Wanted - role model

Within my life time the family has gone from conservative and insular to global and transient. Not mine, but families around me were centred on the close family units of the parents, the Aunts and Uncles and the Grandparents. This closed circle set the norm for what you could or could not do, what interests were possible and how you expressed yourself. They provide the reference point and were quick to correct any deviation. From within their safe haven and encircled by their safety shield the children grew and were invited to discover, explore and gain experience in the surrounding world of shops, church, amusements, sports and the evening out and the occasional film. They set the norms of dress and speech and expected conformity. They set the bar and were the only role model to follow. The radio, the newspaper and magazines or the annual trip might give insights into other possible lifestyle. But just brief glimpses, nothing substantive to base a breakaway lifestyle on. Even your school fellows were social clones. You were the product of your immediate society. 

Then came television, breaking apart the insular family time together, introducing appreciable insights in to the how others live, offering tangible alternatives. Television plus of course social mobility. The freedom to roam and spread, dispersing the family core, breaking forever the close bonds that tied families together. Lots of other social factors were also playing, but mobility and television were the key factors that finally broke the former almost total reliance on the family unit, to get by.

Nowadays the core family unit, of parent and children, cannot compete against the rival attractions of  television, personal computer, online social media, live streaming of news or entertainment, virtual avatars. The family unit is dysfunctional, it can no longer sit together at best spending quality time relaxing in each others company at worst just updating each other on events. Even the core unit of parents is challenged with a single parent, with possibly serial partners, becoming the norm. So what role models do our children of today encounter that will give substance to their perception of who they are and the society they inhabit?  Not the schools with their imposed roles to mentor our new citizens and assume quasi-parental duties. The contacts are too fleeting, too transient, too impersonal to really count. We are just left with the the fictions they are now surrounded by, of cardboard caricature soap stars, media celebrity fantasy lives or even worse some ephemeral virtual being lacking any substance beyond a spotty teenagers imagination. 


In this global connected world the old role models are totally irrelevant. Right? Wrong, when even the language we speak modifies our thinking and logic structures what chance have we of assimilating other cultures. I defy any English born native speaking person dropped into the middle of say China, or India, or South America, to feel at ease and be able to comprehend the reactions and intentions of the people now surrounding them, let alone elicit favourable reactions to their aspirations. No, we are of our society. As I explored in Know Yourself, who we are as individual depends on the society we are born into. We have to have relevant role models to inflate and guide our sense of being, as that person within that society. Without it lies insecurity, anxiety, misplacement, that feeling of never belonging never being understood. We have to rethink our societies evolution. As a start we have to restructure the family unit as I explored in A baby is for life.

A baby is for life

Caught a breakfast item the other morning about a girl bemoaning that the NHS will not fund her IVF treatment for the baby she so desperately wants with her new partner. The significance of the two children she successfully had but with a previous partner escape her self preoccupation. Babies are a necessary and an essential status image to show off to the world how successful you are. It is your right to have as and when you choose.

Maybe, just possibly there are other considerations that have got lost along the way and need to be taken down and dusted off. Yes, having a child is the single most important life event for man or woman. Our society needs strong healthy children to sustain its population, provide the labour and wealth generators to keep the social infrastructure rolling on. We need stable, well-rounded and confident children that fit easily into the established social networks and patterns. The few odd-ball adventurers or opportunists can be absorbed. We know that children with a single parent or possibly worse serial parents do not grow up to become stable, well-rounded and confident adults. The parenting skills or wants have a huge impact on how that child matures.

It is not about our self-centred personal whims and fancies. How lovely a baby would be. At its roots, it is only about ensuring a sound society can continue to grow and prosper. In the past sheer bloody economic necessity meant there was no option. You had to make do with the partner you ended up with. Woe betide you if you let your fancy wander to a peacock or a thrilling stud. Your life partner choice was critical. Get the best partner your circumstance gave you access to and your circumstance enabled you to seal against the competition. Choose well, then a well managed house and children with the best food from available resources and a regular income provider not tempted to dally elsewhere. Else you are stuck in all the flip sides. With a high mortality, where with luck three out of twelve children might survive into adulthood, unimpeded fecundity was the order of the day.

Not any more. We have to constrain our birthrate but a single child policy is not the answer either, as China's growing pool of 'Little Emperors' testifies. Our investment in marriage as a concept has to be overhauled. It used to signify family, the core and centre of society. Family, the start of the new generation and the handing on of all the inherited attributes. A big event where two gene lines meet, exchange and forge long term relationships. A hugely important event carrying the whole investment of the past and the hopes for some sort of future. Now sidelined as a show, a public display of current success, ephemeral, the oaths given as meaningless as the bouquet tossed aside. No wonder a gay marriage is on the agenda. A marriage is just a civil right, no more significant than casting a vote.

