Poverty and Life Chances: Camerons Third Way?

"....There are 4 vital, social insights that I believe must anchor our plan for extending life chances.

First, when neuroscience shows us the pivotal importance of the first few years of life in determining the adults we become, we must think much more radically about improving family life and the early years.

Second, when we know the importance not just acquiring knowledge, but also developing character and resilience there can be no let-up in our mission to create an education system that is genuinely fit for the 21st century.

Third, it’s now so clear that social connections and experiences are vitally important in helping people get on.

So when we know about the power of the informal mentors, the mixing of communities, the broadened horizons, the art and culture that adolescents are exposed to, it’s time to build a more level playing field with opportunity for everyone, regardless of their background.

And fourth, when we know that so many of those in poverty have specific, treatable problems such as alcoholism, drug addiction, poor mental health we’ve got to offer the right support, including to those in crisis.

This is what I would call a life cycle approach – one that takes people from their earliest years, through schooling, adolescence and adult life.

And I believe if we take the right action in each of these 4 areas combined, with all we are doing to bring our economy back to health, we can make a significant impact on poverty and on disadvantage in our country."

Once everyone has recovered from David Bowie's death, it might be worth paying a little more attention to another David, the Prime Minister, and his speech today. The remarks above were prefaced by a brief critique of left and right 'solutions' to poverty based on economics. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the speech & strategy was written by the Centre for Social Justice (beware, slow website). 

Some of the policy announcements include:

• extension of relationship support
• financial education in schools, expanding a pilot CofE scheme designed to help children develop a positive attitude to saving and a responsible attitude to debt. 
• expanding the 'Troubled Families' programme to another 400,000 families
• a stronger focus on parenting skills in early years, incentivising the take up of parenting classes and trying to make it a normal part of becoming a parent: "I believe if we are going to extend life chances in our country, it’s time to begin talking properly about parenting and babies and reinforcing what a huge choice having a child is in the first place, as well as what a big responsibility parents face in getting these early years right." (I remember being stunned that, on a parents ante-natal course lasting several weeks, there was not a single bit of input about parenting skills, it was all about the mechanics of late pregnancy, birth, feeding etc. Ante-natal classes and health visitors have a massive opportunity to support parents and to help us learn good habits very early on. Children are too precious and vulnerable to leave this to chance.)
• a clearer focus on character development in education, alongside the acquisition of knowledge and skills
• expand the National Citizens Service to cover 60% of 16 year olds
• targetted mentoring for those most at risk of dropping out of GCSEs
• the much trailed demolition of ugly housing estates (this is fraught with risk - it will be very easy for this not to serve the people who live there, if the estate is anywhere in or around London then developer can make more money by pricing the poor out of the replacement housing built on the site. Judging by the successive waves of housing built around Yeovil, we are getting worse at building low-crime aesthetically good environments, not better, and building regulations and pressure on housing density are driving this, alongside house prices and affordability)
• mental health: continued promotion of an open culture around talking about mental illness, support for new mothers, mental health units in A&E, waiting targets for severe illness
• funding for more research and programmes to treat addiction

If it's done well, this could be one of the most important things this government does. There's evidence here of more in-depth thinking about the causes of poverty than we've seen before. What's interesting is that it goes further than Labour ever dared, in terms of the state taking on more parenting functions (developing character, mentoring). 

The proof will be action, rather than words - mental health spending has fallen under the coalition, and Camerons Conservatives have a poor record on housing policy and the vulnerable. They have a life-threatening blind spot on food banks, and the planned cuts to tax credits would have been a punch in the face to anyone earning below £30,000, though thankfully these were reversed. 

Whatever the flaws, this policy at last reckons with one of the big social facts of modern Britain, that the family unit in many places no longer does the job it once did, of transmitting value, values, skills and role models from one generation to the next. We have been avoiding the uncomfortable truths for a while,  I hope there can be a new political consensus that we need a mixed economy of social and economic policy to tackle poverty, and some of this new thinking could be vital. But it will count for very little if Cameron continues to dismantle the welfare state.

update: good piece from Tim Montgomerie on what Cameron missed out

Who's the Mummy?

