Less poverty - Reclaim Rights for Children

The solution to poverty is less poverty (more money/lower cost of essentials)

Section on the evidence that money helps and that behaviour modification and education do not.

“…we don’t have a cure for poverty.”

Kemi Badenoch, Covid Enquiry

Just as government measures have increased poverty, so we can decrease or ‘cure’ poverty. Not by changing parental behaviour or through education but by increasing the money available to families or decreasing the cost of goods, services and essentials.

The two child benefit cap increased poverty. Removing that cap would decrease poverty.

The myth of the parental behaviour cure So-called ‘help’ which demands more from these families, without changing the realities of their lives, will not help children. Ensuring families have enough money helps make parenting easier and life outcomes better.

The solution to poverty is not education. While a decent education is a good thing which all children deserve education does not solve poverty. Our grading system is a bell curve – one third of children will always fail.

Solutions must tackle the root problems and must respect all rights of children and of their families.

Too often rights to support are used as justification for intrusive measures including surveillance and profiling to identify families and then assessment processes which are intrusive and harmful. Children and their families’ rights to privacy and to family life under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act 1998, and rights to protection of their data must be respected also.

Families need help – which is consent based – not intervention.

Too often ‘support’ focuses on altering the behaviour of mothers and the way that they parent, rather than altering the circumstances in which they are parenting.

“The strength and resilience of many working class families, and especially women and mothers, has been misrecognised as a failure to live up to middle-class standards and priorities.“

Dr Stephen Crossley
Troublemakers: The construction of ‘troubled families’ as a social problem

“The idea that hardship and discrimination is to do with how much attention of the right sort that mothers give to their children, and the notion of countering global traumas and inequalities through parenting, is jaw-dropping.”