Childhood in Britain is not all gloom and doom, but our 'nation of workaholics' must now focus on giving family life the value it deserves, the chair of the new national parenting academy tells Lucy Ward
The notion of a golden age of childhood is, as the children's secretary, Ed Balls, pointed out in the run-up to yesterday's Children's Plan, a favourite English myth. But, as childhoods go, Hilton Dawson's sounds more golden than most.
Brought up in Newbiggin-by-the-Sea in Northumberland, the 54-year-old chair of the newly launched National Academy for Parenting Practitioners recalls "one of those north-east working-class communities, extremely warm, with the grannies round the corner. There was the beach and moor and fields to roam around in all the day. I had a very idyllic childhood really."
Dawson's free-ranging early years represent exactly the kind of childhood experience many now lament has gone for good, driven out by modern evils - from Game Boys to E-numbers, Big Brother to happy slapping. While past generations may have wandered the countryside, today's youngsters are, we fear, sedentary and over-protected, doomed to obesity and unable to deal with risk.
Our panic over modern childhood, branded toxic by the most ardent of the golden-agers, is reflected directly in concerns over parenting. Insecurity and its unpleasant sidekick, condemnation, are widespread, feeding and being fed by a plethora of reality television shows urging parents to learn for their own benefit, while offering also the car-crash horror of families so dysfunctional they make the majority feel Waltons-like in comparison.
Dawson, with the benefit of 15 years' experience as a children and family social worker and manager in a range of care and other services, not to mention eight years campaigning on care issues as Labour MP for Lancaster and Wyre, believes that much of the panic is unfounded. "A lot of children feel they get huge opportunities now, and many children in this country are very happy and doing very well," he says. "It would be a mistake to characterise it as all gloom and doom."
Amid that general picture of "a very, very large number of kids growing up in ordinary, decent families", he acknowledges that there are problems. Among that general group are some children who are "cosseted and over-protected to the point where it becomes undermining of them", while at the other extreme are those whose parenting is so lacking or inadequate that they are left deeply vulnerable.
The new academy, launched last month with a remit to become a national authority on the most effective parenting techniques and to support and train the parenting workforce appropriately, will seek to target both those with the greatest needs and the wider majority of parents who are muddling through but could do with occasional advice at tricky stages.
It is good parenting, Dawson passionately believes, that is "the key to people living fulfilled and successful lives, and poor parenting can leave people with a complete lifetime legacy of problems that are taken up by the health system, the care system, the prison system - almost every part of the welfare state".
While the new academy chair may not believe British childhood is toxic, he does regard our attitude to children as deeply flawed. By extension, Dawson argues, that applies to our views on parenting too: we don't value it adequately, and tie ourselves in knots, with those inclined to blame the parents for the actions of anti-social children simultaneously arguing that parenting is intrinsic and the state and the professionals should lay off and take their busybodying views on compulsory nursery rhymes with them.
Not child-centred
"We don't like children in this country," he observes. "We are a bit afraid of them, and we don't value parents or parenting, much as some would like to pretend that it's easy and we must not let the state interfere. We don't value family experiences: it's a cliche, but it's true. Compare the way we view families in this country with the way they view them in southern Europe, with the way the state operates to support them in Scandinavia. The way we live our lives is not child-centred in any way."
Britain, he argues, has become "a nation of workaholics, where adult life is a much greater priority than children".
Dawson, a father of two adult daughters, one with a baby son and the other due to give birth within weeks, insists he is not attacking career-minded working women in regretting a lack of attention now paid to childrearing. Men and women can be parents and still have fulfilled lives and make whatever progress they want in the adult world, he contends - though many struggling to balance a job, never mind a career, and a family, might disagree. Fathers have a vital parenting role, he points out, and here he can see progress, with his own sons-in-law attending antenatal classes and seeking flexible working to spend more time with their children.
The north-east in the 1950s would barely have countenanced such a thing, he smiles, recalling his own days pushing a pram as a new 1970s father in a way his own father and grandfather would never have done.
But even with policy changes, such as a right of parents to ask for flexible working, the required "cultural shift" towards a society that values children and recognises the significance of childhood experience remains far off, Dawson argues.
He is enthralled by the new scientific research reinforcing with images of brain development the impact of attachment - or lack of it - between a child and a "significant adult" in the womb and in the early days, weeks and months of life. "That quality of attachment can produce enormous physical effects on the brain and can set patterns that are very, very difficult to shift," he says. Such research will feed into the academy's practice, and should influence policy-making, he believes.
Dawson is excited, too, by studies indicating that a genetic pre-destination - a "resilience gene" - may explain why some children survive terrible childhood experiences remarkably successfully, while others suffer lifelong trauma.
Care, the backbone of his varied career to date and again at the heart of his day job as chief executive of care charity Shaftesbury Young People, clearly remains Dawson's passion. He has, he says, seen some care leavers become great parents, driven by a desire to create a different experience for their own children, while others struggle through that same lack of a role model - something he believes the academy's work can address as it seeks to bring together parenting support and the Every Child Matters agenda.