“I am not a biological parent, but I am a parent. I have young actors and actresses that I mentor, I have nieces and nephews that I am very close to,” she tells host Jane Garvey.

“There is a way to become a mother in this day and age which doesn’t include your name on the child’s birth certificate. You can express that maternal side, very clearly, very strongly. It feels very satisfying.

“I didn’t change nappies, which is okay with me, but I did help my niece get through medical school. I did sit down with my nephew when he was [going through] a very tough time to join the army. And those are very motherly things to do, very nurturing things to do.”

Thus spake Kim Cattrall on Womens Hour. Is anyone else reminded of Rachel Dolezal, the white American woman who 'self-identified as black'? Kim, you are a mentor, and an aunt, and I'm sure you're very good at both. That doesn't make you a mother, just because you don't like being described as 'childless'.

At what point do words cease to mean anything, because the arbiter of meaning becomes our emotional response to them, rather than their factual content? If I self-identify as thin, because despite the fact that my BMI is 26.9, telling me I'm fat upsets me, then am I thin, or fat? Do I describe my body as thin, my parenting status as a mother, my relationship as a marriage and my tax dealings as honest, because that's how I like to think about myself? Or is there an actual measure outside of my narcissistic little world that gives either an agreed meaning, or an objective standard, to these words? If not, then we may as well go back to grunting at each other, because that would carry about the same amount of shared meaning.  

Does this mean anything to you, or only to me?

Halloween: Parental Guidance

I was at a well attended public sports event Up North last week, with lots of children present. It was 31st October, so there was a Hallowe'en theme, including a fancy dress competition and the home team playing in themed shirts (which were then raffled off). During a rest period in the match, we were treated to Michael Jacksons 'Thriller' video. The uncut one that they wouldn't play on Top of the Pops, which has a 15 rating (originally 18).

Neither of my kids are anywhere near 15, and neither were scores of other children present. I've emailed the host venue to highlight the issue, and also BBFC to ask about the legality or otherwise of showing a 15 certificate film in a public venue with no warning or parental advisory.

Hallowe'en is getting worse by the year - this years pulling of mental patient 'costumes' by big high street names is the tip of the iceberg, there is a gruesome window display greeting you as you turn into the centre of Yeovil, zombies are murderers are taking over from pumpkins. Even Angry Birds has gone into overkill (sorry for the pun) with 4 weeks of Halloween (i.e. zombie pig) themed games on its Facebook app running deep into November.

I'm not an angry bird, just a parent feeling protective and besieged in equal measure. Hallowe'en is becoming a celebration of gold and gore, can I say 'enough' without being called a killjoy?

update: the BBFC have responded and are looking into it, no reply from the venue yet.

update 2: still no response from the venue, but here's the BBFC's email -
Dear David,

Thank you again for your query regarding the screening of a sequence from Thriller at an ice hockey match.

As the venue was not a cinema we would advise you to send your comments to the organisers of the event. If you don't get a satisfactory response then you may wish to contact the appropriate local council as they should be able to advise you on the matter.

I hope this information is helpful.

odd that the BBFC can't advise me on whether this was legal. 

Making Parenting Pay

It seems New Labour hasn't lost its appetite for outsourcing parenting. Ed Balls announced today a policy (yes, a policy) of 25 hours free childcare for 3-4 year olds where 'all' parents are working. This extends the free nursery care introduced by the last Labour government.

Last week the Libdems offered to let the state cook the main meal of the day for all infant school children. This week Labour are offering to relieve us of the burden of being with our own children so that we can get out to work.

Hello? Parenting is the most significant work that anyone with children will ever do. Yet again politicians send the message that earning money matters more than raising your children. But not to worry, the Big Friendly Government will do it for you. Politicians go on and on about making work pay, how about making parenting pay? Shouldn't it be more rewarding, in every sense, for parents to invest in their children rather than being bribed back into the workplace? Home is a workplace too.

