mark Rothko, and people who dislike kids.

Oh, give me strength…. 

...it’s the usual calls for children to be banned from public spaces. They shouldn’t be allowed into galleries if they can’t behave, and their parents should be made to pay – that sort of thing.

And you can see why! 

Children respond instinctively to art. They have not built up defences, or preconceptions about it, and the earlier you take them to galleries and expose them to different styles and mediums, the more open and receptive they will be to things that are experimental, unusual or transgressive.

Or maybe children are just unsocialised little animals that shouldn’t be allowed free rein in society? 

Children explore the world through touch. My boy loves to scratch his fingers against woodchip wallpaper, to stand with his palms flat against the rough bark of a tree. Anyone familiar with kids will be able to imagine what went through that child’s mind as they stood in front of Grey, Orange on Maroon, No 8. Something about the unvarnished, slightly chalky surface of the paint made them want to feel it. And so they did. Arguably, in doing so, they connected with the work of Rothko on a deeper level than many adults.

🙄

Either way, I hope that the child wasn’t made to feel too bad. Perhaps it’ll be a funny story that the parents tell someday, and I bet they watch their child a bit more closely in future. I don’t want to add to the shame they are probably already feeling, but I do wonder if it’s time modern parents had a think about rehabilitating the much-maligned toddler reins of the 1980s and 90s, even if just for occasional use.

But wasn’t it your type of progressive mummies who demanded their use be curtailed as they stifled ‘free expression’ in the first place?  

Instead Of Questioning What Went Wrong With The Finances, Why Not Question What’s Going Wrong With Biology?

The financial threat hanging over English councils, as a result of the last government’s decision to mask special needs overspending with an accounting ruse, is made plain in a Guardian investigation that used freedom of information requests to dig into their accounts. How ministers plan to deal with the £5.2bn debt that will reappear on balance sheets in a year – having been temporarily hidden by the Conservatives – is unknown. But doing nothing is not an option.

Clearly, trying to find out the cause of this increased spending is also not an option. Since no-one appears to be asking the question.  

The alarming mismatch between the steeply rising need for special education and the budgets allocated to pay for it is one of the biggest challenges facing the government – with at least 18 councils at risk of insolvency.

They've known the bill will come due for seven years. Maybe if they'd cut back on DEI nonsense and activist pandering, they'd have a few more pennies in the kitty to pay for it? 

There is no short answer to the question of what went wrong.

As this is the 'Guardian', I'm sure the blame can be laid at the feet of the previous government, can't it? 

But reforms brought in under David Cameron are responsible for pitting families against councils in the struggle for additional support – while central government sits on the sidelines.

Thought so!  

Between 2015-16 and 2024-25, high‑needs funding in England rose by 59% or £4bn to nearly £11bn.

Why? For the love of god, doesn't anyone ask WHY?! 

The Piper Always Has To Be Paid Eventually…

The staggering cost of England’s special educational needs and disability (Send) crisis shows no sign of easing. A Guardian investigation has revealed councils will overspend on Send services by nearly £2bn over the next year, pushing their accumulated deficits to at least £5.2bn by 31 March 2026. The date is crucial because that is when the £5.2bn debt, hidden away off local authority books using an accounting fix for seven years, is due to come back on to the balance sheets, threatening to instantly bankrupt scores of town halls.

They've had seven years of knowing this axe was going to fall, and what have they done, except spend like drunken sailors on DEI nonsense and pandering to every crazy activist in the area? 

The government faces a massive headache: not just what to do about the rapidly increasing billions of historic Send debt, but how to keep a lid on future Send spending, which shows no sign of abating.

And is anyone asking why this is? Why are a growing number of children requiring SEND assistance? Wouldn't that be a sensible thing to do?  

City of York council, the only authority surveyed by the Guardian that is projecting its accumulated Send budget deficit to move into surplus next year, was sceptical about keeping its head above water in future. “Unless the system is changed, we will go back into deficit quite quickly,” said Bob Webb, York council’s executive member for children, young people and education.

