Trophy Children

It strikes me that there is an all pervading expectation that adults have an ordained right to have child as and when it pleases them. No questions, this is an absolute, I want a child, I want it now so why are you not making it happen? Nature of course is very complicit in this and more often than not, sometimes to all-round consternation, pregnancies come along easily. That is for most young heterosexual couples. Just because perhaps it can be too easy to conceive we mistake that as a right to conceive. Now children are great fun, through them we can rediscover and enjoy once again our childhood, through the contacts made around children we can slide easily into new social circles with multitudes of opportunities to boast, display our child or parent skills and engage in all manner of one-upmanship contests and with a child as entry ticket we can exalt in all manner of events and occasions. Should the child's needs clash with your ongoing adult life there are plenty of opportunities to park them out with all manner of educational enrichments to boot. Or failing that option then just parking them infront of a TV or a computer console will ensure you can get on with those essential adult tasks with the minimum of distractions. So good to have children around, it feels right, familiar and is after all what every other couple expects. You are conforming to the social norms. You have child, purrr.

When child mortality was so high in the past, the supremacy of new life, any new life, was paramount to the survival of the nation. We are in a different era, there are too many of us on this planet, beyond what it can renewably sustain but we each want to add our child into the pool, to reproduce and further increase this pressure of just too many people. We have outgrown our planet. The sanctity of life is no longer a prime issue, instead we should be thinking deeply about the quality of the children we already have and even more so about those children that might come in the future. Those that are born to carry our genes forward, what should we set as a benchmark when considering all the deprived children, the maimed children, the children born with life challenging abnormalities, the children yet to be born or at the moment of conception? We should want all our children to be self-confident, enthused and full of hope as they launch out into the world. Sure children are highly resilient and can overcome the most dreadful of beginnings but they do carry those emotional and physicals scars, from that childhood, into their adult lives to pass on reflections of their horrors endured into the next generation. So with a reduced pool of children going forward we should want to encourage that the most assured and confident children carry our genes forward and not the scarred and maimed.

We should be aware of a range of concerns that impinge on whether or not the children we choose to have occupy this pole position of assured and confident. Same sex couples are biologically incapable of having a child sharing genes from both partners. Surrogate genes are just that, apart from many other issues, the motivation and or selection of genes thus acquired has to be questioned. I go further, the right environment for a child to grow is within that tension between the male and female roles. Only here can the child truly explore and understand this complex relationship and learn where they fit within these complimentary but almost opposing models. When career choices and or the ability to afford a home pushes back the mothers age for a first child beyond the early thirties in to the forties and even further on into the sixties, the risk of foetal errors increases as does the inability to readily conceive. If the career is the first choice then the honour of creating the genes to be passed on should move over to others fully committed to the mother role. Nowadays the stable family unit is no longer the norm instead serial partners with half-siblings are the new units. There are many strands to why this is occurring. The key issue is that a family unit that has overcome the tensions that arise between the male female bonding is a stable model and a good environment for child development. A pairing which, for whatever reasons, fails, leading to separation and new pair relationship to be formed, damages the children involved leaving them scarred, confused about their identity and their self-worth. This does not bode well for their development or their induction of future generations. Just because a woman is a natural mother with an inexhaustible appetite for yet another baby to care for, does not automatically mean that she is the right choice. Beyond some number there are just too many children in one family to be given full attention and the woman's body cannot recover from successive pregnancies, leading to runt babies. A final thought, we be protective of our gene pool and make sure, short of breeding for specific characteristics, that inherited defects, such as cystic fibrosis, are not passed.  

Nothing could be further from my intention that any couple wanting to have a child should be prevented. Perversely, such is life, the most unlikely child parent circumstance may well turnout an exemplary child. The State can and does choose to influence how society responds to issues. Often using taxes as a way of nudging behaviour in a direction. So I have nothing more in mind than that. A nudge, a financial incentive, where the outcome favours the emergence of a self-confident, enthusiastic and hopeful new adult. A tax regime with a nominal tax credit for any children during the first three years. After the third year the child tax credit cranks up significantly until a substantive level is reached only to taper off from sixth form until it ceases on graduation. However there are key criteria. The genetic parents must still be in a viable live together relationship, else it reverts to base nominal level. The benefit for all children in the family tapers off sharply with each succeeding child after the third.

I sense howls of protest, discrimination, fault, blame, victimisation but society does have to make choices. It has to promote what is in its best interest, not the individual interests. Individual respond and make life style choices based on the freedoms they perceive society offers them. Singles parent should not be on the choice list, IVF should not be there on demand. Serial Partnerships should not be on the same footing as a longterm stable marriage. The trophy child should be confined to history. We have to make choices. We should choose carefully to ensure the children we do have emerge healthy, bright-eyed, confident and eager to take on tomorrow's world, carrying us along with their enthusiasm.



ps: Initially this was just going to be a post in https://somersetspiess.wordpress.com/ just airing some passing thoughts. But the more I considered the more I realised this is a mainline political theme that strikes at the core of our society. So this Blog is the better location. I hope you find it.