We have evolved, we have a plethora of weapons, so let us keep civic partnerships for all who want a legal sanction on their union, whether for one year or for life. Marriage needs to be upgraded given a special place. Marriage that is the rock bed of procreation and long relationships. Marriage only for couples willing to commit to stay together and bring up the direct results of their union, their children, no matter what.  Not an automatic right for all and sundry but a much sought after and highly regarded right only conferred on those able to demonstrate a long term commitment and likely to produce vigorous progeny.  A precious and hard-earned right then achieved only after passing a peer review and assessment on your suitability, your conformity and viable breeding. Your peers deciding whether you have what it takes to produce and hold a family together in your neighbourhood. With that granting, recognition by the State of that special status approved with additional health, housing, pension, tax rebate rights. Encouragement to provide that long term stable care that we all need our society to foster.

Nothing wrong with childbirth, fostering, IHV, adoption, whatever outside of 'marriage' but within a civic partnership, just lacking the state's sanctification and benefits. We must invest heavily into our future but be compassionate for the many that do not measure up.

Animated Stupidity

Just an aside really, there was this item which drew attention to how UK animation studios where working under a severe disadvantage, compared to EU colleagues, as they receive no Government support. Here was a leading edge industry, with a worldwide repute, pushing forward vigorously the frontiers of IT exploitation, capable of growing careers for a wide range of skills from the creative edge all the way across to tradesmen. What is not to support? Well of course the chorus of me-to's when you are struggling to know where to lop yet another branch off a bloated overgrown unsustainable tree.

Then the incredible stupid short-sightedness struck me. Animation is used by a wide variety of sectors but one sector in particular, has a singularly large and voracious appetite for animation. Children's TV. Young impressionable minds, in this new ever on live-stream feed age, being fed material largely from another culture, the USofA. Material that permeates the language, roles models, ethics, racial, cultural, rich v poor every issue that weaves the fabric of the society that you are and what feel you belong to. This market then is the market our government see no role in supporting! Let market forces be the sole determiner of what TV diet our children are fed! Mind-numbing stupidity of the crassest order.

Family Unit

Fact, as far as I am concerned, the best environment to bring up a child is within a stable marriage. This statement is not suitable to be a subject of a scientific proof and lies beyond belief, which requires an acceptance of some deity. It is the cornerstone of our development as a human person. Let us not beat about the bush. I mean opposite sex marriage, there is no other, period. No matter how political correctness might wish to fudge the issue, there is no other basis. It requires each sex to make the baby and to provide the best, richest (in stimulation) and supportive environment within which the child can confidently grow and mature, until ready to launch out on their own. Life deals rough cards, partners die and some are wildly false to their initial presentations. So a single parent is part of life mosaics but one of regret, not as a state of normality.

Bring these two contradictory sexes together, with opposing aspirations and inner conflicts, and it is a miracle that a stable long lasting partnership could ever emerge. Yet is has because it was the requisite platform for their progeny to prosper. Perhaps the key cornerstone of this survival was sheer economic necessity. Man and woman just had to stick together because that was only way to keep a roof over their heads and food to come in to feed the family. She had to stay at home to keep his home, look after the children, so he was able to go out and get work to provide for them. Yes of course, there were many permutations, both man and woman, or only woman, or all including children had to work. Yes I know, the man seldom looked after the home or the children if the woman had to work. I am not pretending it is any form of ideal life. Just that was how it was, over the centuries.

One result of female emancipation is that they have achieved financial independence. They are not longer dependant on a male to succeed and make progress in life, they can go entirely their own way. Bravo for that. We should perhaps be surprised that it is only one in three marriages that survive. The challenges of two sexes getting to live together is so great that, without that sheer financial necessity binding them, it is a constant wonder that any at all make it. Let us not under-estimate just how difficult it is for man and woman to live together with some degree of harmony. When the woman forms her attractive and protective nest and looks for reassurance and confirmation that she has done well it is easy to understand any frustration even resentment when the males comes in and fails to acknowledge the efforts. Why should she put up with the male trashing her objectives and ignoring her needs whilst he looks for new horizons and challenges. They are poles apart in aspiration yet so need each other and should be dependant on each other when it comes to raising their children.

Convention has it that after a separation the children go with the woman. Convention, but it also acknowledges the reality that the woman gives birth to the child and only she knows with degrees of certainty who the father actually is rather than the one who believes or accepts he is the sire. On a break-up, more often than not, the woman takes the child and then society arranges that she is granted sufficient of the couples estate to bring up the child. It is a win win for the woman freed from the shackles of the male, supported and nurtured by her society. Why should she choose any other route and why should she endure the inconvenience of putting up with a male in her domain. All the incentive are currently stacked against couples staying together.