Bob doesn't seem too surprised or even concerned at anything about this, except the bottom line for his funding. He's not the only one. 

Mike Cox, the deputy leader of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council, whose forecast deficit will hit £168m by 31 March 2026, up £60m in a year, predicts: “[Government] is going to keep kicking the can down the road. The only thing that will change is that the can will get bigger and harder to kick.”

Maybe you should be shouting about where the can came from in the first place instead? 

🎵Friend, either you're closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge, or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated by the presence of emojis in your community..🎵

Police and schools have issued warnings to parents about a 'sinister emoji' code used by incel teenagers in the wake of the success of Netflix hit Adolescence.

Is there no end to the ridiculous panic over this TV propaganda? Now every quango and charlatan wants a piece of the 'incel' grift... 

Teachers and police forces have distributed a 'periodic table of sinister emojis' believed to be used by under-18s to conceal disturbing messages about violence, sex, drugs, and extremism.

In case any parents were thinking 'Whew! At last, the police and schools are on OUR side!' then I caution you to think again.  

Merseyside Police have already circulated the emoji table to schools and parents, according to the Liverpool Echo. However, critics have dismissed the warnings as 'moral panic'.

And they are right.  

Amit Kalley, the founder of education charity For Working Parents urged mothers and fathers to 'keep researching and asking the right questions' about their children's digital lives. He told the Telegraph: 'The table I created is far from an exhaustive list, but I wanted to include emojis beyond incel and misogyny, because lots of young people are groomed online into drugs and violence and lots of young people are involved in dangerous sexual behaviours, which they can hide from parents by using emojis and acronyms. '

OK, Amit, I'll ask questions: Why the hell is anyone expected to listen to you and your little grift frightening parents about what their kids might be getting up to? You don't appear to have any qualifications for this, after all.  

Is It ‘Thatcher’..? It Usually Is…

The key culprit, in my opinion? Screen time.

Oh. Silly me.  

On a child’s first day at school, it’s normal to expect a few nerves. But they should be able to move around confidently, pick up stationery, make new friends, build a relationship with their teacher and start to feel part of a wider community. Instead, a recent survey reported that some children in England and Wales are unable to sit up or hold a pencil. I have seen kids racked with separation anxiety and unable to form bonds. Upset and confused, they miss instructions and hold back or lash out. To a busy teacher this looks like a lack of ability, or a disruptive child to be managed. Children are simply being set up to fail.

Hmmm, sounds to me like this 'busy teacher' is simply getting her excuses in early... 

For a while, it seemed as if the pandemic might have been the culprit for delayed development. Lockdowns undeniably had an impact on the development of children raised during that period as they were unable to play outside and interact with others, but five years on, it would seem that this was a short-term issue masking a much longer-term trend.

Wow, can't blame the pandemic? I thought that could be blamed for everything. But then I'd reckoned without the modern bugbear: tech. Specifically, tech in the hands of someone they don't like. 

More and more parents relied on smartphones to work, organise their lives, shop, and keep in touch with friends and family. Burnt-out and distracted, they spent less time actively parenting. In turn, they handed their kids a device to keep them entertained. The result has been children growing up with less physical activity and face-to-face social interaction. Imagine spending a year immobilised in a cast – your muscles would weaken and your movements would become awkward. Now, think about children missing foundational years of muscle development, when practice should be natural and constant, because, instead of moving, children have been incentivised to sit quietly with a device.

An expensive device, at that! So at least this won't affect Labour's preferred voting demographic, eh? 

Even more worryingly, these outcomes are not being distributed equally among children; they affect those who already face significant disadvantages due to economic and racial inequality.

Economic inequality? Does anything say as much about the reason for such 'inequality' as buying a £600 babysitting device and then claiming you can't feed your own kids? 

And What’s Wrong With That?

