I find it interesting that the reporting of these numbers (by the left and the right) has been largely free of actual analysis. I suspect this is because Bernardos have been rather good at encoding their findings in largely liberal language; the sensationalist advert, the term ‘demonisation’ and the use of words such as ‘vermin’ and ‘feral’ trigger the liberal dislike of tabloid demonisation tactics.

However, while a constant stream of stories about hoodies and stabbings have had an appreciable effect, I think that one of the reason why those stories have found an audience is because of a deeper shift in attitudes towards children. A shift prompted not by tabloid demonisation but by middle class moral entrepreneurship.

The demographics are clear, less and less people in this country are having children and those that do have children are having them later and later.

Despite this fact, the primary argument for progressive taxation deployed by the government has been to get rid of child poverty. A movement of taxation which should be about moving the burden from rich to poor but is actually more about moving the burden from parents to non-parents. Government tax credit systems aimed at getting children out of poverty extend upwards to households taking in £60k a year. If you believe the Joseph Roundtree foundation then you’ll see that during Labour’s first two terms, tens of thousands of childless people slipped below the poverty line, left behind by a government that was raising the tax burden on them. Meanwhile, Britain’s almost Dickensian employment laws have been liberalised with rights to flexy-time or time off for emergencies rolled out not for all workers, but for parents.

Similarly, the major force for social conservatism for the last decade or so has not been religion but parental concern for children. Violent or sexual media? think of the children. Gay adoption? think of the children. Lowering the gay age of consent? think of the children.

In effect, the political classes have allowed the creation of a cultural milieu in which it is clear that children are seen as more important than adults.

To my mind, the problem here is the government putting all of its progressive eggs in a gradually emptying basket and this has created a lot of resentment as well as feelings of impotence and anger. Unfortunately, many people lash out not at the government but at the perceived beneficiaries of these changes: the kids.

The tabloids have been on the wrong end of a number of fights over the last decade but their scare stories about kids are finding some real traction with an aging and increasingly childless population that feels powerless and incapable of dealing with younger people.

These numbers aren’t entirely about demonisation, they’re also about deeper demographic and political changes.

I have to say, as a parent, that the perception that we get special treatment does not accord with my own experience. My partner and I earn more than my parents ever did, we have 2 children, as they did, but are bringing them up in a smaller house, have less time with them and have to farm them out to childminders and relatives far more than I ever was, overall I feel that we are both forced to work precisely because the tax system mitigates against working parents, making our weekday lives are a stressfull, complicated treadmill.

The governments seems to have tunnel vision and sees the solution as making it ever easier for working parents (women especially) to dump their kids while they are at work, via a stream of initiatives around chilcare, nursrey and extended school hours, rather than empowering individual families by giving them the choice of whether to outsource their childcare or allow one parent to stay at home for say, the first five years of the childs life. At the moment the financial “rewards” for both working (taking tax credits, childminding fees et al into account) are marginal, especially when you conider the potential psychological damage done by early years care from strangers. The government now expect us to send our kids to nursery at the age of 3, when they are little more than babies. Rather than providing ever more of this kind of “support” for working families I would welcome the return of something akin to a transferable tax allowance that allowed middle income families the option of allowing one parent to stay at home and look after the children full time, currently that option is only open to the affluant middle classes and the benefits classes, the latter are iIronically non expected, by the benefits system, to work until their children are 12.

The fact that the tax system does not make your life easy enough does not preclude the fact that it makes it easier than it does the lives of others. If you consider the tax system, the benefits packages of many firms and the unbalanced employment legislation then it is arguably the case that many parents work shorter hours for more money upon which they pay less tax than childless people doing the same jobs.

We all have private lives that we value. You choose to fill yours with children, others have not gone down that path and yet they carry much more of the proportional burden of tax than you do. This is going to breed discontent and when you factor into it the fact that every time a moral outrage is cooked up it is done so in the name of ‘the children’ then you have a recipe for an adult population that sees children being loud, children playing in the street or children doing wrong things as yet another imposition.

You may be correct that the existing tax system has other value judgments concealed within it that are as senseless as they are unjust but, to be fair, I’m not sure that these are strictly relevant to creating a backlash against children.

My point was that this is not merely a case of tabloid demonisation, as Barnardo’s suggest, it is also a result of complex demographic and social shifts.

(I’m also completely unclear as to what Barnardo’s could possibly do about the problem)

Matt,

My guess is that the reason you live in a smaller house and have less time than your parents’ generation did has more to do with the housing market than the tax system. A generation ago, the UK population was far smaller and lived in larger households.

Household sizes have since fallen and housing stock has not kept pace with population (or at least household) growth. At the same time, societal norms have changed so that there is an ever increasing number of households where all the adults work. This is even more likely in the case of younger households who (until recently) made up the nation’s supply of first time buyers and a sizeable proportion of its private renters.

So you have ever more dual income households flinging ever more money at a still limited housing stock. And because the social housing sector was marginalised by both the Tories and then Labour, competition for housing increased forcing values and rents up.

In the face of a housing shortage buyers must compete, taking on larger debts or paying an ever larger share of income on rent and with no guarantee of a future stabilisation. The result is working more hours to service larger debts than our parents generation would have though possible, let alone prudent. This insecurity explains why you live in a smaller house than your parents did, why lots of people feel too financially insecure to have kids and why your dual income family has less time to spend with your children than your parents did with you.

And the beneficiaries of this, those of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations who owned property – they have made immense paper fortunes out of their houses which they hand on to their off-spring when they die – thus fuelling the single largest source of wealth inequality of the last 20 years.

I realise that the housing market is now in freefall but the underlying problems within it are not even being addressed – let alone solved – so whatever shape it ends up in at the end of this crash, serious problems will certainly recur.