An article in the Sunday Times discusses parents’ “right to know” about various aspects of their children’s lives. I’ve been thinking about this all week.
Last week we had the story of a 17-year-old pupil at a fee-paying school in London, caught trying to use a photocopied travel pass. The school knew that she was prosecuted, and indeed provided a teacher to accompany her to court, where the girl pleaded guilty to theft and was fined £100.
The first her parents knew about it, however, was a year later, when their daughter was being threatened with the bailiffs over non-payment of the fine. They have now publicly expressed their fury with the school for not telling them of the girl’s plight.
I think the school acted correctly here, for a couple of reasons. First, the offence took place outside school premises. The school had no right to know, so how could it be obliged to inform the parents? Presumably the girl approached the school for support - would she have done so if she had believed the school would inform her parents, who she clearly did not wish to know? Had the school been required to inform the parents, it seems likely she wouldn’t have told the school either.
Second, a 17-year-old could quite legally be living independently, earning her own money and paying her own rent - and many do. A 17-year-old could even be a parent herself (or himself). I don’t think such a person’s parents would have any right to know about a criminal charge or conviction, and I don’t think it makes much difference that this particular 17-year-old was still studying and living at home. Being a pupil should not remove a person’s rights.
I hope, of course, that if my children ever need support, they’ll feel able to approach their father or me. If they didn’t, however, I’d much prefer that they had access to other sources of support, rather than having to handle problems alone out of fear of lack of confidentiality.
Parents now do not have the right to bar their children from having sexual relationships even if they are minors; and as Sue Axon from Manchester discovered in a High Court ruling last month, parents also do not have the right to ban their children from receiving confidential advice on contraception and abortion.
I’m a great believer in answering children’s questions about sex whenever they ask them. I think that most, if not all, children who ask for information about contraception are probably served better by giving them that information than by withholding it. Refusing to allow a child to get such information from a responsible source will only result in them getting it from somewhere else - probably somewhere less accurate, and quite possibly their would-be sexual partner.
It seems even more extraordinary when you consider that, while parents are having crucial information about their children’s health, behaviour and wellbeing denied them, they can now, thanks to Tony Blair’s Respect agenda, be sent to prison for their children’s misdemeanours - such as bunking off school or breaking Asbos.
Indeed it does seem extraordinary - but the problem here, in my opinion, is that you have one person being punished for the actions of another. That’s not how the justice system is supposed to work.
In the early years of this government Gordon Brown said that “all new rights will be matched by new responsibilities”, but instead we have a situation in which children have new rights without responsibilities and parents new responsibilities without rights.
Parents have been rendered as powerless by the state as Plato would have wished in his Republic, even if they are still allowed to bring up their children. The attitude of the state seems to be that parents can never do as good a job as professionals - whether these are doctors, lawyers or head teachers.
The last sentence sums it up. From the minute a woman gets pregnant, she is told that the experts know best. She can’t possibly know better than the midwife or the obstetrician; they will tell her what to eat, how to behave, where and how to have her baby. Then they’ll tell her what to do with her baby, and then the health visitor will take over. And soon - as soon as possible in Blairland - the child will be off to daycare and then nursery and school, where teachers will of course know best. And after a dozen or so years of being told that the experts know best, if something goes wrong, parents are suddenly told that it’s all their fault.
How can parents be expected to take responsibility for their children if, from conception, they are told they can’t possibly know how to parent unless they have a team of experts telling them what to do?
The reason I’ve been thinking about this all week is that while I believe that parents have rights (despite the state’s attempts to disempower them), I also believe that children have rights. The problem, of course, is determining when the rights of one over-rule the rights of the other. But I don’t think denying information, support or confidentiality is going to help anyone.