Elizabeth Pisani
It’s hard to know what goes on in other people’s relationships. But there is one point on which all of us can be certain: our parents had sex. Most of us, though, don’t want to imagine their amorous exploits, and most parents don’t care to spend much time thinking about the finer details of their children’s sex lives either. All of which makes the ongoing controversy about sex education in schools somewhat strange.
Children currently cover the technicalities of reproduction in science classes. But from 2011, 15 year olds will be given sex education, whether their parents like it or not, as part of a compulsory class teaching the basics of adult life. Personal, social, health and economic education (or PSHE—ugh!) covers the joys and pitfalls of relationships and sex, alongside internet safety, first aid, and the downsides of addiction and gangs. It will be part of the national curriculum from the age of five.
The problem is that parents will be able to pull their kids out until they are 15. That seems odd: if such education is important, why make it optional for most of a child’s schooling? Even more bafflingly, 30 per cent of adults tell pollsters that they think parents should be able to deny their kids access to sex eduction altogether. “Parents are the first educators of their children,” declared the Catholic Education Service of England and Wales. And yet the truth is that the “ick factor” of thinking about your children having sex makes parents peculiarly ill-suited as sex educators.
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Simon Crompton
Another primary school dressing-up day looms. This term it’s the Victorians. Before that it was the Romans, and the Egyptians. My wife and I scrabble around painting cardboard and tying up sheets, sometimes even buying a costume that our nine-year-old won’t find embarrassing. It seems like harmless fun. But dressing-up days, extra homework, pressure on school attendance and the expectation that parents should do more to support their children’s education are taking a toll. You can chart the discontent on the Mumsnet website, where parents complain in their thousands against such demands, particularly from primary schools. One suggested dealing with the dressing-up request on world book day by giving children a day off, and saying they’d gone as the Invisible Man.
Sometimes parents reject school rules out of self-interest. Figures released in June showed 397,851 daily absences in England between September and December 2008—an increase of more than 20,500 in two years largely due to parents taking holidays in term-time, when they are cheaper. But increasingly there is an ethical dimension to parental non-compliance. Tom Hodgkinson, author of The Idle Parent (Hamish Hamilton) makes a virtue of taking his kids for weekday camping breaks. More serious is Kevin Rooney, a parent and a teacher from Hertfordshire, who recently spoke out against the increasingly formalised involvement of parents in homework and other areas of school life. He thinks their time can be better spent with their children on other things: “A parent should be free to parent, and a teacher to teach, but there’s been a real blurring of the line.”
Of course, attempts to reach out to parents are neither new nor entirely unwelcome, and are often pushed by high-achieving schools. Good communication between parents and teachers has long been important, while measuring absenteeism is nothing new. But the past decade has seen such moves pushed forward ever more aggressively by a government enthralled by evidence that parental engagement pushes up academic standards. And busy parents have been caught up in a blur of demands.
The root of this lies in home-school agreements, the contracts between schools and parents first introduced by education secretary David Blunkett in 1998. The idea was fine: schools would give parents more information and support, and in return parents would agree to objectives set by the school, for example on attendance, homework, going to parent evenings, acting on information sent home in letters, supporting school activities, and so on. Implicit in the agreements was the fact that teachers couldn’t do everything needed to help a child learn—a belief supported by the research. But whereas parent-school agreements used to be voluntary, in July schools secretary Ed Balls announced that they will be made compulsory under the education bill to be introduced in the next session of parliament.
To many parents, the tensions caused by increasing school demands add up to only a little light-hearted grumbling. But for poorer parents, or working parents with less time, this is a more serious matter. It’s the imposition of special measures on every parent—no matter the circumstances—that frustrates and angers some parents. Parental engagement is helpful. But the research also shows how important it is not to over-pressurise families who already support their child’s learning in different ways.
A government review by Professor Charles Desforges in 2003 pointed out that it was good parenting in general that had most influence on children’s attainment, not specific measures tied up with schools. He concluded that results might improve if initiatives were targeted at those he calls “working-class pupils.” Elsewhere, a review by Professor Susan Hallam at the Institute of Education found that parents as well as pupils and teachers needed to be involved for homework to have benefit—a good reason to make sure that demands about homework are carefully tailored. Parental involvement can, after all, come in many forms. It may be about providing a stable environment, or intellectual stimulation, or social values, or high aspirations. Yet parents are too often being strong-armed into the same model of engagement, with individual family circumstances, interests, abilities and parenting styles ignored. The result can be alienation, even at good schools.
Other centralised government messages that treat everyone as if they were the same—on health education, for example—have similar disadvantages. Carefully targeted local projects by primary care trusts using “social marketing” techniques have proved effective in combating smoking, binge drinking and poor diet, and getting those with a high risk of diabetes to get screening. Yet the amount invested in such campaigns is tiny compared to the blunderbuss television and billboard campaigns telling us to cut down on booze, eat less salt and cut out the fags—which irritate the moderately-living majority, and are ignored by the minority they are aimed at.
