Yeovil 4 Family - Award for local family support charity

Yeovil4Family were one of 7 winners at the Centre for Social Justice awards last week. Great local example of the church in action, offering holistic support for families, .

Altruistic Voting

What is my vote for? Is it a token I trade in to serve my own interests, or is it there to be used for the good of others? Should the following stories and quotes make any difference to how you and I vote on May 7th?.....

"What we have seen and heard has again shocked and inspired us.

• We have heard from community workers who have seen three generations of the same family out of work and where local employers fly workers in from Portugal because they cannot find people with basic skills.
• We have been to communities where nearly three quarters of children are growing up without their father at home.
• We have been to schools where it is normal for parents to turn up drunk and fight at the school gates and where dealers stash drugs in the school hedge.
• We have met people stuck on methadone for 20 years and a man who has lost one kidney to drug abuse and now has the other only functioning at 15 per cent.
• We have spoken to people who have tried to take their own lives because they could not face their spiraling debt.
• And we have been told of children so neglected by their parents that all their teeth had rotted away.

These are only small snapshots of what is wrong but they reflect the wider problems with

which the country is still grappling."

‘defeatism (has) defined policy-makers attitudes towards family breakdown too. The pervasive view of successive administrations appeared to be that after four decades of continuous decline in family stability, mainstream family breakdown had become inevitable, that government was powerless to act and should not interfere.’

and some prophetic words written before the campaign began:

During a parliament that may be heavily dominated by unfolding international crises, intense deliberations about Britain’s relationship with the European Union, further deficit reduction and the fall-out from the imminent referendum about Scottish independence, the importance of political parties remaining committed to the necessary social justice reforms we have outlined cannot be overstated. 

source here. It may have been set up by a Conservative minister, but the Centre for Social Justice has plenty of critique of Coalition welfare and family policy. Several of its ideas have found their way into the manifestos of other parties. However that middle paragraph still applies, there is no party which sees family breakdown as a key policy area for social change. They go on about immigration, waiting times, class sizes, the welfare bill etc. yet family breakdown is a social factor which affects millions of lives each year and what do we hear? Almost nothing. Maybe we, the voters, need to interrupt the media narrative and ask some louder questions.

Enough about the SNP, lets get back to stuff that matters. 

Labour Manifesto - Working Hard for The Kingdom of Ed

I wonder if its ever struck politicians that if 'hard working families' are as hard working as they're cracked up to be, most won't have the time or the energy to read an 86 page manifesto, even if a lot of it is pictures. They/we are too busy working hard, getting on, doing the right thing, or whatever it is the Stakhanovs do most of the time.

Maybe Labour knew they wouldn't get beyond page 1, so they stuck this on the cover:

Britain only succeeds when working people succeed. this is a plan to reward hard work, share prosperity and build a better Britain

Odd that they pitch the manifesto to a minority of the British population, given that over half of us aren't working, being too young, too old, too ill, or too busy volunteering (of which more later)

It's a clear pitch to be the Labour party, the party of working people, but with a lot less socialism and toff-bashing than in the good old days. There's a brief swipe at the Conservatives, and no mention of the LibDems (keeping the door open for the coalition negotiations which are bound to begin on 8th May).

There's plenty of commentary elsewhere, but a few things really stuck out to me:

1. There are pledges to increase the number of GPs, nurses and midwives. Unless there's a big change to GP training in the pipeline, it takes longer than a single parliament to train a new GP. So, where do they come from? Will Labour be trying to get health professionals who have quit the NHS to return, or (as under Blair) will they be recruiting overseas? There is a massive moral question mark over this, we have one of the best health services in the world, most other countries need their doctors and nurses more than we do. The Labour manifesto makes much of the UK re-engaging with the world, promoting the Millenium Development Goals (good) but if we poach doctors from developing countries then white man speak with forked tongue. 

2. Kids, wave goodbye to your parents. You'll see them again in 18 years. Labour wants an education system that starts with 25 hours free childcare at age 3 (provided by your renewed Sure Start centre), extends to 50 hours by the time you are 4 (yes, 50 hours. schools will have to provide access to 'wraparound' childcare from 8am - 6pm), and continues until you are 21. Out of work benefits won't begin until you turn 21, prior to that it's a Youth Allowance dependent on whether you're in training. Some of this will be welcome news to parents who need more flexibility so that they can work to bring in the pennies, some of this will simply mean families spending less time together. It's bizarre that in a document which declares Labour believes a decent society grows out of family life and relationships the main policy direction is one which will mean families seeing less of each other. Does Ed Miliband not get on with the rest of his family? 

3. The wraparound school clubs are all going to be provided by volunteers. Really? How? It's a nice aspiration, but there's no suggestion of how it could be achieved. Worse, if it is achieved, where do those volunteers come from? There's no national strategy for encouraging volunteering, so they will have to come from the existing volunteer pool. That's the folk who look after the elderly, run playgroups, staff foodbanks, pop in on neighbours etc. Good luck on either score. We can't even find the handful of adults needed locally to keep a single council youth club up and running for one evening a week.

4. Also on family policy, there are warm words about 'strengthing the institutions that help individuals, families and communities to thrive' but nothing about strengthening families themselves. Sure Start will be resurrected, but mainly as a national childcare agency. 'Early years intervention' is fine, but there's no suggestion of tackling the reasons why this might be needed. Family breakdown remains the elephant in the room, responsible for vast levels of misery, mental illness, educational failure, substance abuse etc. Labour wants a constitutional convention to look at how the UK can hold together, but when did it (or any other party) ever give serious thought about how to hold families together?  

