THUS Magazine

Mum's not the word

By Julia Margo, Demos

I expect that my fascination with Karen Matthews is predictably middle class. Her crime may be heinous, but she has captured our imagination in her role as working class anti-hero: a reminder of how some people (the ‘other half’) live in today’s Britain. The weekend coverage of sink estates – the ‘bubble communities’ in which the working class associates of Matthews and other greasy-haired and withered welfare-dependent mothers supposedly live and breed, governed by social norms unrecognisable to you or me – reveals our need to intellectualise from above the divides that shape our society. Not to make sense of them but to shiver in smug confidence that this is not our world.

Clear your plate, Emily, or mummy will patronise you

In middle class suburbs children skip to school with nutritious lunch boxes and lacrosse sticks. In Matthews-land they walk barefoot with mud for shoes and lice in their hair. Or so our narrative goes. Poverty is linked to poorer child well being, but lots of poor parents are brilliant and norms of behaviour in many small working class communities are often better enforced than in some looser middle class hubs.Somewhere in the reporting of this horrible story cruelty and bad parenting became a class issue and being poor or out of work became synonymous with child abuse and neglect.

Take the Conservative party’s new plans to intervene in low income homes where parents do not work. In these homes, parenting style and effectiveness will be examined by trained staff as well as parental attitudes to work. The assumption is that parents who do not work or work sporadically are worse parents. An army of trained welfare to work officers will therefore help parents into work and thus magically solve their parenting deficits. An earlier idea from the Conservatives was to use the tax and benefit system to promote marriage, the assumption being that married parents are better parents. Matthews, who is neither married nor employed, would presumably have been targeted by both interventions. (For balance, let’s not ignore the incumbent Labour government’s ‘Welfare to Work’ plans to force disability claimants and other cadres of the long-term unemployed to seek work or lose benefits in an economic downturn with the prospect of 3 million unemployed amongst the able-bodied portion of the population? JK)

Why would they not work?

The statistics do suggest that children are more at risk if they come from single parent or unemployed families. A wealth of econometric analysis shows there is a small association between being very poor and being a bad parent and being a single parent and neglecting your children. But this is merely freakonomics, it tells us nothing about why this may be the case, and since the vast majority of single parents and unemployed parents are absolutely fine, it appears to be a red herring.

It is quite simply more difficult to parent alone and without money; we should not ignore the need to tackle structural disadvantage in society if we are to genuinely protect children. But being poor does not make parents cruel or neglectful. The link between bad parenting and poverty or unemployment is there because the skills required for good parenting are similar to those required for successful employment and holding down a relationship. Quite simply nice, friendly people, who would make nicer, friendlier parents, keep their partners more often than moody, difficult people and tend to find it easier to get and keep work. And following this through, people with personality disorders and extreme interpersonal difficulties find it next to impossible to work or hold down a relationship and parent in a Karen Matthews-esq style.

Identifying and treating antisocial traits in childhood will definitely help

The solution to genuinely bad parenting (as opposed to the average struggling parents) cannot be to either redistribute money, or to force parents into work and incentivise marriage. These address merely the symptoms not the cause. And at the extreme end, would not address the interpersonal difficulties that explain why a mother would abuse her child. In the long-term we need to develop interventions that address the roots of cruel parenting: interpersonal development. Indications of anti-social personality disorder and other psychological and social problems are often apparent in children and teenagers. The way to protect the next generation of children from cruel parenting is therefore to invest in interventions that would address developmental problems in early childhood and end the cycle of cruelty.