On the government's wider care reforms, which he helped to influence, he has yet to feel confident, but stresses the need for a reduction in the numbers in care; again, he hopes parenting support can help. Kinship care is crucial here too, he believes, arguing that the government should pay appropriate relatives to care, just as it would foster carers.
In its work at the sharper end of parenting support, the academy - set up originally under the government's "respect" agenda - will oversee programmes for those ordered by the courts to learn how to fulfil their parenting responsibilities. Dawson has no problems with compulsion; experience shows, he says, that such parents "welcome parenting support and wish it had been provided a long time ago. My experience is that even parents who are reluctant to take it up realise it has been enormously beneficial, and to them."
Sensible advice
The more-or-less-coping majority, meanwhile, are far less reluctant to seek out advice and support than the media warnings of a nanny state encroaching unbidden into the nation's living rooms would imply, he insists. "All my experience as a social worker and a politician is that people welcome sensible advice, especially if it is offered in a way that does not stigmatise them, through universal services - the GP surgery, their local school."
Any parent may need extra help, for example, at times of transition - those difficult points such as the move to secondary school or into adolescence, highlighted by the government in yesterday's Children's Plan.
For Dawson, the significance of good parenting is too great to be left to those who are already parents. The subject should be taught in schools, he argues, with even the youngest primary-age children able to learn about the importance of family. Likewise, he feels, parenting is too important to fall foul of party political squabbles. He would welcome "an all-party consensus on the significance of parenting and family life".
How should we grant that significance? Ultimately, Dawson says, "it is about spending more time. It is society understanding that the most important thing you can do for a child is give them an attachment to a significant adult. Every child should be entitled to that sort of attachment, that basic building block of emotional life."
Curriculum Vitae
Age 54
Status Married, with two daughters, one grandson
Lives Walkworth, Northumberland
Education Ashington grammar school; University of Warwick, BA philosophy and politics; University of Lancaster, diploma in social work; University of Central Lancashire, diploma in management studies
Career 2005-present: chief executive, Shaftesbury Young People; May-August 2005: project manager, Childline; 1997-2005: MP for Lancaster and Wyre; 1987-97: councillor and deputy leader, Lancaster city council; 1989-97: manager (children's services), Lancashire county council; 1987-89: divisional intermediate treatment manager, Lancashire county council; 1983-87: intermediate treatment manager, Lancashire county council; 1982-83: child care social worker, Lancashire county council; 1979-80: unqualified social worker, Northumberland county council
Interests Marathon running, Sunderland FC, outdoor natural sculpture
The notion of a golden age of childhood is, as the children's secretary, Ed Balls, pointed out in the run-up to yesterday's Children's Plan, a favourite English myth. But, as childhoods go, Hilton Dawson's sounds more golden than most.
Brought up in Newbiggin-by-the-Sea in Northumberland, the 54-year-old chair of the newly launched National Academy for Parenting Practitioners recalls "one of those north-east working-class communities, extremely warm, with the grannies round the corner. There was the beach and moor and fields to roam around in all the day. I had a very idyllic childhood really."
Dawson's free-ranging early years represent exactly the kind of childhood experience many now lament has gone for good, driven out by modern evils - from Game Boys to E-numbers, Big Brother to happy slapping. While past generations may have wandered the countryside, today's youngsters are, we fear, sedentary and over-protected, doomed to obesity and unable to deal with risk.
Our panic over modern childhood, branded toxic by the most ardent of the golden-agers, is reflected directly in concerns over parenting. Insecurity and its unpleasant sidekick, condemnation, are widespread, feeding and being fed by a plethora of reality television shows urging parents to learn for their own benefit, while offering also the car-crash horror of families so dysfunctional they make the majority feel Waltons-like in comparison.
Dawson, with the benefit of 15 years' experience as a children and family social worker and manager in a range of care and other services, not to mention eight years campaigning on care issues as Labour MP for Lancaster and Wyre, believes that much of the panic is unfounded. "A lot of children feel they get huge opportunities now, and many children in this country are very happy and doing very well," he says. "It would be a mistake to characterise it as all gloom and doom."
Amid that general picture of "a very, very large number of kids growing up in ordinary, decent families", he acknowledges that there are problems. Among that general group are some children who are "cosseted and over-protected to the point where it becomes undermining of them", while at the other extreme are those whose parenting is so lacking or inadequate that they are left deeply vulnerable.
The new academy, launched last month with a remit to become a national authority on the most effective parenting techniques and to support and train the parenting workforce appropriately, will seek to target both those with the greatest needs and the wider majority of parents who are muddling through but could do with occasional advice at tricky stages.
It is good parenting, Dawson passionately believes, that is "the key to people living fulfilled and successful lives, and poor parenting can leave people with a complete lifetime legacy of problems that are taken up by the health system, the care system, the prison system - almost every part of the welfare state".