5. One oddity: Labour want to abolish Police and Crime Commissioners, but set up an equivalent version in education, a local Director of School Standards who monitors performance, intervenes in underperforming schools and can commission new schools. Local authorities will continue to be players in the school system, so I'm not quite sure where that leaves LEAs. The roles of PCC and DSS are slightly different, but it seemed odd to be scrapping one and inventing the other!

6. 200k new houses a year won't go very far if 300k people are being added to the population each year. There are no targets for sensible immigration, just a few policies around benefits and controls. This is a real problem. Yes we need immigrants, but there is surely an optimum rate at which people can be assimilated, and infrastructure be put in place? We are adding a new county's worth of people every 3 years to the UK, but short of a specific cap, I haven't yet seen a policy that amounts to more than hoping the problem will go away if we look tough. That hasn't worked yet.

7. Foreign policy: Labour propose a 'global envoy for religious freedom'. Good. Gordon Browns next job perhaps? It would be good to see a specific role though: they also propose an envoy for LGBT rights whose goal will be to secure the decriminalisation of homosexuality worldwide. I'd be thrilled if the goal for the religious freedom envoy was to secure the decriminalisation of conversion to Christianity.

8. Labour seem to be taking climate change more seriously - there's a welcome goal of a zero-carbon electricity supply by 2030, and interest free loans for energy improvements will reboot the domestic solar energy market. Right noises, but I don't see enough on, for example, public transport (most of the policies are devolved to local level) to see a thorough response. There's a welcome commitment to keep the 0.7% aid target and refocus it on the poorest countries.

9. Mental health: will be 'given the same priority as physical health'. I wonder what that means in practice? The document says there'll be the same right to psychological therapies as to drugs. If true, that means free, lifelong access, rather than 8 weeks after a 5 month wait, as is the current (approximate) situation. Do they really mean that? Access to drugs doesn't stop after a set number of weeks, so if that's what's really being promised for talking therapies, then that's a very hefty commitment. And please, not just CBT, it doesn't fix everything. And if you do offer CBT, please lets have proper professional counsellors, not a nurse who's done a short course. Labour wants more access to counselling at schools (good) and there's a suggestion of putting mindfulness on the national curriculum. There's no extra money committed here, only a promise that a higher % of the mental health budget will be spent on children. That, of course, means a lower percentage on adults, so without a significant rise in the overall budget, there's the prospect of a cut to adult mental health funding. Surely not?

Overall Labour are trying not to frighten the horses, but I'm not sure whether the horses will be very inspired either. I guess a proper rationale for the policies (e.g. the 50 hour school week), or proper details of how they'll work (adult mental health) would have needed a longer document. Labour seem more aware of the vulnerable - disabled, users of food banks, low wages - than the current government, but I don't see much of a great vision here. It's a bit more of an engineers budget, how do we make this system work better, and produce more of what we want (houses, good healthcare, clean energy at affordable prices). I can't see it setting many pulses racing, and as the first page states, its a 'plan...for a better Britain'. The P-word again. The 2015 election is the Battle of the Plans.

Absent Fathers Day

'The family' is in rapid flux - the traditional father/sole earner combination of the early to mid 1900s is dying out, and the traditional dual parent family is rapidly following.

Fractured Families, a report issued earlier this week by the Centre for Social Justice, observes:

One in two children born today will not grow up with both their parents and every year an additional 20,000 people, mainly women, join the throngs of those raising children more or less singlehandedly. One million children have no meaningful contact at all with their fathers, and that’s a conservative estimate.

The personal and social costs are huge:

Such breakdown would matter not a lot if the human and economic costs were insignificant. But they are in fact devastating. Children with separated, single or step-parents are 50 per cent more likely to fail at school, have low self-esteem, struggle to make friends and with their behaviour. They often battle with anxiety or depression throughout the rest of their lives. 

Adults’ mental and physical health can take a huge knock when relationships crumble, making it much harder for them to achieve at work and be the parents they want to be. The costs are eye-watering – rising to £49 billion per annum by the end of this Parliament, it’s more than the Government’s whole defence budget.

There is an epidemic of family breakdown, and whilst the government showers sticking plasters at the symptoms (mental health problems, educational failure, substance abuse etc.) nothing is done about the illness. Government after government has shied away from significant investment in family stability, investing in relationships & marriage and encouraging people to stay together.

92% of lone parent families are headed by the mother. Even at birth, 20% of children live with only 1 parent, by the time they are teenagers this is nearly 50%. For up to 3 million children tomorrow will be Absent Fathers Day, and here are some of the the consequences:

Children who experience family breakdown are more likely to 

• experience behavioural problems; 
• perform less well in school; 
• need more medical treatment;
• leave school and home earlier; 
• become sexually active, pregnant or a parent at an early age; 
• and report more depressive symptoms and higher levels of smoking, drinking and other drug use during adolescence and adulthood.

The report points out the structural issues, as well as the personal ones. At the more dramatic end of the scale Fathers4Justice highlight the way that family support often leaves dads out of the picture. Our experience of ante-natal classes was a lot of stuff about the mechanics of birth and feeding the baby, and nothing at all about how to parent together and support each other as mother and father, even though it was a prime opportunity to support new parents in that way. In other cases the father simply walks away. The overall effect is that over 1 million children in the UK never see their father, and up to a million more have little or no meaningful contact.

The UK is near the bottom of international leagues on this. It's peculiar that in some areas of childrens policy, league tables are assiduously compiled and published (education) but in others they are completely ignored.

The full report goes into a lot of detail, statistics, and analysis;

 -  for example that cohabiting couples are 2 to 2.5 times more likely than married couples to break up, which in turn has consequences for the nearly 2m (and rising) number of children in 2-parent cohabiting households.  