Labour MPs said that while they strongly supported breakfast clubs, it was clear that the emphasis on the clubs helping to end child poverty was evidence of a wider initiative to “soften us up” to be told that the two-child benefit cap would remain.

Well, yes. If government (in reality, the taxpayer) has to feed other people's children, limiting them seems sensible, surely?

They said there were now signals that ministers would reject scrapping the cap this summer despite the fact that most experts and charities say it would be by far the most effective way of reducing poverty. Introduced by the Tories in 2017, the two-child limit prevents families from claiming child tax credits or universal credit for more than two children.

Proof the Tories did get a few things right, if only by accident.  

A group of Labour MPs has been pressing for the government to meet them halfway by extending the cap from two to three children, which they claim would cost very little. But government insiders suggested that the idea had already been rejected by the government’s own child poverty taskforce which is chaired jointly by Phillipson and the work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall.

Principled of them to decide not to encourage the breeding of more voters, though maybe it's because Rachel from Complaints is too worried about the so-called Black Hole in the finances. 

Last July seven Labour MPs were suspended from the whip for voting in favour of scrapping the two-child limit which has been criticised by several senior figures in the party as punitive and indefensible. But while ministers have suggested they would like to see it lifted they have said this can only be done if the public finances allow.

And they don't.  

Perhaps That’s The Issue – There Should Be Judgement, Just Not Of The State Of The House…

Kirstie knew it was time to ask for help, but she was scared. "I was so embarrassed," she says. The mother-of-three's house in Ipswich had got out of control after a traumatic event left her bedbound. "I had a stillborn baby girl in May 2022 and I had to carry on for my other two children but every day was a struggle and I spent months in bed," she explains.

There are pictures, and they aren't the worst I've ever seen, no dead decayed pets, rodent droppings or unwashed dishes, but still.... 

Every surface of the house was covered in clutter and one of the three bedrooms was out of bounds because it was full of broken furniture, so her six-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter had to share a room. The dining room was full of baby items like a crib and bouncer and pram that Kirstie could not bear to look at.

Is she single? No, Reader. But he's not much use either.  

"Both myself and my husband Stephen really struggled with our mental health and we couldn't keep on top of the house," she says.

So, what to do? Well, the answer's obvious isn't it? Breed again!  

The NHS worker conceived another baby but it was a high-risk pregnancy, leaving her anxiety "through the roof". She started having therapy at home, but a visiting nurse struggled to find space to sit down.

/facepalm 

When their baby son was born, Kirstie knew it was not the ideal environment for him. After a week in the neonatal unit, she worried about bringing him home. They looked into decluttering services but they were too expensive for her and her husband, who works in a supermarket.

"I took some photos of the house and I was so nervous, I was shaking, but I showed the leader of a baby group I went to, who got in touch with a health visitor who referred me to the charity Dora Brown," the 37-year-old says. The Suffolk charity has a team of 80 volunteers who transform homes, free-of-charge, for families living in crisis.

Ten volunteers pitched up at Kirstie's house in June and "got stuck in". They sorted everything into piles of items to be thrown away, kept, recycled or given to charity. They gave them more storage and took away their rubbish and even their dirty laundry, later bringing it back and putting it away.

Cleaned, one assumes... 

"When you're really depressed and really overwhelmed, these things feel like huge, insurmountable tasks. I was just trying to get through each day. "It was such a positive experience and there was absolutely no judgement," she says.

I can't help but wonder if maybe that's the heart of this issue. 

The charity, which has a waiting list of families needing help, hopes to expand across England, but that depends on funding and for now it is "small but mighty" with six part-time staff.

It does seem as if it's a genuine charity, not one of the many fake ones that are simply fronts for government propaganda or sinecures for ex-politicians, but still... 

