Plugs

I've been thinking about them a lot recently. Blame it on the biological clock, ticking away without my permission or desire, changing the way I look at babies and couples with them from horror and fear to something more akin to some kind of ... yearning that doesn't fit at all with my current financial or life situation. Don't worry, I'm not about to pop one out, it has just been rather odd to feel this strange emptiness inside me, a desire to be full with a creation of love. Icky I know. Nothing like reality, I know. Blame it on those rose-tinted spectacles my Dad always accused me of wearing.

However, various discussions and news reports have made me wonder, like many others before me, (there are various blogs on this topic...) if there should be some sort of licence for childrearing. Or, more simply, mandatory parenting classes at secondary schools. I understand that there are many disturbing implications involved in the government or society at large deciding who can have children and who can't; but then seeing as we all end up paying for everyone's biological experiments gone wrong (not to mention the emotional and physical pain that many kids go through), shouldn't there be some sort of ... precedent to be set before people can start churning out the wee little'uns?

I have not really thought this through all that much, but in light of recent (and recurring but mercifully not that prevalent) cases of severe child abuse ending in death - Baby P., Victoria Climbié and a few others spring to mind, not to mention the British government's recent decision to install CTV cameras in some of the homes of 'problem families' (at a cost of £400 million ($668 M)!) it seems like an increasingly important consideration to me. You see, I really think that parenting classes (and a shift in social services, including income support etc.) could help reduce the amount of children born into families who don't know how or don't even really want to look after them.

Let me clarify something here. I am not advocating that those who 'fail' the classes should not be allowed to have children, or that the government should put agents in place to constantly check up on the raising of some (or all) children over others. More that...well... in all honesty I have not researched any statistics but it does strike me that the British government will give you a house and money if you pop out a child and are unemployed (then give you more money and an even bigger house if you have more: where is the incentive to work?) and have more teen pregnancies and 'problem families' (am not making a correlation between the two; more that I think certain behaviours are generational - as in become the norm as are learned from those around us) than most other western countries.

*A quick Google search - what would we do without it? - shows that the UK and US are top on teen pregnancy rates in the developed world (guess Hungary is not counted as developed then).*

Don't get me wrong, I think it is great that there is help available for those who need it; and having lived on that sort of help myself at various points in the past, I would be hypercritical to deem it unnecessary. What really gets to me is the people who abuse the system: most people who grew up in the UK know of at least 1 person in their peer group whose sole desire when they left school was to get pregnant and get a house. The crazy thing is that that is how it works. This is where seemingly contradicotry statements appear.... You see, I hate the idea of the nanny state, but at the same time think that a lot of heartache, pain, time and money could be saved by making some small changes.

- Give teenagers real advice on bringing up children. Give them alternatives to getting pregnant at 16, being given a house and living their lives in unemployed sloth from thereon in.

- Make all teenagers and prospective parents take some sort of parenting class, from the basics of changing nappies and feeding, bathing etc. to more complex things (that are somehow transmitted as objectively as possible) such as child development.

- Reduce income support and jobseekers allowance payments for those who don't show any effort to find work (for those who can work) over a set period of time.

Meh I dunno... just sometimes I wish I could change the world and help it become a better place somehow. However, I should really be starting with myself. As Mahatma Gandhi said "Be the change you want to see in the world".