United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron has come out as a large support of state-backed parenting classes to improve children's lives in the UK. However, reports suggest that not a lot of parents are interested in taking these classes.
According to Spiked, Cameron's efforts will likely end the same way as then children minister Sarah Teather's efforts with CANparent. Teather's scheme involved handing out vouchers to parents. These vouchers could then be exchanged for free parenting classes led by a number of charities. When CANparent was first announced it aimed to give "free parenting classes to over 50,000 mothers and fathers' as part of a new Department of Education scheme." Teather emphasized the idea of parental determinism, which is the belief that how you are as an adult is largely determined by how you were treated as a kid.
If this were the case, then a lot more parents would be interested in taking those free parenting classes. However, the result was not as expected and CANparent turned out to be a major flop. A lot of people believe that what Cameron is planning would just end up in the same manner.
"Bringing up children may well be an 'important job', but that doesn't mean it's a legitimate area for state intervention," says Toby Young for the Daily Mail. "Few Englishmen or women would be able to regard their home as a castle if they had to put up with official advice about how to run their household," he adds.
People have yet to see the effectiveness of these parenting classes, so opinion about them may change over time. It would be a long time before we can consider this as either a success or a failure. Hopefully, it won't fail since the UK Prime Minister is planning to spend over £70 million within the next five years to fund these parenting classes.