There Is No Real Question

Like most hearing parents of deaf children, my first close relationship with a deaf person was with my child. Despite a relatively broad cultural education, I knew next to nothing about hearing loss or deaf culture. What little I had absorbed was an incomplete and almost entirely inaccurate patchwork of pop culture snippets – the mother’s horror when her baby doesn’t react to the fire engine’s siren in the film Mr Holland’s Opus (1995); Beethoven’s struggle to hear the first performance of his Ninth Symphony; the lift scene in Jerry Maguire (1996) where the loving boyfriend signs “you complete me” to his partner; Quasimodo’s apparent industrial deafness from the bells of Notre-Dame; and, worst of all, the appalling memory of my university housemate imitating a deaf accent for laughs.

This woman's dilemma is whether or not to put her child under the knife to install a cochlear implant that would allw them to hear. Why is this even a dilemma? 

But what I had experienced as a genuinely caring, evidence-based and pragmatic attempt to empower deaf children and give them the widest set of options had been singled out as an example of “audism” by influential deaf and deaf-adjacent critics – a sinister assimilationist model with paternalistic colonial overtones and a complicated history.

Ah. Yes. The nutters... 

Not only was it inaccurate (no hearing technology makes hearing easy or natural for deaf people), but it spoke of, at best, a normative desire to correct or fix something that was not in their view broken – only different.

Humans should be born with functional hearing - if they aren't, then it's a defect. Not a sign that they are part of a community with its own culture. 

Proof – As If We Needed More – That The Wrong People Are Attending University

The parents of a student who killed herself after receiving inaccurate exam results are calling for universities to provide better support.

What? How exactly are universities to anticipate some snowflake topping herself over something so trivial...except, perhaps, by better screening of the people they let in? 

Mared Foulkes, from Anglesey, received an email in July 2020 saying that she had failed an assessment and could not progress to her third year – even though she had already re-sat it and passed.

Did she know she'd passed on the retake? The article doesn't make it clear. 

Mared’s family want to see a change in the law on how universities support students with mental health issues, and how they communicate with the families of students.

Mared’s mother, Iona Foulkes, said: “She came home that evening from work and we had a normal family meal.

“Then she decided she wanted to make a cheesecake and said she was going to the local supermarket and asked if I wanted anything.

"She took the car keys and left.”

Two police officers visited the house later that evening to tell her family that she had died.

How this could have been forseen by the university, if the family didn't suss it out, is anyone's guess.  

"She had worked so hard at her course," her mother added. "She had her heart set on becoming a pharmacist from a young age. She had done voluntary work in a hospital in the Philippines and been accepted to study in China.

“To be informed that you have failed two years of study and you couldn’t progress – it must have been horrific.

“You are talking about a 21-year-old, a young person getting this information.

Did she expect to go through life never encountering disappointment? If so, her family failed her.  

“It is a tragedy which should never have happened. It shouldn’t be. Something needs to change – quickly – before more families have to endure what we have to live with for the rest of our lives.”

Well, we could mandate mental health assessment before attendance? 

Nine months before Mared died, she had visited the university’s support services to discuss her mental health, but her family did not find out until a year after her death.

They had no idea? It's not like the university could breach her confidentiality and tell them, is it?  

A 'Cruel Policy', Ruth? I'd Say It's Not Cruel Enough...

This morning, about 300,000 children woke up in households affected by the benefit cap. Lots of these children – enough to fill more than 1,000 primary schools – will be living in cold and damp homes, with food cupboards near empty; in deep poverty that leaves normal childhood activities, such as after-school clubs, swimming lessons and family days out, far out of reach. Since 2020, I’ve been working with colleagues at the universities of York and Oxford and the London School of Economics to investigate the impact of the benefit cap and the two-child limit (commonly referred to as the two-child benefit cap) on families with three or more children.

She doesn't mean the effect on us, the long suffering taxpayer, of course.

In our research with families affected by the benefit cap, we have spoken to parents such as Lucy, who pays £1,375 a month to rent a mould-ridden, rat-infested property. At times, the cap has left her family with as little as £65 a week to survive on once the rent and some of the bills are paid. £65. For five of them. It is simply not possible to get by on that.