If Labour really do want to put £800m into family support, then how about something really useful: parenting skills courses for first-time parents, with regular refreshers/peer support as children grow older, to equip parents with the skills they need to raise children well. Then there wouldn't be so much need for the state to step in at a later stage to provide the hot meals and safe/supportive environment that some children never experience at home. It also empowers people to do a better job themselves, rather than extending the client base of the state at the expense of family life.

Safeguarding - are we missing something?

The Church of England and the Methodist church are currently updating their safeguarding policies to keep abreast of the change from CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) to DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks. DBS checks will have 'portability', which means an individual only needs one, rather than a separate check for every role they have in working with children and vulnerable adults.

Following guidance from the Charity Commissioners, the CofE has published its latest guidance for Dioceses and parishes.

Along with 13,000 other parishes, we're trying to process what all this means. This paragraph (from p42) is of particular interest:

Members of the Parochial Church Council (PCC), church council or circuit meeting

Where the parish, church or circuit works with children and/ or vulnerable adults, then all  members of these governing bodies, as Charity Trustees, are deemed to be in Group 2 and as such are eligible for a criminal record check. The detailed justification for this is that prior to the Protection of Freedoms Act they were engaged in Regulated Activity according to the previous definition, and therefore remain eligible for a criminal record check without barring information.

....A minimum of three checks should always be undertaken: the safeguarding lead person and the two church wardens (C of E) or senior stewards (MC). For the other members, the meeting can decide on what checks are appropriate. It would not normally be deemed necessary to require checks from the all trustees.

This is a bit confusing: Our PCC has a membership of just over 20, and we have a children and families worker (employed by the PCC), midweek childrens groups and Junior Church on Sunday.  Will PCC members, even if they have no direct involvement with childrens work, now have to be vetted? It's not actually that clear - they are eligible, but not required? When would checks be required? How can the meeting decide what is appropriate? Multiply that by 13,000 Anglican parishes, plus all the Methodist circuits (and equivalents in other churches) and that's a lot of paperwork.

Does there comes a point at which a system designed to protect children and vulnerable adults actually begins to do more harm than good? We rightly are getting much more vigilant about abuse and the kind of behaviour that safeguarding is aiming to stamp out. But no tally is kept of the childrens and vulnerable adults activities which close, or never open, and the volunteers who don't materialise, because of the quantities of paperwork and bureaucracy. And where does it stop? Every one of the 102 adults at our church on Sunday had contact with children. Our regular members have regular contact with children - will they all need vetting too?

The irony is that the best thing the government could do to safeguard children is to invest in parenting. Whilst volunteers jump through more hoops than a dog agility champion, parents are simply left to their own devices, with occasionally tragic results.

We recently recruited a number of volunteers to do pastoral visiting on behalf of the church. Wider church safeguarding policy rightly required us to use a 'safe recruitment form'. All well and good, except that using the form might have recruited us people who were 'safe', but there was no scope to ask about  pastoral competence or gifts, we had to reinvent the form to make it fit for purpose.

This is symptomatic of the bigger picture. It seems absurd to me that so much time and effort will go into vetting volunteers, some of whom are going to have no contact at all with the people we are trying to protect, whilst there is no national policy or framework for equipping mums and dads with the basic skills of good parenting and relationships. We may even get to a point where statistically, the safest place for a child to be is away from their parents. Are we straining out gnats and swallowing camels?

Fathers Day: Time for Britain to Man Up?

I was talking to our FE College chaplain earlier this week, who gets involved in a lot of pastoral support cases at the college, often because he's the only male in the student support team. He remarked on the increasingly common situation of children being brought up with no male role models for the first 11 years of their lives (most primary teachers are female, and almost all nursery staff), and the knock-on effects of that for students well into their teens. 

The Centre for Social Justice reports this week on the rising prevalence of absent fathers, and the cost of that on the mothers and children they leave behind, and society at large:

"For children growing up in some of the poorest parts of the country, men are rarely encountered in the home or in the classroom. This is an ignored form of deprivation that can have profoundly damaging consequences on social and mental development.