 - Or that for every £6,000 in reactive spending to family breakdown, the government spends only £1 on prevention. 

 - Or that 76% of young people in custody have an absent father. 

It's not a simple issue, there are multiple causes, from culture to cost (the sheer cost of getting married makes it unavailable to low-income families). Whatever you think about same-sex marriage, in the light of the above, is that really the top priority in family policy? Shouldn't we be debating all this instead? 

So pray for us dads, absent and present, on Fathers day, for mums, for children. And pray that this will be the generation where the tide of family breakdown turns back, and we get the political and civil and cultural leadership to make that happen. 

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.

I Was Out of Prison, and You Visited Me

In this Prisons Week, The government is about to announce plans for a mentoring scheme for those recently released from prison, to help them get their lives back on track and reduce reoffending rates.

In his speech (Chris Grayling) is expected to say that when an offender leaves jail they should be met by a mentor who would help them find a place to live and arrange training or rehabilitation from drug or alcohol issues.

Continue reading the main story

Only those who are jailed for more than a year are currently given rehabilitation, but the prime minister wants all but a small number of high-risk prisoners to be supported by the end of 2015.

Mr Grayling will say everyone has a vested interest in "an enlightened approach to reducing reoffending" as "we can't just keep recycling people round and round the system".

He will say: "I want [released prisoners] to be met at the prison gate, to have a place to live sorted out, to have rehab or training lined up, and above all someone who knows where they are, what they are doing, and can be a wise friend to prevent them from reoffending.

And who will do this? 'Private and voluntary sector groups', according to the report. This seems to be a repeat of the approach to 'problem families' - the government has announced a headline figure, released a certain amount of funding, but has left it up to local authorities to identify who can make most progress on the issue in their area. Interestingly, our local 'provider' for supporting troubled families is a mentoring scheme, Yeovil4Family, based at a local church. There is some wisdom to this approach: a voluntary sector group doesn't represent 'the authorities' in the same way, and can be on the side of the client, rather than being seen as a big stick or Big Brother.

But released prisoners need more than just job training. Work is the solution to some things, but not all: a mentor programme needs to go further than that, and help people to change behaviour, to work through damaged relationships etc. Private training agencies which might be drawn to the rehab scheme will have part of the picture, but being a 'wise friend' is going to involve a lot more than lining up an apprenticeship or a work placement.

The deadline of 2015 is a worry - yes, the sooner ex-offenders can be supported well the better, but it will take time to get 'results', and this sounds more like a deadline set to coincide with an election than anything else. There will also be a lot of volunteers needed: locally the church has been a dependable pool of volunteers for all sorts of things, most recently family mentoring, debt counselling, a food bank, alongside a whole stack of groups for parents, preschoolers, youth groups, lunch clubs etc. But how much water is left in the pool? Is the government getting carried away by the level of volunteering for the Olympics, and assuming that time and dedication is available 24/7/365, rather than just once in a lifetime?

Jesus would want us to be the first in line to work with those released from prison, and I hope this scheme might be the trigger for some creative, imaginative and significant work. It might even be a natural cousin to the family support work that's just starting. But I worry that it's too fast, too quickly. What happens after 2015? It takes a long time and a lot of dedication to change a life.

update (11.15) the proposals are currently being discussed on 5 live, it sounds like the Grayling plan is to involve as many ex-offenders in mentoring as possible. 

Wanted: A Proper Debate About Consumer Capitalism

Only in Britain. We've never been very good about talking about the things that really matter, and it's bizarre that, as we've finally become more open in talking about sex, death, religion and politics (well, maybe with the exception of death), we've also lost the taste for serious conversation. It's now been the best part of a generation since we had an ideologically based political party, and Karl Marx would have his work cut out identifying one opiate of the people from the many candidates: lottery, celebrity culture, mobile phones, shopping, social media, sex. Pretty much anything except religion.

And so it is that, when a protest about how our economic system is run, a chance to debate some of the fundamental things in our society, finally hit the headlines for seven days running, we blew it. Instead of a substantial discussion about the consumer society, vast city pay packets, our crippling dependence on the banks, what do we have? The pretty trivial issue of whether a Cathedral was right to close on health and safety grounds. Only in Britain could the chance of a fundamental debate over the foundations of our society be scuppered by Health and Safety.

What have we been talking about:
 - Should St. Pauls have closed?
 - Should Giles Fraser have resigned over something that hasn't yet happened?
 - Would Jesus be in the camp, or in the cathedral? Or neither?
and there is now the unedifying spectacle of Anglicans publicly criticising each other (though I guess that's what I'm doing now!), and groups with little sympathy for the CofE pitching in to rub salt in the wound.

There has been an opportunity this week for the church to speak about Jesus message, to articulate a biblical ideology of wealth, poverty, justice, and money. St. Pauls has, apprently, a report ready to be published on the morality of City of London capitalism. Provided it is presentable and well-argued, this is precisely the time to go public with it. There will never be more attention on St. Pauls and its views than there is now, and it could take the debate in a whole new direction.

After all, what should we be talking about?
 - Developing an alternative to a Western economy based on debt, and a global economy biased against the poor.

 - Looking at the crippling economic, social and psychological consequences of consumer capitalism, and the epidemic of debt, depression and social breakdown that has come in its wake.

 - A robust public ideology of justice ('fairness' sounds a bit too weak and whiny for the phenomenal greed and inequalities we are dealing with here), that refuses to be held to ransom by people threatening to take their business or tax receipts elsewhere, one which values justice, integrity and community higher than profit.