We spoke to Lucy four times over four years, and she was always doing all she could to move out of that property. But as our analysis of Zoopla listings shows, the housing just isn’t there.

How far afield was she looking? That often proves to be the stumbling block. 

But there is a complete absence of affordable housing in many areas.

In the areas that these people want to live, usually. They don't see the wisdom of cutting their cloth to meet their funds. 

Statistics released today reveal that 123,000 households in England, Scotland and Wales were affected by the benefit cap in May 2024, a rise of about 46,000 in just three months according to government figures. Introduced by George Osborne in 2013, the cap means the most a family without regular work can claim is £25,323 in London and £22,020 in the rest of the country.

In many countries, you wouldn't get anything if you didn't work for it!  

Both the benefit cap and the two-child limit sever a foundational principle within our welfare state that people should be entitled to support based on what they need.

'Entitlement' is the real issue here, isn't it? 

Lifting the benefit cap would provide immediate relief to hundreds of thousands of families such as Lucy’s and Zauna’s, who are currently facing a long, cold winter. What better way, after all, to start investing in our future than by ensuring children’s basic needs are met?

We do. There's a little thing called 'child support'.  

If You Build It, They Won’t Come

Parents do not use parental controls on Facebook and Instagram, according to Meta’s Nick Clegg, with adults failing to embrace the 50 child safety tools the company has introduced in recent years.

So what to do, what to do? Well, it's obvious, isn't it? Don't give them the choice, impose it.

Regulatory pressure is building on tech companies to protect children from harmful content, with the Australian government announcing plans this week to ban younger teenagers from accessing social media. Speaking at an event hosted by Chatham House in London, Clegg said parents were not using controls that allowed them to set time limits and schedule viewing breaks. “One of the things we do find … is that even when we build these controls, parents don’t use them,” he said. “So we have a bit of a behavioural issue, which is: we as an engineering company might build these things, and then we say at events like this: ‘Oh, we’ve given parents choices to restrict the amount of time kids are [online]’ – parents don’t use it.”

Perhaps they don't accept that it's the disaster they are being told that it is? Perhaps they are just lazy?  

Andy Burrows, the chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation, a charity set up by Russell’s family, said: “Nick Clegg would do a service to children’s safety by stopping passing the buck and starting to take responsibility for the preventable harm caused by Meta’s choices.”

Why is it his responsibilty? They aren't his children. They aren't your children either..  

Why Did You Not Tell Your Son To Avoid Dangerous Areas?

A fatal accident inquiry at the city’s Sheriff Court heard from his mother, Joanne Ferguson who claimed it had been ‘well known’ children had been able to venture onto the site.

She wanted to know why nothing had been done to stop them and wanted to know who had uncovered the manhole, when and why it had been left uncovered allowing her son to tumble down 20ft to his death.

I guess she didn't demand to know how her son got the idea trespass was A-OK because the finger of suspicion only pointed one way... 

Graeme Clark, joint managing director at RJ McLeod, the principal contractor for the flood alleviation project, told the inquiry he had ‘no idea’ how the boy had been able to get onto the site and access the manhole.He told the inquiry that while there, he walked around to inspect the fencing and the only damage he could see had been caused by emergency vehicles coming in that morning.

Which presumably had the effect of covering up any point of entry... 

Ms Gillespie pointed out he had said he had not known how Shea got into the site adding: ‘But immediately you thought you’d put extra fencing in the area next to the play park?’ The witness responded that the company had been aware of the play park when the original security plan was drawn up, and the firm ‘had a contractual obligation from Glasgow City Council not to fence it off’.

When he was asked why, he replied: ‘You’ll have to ask Glasgow City Council.’

Oh, if only we had journalists who did just that, instead of regurgitating court transcripts and calling it 'news'. 

Really? It Makes Me Feel Utter Despair...