"There are 'men deserts' in many parts of our towns and cities and we urgently need to wake up to what is going wrong."

.....The report warns that the absence of fathers is linked to higher rates of teenage crime, pregnancy and disadvantage.

It is also costly. The CSJ puts the total cost of family breakdown at £46 billion a year, or £1,541 per taxpayer, a figure which has risen by nearly a quarter in the last four years. On current trends, the cost of family breakdown is projected to hit £49 billion by the end of this Parliament.

The CSJ criticises the lack of Government investment in families, saying that for every £6,000 spent on picking up the pieces after a split, just £1 is spent on helping to keep families together.
The report accuses the Prime Minister of neglecting his election pledge to lead the "most family-friendly Government ever".

The family stability agenda "has barely been mentioned", the CSJ says, while comprehensive action to tackle existing policy barriers to family stability "has been almost entirely absent" (more here)

There's an immediate knee-jerk response, that all this talk about family breakdown stigmatises single mums, so we shouldn't talk about it. It's the shut-down-the-discussion equivalent of saying that if you question immigration, you're a racist, or if you have second thoughts about gay marriage, you're a homophobic bigot

But this is the wrong response. From the CSJ blog: Since 2010, the formation of lone-parent families has continued to rise at a rate of 20,000 per year. By the time of the next election, we will have crashed through the two million barrier. The CSJ would be the last organisation to indulge in lone-parent bashing; our Alliance of several hundred grassroots charities tackling social breakdown works day in, day out, with parents raising children on their own. They are the ones who tell us how tough it is, how much harried mums (only eight per cent of those raising children on their own are dads) would appreciate an extra, reliable pair of hands in the home on a permanent, committed basis.

For too long a harrowing litany of statistics has been buried through the fear of stigmatising those who rarely chose to go it alone, but in so doing we have, as a society, ignored the lack of choice around parenthood facing so many women and men in low-income neighbourhoods. Aspirations to marry are solid across the social spectrum, but the cultural and financial barriers to realise those are almost insuperable, especially in the pockets of intense disadvantage we identified where up to three quarters of families are headed by only one person.

The full Fractured Families report will appear here once published later this week. It would be easy to have our superficial celebrations of Fathers Day this weekend, but each year that 'celebration' is non-existent for more and more children, and more and more fathers. Do Dads need to man up, and stick around for the children they bring into the world (or not bring children into the world until they've decided to stick around?). Does government and society need to do more in supporting men as fathers, and supporting couples as parents and partners? Forget stigmatising, this is a tragedy on a massive scale and is crying out for some hard thinking and courageous leadership. 

Centre for Social Justice - watch this space

The Centre for Social Justice, the thinktank set up by Iain Duncan Smith, published a poll yesterday to flag up a new project which could underpin future Conservative social policy. The headlines from yesterdays press release point to possible areas of policy focus, for example:


Family breakdown and the decline in the importance of marriage are cited by the public as key causes of the serious social problems facing Britain, according to a new opinion poll.

The survey found that 55 per cent of people – the equivalent of 25 million people across the land – say at least one of their local communities is plagued by broken families, crime and poor schools.

Some 60 per cent say that over the last few decades, marriage has become less important to society and that is having a damaging effect on the country.

And with 89 per cent agreement, the public identifies better parenting and stronger families as the key to mending the broken society.

We haven't seen that phrase 'broken society' for a while, I'm glad it still has some currency because it's still true, perhaps even more so in some places since the Coalition came to power. I also wonder why the CSJ needs to report again on families and parenting when it's already done so in a fairly meaty way, and only seen a few of its recommendations taken up.

Christian Guy, (his name, and who knows, perhaps a personal description too?) the head of CSJ, also flags up poverty as a key focus:  we have brought together a genuine team of experts with frontline poverty-fighting experience to help us draw up a new social policy blueprint to tackle the challenges of the 21st century."