The change point was small and insignificant in practical consequences but huge in terms of the social message it sent out. The ending of the Marriage Person Tax allowance, absurd in its triviality, yet it underlined that the State now considered a married couple no different to two people living together. It normalised a growing trend. The financial implications were slight but the message was clear. Why bother to get married when there was no advantage to do so. It confirmed getting married and, even more important, staying together was no longer the norm but now for the minority. Many of those that do now marry may not be together ten years later. Serial partners for the children is now the acceptable social currency. Marriage like Divorce are just part of the tools we use to arrange our affairs.

We as a Society have to make marriage matter as that is the only acceptable stable relationship within which to bring up children. I can see no other satisfactory option. Married couples have to be given priority by the State when it comes to Tax, Housing, Retirement, in all of its dealings. Harsh yes on those that fall out of marriage but that rather is the point. It has to hurt to not succeed else it is too easy to fail. Which is not to say we as a society do not need to be doubly compassionate with those that fail through no fault of their own.

But there is the point, we as a society have to be able to know with confidence they are victims of a 'no fault'. The community have to know and share in the person misfortunes so they can agree how blameless and how much compassionate support should be offered. Single mum's had better think twice before the deed unless they can stand on the rostrum and have their cry of rape accepted by the community that it occurred in. Pregnancy is not an incidental accident, it is as the result of a choice, to have sex. There is nothing to say that if a person wishes to keep their life private they should but then they cannot seek benefit merely because it hurts as a consequence.

The child is always the victim when a parent gets it wrong. We as a society have to choose our priorities then each of us have to moderate our behaviour to fit within those priorities established. For me quite clearly parents who stay together to bring up their children is an overriding priority. We as a society have no better arrangement to ensure the best possible start off in life for our children. There are prices to be paid and we need to ensure our compassion is freely and easily available to those deserving amongst us, as long as they choose to share their troubles.

Being a child of a failed broken marriage the last thing I would advocate is a marriage kept together just for the sake of the child. It is more a matter of how we handle the inevitable breakdown of some marriages. But before that it is raising the expectations of what it means to be married and what each partner is required to endure so that it can succeed. Helped to see the strengths in the partner not just the weaknesses and having as roles models couple living together, not individuals pursuing self-satisfaction.

Parenting

Fashions come and go but the one irrefutable constant is that parents have to prepare their child for entry into their society. As communal animals, whilst other aspects may or may not be true, to be socially acceptable as a minima the child has to acquire the skills of knowing when and how to get what it needs and judging when to let others have their way and to fit into this society to be able to queue and wait for a turn.

How best to pass on those skills depends on circumstances and absence of economic necessity. A well provided for parent with boundless time, energy, patience and an overwhelming passion for mothering may well be able to devote 24/7 to explaining, educating and showing the child by example how to progress, to the career mother who may only be able to grab a five minute slot to cram in the maximum impact into the child's development. Neither is right or wrong, one just driven from pure necessity and the other from an obsessive maternalism, with others occupying every possible degree inbetween these extremes.

Whatever the approach the inescapable factor is the child mind is not a mature adult mind. I will have to leave it to better authorities to mark out the development phases of the developing mind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_cognitive_development Suffice to say as the child grows so do the skills of recognising space limits, reasoning, understanding of the unseen, awareness of others and their objectives, to the explosion of emotional responses, through to the blossoming of planning and strategy to, I would argue the final unrecognised phase of contemplative experience. A child cannot respond to the adult world until it has developed adult mind skills. A child can and does from within the womb, to the trauma of birth, from the earliest cries to the eagle eyed teenage exploitation, experience the outer world and learn how to manipulate it to its singular benefit and advantage. Woe betide the starry-eyed mother besotted with visions of immaculate innocence!

The good parent will be responsive to the child's manipulations and divert it to support the parents own agenda. Though there haven't been blind controlled trials and therefore it isn't science, therefore not proven, therefore can be tossed aside, the one thing all experienced successful parents do agree on is that all children respond best to regularity, consistency, quality attention and affirmation.

Makes sense, from the child's perspective the world is huge, unfathomable and full of weird unexpected and often unpleasant experiences. What you need as a child to cling onto, as your solid rock, is certainty and security from which you venture out to explore and make sense of this world or retreat back to to recover. With luck getting encouragement and appreciation for the explorations safely negotiated and quite time to reflect and blend into to past adventures. The best sacrifice the parent can offer is to postpone their pleasures and indulgences so that their child can enjoy regularity and consistency.

Simple but effective.