...when I hear politicians talking about lifting the two-child limit, it makes me feel excited and hopeful.

I suppose it takes a particular mindset to celebrate the forthcoming opportunity to profit from others' hard work. I'm glad I don't have it. 

Even without the limit, we would only be living just a little bit better. The price of everything – gas, electricity, water, council tax – keeps going up, so things would still be very hard. Surviving is so difficult. I wish someone in power would assess the current price of everything and think about how much families actually need to not only get by, but to live on.

I wish that someone would remember that those 'hardworking families who want to live and not just get by' will instead be further impoverished by being taxed to support the feckless like you...

I did used to get some financial support from my children’s father, but that’s all stopped now. My relationship with him was very abusive, and I don’t want to ask him for anything now, as he always expects something in return. For the past 16 years, he and I were on and off – and there were arguments, fights and violence. We’ve separated now, and I’m trying to do what’s right for me and the kids.

You had three kids with him despite all that, and now you want the taxpayer to pay for them? GTFO!

Why can't the 'Guardian' ever find a genuinely deserving case to champion? 

And Parents, Hannah? Where Do They Feature?

Received this on Thursday: 

Here's the text:

"The King’s Speech contained some positive first steps on health, reiterating the government’s commitment for the NHS to focus more on prevention. This included specific legislation to restrict the advertising of junk food to children and banning sales of high caffeine energy drinks to children.

"However, if Labour is going to meet its ambition of achieving the healthiest generation of children in our history, they will need to go much further than this and take a wider range of steps to improve our food system. Recent evidence showed children in England are getting shorter, that life expectancy at birth is decreasing, and children are more likely to have obesity and type 2 diabetes, highlighting just how important addressing this issue is.

"The King’s Speech also touched on issues of wealth creation, opportunities for all, and getting through the cost of living crisis, however there was no mention of the child poverty strategy previously committed to. With millions sadly still experiencing food insecurity across the UK, it was positive to see commitments around a better deal for workers, however more action is desperately needed to ensure everybody can access and afford a healthy and sustainable diet, including by enhancing benefits and strengthening existing nutritional safety nets such as Healthy Start and Free School Meals."

You could be forgiven for reading this and thinking that the UK was some strange sci-fi world where children were raised in podding hutches as wards of the State, and not by mothers and fathers with responsibility for their welfare and upbringing, couldn't you..? 

The Thing You Need To Remember About Reports...

...is they may not go the way you want.

The mother of a 17-year-old trans girl who was a patient at the now-shut Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust said she had initially welcomed Cass’s inquiry, but had been left “disappointed”.

If she's the mother of a child who has decided it was 'born in the wrong body', a lifetime of disappointment is heading her way... 

She had believed the Tavistock was “fundamentally not fit for purpose” as a specialist clinic set up to handle a small number of patients, but the “hysterical environment” surrounding the report was leading to young people losing out on healthcare.

'Healthcare' is a strange term to see used for chemical and surgical castration.  

She described being “shocked as hell” when her child began saying she was a girl at the age of eight in 2015.

A charity recommended she be referred to the Tavistock, “on the basis that it would either go away or it wouldn’t – and it didn’t go away”. “[Because she was autistic] they took everything really slowly. Really, really slowly.”

Another autistic child claiming they were 'transgender'. What a surprise.  

“Puberty blockers have been really good for her. As she entered puberty, she was really, really dysphoric about her shoulders, her facial hair growing her voice deepening. She was very distressed by it and very sad.”

What this child needed was mental health treatment, but what it got was collusion in it's delisions that it could become something it wasn't born to be. The adults haven't been in charge for a long time.  

The woman said the Cass report represented “an agenda from up on high that things need to be more difficult”.

“It’s hard enough as a parent without having the entire society or media pointing at transgender people as if they’re some aberration or as if they threaten us.”

They are some aberration. How many 'transgender children' can anyone remember from their own schooldays? For that matter, how many 'autistic' children? This is a social contagion, spread as much by social media as by word of mouth.   