A longstanding CSJ theme has been, in line with Conservative (and Libdem) policy, that local/voluntary/community solutions are better than those delivered by the state. The government is starting to  promote and support 'community franchise' approaches in key areas of social policy. Remember David Camerons 200,000 'problem families'? The money for that is going to local councils, who have to identify local providers who can deliver results. The local contract in South Somerset has gone to a church-based initiative, who are now fielding requests for information from other parts of the UK. Chris Graylings' ideas for mentoring recently released prisoners are based on the same model, and Sure Start is about to head the same way. At the same time organisations like the Cinnamon Network are promoting 'franchise' models of community engagement for churches - projects set up in 1 place, but which can be replicated in many settings without reinventing the wheel.

Update: this is all the more significant as a report today shows that one of these projects, using charities and businesses to get the long term unemployed back into work, has failed quite badly. 

This is a bit of a brave new world - it's been a long time since we looked elsewhere than the state to 'sort things out'. It's an interesting model - comparisons to the US and Victorians are wide of the mark, provided the state remains in place as a guarantor of quality and resources, even if delivery is left up to the voluntary or private sector. Labour co-opted many charities as arms of the state, throwing funding around with gay abandon, thus making many voluntary groups just as state-dependent as the people they were trying to help. Ironically, the Conservatives are actually taking this further. I hope this is as far as they go: devolving funding and activity may work better, but lets hope this isn't a step towards the state withdrawing completely, leaving the voluntary sector with all the caseload and none of the funding or policy leadership.

I hope the CSJ are going to be truly radical, and challenge everything which brings poverty and family breakdown. 24 hour opening, deregulation of Sunday trading, increasing shift work and unsociable hours all limit the time which parents and families can spend together. Extending parental leave at the beginning of life is good, but that's then rather undermined if, once little Johnny/Joanna is 1, the parents never see each other, or their child, because they're both working daft hours and the kid is in childcare from 7.30am to 7pm every day (the opening hours of our local nursery). When asked to draw a picture of the most significant person in their life, how many 3 year olds will draw their childminder or key worker?

And why are the parents both out to work? Because the average house costs 9x the average wage, compared to the 3x it did back in 1990. Everyone who got in on the property bubble? We did that. Yes, the state could have held things back, built more houses, told the banks to be more responsible about mortgages. But there's no way out of this without substantial pain, and at the moment new buyers are getting most of it. If the CSJ can find a solution for this (and make sure that all new homes have space for a family to eat together round a table, rather than the TV) then they'll have done something really radical. If we're serious about family breakdown, then the economic and 'free market' factors have to be brought to heel: not everything that business wants is good for families. There is no such thing as a free market, someone always has to pay. Part of the governments job (and ours too) is to identify the vulnerable parties in that equation, and protect them.

Wacky BaccE?

With the resumption of the political football season, education is getting the usual kicking around. Michael Gove's announcement of the scrapping of GCSE's for an exam-based EBacc (if it's English, why not use an English word for it?); Nick Clegg's apology over tuition fees, and strong words from the Bishop of Oxford about the marking fiasco this summer.

An O-level style, final exam system bases success on a number of skills:
 - accumulating knowledge
 - short term memory
 - ability to think clearly under stress
 - exam technique (e.g. spotting questions)

one friend at theological college went into his exams armed with 6 7-letter words, an acronym for each question which was likely to turn up. It worked, he got a first.

I've been mulling over whether continuous assesment or a final test is more Biblical. Probably neither/both: the bible does talk about a final judgement, some kind of test where everything is evaluated. At the same time there is continuous assesment - Jesus continuously reviews his ministry and priorities in prayer, the Psalmist asks God to search his heart.

More Christian thinkers and leaders are writing about discipleship, and best practice in discipleship - for the development of skills, character and holiness - is about 'a long obedience in the same direction'. The church has centuries of experience of 'continuous assesment', though whether the confessional, or the daily examen of Ignatius, produced the fruit of holiness is questionable. Methodists had their class meetings to help one another grow in Christian virtues.