 - Revisiting the whole structure of work and family, which has changed out of all recognition in 2 generations. The 24 hour society, twin incomes to prop up inflated mortgages, a toxic mix of overwork for the employed and no work for the unemployed, the increase pressure to offload children to state-sponsored childcare, and an ossified and overpriced housing market. How did we get here, and is it where we want to be?

 - Whether the current 'hands off' government approach really holds any water: lecturing banks, energy companies and city bosses has so far failed completely. We are rapidly reaching the point (maybe we have already) where corporations are more powerful than governments. Can this be tolerated? Is there an alternative? Can business be humanised, can we find an alternative trump card to profit and economics, and if so how?

 - The debt crunch has revealed just how weak and vulnerable the Western economies are. That the Eurozone is now actively going cap in hand to China is deeply worrying. The final act of Western democracy, as the sun set on its empire, was to max out its credit card and turn to an oppressive, rights-denying, church-suppressing, web-censoring regime for help, promising to lobotomise its conscience in payment. (Gordon Browns greatest gift to the British people was his '5 economic tests' for entering the Euro, tests which would never be passed as long as Brown was Chancellor. History may smile upon him for this.) Is there a way to keep Britain from this route? Even if there is, what will a world look like where appeasement of China is the pre-requisite for doing business? What will it mean for the oppressed Chinese themselves, for the world to go silent?

 - Plus a whole stack of issues around trade, global poverty, the conditions in which many Western consumer goods are produced (including, probably, some of the tents outside St. Pauls and the clothing worn within it), global warming etc. All of which, at root, are moral as well as economic questions.

Sorry, this is a bit of a rant, but I'm so frustrated. Perhaps I should pack my tent for London and hope to catch the eye of a camera crew. Perhaps taking my dog collar would help.

Government Strategy for Problem Families: Passing the Buck to Local Councils?

A couple of days ago Eric Pickles spoke on the 120,000 'troubled' families identified by David Cameron in the wake of the riots. He announced that he'd been put in charge of 'turning their lives around' by the end of the parliament - quite a big ask! It's significant that it's the minister for Local Government that's been put in charge of this. Why? read on...

Here's some of his speech to a Local Government Conference

The whole country got a sudden, unwelcome insight into our problem families. The ones that make misery in their communities and cause misery to themselves.

Any local politician worth his salt will already know the family members by name - along with the police, the social workers, the courts, the schools, the A&E. And they will be known and avoided in their local neighbourhoods.

There are 120,000 plus of these problem families.

And there hasn't been a lack of interventions. A lack of money spent. Less than one per cent of the population, they cost the economy over eight billion pounds a year.

It's a story of futility and waste. Waste of money. Waste of people.

And it has simply got to stop. We are going to stop it.

We can no longer afford the luxury of fruitless, uncoordinated investment. The damaged lives and communities.

The Prime Minister has set out an ambition of turning the lives of these families around by the end of Parliament.

I'm in charge of delivering this across Whitehall.

And someone's got to show local leadership to deliver this on the ground. And that should be you in local government.

So don't dither or fret. Um and ah. Don't pass the buck. This is it.

Last week the Prime Minister announced a Troubled Families Unit in my Department led by Louise Casey.

She will be working on an action plan for what needs to be done nationally and locally to deliver this ambition. That will include cutting the bureaucracy that gets in your way.

And she'll be supporting and talking to you. To ensure that all across the country, councils and their partners are prioritising the activities and interventions which work.

If you're wondering is this a threat to your independence - the answer is yes, it is a threat. It is a threat if you don't get on with things.

Think of this as a race to deliver by 2015. If you motor along then we'll play catch up. But if we get there first - you'll find yourselves behind the agenda.


Several features of this jump out:
1. Is Pickles simply passing the buck to local councils and agencies? The government has a vision (or at least a soundbite) of dealing with the most dysfunctional and socially costly families (misnomer: some of them are individuals rather than families). But it doesn't look like it'll be the government putting it into action. The onus here seems to be on local authorities. OK, the context may explain that, but there's more said about what local government can do than about national government.

2. Cameron has set himself a goal, but it doesn't look like he's that sure how to hit it. If he did, they wouldn't need a unit to work out an action plan.

3. There is general government mood music to set national goals, but devolve responsibility for meeting them to other people. The recent, and laughable, obesity report from the department of health encouraged people to eat less and exercise more (must have had the best minds in the country working on that one) but refused to put a single piece of legistlation in place. There is a bizarre duality to this government, in certain areas they are hyperactive (e.g. pension reform - but fair enough, after 13 years of Labour inaction on a looming social and economic timebomb, there was some catching up to do) whilst in other areas it is all about saying lots and doing little.

David Camerons conference speech emphasised 'leadership' from business, social enterprises, communities, and the role of government of setting free and enabling this local leadership. Fair enough, but at the moment the government seems to have a better idea of the problems than it does of the solutions. Maybe it's a cultural issue: perhaps Brits are better at waiting for someone to tell us what to do, and rather than simply getting on and doing it. But as with the 'problem families' - if that doing isn't strategic, well informed, co-ordinated, and sustained, it doesn't actually work.

What does work? There's quite a bit of material on Christian discipleship doing the rounds at the moment, which addresses the same core issue: how do you help people to change? I'll probably blog more on this another time, but some of the constant factors seem to be
 - a mentor, sponsor or soul friend, who holds you to the goal of personal change
 - accountability to a small group on the same journey as you
 - an interactive learning process, based in real life rather than in the classroom
 - learning a new set of values and priorities in life
 - learning experiences
 - a goal and vision of life that goes beyond ourselves (in the case of Christian discipleship, this is the mission of Jesus).