And the medical profession has been found sorely lacking in containing yet another plague. That's the finding of the Cass Report.  

Oh, To Be A Fly On The Wall!

Do you suppose the subject of poor parenting included pretending your son is your daughter?

Did they come to any earth-shattering conclusions?

“It was a positive and respectful meeting, which allowed us to initially get to know each other. Although I don’t want to go into any detail, we discussed family and the challenges of parenting.”

Yes, it's hard to be a parent these days; the choice between raising a confused child who doesn't know what sex it is, or one who's obsessed with serial killers. Tough call.  

'Gosh, How Unexpected' Said Nobody, Ever...

Actress and TV presenter Danielle Mason...

Sorry, Reader, no idea...

...claims her 12-year-old son, who has autism, hasn't been to school for over a year due to a lack of funding for his special educational needs - and says 'he'll never go back because his confidence has been knocked so much'. Mason, 41, who lives in Bracknell, says her son Rudy, who should be in Year Eight, has been declined a place at numerous schools in Berkshire after he was excluded 21 times from his last school, The Brakenhale School.

Twenty-one times...! 

Speaking to MailOnline, the mother-of-two claims that the schools 'cannot cope' with her son's EHCP [Education, Health and Care Plan] due to a 'lack of government funding' - and that he's received homework for the first time in a year this week. She says her daughter Delilah, who also has an EHCP due to mental health problems, is currently in Year Six at primary school, and has also failed to get a place at several senior schools.

Two children with mental health issues? Gosh, what are the odds?  

The mother claimed her son would be excluded for 'silly reasons' such as coming in wearing his trainers instead of his school shoes, while other days he was 'triggered' when the school couldn’t handle his needs properly.

But sweetie, those aren't 'silly reasons', are they? 

Danielle revealed it has become like a full-time job trying to find a place for her children's educational needs.

It's probably the only full-time job she's ever had. And she's failing at it miserably. 

Or, You Could Actually Do Some Parenting?

Many parents of digitally obsessed teens must have wished they could bin their smartphones. As evidence mounts about the risks of social media, there is a growing public clamour to protect children better – with some now even calling for a ban.

How many of these parents demanding someone else parent their child have actually bought the things for them, and are paying the airtime?  

The debate in the UK took on a fresh resonance in recent days after Esther Ghey, the mother of the murdered teenager Brianna Ghey, added her voice to those highlighting the dangers of smartphones.

“We’d like a law introduced, so that there are mobile phones that are suitable for under-16s,” she told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg last Sunday. “So if you’re over 16, you can have an adult phone, but then under the age of 16 you can have a children’s phone, which will not have all of the social media apps that are out there now.”

You can already do that now, if you want. Don't allow them to download anything you don't approve. It's just that you have to make the effort.  

In demanding tougher curbs on big tech, she echoed other bereaved parents who believe social media played some role in the loss of their children – including Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly took her own life after viewing harmful content online.

As Longrider points out, the very people who we shouldn't be listening to on the subject. Their personal tragedy gives them no special insight. The experts don't agree with their plans, but who is listening to them? 

Despite the acknowledged dangers, few experts and campaigners the Guardian spoke to believed an outright ban on social media use by under-16s was workable, or even desirable – though all are united in believing tech firms must do more.

Why don't they demand parents do more? They are, after all, the ones with most to lose... 

Lady Beeban Kidron, who campaigns for children’s rights online, said there was understandable focus on removing harmful content from apps – but policymakers should also be focusing on their underlying design.

“What we have to concentrate on is: why are we allowing companies to give addictive products to children? There is no reason on God’s earth that they have to be designed to be addictive. That is a business choice,” she said. “You’ve basically got a faulty product here: they need to fix it.”

That would mean looking under the bonnet of popular apps and rewiring the algorithms blamed for hooking teens – and in some cases, for radicalising them.

Good grief!