“A quiet growing time” — this is how the educational reformer Charlotte Mason described the ideal for a child’s first six years of life. “A full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it spent for the most part out in the fresh air” was a goal for mothers to strive for during “this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social.”
By “this time”, Mason didn’t mean childhood, but the turn of the twentieth century. It is hard not to think that she didn’t realise how good she had it, given the social and educational pressures now faced by children as young as four in full-time schooling in the UK.
A “quiet growing time” is precisely what British children today don’t get. They are thrust into long hours of state-funded childcare from as young as nine months, the point at which statutory maternity pay ends. And so, between the ages of nine months and five years, and between the hours of 8am and 6pm each weekday, the British state will give money to almost anyone to look after your child apart from you.
This week, the government piloted its new school breakfast club program, a £30 million pound initiative to provide free breakfasts in schools across the country. These clubs are meant to be 30 minute sessions immediately before the school day, meaning 8-8:30 am in most schools. The rationale for the clubs was dystopically but articulately laid out by Labour councillor Sebastian Salek in a thread on X this week. Aside from the alleged benefits of saving families £450 per year, improving academic achievement, and ensuring children don’t start school hungry, the clubs are supposedly an instance of “clever economics” which “makes everyone richer”. This would happen by “giving parents back 95 hours a year”, thus allowing them to “work more hours”, “earn more money”, and “pay more tax that funds our public services.” Salek cites a stat saying that 1.7 million mothers want to work more, concluding that, if they could, they would generate £28.2 billion in economic output. Everyone’s a winner.
The classic caricature of the vices of the political Right and Left is that the former see the country as a business and the latter as a charity. Yet, in the UK, we increasingly live in a uniparty system in which our political parties give us the worst of all possible worlds by thinking that the country can be both at the same time. The Tories did this by talking a good game on post-Brexit liberty and renewal, and then ballooning the state in a fashion that would make Mr. Creosote look slender. For this, they were justly punished by the electorate. Yet, nine months into Keir Starmer’s tenure as Prime Minister, the mask has come off enough times to make it clear that Labour are no different. They are beholden to the idols of Mammon and of the State and are happy to offer up on their shared altar a sacrifice which, once given, cannot be retrieved: the family.
Increasingly our political parties think our country is a business and a charity at the same time
Salek’s whole description of Labour’s rationale betrays an attitude in which both families and time are totally fungible, adaptable and interchangeable to the nth degree. For children, it doesn’t really matter if they have breakfast in the comfort of their home with their parents and siblings, because it’s no different to being served it in a chilly school hall by a dinner lady who barely speaks English, surrounded by your increasingly dysfunctional peers. And for parents, those thirty minutes serving your kids breakfast are no different to thirty minutes spent tapping at a keyboard for your makework hybrid email job. Apparently.
Now let’s be clear, breakfast time on a typical English school day is hardly an idyllic scene from Little House on the Prairie. It will typically involve a fair bit of crying over spilt milk. Just yesterday, on the first day back from the Easter holidays, I watched my neighbour rushing a plate of toast out to the car with her children in tow. And yet, however chaotic they may be, and as much as Salek and others might try to spin breakfast clubs as being good for “child development”, shared family mealtimes are widely known to be incredibly beneficial for children’s wellbeing. Time spent with parents and siblings is simply not interchangeable with time spent with staff and peers. There are only two things you as a parent can give your children that no-one else can: yourself, and their siblings. As I have written elsewhere, families are stubbornly non-fungible. Those 95 work hours “given back” to parents for work each year will be, unavoidably, 95 hours taken away from their children, however you spin it.
Furthermore, this isn’t even what most parents want. Salek cites a stat that 1.7 million women want to work more but can’t due to childcare. True, more or less — a 2023 report from the Centre for Progressive Policy puts it at 1.5 million. And yet other figures from the same year show that 2.9 million mums want to work less than they do. If Labour were really interested in supporting parents, they’d pursue policies that helped the majority of mothers who want to work less or not at all while their children are small.
Finally, not only do policies like breakfast clubs damage families, but they will not even succeed on their own stated terms. Salek claims that the policy will benefit both the economy (by boosting productivity) and the state (by boosting tax revenue), but this is incredibly short-sighted. The disintegration of family life in the UK is upstream of our decreasing national prosperity. So many of our national dysfunctions — the burdens on schools, mental health, long-term benefits claimants, lack of social care capacity — are in large part the result of the weakening of the family. If our families were stronger and able to care for their own children, the infirm, and the elderly, then the burden on the state would be reduced and the tax burden would fall. We would also be happier and more prosperous as a result. Allowing mothers to stay home in a child’s younger years is overwhelmingly in our national and economic interest, and yet we do absolutely nothing to facilitate this.
Many may respond to the above criticisms by talking about disadvantaged children who are neglected and need breakfast. And to that I say: quite right, we should make efforts to provide breakfast for those children. Yet we already have (in most cases) assessment criteria for free school meals at lunch, so why not simply offer breakfast to the same children? The reason is because disadvantaged children are not really the focus here, as Labour’s messaging shows. It’s about appeasing the god of Mammon with growth, and the god of the State with tax revenue. It’s a policy designed to turn English mothers across the country into the distracted, cellphone-wielding workaholic dads of 90s American movies. No one thinks they’re going to end up being Robin Williams in Hook, with your spouse telling you “you’re missing it” as you take another very important call while your children grow up just outside your line of sight. But as you drive away from the school, having dropped your bleary-eyed kids off at 7:55am for the fifth day in a row, “missing it” is exactly what you’ll be doing.