Members of Alcoholics Anonymous will recognise most of this. It's an approach that doesn't have to be confined to Christian formation. Should Eric Pickles be looking at those organisations which have specialised in life change, repentance and redemption? Is this something governments can deliver, or merely enable?

Housing Developers Stop You Being Christian

Yesterday the Royal Institute of British Architects produced the 2nd frightening report in 2 days, following the Unicef study on UK children. They found that new homes in Britain are the smallest in Europe, with many below the recommended size for the number of people they claim to house.

some of the figures:
58% of new home buyers in 2009 found there wasn't enough space for their furniture
70% said there wasn't enough room for their possessions (I can't believe they were all downsizing, but this might not actually be too bad, as most of us own more than our fair share of the worlds stuff.)
34% had no space to have friends over for dinner
48% had no space to entertain at all.

And that's just the inside. If you look at our main local housing development, there is one (very small) area of public green space, a triangle of grass enclosed by a brick wall. There are no front gardens, and many back gardens are about 4 metres square and on a 30 degree slope. Guess what? Since there's virtually no grass, and no space to store a mower, people are digging up the grass and replacing it with paving or stones. There's no space for the community to gather, and no plans for any community facilities, shops, or meeting places. Even plans for a school look shaky. What is taking shape is an arid sea of concrete, boxed in and soulless.

But what really struck me was that last stat above. Matthew 25, the famous parable of the sheep and the goats, has Jesus speaking about people taking a stranger into their homes, and feeding the hungry. In roughly half the homes now being built, that is impossible. Our developers have designed away the possibility for families to sit together around a meal table by eliminating dining space from housing plans, and now they are making it impossible to show any kind of hospitality. That's a great way to increase isolation, and to erode a basic human grace.

"And the King will say to them 'I was a stranger, and you created homes so small that people had no space to invite me in to'."

Update: in totally unrelated news, Barratts has reported a rise in profits.

Miserable Children Surrounded By Toys

A very blunt piece from the BBC's Mark Easton, on the recent Unicef report into children's quality of life.

Unicef paints a picture of a country that has got its priorities wrong - trading quality time with our children for "cupboards full of expensive toys that aren't used".

"Parents in the UK want to be good parents, but aren't sure how," the research suggests. "They feel they don't have the time, and sometimes the knowledge, and often try to compensate for this by buying their children gadgets and clothes."

The research compares Britain with Sweden and Spain. While the UK languishes in 21st, and last, place in the child well-being table, they come second and fifth respectively.

The report argues that the pressure of the working environment and rampant materialism combine to damage the well-being of our children. They want our attention but we give them our money.

"All children interviewed said that material goods did not make them happy, but materialism in the UK seems to be just as much of a problem for parents as children," the research concludes. "Parents in the UK often feel compelled to purchase consumer goods which are often neither wanted or treasured."

It is a profoundly depressing analysis of British life, not least because it rings true.

The importance of parents devoting energy and love to the rearing of their children is accepted by political leaders from across the spectrum, but maximising income and encouraging consumption are regarded as vital components for economic growth.

In the UK, the demands of the latter often undermine the former.

Parents work all hours to increase family income but then are too exhausted or too busy to give their children the attention they need and deserve.

More on the report here, and here's the report itself. It's worth a read, there are plenty of uncomfortable home truths. Page 26 is simply frightening.

The solution has got to go beyond banning advertising aimed at children. There are lots of factors here. Notable in the report above is the loss of confidence among parents. We're desperate to do a good job but we no longer know what a good job is. Parents seem to lack the confidence to identify a set of values and stick to them, which isn't surprising, as we no longer have any framework of accepted social values.

There are all sorts of other factors too: we're propping up the league tables on families that eat together: that's partly about planning policy (many new properties no longer have a separate eating area, or are just too small), partly about the structure of work (the drive to a 24/7 society, shift work, Sunday working, and rising housing costs forcing parents into work and kids into childcare).

Possibly most concerning, is that the shape of youth culture in the UK is on a massively different trajectory to anywhere else in Europe. Less than half of our 11-15 year olds find their peers 'kind and helpful', and we are almost off the scale when it comes to 'risk taking behaviours' - ie smoking, underage sex, poor eating habits etc. Many of our teenagers are miserable, rude, confused, desperate to be happy but clueless in how to be happy because their parents don't know either. After all, we thought that what would make us happy was having those children in the first place.....

This is all a bit broad-brush, but for goodness sake lets start debating this stuff, and working out what to do about it.

The riots were the tip of an iceberg, this is the iceberg.

Riots, Fathers, Materialism, God and Redemption.

This is quite something. Former gang member on Sky telling the story of how he got into gang membership, and how he discovered Gods love and changed. This is really worth listening to all through.

"I was very bitter and resentful about my father...I was seeking that father (figure), I wanted it."

"If you have a broken society you can't ask them to take control of their children. Most of these mums are scared of their children."

"We have seen more people cry in the last few days over material things than they ever have over the life of a young person... we cannot be a society which puts material goods as more important than the life of a young man."

"What are your hopes for the future?"  "I wanna change London and the world."

One of the good things about 24 hour news coverage is that there's the chance to hear people at length, rather than soundbites, followed by a lengthy piece from Nick Robinson. So well done Sky (words I never thought I'd see myself writing) for giving these 2 guys the airtime.

Adoption Blessing

It was a great joy last week to baptise the adopted baby son of some friends of ours. I suggested to the family that as well as baptising him, we pray for God's blessing on them as a family unit. Having searched in vain for a family blessing for an adoptive family, I came up with my own. Those familiar with Patricks Breastplate and the CofE Marriage service will recognise some of it.

We stood with the family in the centre of the church, and everyone facing in towards them, the congregation joined in the first and last paragraphs. Thought I'd post it in case anyone else would find it useful.