While the new academy chair may not believe British childhood is toxic, he does regard our attitude to children as deeply flawed. By extension, Dawson argues, that applies to our views on parenting too: we don't value it adequately, and tie ourselves in knots, with those inclined to blame the parents for the actions of anti-social children simultaneously arguing that parenting is intrinsic and the state and the professionals should lay off and take their busybodying views on compulsory nursery rhymes with them.
Not child-centred
"We don't like children in this country," he observes. "We are a bit afraid of them, and we don't value parents or parenting, much as some would like to pretend that it's easy and we must not let the state interfere. We don't value family experiences: it's a cliche, but it's true. Compare the way we view families in this country with the way they view them in southern Europe, with the way the state operates to support them in Scandinavia. The way we live our lives is not child-centred in any way."
Britain, he argues, has become "a nation of workaholics, where adult life is a much greater priority than children".
Dawson, a father of two adult daughters, one with a baby son and the other due to give birth within weeks, insists he is not attacking career-minded working women in regretting a lack of attention now paid to childrearing. Men and women can be parents and still have fulfilled lives and make whatever progress they want in the adult world, he contends - though many struggling to balance a job, never mind a career, and a family, might disagree. Fathers have a vital parenting role, he points out, and here he can see progress, with his own sons-in-law attending antenatal classes and seeking flexible working to spend more time with their children.
The north-east in the 1950s would barely have countenanced such a thing, he smiles, recalling his own days pushing a pram as a new 1970s father in a way his own father and grandfather would never have done.
But even with policy changes, such as a right of parents to ask for flexible working, the required "cultural shift" towards a society that values children and recognises the significance of childhood experience remains far off, Dawson argues.
He is enthralled by the new scientific research reinforcing with images of brain development the impact of attachment - or lack of it - between a child and a "significant adult" in the womb and in the early days, weeks and months of life. "That quality of attachment can produce enormous physical effects on the brain and can set patterns that are very, very difficult to shift," he says. Such research will feed into the academy's practice, and should influence policy-making, he believes.
Dawson is excited, too, by studies indicating that a genetic pre-destination - a "resilience gene" - may explain why some children survive terrible childhood experiences remarkably successfully, while others suffer lifelong trauma.
Care, the backbone of his varied career to date and again at the heart of his day job as chief executive of care charity Shaftesbury Young People, clearly remains Dawson's passion. He has, he says, seen some care leavers become great parents, driven by a desire to create a different experience for their own children, while others struggle through that same lack of a role model - something he believes the academy's work can address as it seeks to bring together parenting support and the Every Child Matters agenda.
On the government's wider care reforms, which he helped to influence, he has yet to feel confident, but stresses the need for a reduction in the numbers in care; again, he hopes parenting support can help. Kinship care is crucial here too, he believes, arguing that the government should pay appropriate relatives to care, just as it would foster carers.
In its work at the sharper end of parenting support, the academy - set up originally under the government's "respect" agenda - will oversee programmes for those ordered by the courts to learn how to fulfil their parenting responsibilities. Dawson has no problems with compulsion; experience shows, he says, that such parents "welcome parenting support and wish it had been provided a long time ago. My experience is that even parents who are reluctant to take it up realise it has been enormously beneficial, and to them."
Sensible advice
The more-or-less-coping majority, meanwhile, are far less reluctant to seek out advice and support than the media warnings of a nanny state encroaching unbidden into the nation's living rooms would imply, he insists. "All my experience as a social worker and a politician is that people welcome sensible advice, especially if it is offered in a way that does not stigmatise them, through universal services - the GP surgery, their local school."
Any parent may need extra help, for example, at times of transition - those difficult points such as the move to secondary school or into adolescence, highlighted by the government in yesterday's Children's Plan.
For Dawson, the significance of good parenting is too great to be left to those who are already parents. The subject should be taught in schools, he argues, with even the youngest primary-age children able to learn about the importance of family. Likewise, he feels, parenting is too important to fall foul of party political squabbles. He would welcome "an all-party consensus on the significance of parenting and family life".
How should we grant that significance? Ultimately, Dawson says, "it is about spending more time. It is society understanding that the most important thing you can do for a child is give them an attachment to a significant adult. Every child should be entitled to that sort of attachment, that basic building block of emotional life."
Curriculum Vitae
Age 54
Status Married, with two daughters, one grandson
Lives Walkworth, Northumberland
Education Ashington grammar school; University of Warwick, BA philosophy and politics; University of Lancaster, diploma in social work; University of Central Lancashire, diploma in management studies
Career 2005-present: chief executive, Shaftesbury Young People; May-August 2005: project manager, Childline; 1997-2005: MP for Lancaster and Wyre; 1987-97: councillor and deputy leader, Lancaster city council; 1989-97: manager (children's services), Lancashire county council; 1987-89: divisional intermediate treatment manager, Lancashire county council; 1983-87: intermediate treatment manager, Lancashire county council; 1982-83: child care social worker, Lancashire county council; 1979-80: unqualified social worker, Northumberland county council
Interests Marathon running, Sunderland FC, outdoor natural sculpture
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