(c) xkcd

Demos’ report ‘Building Character,’ on the effect parenting has on children’s life skills is interesting for a number of reasons. The report would be interesting enough on its own merits, after all ‘character’ or the lack of it is becoming a central part of the ‘Broken Britain’ narrative. Isn’t lack of character essentially the joke behind Vicky Pollard and other such instantly recognisable grotesques? The report should also attract interest for the fact that Demos, a prime influence on the Third Way, had Cameron providing the main speech at its launch. This is emblematic of where the smart money is heading in UK politics: Cameron is still trying to smooth over dividing lines between him and Labour and last May Demos gained two Tories to its board, leaving it well positioned should the Tories triumph in a few months.

Looking at the actual contents of the report, the researchers are self-consciously operating against a background of evidence that shows that ’structural factors’ (like material poverty), parenting skill and general psychological susceptibility (such as genetic tendencies) each play a complex part in determining child outcomes. There is exhaustive evidence connecting poorer income levels and relative poverty with worse outcomes in education, psychological and physical health. Comparing the poorest to the richest fifth, roughly 3 times more children end up in the worst 20% for behavioural outcomes and roughly 3 times fewer in the top 20%. Strikingly, this occurs by the age of five, long before the child can be labelled a ‘chav’ or indeed have settled into school.

The important thing to work out here is what the actual causal relations are. For example, it is argued by the Tories that children of married parents do better than those of single mothers. Yet the research suggests that this doesn’t have any causal significance, for when one controls for income level, children of single parents achieve at the same level as those married couples. (Would that Cameron were paying attention to this finding, when he insisted that marriage needs financial incentive. This is to confuse the mark of a happy family with the making of a happy family.).

The main conclusion of the report can be summarised as being that parenting skill is the central distinguishing factor between different outcomes in child behaviour. When you control for parenting style and parental confidence, the difference between different incomes almost disappears. Children with parents who combine“warmth” with “discipline” (misleadingly labelled “tough love” parents), do twice as well as those with “disengaged” parents. Should we conclude that material poverty isn’t an important factor? Not at all. Although it might be parenting quality that makes the final difference, material poverty heavily determines the sort of parenting a child will receive. The report shows that those parents who are materially worst off are the most likely to be disengaged and to lack confidence as parents.

To read Cameron’s speech on this is a bemusing experience. Credit where credit’s due, he makes great steps in setting out a position removed from the positions of his party: in promising to recognise “marriages between… man and a woman, a woman and a woman or a man and another man” and insisting that “it’s vital to alleviate material poverty through fair tax and benefits.” (I look forward to his party and his policies catching up with these insights!) But much as he quotes the report approvingly, his actual conclusions seem to follow a path of their own.

He praises the finding that for children “raised by “confident and able” parents” there is no difference between rich and poor as “one of the most important findings in a generation.” His conclusion is that “to alleviate poverty of parenting… is the best way to help children escape material poverty.” This is fundamentally flawed. Poorer families are far more likely to have parents with worse parenting styles and less parental confidence. It is therefore ludicrous to insist that trying to improve the parenting skills of poorer families is “the best way to…escape material poverty.” Consider an analogy: some people smoke 40 cigarettes a day, don’t get lung cancer and so live to 100. This does not mean that smoking 40 a day won’t undermine your chances of long life. We can grant that what most ensures a healthy life is simply not getting cancer, but that doesn’t mean that we should focus on creating cancer-free smokers and rather than identifying smoking as the prime concern.

Cameron’s argument would be dubious enough in isolation, but the idea that good parenting is the key to undermining material poverty is even more fantastical given the wider context. The report does show that parental skills most determine how well children behave aged 5, which is used as a proxy for “character.” This cannot support the contention that either good parenting or “character” are the best ways to produce good outcomes for children tout court and thus to allow them to escape poverty. This might produce better behaved 5 year olds, but the evidence is overwhelming that these well-parented, well-behaved but poor children will face innumerable other disadvantages at every other stage of their life. It is all very well to be be raised to “bounce back from bad times,” but positive attitude cannot necessarily make up for the harm of a life simply filled with far more “bad times,” than that of a more privileged peer.

The wider context also sheds light on the policies outlined in the speech. Cameron supports Demos’ proposals to focus Sure Start on early intervention in childcare and proudly proclaims his “commitment to Sure Start” in this new guise. Fair enough, if the research suggests that Sure Start is best run in this manner, but we must not forget, as Demos note, that Labour has extended Sure Start from purely early years provision to offer support “up to teenage years” in a host of ways through 3500 children’s centres (offering parenting classes, dentistry, dietary advice, speech therapy, budgeting help and more). Cameron’s “revamp” would reverse this, funding his 4000 health visitors by reducing the program’s scope and limiting the service to the poorest families.

So between the report and the political speech, we lose the inconvenient evidence that marriage doesn’t significantly impact on children and segue seamlessly into the familiar routine about “reversing family breakdown.” The status of the family has been placed centre-stage in Cameron’s plans, even while hailing the report that proves it is insignificant. Meanwhile the significance of poverty and social status to parenting seems to have been pushed aside. It is truistic that we should help people to overcome difficulty parenting, but it is an unargued assumption that this is best achieved through direct parenting-skills intervention, rather than removing the material factors that cause poor parenting. Worse, this focus on early parenting interventions, at the expense of the wide-ranging support for families offered by Sure Start under Labour, can only worsen the very poverty that has been shown to be at the root of poor parenting.

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