Family Blessing

Christ be with you, Christ within you
Christ before you Christ behind you
Christ on your right
Christ on your left
Christ above you, Christ beneath you
Christ around you, now and for ever.

Blessed are you Lord our God for you have created joy and gladness, pleasure and delight, love peace and fellowship.

Pour out the abundance of your blessing upon n......... in their new life together. Bless them at work and at play, awake and asleep, in joy and in sorrow, in laughter and tears.

May they love one another, encourage one another, defend one another, bless one another. May their home be a place where n.............. can grow in love, character and goodness, in mind body and spirit.

Heavenly Father, from whom every family on earth receives its name, who has adopted us into your holy family through your Son Jesus, bless and watch over this family, that they might know day by day that they belong to one another, and that they belong to you. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

Catch them Doing Something Right

The faster way to improved behaviour
There is a principle that is called ‘Catching your children doing something right’. As mothers, fathers, step-parents – even as employers – we’re used to catching people doing something wrong and criticizing them for it.

But the faster and more effective way to improved behaviour is to catch them doing something right and encourage them in it. Many of us, even as adults, are crushed by the constant pointing out of where we go wrong. This is a great tragedy – when the ear never hears praise, the heart loses the will to try.

When you get the hang of catching people doing something right, you can often find the opportunity to encourage – even when it’s not that easy.

The elderly grandmother went to watch her grandson at the school Sports Day. Tom didn’t get into the final of the 100 metres or the 200 metres, and he was unplaced in the longer races as well. In fact, the only event in which he looked remotely comfortable was the egg and spoon race, but even then he came last. As Tom and his grandmother walked away together, the little boy’s head was down until she put her arm around him and whispered, “You were the only one whose egg didn’t fall off the spoon.”

That young boy never did make it as a sportsman, but against the odds he did achieve great things in other areas of his life. I’m not surprised…

… It’s hard to fail with a grandmother like that.

Read the rest, by Rob Parsons, here.

'5 things parents need to know about exam time'

Another handy little list from Care for the Family, who consistently produce great resources for parents and marriage. Here's a couple of the 5 things:

4. Remember they will need down-time
Everyone needs to plan in regular breaks as they work or study, otherwise their quality of work will suffer. A good ratio is that for every hour you revise, you take a ten-minute break. But it's also good for these breaks to be very different from work - so if your child has spent an hour on the computer, ten minutes playing a computer game may not be the best way to take a break.
It will also help your child to build in time and space to relax. Something energetic like swimming or going for a walk may be beneficial, as exercise helps mood-boosting endorphins get into our bloodstream.

They will feel better if they know they have 'permission' to relax - so encourage them by telling them they have been working hard and have earned a break. This will help lower their stress levels. A good motto that shows the importance of getting the balance right is 'work hard; play hard'.

5. Remember to make sure they know you love them
During exam times children may feel more insecure than usual. If they know that you place great importance on their performance in exams, they may feel under pressure to do well. Help them have a healthy view of success and failure, and look for opportunities to praise character and effort, and not just achievement.

Remember to tell your kids frequently that you love them - however they do in their exams. Tell them that doing well in exams is only one part of life: there are other things that are more important - like character, integrity, honesty and caring for others.

Let them know they have worth and value beyond any academic achievement. By doing this you will set them free from the weight of expectations, and enable them to face their exams with confidence and courage

Care for the Family produce a regular e-newsletter with summaries of new articles, events, initiatives and resources. Very handy if supporting families is one of your aims. I think they've had to lay off a few staff with the debt crunch hitting giving, which is sad news - some of the CFF stuff I've heard and read has been absolutely invaluable.

Advertising Adultery: Does the ASA care about your marriage?

It doesn't look like it. Dave Walker reports on an appalling company which promotes, and makes money out of, adultery. A complaint against one of their billboard adverts drew this response from the Advertising Standards Authority:

Complaints about offence often require difficult judgements but we don’t intervene where advertising is simply criticised for being in poor taste. Apart from freedom of speech considerations, even well-intentioned and thoughtful people will have different and sometimes contradictory opinions about what constitutes ‘bad taste’ or should be prohibited. We can only act if the ad, in our judgement, offends against widely accepted moral, social or cultural standards.

My emphasis. Are we really a nation which no longer finds adultery morally offensive? Is it now ok to make promises to one person, then have sex with someone else, without breaking any moral standard? Without wanting to turn into disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, I find this stomach churning, as will many people who've dealt with the fall-out of adultery and it's catastrophic effects on families, children and the adults involved. That some sick minded individuals want to turn a profit on this is bad enough, but then we already have plenty of people who profiteer from sin and no doubt we always will. But I really don't understand what the ASA are doing here.

Having said that, perhaps there was a straw in the wind last week. I've been following Kirsty Youngs series on the family on the Beeb: last week looked at the period from the late 60's to early 80's, and focused on sex. There was a cool, detached narrative on pornography, adultery, sexual promiscuity etc., without any noticeable moral judgment on any of it.

There's a Facebook group supporting the campaign against the adverts, which, if it attracts enough support, will demonstrate that ads like this do cause 'widespread offense'. Though of course, without the internet, most of us wouldn't have heard of it at all. There's a whole other discussion to be had on whether there's such a thing as 'local' anymore....

see also Maggi Dawn. Sadly the Times has a big cold slab of cynicism in the same vein as the advertisers, but hope is restored if you sort the comments by 'most recommended'.

Conservative Party Family Policy; what does 'Family Support' really mean?