Caring for Customers

The Media churn out another lazy rehash of the old familiar story, Mr Good trying to save money whilst Mr Bad wants to stop him firing all his workers, in this case all the London Underground Ticket Sales staff. If like me, you are an infrequent traveller to London, you always use the Underground as it is the only way to get about. As an aside, in fairness the Buses are getting better organised, (fantastic 'London Journey Planner' App)  but still the dilemma of  which Bus, where to get off and electronic display saying next due in 5 minutes whilst you wait for 25 minutes and still no Bus in sight. Back to my theme. A welter of overlapping tiers of travel options and an automatic ticket machine with an interface devised by the Devil himself, evil incarnate. I regard myself as reasonably technically competent, an average commuter, but my lack of routine familiarity with all the London travel options means I am defeated each and every time I attempt to use the automatic ticketing system. I need the human, even if scowling, face of the Ticket Sale Office to translate my simple travel plans into a sensible Ticket to Travel. Unless London has decided to commit suicide and turn its back on all those tourists that flood the Underground every day, what is it thinking.

Our Society is being driven top down by Accountant Rules. Sure, absolutely, the Money In has to exceed the Money Out, no argument. But Accountants do not have any formula to tell when Customers have had an unsatisfactory experience that they choose not to repeat. In the real commercial world out there, struggling to get by in the ongoing recession, they are highly tuned to the customer experience. They go out of their way to ensure the customer's residual recollection is favourable to them. Not that mistakes do not happen, of course they do, but it is someone's job to proactively respond with more than a smiley face and 'Have a Nice Day' to ensure any problem is fixed and they are left satisfied. Not so our quasi-private companies running our essential services. They are only in it for profit, customer, or consumer, satisfaction is of no account. Sure a stone-walling complaints procedure that at most logs the complaint then dead files it away. Their remit is not to provide a good quality service that meets the needs of the users, just to return a profit. Not just London Underground but a plethora of quasi-private service provider have all been hitting the news for failing to address their 'customers' needs. Take the water utility boards, responsible to safe discharge of sewerage, brushing aside one of several householders that have repeated (five times), raw sewerage flooding into their homes; or Environment Agency with responsibility to manage our natural resources, failing in their duty of care by allowing the Somerset Levels to be inundated for weeks on end; or our treasured NHS failing to provided basic care robbing their elderly patients of dignity; or Local Authorities not allocating sufficient Care Hours to enable carers provide a decent quality of assistance and so on, rail failings, postal failings and on and on. Staffed by dedicate people who joined to serve the public but in the end are undermined by administrations that can only see the profit line and have no motive to meet the needs.

As I argue elsewhere, (All Change)(Time to Stand Up) quasi-'competitive' private companies have no place in running essential services. The 'competition model' is an entirely false fabrication, no real viable alternate options exist, the customer is stuck and stuffed. Nothing wrong, in fact overwhelming reasons why, essential services should be State organised. Just a new leaner model of how to go about organising and arranging them and making them accountable. There is hope that we can get back to providing all the customers, that is us, with services that aim to at least meet the needs of its customers. Now that would be a refreshing change.

Slow Death

The Accountants are slowly strangling and stifflling the life out of UKplc. Now let us get this straight from the outset. You have to make a profit to survive in business, no question. In hard times you have to work your business hard, cut out waste, improve efficiency, make sure you are as productive and effective as you can be. Run a lean mean machine, no problems. There is however a switch over point. When you run your business with the aim to make a better profit, achieve a percentage increase in market share, to improve your shareholding status or whatever of the many and varied slices the Accountants use to 'judge' the financial success of a business by. You have crossed the line.

The first and only criteria to be in business is to provide what you do to the best of your ability and to the customers satisfaction. Once you lose that motivation you have sold out any solid morale justification and thereby squandered your rights to be in business. No matter how much hype and smooth sounding customer focussed mission statements you come up with you have lost that vital contract. Your personal contract to provide the best. This is where UKplc is now finding itself. Whether we are talking the corner shop, a long-standing family firm, a national or international producer or supplier. The Accountants have their claw around them all. We have grown to expect short-term solutions to be the sole inspiration, another percentage point here or there in profits or growth. Entirely losing sight of the long-term goal of keeping your existing customers happy and wanting them to come back, again and again and telling all their friends to join in. This is real growth, this is real vitality and this is the only measure of survival.

If your priority of attention is to squeeze another percentage point of profit out of your business, the end figures may look very impressive, with lots of noughts, but along the way you have had to sacrifice. The sacrifice might be one or some of many things, quality, supplier relationships, staffing morale, reject standards, returns handling, future investment, plant upgrades, transaction delays, support, or a whole host of other such issues. A host with one thing in common they directly impinge on what you supply and your customers satisfaction in receiving what you offer. A host that might add a small percentage in your costs and that can look large in the balance sheet. They can make major contributions to achieving quality, but quality is not a balance sheet account. So any of these minor irritants that you have given ground on have set off a time-fuse. Your criteria for quality has become compromised. A fuse that will, over time, gradually eat away at customer satisfaction and confidence. By then your business will be in terminal decline and your helpful Accountant, that helped you make more profits, will have slipped away to a better and more promising punter.


Once you give ground on being the sole arbiter on what you are offering and it becomes subject to others value-engineering assessments then you are in the mire. Savings are always easy to offer but retaining the standards you set for yourself are a daily nightmare battle only you can make. 

This is where this blog wants us to all stop and think. As we too are the Chief Executives of our own business. How we put ourselves out and about is our business and we need to be clear in our minds the standards we set ourselves to achieve. Not to be seduced by tempting offers to buy more, buy cheaper, buy easier but to keep on taking ourselves to task for not quite attaining that quality standard we know is right for us.

So look around, be alert, questioning and challenging on whose products you bring into your life. Keep your life account in balance but strive within that limitation to make the quality happen on a daily basis that you know is right for you.