It all depends what we want to happen in education. If it's merely about knowledge and fact retention, exams are fine (up to a point). But what about growth in skills and character? Instruments are learned through regular practice, tutorials, and a series of grade exams, it's the same with sporting skills like swimming and gymnastics. Together with those go the character qualities of patience, perseverance, coping with success and failure. On the one hand it will be good to remove from students the pressure of continuous assesment, some learning is best done in a more leisurely way, rather than cramming facts in order to pass a test/assignment. But continuous assesment also gives the opportunity to develop skills and character in a way that exams don't.

I've recently become a 'Training Minister' on STETS, a local training course for church leaders in the CofE, Methodists and elsewhere. I've been impressed by their course structure - the academic is integrated with personal spiritual disciplines and growth in character. All three are addressed together. This is a million miles from the segmentation of my own training in the 1990s, where character and holiness issues were hardly ever addressed. And guess what? Most of the ministers dropping out of parish life, year in year out, are doing so not because they can't do the job, but because of character and personal issues.

One other thought: as a political football education is now much bigger than it was, as successive governments have tried to wrestle children from their parents at an earlier and earlier age. This is partly to get parents back into the job market, and partly to offer a better environment for growing up than some of the more troubled homes. Parenting is being progressively nationalised. But children still go home at the end of the day, and parents are still the prime educators. There shouldn't be a rigid division of labour between home and school (facts at school, character at home), but it's hard to build a partnership approach without a shared public ethos of what a good life and a whole person actually looks like.

Late Valentine: A Win-Win Gift

Spent Valentines night doing our marriage preparation course, which seemed like an appropriate way to spend Feb 14th. Must be the recession, that they'd all rather be at a free evening in church than an expensive restaurant.

In the meantime, God and Politics has some good stuff on National Marriage Week and the up and coming National Parenting Initiative, which is encouraging local churches to offer more in the way of parenting support.

Motivational Signs for Teenagers

Reminds me of a quip attributed to Mark Twain, which goes something like "when I was 14, my dad was so stupid I could hardly bear to have him around. By the time I was 21 I was surprised by how much the old guy had learned in 7 years."

thanks to various people on Facebook for this one.

Sex Education and Carol Services

"Daddy, what's a womb?"
"Mummy, what's a virgin?"

Anglicans who worry about children starting sex education classes too early at school need to work out whether we should sing 'O Come All Ye Faithful' with children present. Mind you, at least it gets parents talking to their kids about sex in a Christian context.

Clegg on Marriage Part 2: We'll Take Your Toddlers

Following on from yesterdays post about Nick Cleggs views on marriage, there's also a deep contradiction at the heart of Cleggs speech on how to spend government money. Take this:

...I have made clear that intergenerational social mobility is the principal objective of the Coalition’s social policy. And why I have been so determined to increase our investment in the vital early years, including, recently, by extending the new two-year old offer to an additional 130,000 toddlers in working families

and a reminder of what Clegg said about state finance and marriage:
We can all agree that strong relationships between parents are important, but not agree that the state should use the tax system to encourage a particular family form.

Now I may be being thick here, but I can't actually see the difference between using state money to encourage marriage and using state money to encourage a particular model of childcare. Both are using state money to incentivise/encourage/nudge (pick your own) a particular family form.

In the first case, the family form is of two working parents, and the state picking up more of the childcare. This has various benefits for the government: a more flexible labour market, a chance to get it's OFSTED-regulated hands on the children of 'problem families' at an earlier stage, and some good headlines about spending money on kids. It also has benefits for families where both parents want to work (or need to work to pay for mortgage, student fees, fuel bills, you name it) it's less costly to do so with small children. It also extends the pressure on new mums to go back to paid work, and basically says that the government would prefer them doing this than the work of parenting.

So this isn't actually about whether the government should subsidise or incentivise a particular family form. It's politics: being sniffy about marriage puts clear yellow water between Clegg and the Tories, spending money on kids is like motherhood and apple pie. Unless your a mother of course, because you're being told that what you do doesn't matter as much as if you were on the checkout at Tesco. Clegg is simply continuing the social engineering begun under New Labour: let the state raise your children, now you go find your place in the economic machine.