Our marriage preparation course starts in a couple of weeks time, so I'm a bit more tuned into political debates on the family and family support than normal. Yesterday the Conservatives published their 'Draft Manifesto on the Family'. That's not quite as grand as it sounds - a 4-page excerpt from their draft manifesto, which is been released in bite-sized chunks on what seems like a daily basis.

Here is what I understand to be the aspirations, and concrete Conservative policies, for families. Some of this is a direct cut and paste, so my apologies if the grammar doesn't quite work. A few comments in brackets:

Aspirations
- Ending child poverty by 2020
- “Britain is one of the least family-friendly countries in the developed world. This will change with a Conservative government.”
- Support the provision of free nursery care for preschool children and we want that support to be provided by a diverse range of providers.
- Ensure that the public sector becomes a world leader in flexible working.
- Make sure couples are given greater encouragement to use existing relationship support (what does this mean?)
- “A Conservative government will help families with their finances”

Policy Commitments
Tax
- End the couple penalty in the tax credit system
- Recognise marriage and civil partnerships in the tax system in the next Parliament. This is as much about ‘sending an important signal that we value the commitment that people make when they get married’, as it is about personal finance and taxation.
- Freeze council tax for two years, in partnership with local councils (? Isn’t that taxation policy?)
- Reform the administration of tax credits to reduce fraud and overpayments

Sure Start/family support/childcare
- Take Sure Start back to its original purpose of early intervention, increase its focus on the neediest families, and better involve organisations with a track record of supporting families. (new providers to be paid on results)
- Provide 4200 more Sure Start health visitors, giving all parents a guaranteed level of support before and after birth until their child starts school. (to provide advice on physical development, and support for emotional health of whole family – particularly the relationship between parent and child, and parents themselves)
- Bring all funding for early intervention and parenting support into one budget, to be overseen by an Early Years Support Team within the DCSF. Currently spread across many sources and departments.
- Review the way the childcare industry is regulated
- Funding for relationship support on a stable, long-term footing through multi-year funding settlements

Workplace practices
- Extend the right to request flexible working to every parent with a child under 19
- New system of flexible parental leave – i.e. making maternity leave transferable within a couple

Comments:
1. What do they mean by ‘relationship support’? Relate? Sure Start health visitors? Marriage and relationship preparation through civil and church registrars? I'd like to hear a bit more about what this means, and what it would look like in practice. It sounds good, but what is it?

2. Health visitors are a good thing, but it might be worth looking at their job remit. The giving of information and options to a stressed new mum when she actually wants advice and wisdom is sometimes worse than useless. If health visitors are actually able to mentor new parents, and pass on wisdom about parenting and relationships, then they will be a lot more use. It sounds like the Conservatives do want to raise the bar on Health Visitors to make them a bit more proactive. But that more 'directive' approach carries its own risks, and involves a lot more input. 4200 extra health visitors will only scratch the surface. However, targeting them at the most dysfunctional families might make some headway, provided they are well prepared and resourced.

3. Flexible working is all very well, and will help, but one of the key pressures on families at the moment is the culture of debt and overpriced housing. It’s a generation and a bit since a mortgage could be supported on one income, families are now under pressure to have two earners, and juggling this around young children means that Mum leaves for her evening shift on the ASDA checkout 5 minutes after Dad gets home from the works. That’s not conducive to a stable relationship. The logic of that tax freeze on local authorities needs to be extended to the whole economy. A low-debt economy where value is placed on family, community, and non-material goods is needed as a counterweight to consumer capitalism, which drives families into overwork, overconsumption and debt, with all the associated stresses. Debt is a factor in a significant number of marriage breakups - I think the figure is about 25-30%.

4. The really thorny issue is how you intervene in the parenting of small children. It's widely recognised that the early years are crucial in how a child learns to see themselves, others, and the world, in how much they develop emotionally, intellectually and socially, and whether they're able to go on to form stable loving relationships themselves. How much tough love is required to intervene in chaotic families with a merry-go-round of partners and deskilled parents who've never been mentored into good parenting and relationship skills themselves? And what kind of 'intervention' would work without being oppressive? To what degree can the rights of parents be infringed to protect the wellbeing of their children?

5. That probably requires some joined up thinking with the education system. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anything in the draft Education Manifesto which addresses relationship skills. There is no point trying to tackle low attainment if that's just the symptom of a chaotic and dysfunctional family background. I know of a local school which wrestles with this as a key issue: the school feels that it's struggling against the background that many children come from, and providing security, love and encouragement is just as important as helping children to learn the basics. Is there a place for relationship education and parenting skills on the school curriculum? If education is about what can't be left to chance*, then can we afford to leave to chance the basic life skills which will make a crucial difference for the families which schoolchildren go on to have? It's not failsafe, but isn't it worth a try?

6. Who are these 'organisations with a track record of supporting families'? Is that folks like Relate, NCT etc., or more voluntary, community-based groups? What kind of stuff is going to be farmed out, and with what sort of strings? Will Sure Start be subcontracting?

I'm glad the Conservatives have kicked off this debate, and I hope that the parties can all recognise that we have a serious problem here. A proper debate, rather than simplistic call-and-response politicking, is what we need.

I'm well aware that 5 sessions of marriage preparation is a drop in the ocean for the couples who'll be coming along next month, but it's more input than many recieve. No organisation, be it church, government, voluntary sector, Relate, Sure Start or whoever can carry this ball on their own. On that level the tax break for married couples is right: we need to address the culture around families - there's no point them being propped up by one or two structures if culture and society as a whole is toxic to committed relationships and the raising of children in a loving stable home. That's more than policy.

*source: Christina Baxter, head of St Johns College Nottingham, it's a definition which has always stuck with me.