Many parents don’t speak out about their frustration with the one-size-fits-all demands made on them by schools, for fear that they will sound lazy or uncommitted to their children. Instead, they go along reluctantly. The result is that a well-intentioned but clumsily implemented policy risks alienating more than it helps. It is whining parents, not pupils, who are creeping like snails unwillingly to school.
Sam Leith
This month, as the alarming agriculturalist on The Fast Show used to declare, I have mostly been preoccupied with… nappies! I know, I know. Prospect readers have their minds, no doubt, on higher things than what some stranger uses to contain his infant daughter’s below-stairs mustard apocalypse.
But bear with me. For thousands of new parents like myself, the artwork to which we are most often exposed is Disney’s felt-tip-pen reimagining of EH Shepard’s delicate pencil sketches, as positioned on the front panel of a pair of size one Huggies. Here, an inch or two south of the folded navel, is Pooh. Here is Piglet. Here is Eeyore. Every time your child craps, you meet Art.
This, you might reasonably object, isn’t art. This is marketing. Sure. But since the defining dynamic of the fine art world in the last 20 years has been its ever nearer approach to the condition of advertising, and advertising, at its top end, has become an artform all of its own, I regard that point as moot.
Here is something that started out as proper art—not gallery art, but if you regard Phiz (Dickens’s illustrator) and Arthur Rackham or even the illustrated books of William Blake as worth consideration, I think Shepard falls into place too—and made the journey into commercial or pop art via Disney. (Paul Johnson’s 2006 book Creators contains a splendidly eccentric essay comparing Walt Disney, favourably, with Picasso.)
Disney, as corporation rather than filmmaker, took that process on into advertising. Thanks to the endless reduplication of the images on every conceivable object from tea-towel to toothbrush, Winnie the Pooh’s life as artwork has been swamped by his life as marketing icon. And through that to Huggies. But it is very, very deeply odd that every Huggies comes tattooed with Winnie the Pooh. Unimaginable millions must have been spent in licensing fees to Disney for the rights to the characters. They’ve picked and chosen where the spend goes, too—the textured pattern on a Huggies wet wipe is a generic teddy bear without a hint of the Hundred Acre Wood.
The question is: whom is this image actually for? The wearer of the nappies is too young to make sense of the image (it faces out, in any case—front towards enemy, as they say in the landmine business). And the changer of the nappies is, for Pete’s sake, a grownup. Are we expected to gurgle with infantile pleasure every time we see Eeyore’s cute little donkey face?
Pampers, too, come adorned with cartoon animals; as do the waistbands of Bambo, the supposedly more environmentally right-on brand I’ve been peer-pressured into going for: blissed-out cartoon monkey; pink cat; green snake (with rosy cheeks and pink hearts floating above it to make clear it’s not, like, a baby-constrictor); winsome zebra; pink kangaroo, laughing crocodile (with anatomically improbable eyelashes).
And it’s not just nappies. Except for things like sterilisers and breast pumps—where the look is domestic/medical: all clean lines and sparkling curves, like the packaging of dishwasher tablets—the language of selling baby stuff to adults is about bright colours, cartoons, bubbly writing, hearts and butterflies.
There is, clearly, a slippage here. In the first place, there’s the slightly absurd assumption that parents will find their baby cuter if it is wearing a cute animal on its nappy: that Pooh on the nappy’s crotch, if you like, supplements or even competes for the parents’ attention with the gurgling creature wearing it.
But there’s something odder still than that going on. The assumption seems to be that becoming a parent makes you infantile yourself. You are supposed to be drawn to pink giraffes and crocodiles with eyelashes. The only way I can explain it is in terms of an unspoken theory of parenting that has you identifying with the child; or, more precisely and curiously, identifying with the version of the child that you remember being.
It’s not, after all, Tellytubbies or Fimbles that show up on these nappies: it’s good old-fashioned Winnie-the-Pooh. It’s the art that you, as a parent, consumed when you were a child.
This retro thing ties in with children’s toys too. Think of those wooden choo-choo trains. We teach our toddlers: “What does the train say? Wooh! Wooh!” Aeroplanes still have propellers and go “Neeaaaaoooowwww!” Yet neither of those things has been general in the world since long before I was born.
A complementary trend sees babies in designer labels, punk-rock babygros, or T-shirts with knowing, hipster slogans. We’re on the one hand using babies as billboards for adult ideas; and on the other, being sold the chance to re-infantilise ourselves. My suspicion is that, in our culture, parenthood is now at least subliminally about getting a second chance at being a kid.
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