If Clegg really wanted to be radical, he would make the offer of free childcare conditional. Not means-tested, but linked to some form of parenting support and training, such as Positive Parenting (used extensively by our local Sure Start centre). That would incentivise a social good (good parenting), whilst promoting the governments aim of early intervention in troubled families.

Getting Your Kids Through Church Without Them Ending Up Hating God

...is the provocative title of Rob Parsons latest book, based on his (sadly) extensive experience of adults for whom their childhood experience of church is the main reason they now are no longer part of one.

There's a national tour in November, here's some of the blurb:

We aim to present a challenge and to encourage and equip parents and leaders to meet that challenge by:

•Taking a fresh look at what may cause young people to turn away from the church and how we can play our part in reversing this trend

•Thinking in new ways about what is happening in the lives of young people and what really matters to God

•Considering how the way we live out our own faith impacts young people

•Learning from the wisdom and experience of other parents and leaders who have gone through similar challenges

I heard Rob Parsons on this at New Wine and it was helpful and powerful stuff, very impassioned, and as a parent something that's becoming more and more of an issue.

Care for the Family also has lots of helpful stuff on parenting. Often very simple, but vital insights.

Who Let the Dads Out?

From the latest Baptist Union mission news

Parent and toddler work can transform relationships and strengthen families, yet the church recognised that it is usually the Mums who take part.

In March 2003, Hoole Baptist Church in Chester started Who Let the Dads Out? - a national initiative about creating space where dads and their young children can have fun together, founded on the Christian principle of wanting to demonstrate God’s love to communities

It comprises:
◊ Who Let The Dads Out? toddler sessions - toddler sessions are specifically for toddlers and their dads, stepdads, grandads and male carers. They follow the same traditional format as other parent and toddler sessions. There are toys, craft activities, stories and, if you’re brave, even song time, but with a few masculine touches, such as bacon butties and newspapers.
◊ SODA sessions - School’s Out, Dad’s About, is a special club for dads, stepdads, grandads, male carers and their infant school children. The fun involves a mix of arts, crafts, toys, games and sports.
◊ Daddy Cool! - a 5 session parenting programme specifically for dads and male carers.
◊ Soul Man? discussion group - a format through which men can explore basic questions of faith and spirituality.

The aim is to ‘turn the hearts of the fathers back to their children, their partners or wives and, most importantly, their heavenly Father’. From its opening in 2003, there are now 18 groups around the country, and the team at Hoole encourage and help Who Let The Dads Out? groups, as they seek to support fathers and their children in the local community.

It is free to join, but once a member, churches can use the Who Let The Dads Out? national initiative name and logo, materials, publicity, log on to the forum for ideas and download the ‘Daddy Cool!’ parenting programme.

There might be the odd mum who'd appreciate the peace and quiet too. Great name, great idea.

5 ways to value your loved ones

Lovely, simple article from Care for the Family, entitled '5 ways to value your child'. It struck me on reading it that you could swap 'child' for 'wife', 'husband' 'friend', pretty much anyone.

I particularly love that line 'catch them doing something right' (highlighted below). Todays mission, if you choose to accept it: catch someone doing something right, and tell them. To most of us, praise is like rain in the desert.

5 ways to value your child
Validate them. Children can tell whether you think they are important or not by how seriously you take them. If they come to you with a problem, give them your full attention while they talk to you, no matter how small you think the matter is.

Avoid comparisons. Don't compare them to their friends or siblings. It can undermine their confidence and knock their self-esteem. Instead, affirm something that is unique about them.

Listen to them. Remember to look at them while they talk – listen with your eyes.

Understand the power of praise. Catch them doing something right and tell them. To a child, praise can be like rain in a desert.

Enter into their world. Talk about what interests them. Spending time with a child tells them you value them. Join in their games. Watch their choice of TV show together. Give them the opportunity to teach you – you may be surprised at what you learn.