You can’t outsource family life
by Mary Harrington, The Conservative Woman:
MEASURING ‘wellbeing’ in schools, incentivising feckless parents and micromanaging the rest – that’s the suggested solution to child unhappiness.
As if schools did not have enough to do, the Children’s Society charity now wants teachers to monitor pupils’ wellbeing.
UK children are among the unhappiest in the world and it is no wonder. Everyone has to work to make ends meet so children routinely spend 40-plus hours a week in often noisy, chaotic institutional childcare, outdoor play time is heavily supervised and constrained or simply nonexistent, and parents are too exhausted even to gather the family for dinner.
Add to that a social life that skips real-life contact for the narcissistic filter of social media, confusing messages about sexuality that blend extreme permissiveness with anxious prurience, doom-laden prognostications about the environment, a shaky economic climate and a dearth of adult role models who wish to behave like adults, and it is no wonder children and young people are confused and unhappy.
But what on earth does anyone imagine will be improved by asking schools to measure this? A child’s wellbeing originates, first and foremost, with his or her family. Certainly a school can contribute to wellbeing but if home life is miserable there is not a great deal teachers can do about it.
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