School friends, parties and a rock god: commenting on Katie Hopkins

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My best mate at primary school was called Richard Finnigan. He was the sort of kid who Katie Hopkins would dislike:

Call me controlling, call me ruthlessly aggressive. But I'm convinced one of the best things I can do for my children - India, eight, Poppy, seven, and Max, four - is to choose their friends for them.

Richard's parents were separated and, since it was the 1960s and a Catholic school, this was a big deal. Moreover Richard's Mum, Mary, was a real hippy - trips to Kathmandu and everything - who famously lived with a rock god.

Breaking up with Farthingale shortly after completion of the film, Bowie moved in with Mary Finnigan as her lodger.  Continuing the divergence from rock and roll and blues begun by his work with Farthingale, Bowie joined forces with Finnigan, Christina Ostrom and Barrie Jackson to run a folk club on Sunday nights at the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street.

So it's no surprise that, when Richard had a birthday party, only two of us - me and Andy Bower - turned up. You know - drugs, long hair, tut, tut.

The Finnigan's lived in one of those huge Victorian houses on Foxgrove Road (now mostly demolished and replaced with soul-less blocks of nice flats or twee little cul-de-sacs of town houses). The house had a huge and rather overgrown garden, a tangle of rhododendrons, self-seeded ash and sycamore and the vestiges of paths, statues and ponds that marked its former glory.

For us boys this was brilliant - we weren't interested in the presence of the rock god but in the prospect of jungle adventure, tree climbing and the discussion of those things that matter to nine-year old boys. And we were looked after in that slightly offhand but rather sweet way of hippies. Someone fed us - usually something slightly spicy and pasta-y, probably vegetarian. It might have been Richard's mum, or the couple with a little toddler called Siddhartha, maybe even the rock god himself, this didn't impinge on us - we just welcomed the food.

Parents who want to control the fun of their offspring or who think that somehow the thing we disapprove of in the parents will rub off on our children are telling us more about their own inadequacies than anything else. And, at school, children will make friends with who they wish to not who their controlling mums want them to be friends with.

Perhaps Katie should ease up a little - rather than taking the ridiculous view that consorting with thick children will make her children thick, she should perhaps consider whether her controlling nature might just be damaging them.

Mind you this is the woman who thinks that people who do things she disapproves of should pay more tax, so discovering she's bringing up her children to be ghastly little fascists like her shouldn't surprise us, should it?

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It's bad parenting not the pressure of modern life that's the problem

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We are told by “200 experts” that children’s health is being undermined by the pressures of modern life. 

“Although parents are now deeply concerned about this issue, the erosion of childhood in the UK has continued apace since 2006. Our children are subjected to increasing commercial pressures, they begin formal education far earlier than the European norm, and they spend ever-more time indoors with screen-based technology, rather than in active outdoor activity and play.”

Apparently – or rather according to unspecified “studies” – the ‘well-being’ of British children falls below some supposed international standard. And judging by the letter, this is despite parents being 'concerned'.

Now it seems to me that there isn’t a great deal of substance in this argument. It may be that our children are suffering because of “commercial pressures” but it is far more likely that the problem isn’t advertising, computers games or television but bad parenting.

Here’s one of the 200 making her point:

One study by Sally Goddard Blythe, the director of the Institute for Neuro-Physiological Psychology in Chester, concluded that up to half of children were not ready for school at the age of five because of “sedentary lifestyles”. They struggled to grip pencils properly, sit still, stand up straight and even catch a ball after failing to develop physical and communication skills at a young age.

It isn’t the “pressures of modern life” that’s causing this problem now is it, Sally? It’s the parents of these children – the ones who don’t play with them, who use the telly as a baby-sitter, feed them an endless soothing diet of fizzy drinks, sweets and chocolate and don't take them to the park.

So why do these “experts” take it upon themselves to challenge something called “modern life” rather than the failing parenting of some mothers and fathers (assuming the latter is anywhere to be seen)? I’m sure the children of these 200 ‘experts’ are not suffering in this way. I’m sure they’ll grow up active, able, well-adjusted and able to recognise advertising (and its purpose). Indeed, most children - a clear majority - will benefit from modern life, from the TV, from computer games, from computers and from the wonders these things bring into our homes.

But what these 200 "experts" propose is a collection of tired, old-fashioned ‘progressive’ solutions – banning advertising (there’s always a ban close to the surface when these so-called ‘experts’ write), replacing education with play and further interference in the curriculum of primary schools. And absolutely nothing – not even a mention – of poor parenting.

And it is parenting not modern life that is the problem.

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