Mothers at Home Matter

This letter was sent by committee member Anne Fennell, to her local MP, also concerning the fact that Child Benefit cuts will be highly difficult to implement and very complicated.

"Dear David,

You are probably aware of this document already as it is in the news but it is a good analysis of the Child Benefit problems by the Institute of Chartered Accountants for England and Wales (ICAEW). It documents not only how the bill is unfair in principle: household income is not taken into account; number of dependents are not accounted for; families in similar financial situations could be treated quite differently; it uses the tax system to claw back from one individual a benefit paid to another, but it also shows how it is seriously flawed in practice.

When the proposal was announced the justification for allowing one household where a single earner was in a higher tax threshold to lose their child benefit while a household where two earners...

An article in The Telegraph on the 14th May highlights how "The Institute of Chartered Accountants for England and Wales has told the Treasury that the controversial plan to deny the benefit to families with a high earner “is seriously flawed in principle and in practice".

For more details read here.

A recent study for the think tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Nuffield Foundation has found that children looked after at home by grandparents have better vocabulary and are more emotionally secure. 

Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood says, “You get a variety and a range of abilities but it is the element of personal care which is the most important thing up to the age of three – once they are beyond three company of other children comes into its own".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/9156424/Grandparents-better-than-nurseries-for-young-childrens-development.html

A recent article in the Evening Standard, by the journalist Anne McElvoy, has defended mothers' rights to stay at home to pass on their education to the next generation.  This could never be classified as a 'complete waste' regardless of what the Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt thinks.

What's more, she also brings up David Cameron's notion of the Big Society and points out that educated women at home are often 'the ones on school governing bodies' and filling out a range of other roles that add 'to the mix of city life', thereby benefitting not only their children's lives, but the lives of the community in which they live.

For the full article, go to the link below:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-24039613-intelligent-women-can-be-full-time-mothers-too.do

On the 15th February The Telegraph published a piece by Professor Sir Michael Marmot, Director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity, author of a recent report on Child Development in the under 5s.

His findings show that worryingly, 41 per cent of children don’t achieve a good level of development at age 5. How does such failure come about? The determinants of early child development start with effects from the children themselves, probably biological in nature, but are importantly influenced by quality of parenting and are related to inequalities in society.

Sir Michael suggests that ancient wisdom and modern science come together to provide the answer: cuddling, playing, talking, reading, and generally loving children have a huge influence on the quality of early child development.

So instead of focusing on those parents that may be getting in wrong, could the attention not be given to those that are giving their children all the basic...

This week The Times reported on ideas being explored by the Treasury to help parents with childcare costs, to include £10,000 loans and deregulation of the childcare market.   Our Chair, Anna Lines, wrote this letter below, and although it was unpublished, we felt it might inspire others to write in response to other half-baked government plans.

Nothing illustrates more clearly that the slogan "high quality affordable childcare" is a contradiction in terms than the Social Market Foundation's proposal to set up a childcare loan scheme. Third party care is clearly not affordable unless heavily funded by the taxpayer and it cannot be of high quality if no. 10's policy team is looking at relaxing the staff ratio in nurseries.

The mothers "lost" to the economy are their children's and society's gain, their now invisible work too can be argued to add to the country's GDP and, given high unemployment figures, vacancies are soon filled.

Some...

In this well-reasoned article she has quoted heavily from the article featured in the last issue of the MAHM Newsletter, 'Rattling the Gates of Whitehall', which described the meeting between Oliver Letwin MP and two of our committee members, Anne Fennell and Poppy Pickles.

Please click on the link below for the full article:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2086287/Yes-David-Cameron-mothers-home-matter-dont-let-cutting-child-benefit.html

Subject: George Osborne: Mother's Ruin?

Dear Sir,

As we face the onset of a new and undoubtedly more serious recession, with the Euro in crisis, and with industry and consumers facing soaring energy costs, readers will struggle to understand how, as part of his "long-awaited Autumn Statement", Chancellor George Osborne hopes to lift us out of the economic doldrums by providing mothers of two-year-olds with free nursery places ('Children aged two to get free place at nursery: Osborne unveils £650m plan to help young mothers back to work', Telegraph, November 29, 2011).

You rightly describe Mr Osborne's response to the crisis as "footling and irrelevant"; one might add, baffling. Are we to believe that what has been holding us back all these years is the fact that mothers of very young children have been prevented from doing paid work? Perhaps, then, we might see an even bigger...