Update: its very interesting to compare these policy proposals with the actions proposed by this Demos report into childhood and character. There's a lot of overlap, though the more concrete interventions to support struggling families proposed by Demos aren't mentioned in the Conservative proposals. And look who's in the picture for the launch of the report....

New BBC series on the history of the family

January must be retrospective month at the Beeb, with last weeks 'History of Now' on the Noughties replaced by Kirsty Youngs The British Family. The series looks at how families have changed since the 2nd World War.

Young has written a lengthy piece introducing the first programme, which tracks some of the changes in roles and attitudes in early postwar decades:

I'm a mum of two daughters. I'm also a step-mum and the daughter of a divorce that happened in the period covered by our first programme - the period which traces how marriage changed from the end of the war to the end of the 60s.

So when I started out making The British Family, I was acutely aware that this wasn't the kind of TV series you could simply consign to the compartment labelled "work".

Doing a series about family meant thinking about your own most intimate and meaningful relationships, the lives of the people who are bound most closely to you in life. Divorce has profoundly affected my life and the lives of millions of others. But does that mean our commitment to family has fallen apart?

If there is one thing that unites the experiences of everyone we met making these programmes, it is the simple message: family matters.

Fast forward to the present day, and David Camerons' thoughts on Conservative family policy, including intervention where poor parenting is letting children down. A lot is still in flux, and up for grabs. 'Family' itself is one of those social institutions, like class (see History of Now, which noted the end of class as a significant marker), which is no longer a 'given'. Does that mean that every generation, even every individual, has to renegotiate what 'family' means, or are there some points on the compass?

Meat and Potato in the Auditory Canal

Couple of great pioneer* stories from earlier this week:

1. The Guardian reports on a Christian family who've been inspired to set up a woodland commune in Somerset. Lots of really challenging stuff in Tobias Jones' account, for example:

it feels to me as if old-fashioned charity is at the far periphery of our
life. We have a few standing orders to worthy causes and put a small cheque in
the post, or do a soup run, once in a while. But that sort of charity seems
increasingly to me like carbon offsetting: a way to cleanse our conscience, to
make us feel better about the fact that actually we could keep living just the
way we want. It's a sop, nothing more. I want charity, in the old cliche, to
begin at home, to be an integral part of our lives – not just something we do
with loose change once in a while.

....The hope is that our children, too, will learn about vulnerability when they're still living in a warm, loving home; that they will, over the years, begin to learn about addiction, displacement, bereavement, poverty, prison and so on. That, to us, seems much more important than A-level results or a good degree.

...most of all we're taking our leap in the dark because we've belatedly realised that the sermon on the mount might actually be a manifesto for life, rather than a few nice ideals to take out for a spin on a Sunday morning. We've come to believe in the survival of the weakest, not just the fittest. William Vanstone once came out with the great line that the Church is like a swimming pool: all the noise is at the shallow end. We felt called to the deep end, to the place where it's more quiet, more dangerous maybe, more radical.

Wow. I'm full of admiration for the guy and his family. They want the shelter to be a place where people can come for sanctuary and community, and have already started thinking about what kind of community rule of life they'll need. Suprisingly for a Guardian piece written by a Christian, the comments are almost 100% positive. Perhaps that's because this is faith lived, rather than faith preached, and faith lived is much more convincing. Jonny Baker has more reflections.

2. The first 'Pioneer Minister to the Business Community' was commissioned earlier this week in Yorkshire. Here's a bit of the press release from Ripon & Leeds diocese:

As ‘chaplain’ to the business community, Revd Rob Hinton’s will be based at
‘Club LS1’ in Leeds, a central hub for business people meeting in Leeds and also
the home to such institutions as Common Purpose and the Institute of Directors.
He said he was looking forward to the challenge of the new role: “While so much
of the church is denouncing the banking community, it is an important time to
come and be the new Chaplain to the second largest financial district outside of
London and to become part of a Diocese that is wanting to love those who are
both taking the flack and at the same time trying to put things right for the
industry and the rest of us.” He added, “This is a ministry not just to the
financial sector but all areas of the city’s business world.”

It's a diocese which seems to have more of a grip on mission issues than most, good to see that the mission section of their website has been revamped since my survey of diocesan sites earlier in the year. Some interesting links: highersports is a Christian run sports coaching programme, doing ministry through sports (just like the old days), and they have some vid clips of local fresh expressions, though oddly these aren't actually linked to from the mission section!

*I'm truly very sorry, but couldn't resist**

**I hope this doesn't need explaining.....

Flintoff: I'd rather be Super Dad than Super Fred

Nice interview with Andrew Flintoff over at Cricinfo, talking about how he views his retirement from Test cricket. What comes over is that he sees it as a positive step - a deliberate choice to focus more on his family - rather than a step backwards.

Nevertheless, there was a flip side to Flintoff's emotion, and that came when the players' families - including his wife, Rachael, and their three children, Holly, Corey and Rocky - joined in the celebrations. "I was looking at the lads and how happy they were which was one thing, but then I looked at my wife and kids and I thought 'I've made the right decision here'.

"I'm probably not going to get 25,000 people in my house chanting my name," he joked. "Or people shouting 'Super Fred' when I am doing the school run. However, you know, for me, spending time with my family and having the opportunity to do that is far more important and something I'm really looking forward to doing."

Holly, the eldest, turns five in September, and Flintoff admitted that the days of long overseas tours was something he was happy to put behind him. "It is quite a nice time for me to finish," he said. "The kids are coming to an age where they need their Dad around, and I am going to be there for them. Bittersweet as it is, having to finish Test cricket through injury, the one thing I am excited about is being at home. That is far more important than pinging a few down in a Test match."

Good man.