When the government announced its new £5 million parenting project last week I thought I should offer to help. I have four children, after all, so know a thing or two about the subject. I sent a message via Twitter to the owner of the Parent Gym, one of the organisations involved in the scheme.
‘I’d be happy to donate all my Spectator columns on parenting,’ I said. ‘You could reproduce them as an example of what not to do.’
It was a joke, obviously. Middle-class dads trade anecdotes in the park on Saturday mornings about what crap parents they are, but the fact that they’re in the park with their children — usually playing football or cricket — demonstrates that they’re actually doing a pretty good job.
The trouble with this government scheme is that the sort of people it’s designed to help — let’s call them the parents of the feral underclass, even though that phrase is now verboten — are unlikely to attend the classes, even with a voucher from Boots entitling them to free lessons.
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