...a new survey shows that children in Britain are deeply unhappy. A third of young people say they do not feel happy with life - up two percentage points from last year. One in 20 secondary school pupils admits to being drunk "three or more times" in the past month.
And the Govt spokesman announced confidence in the measures to combat all this: information about healthy foods, "happiness" lessons in schools, and compulsory personal, social, health and ecooimic education.
You couldn't make it up, could you?
2 comments:
This is yet another wakeup call to the government who in their Ivory Tower live in a cocoon.
They seem to believe that you can legislate for everything, when in reality, better parenting skills and children being given time by their parents might resolve most of the issues.
This decline is not unique to the UK, any society where family values have been downgraded and secularised as this government has been set on doing from the outset will suffer the same problems.
Is it to late, I hope not, but there is much to do and it appears that faith communities are the only ones trying to improve things.
We've become a very child- unfriendly society. The symbol of it is of course abortion, but there are lots of other factors.
Children can't drive, which cuts them off from too many independent social activities. Because of a realistic fear of traffic (and an unrealistic fear of criminals) they are also restricted in how much they can play out.
Then we've allowed a reasonable concern with school standards to turn into a repressive testing and educational system. That's what happens when you decide that the 3Rs are more important than religious education. (Catholic schools are almost but not quite as guility, RE is seen as a means to secular objectives).
Then parents have become very ambitious for their children, and very controlling. There's a tendency to load children with too many, competitive, scheduled, organised activities.
This refers to the lucky children, those with two, reasonably loving, responsible parents. For many children, of course, even this isn't the reality.
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