Benefits Street shock horror

When we made our DVD five years ago, one of the young dads was quite open about the fact that he was better off on benefits than he would ever have been in work, not that he could find any.  “I’ve just been paid,” he used to say each week.  And that’s before I discovered that one of the country’s major banks was taking 10% of his benefits in overdraft charges each month because, although he was living within his means, he didn’t have the financial nous to avoid going overdrawn.

As for the flats and houses I used to visit when I was running our young dads-to-be course, it would be enough to say that I wouldn’t want to have lived in any of them.  The worst was so damp that it wasn’t just the walls were mouldy.   I saw mould on both hard and soft furnishings.

And then there’s food banks.  Too often I had to arrange for for young couples to get food bank support because their benefit payments got messed up.

So nothing in the Channel 4 programme is new, or a surprise.  The only surprise is that it’s provoked controversy.  There seems to be a general lack of awareness of the dire circumstances that far too many of our young people have to contend with.

Baby talk

“Speaking directly to a baby or reading a bedtime story has a direct impact on how well they will do in school and possibly their career in later life ... “  So begins an article in last Saturday’s Independent, describing a Stanford University study.  No surprise of course, but a problem for young parents with their own literacy issues.  The study also “warned against using ... TVs as babysitters.”  Far too often I saw babies ‘parked' in a bouncy chair underneath a television while mum/dad’s focus was elsewhere.

The study serves as a reminder that the support needs of young parents can extend well beyond the birth of their children