I saw the invitation for guest posts on this, one of my favourite, blogs & I asked if I could send in a rant about media treatment of the social welfare system. The lovely blogger agreed.
Life intervened and the piece which was about half written (in my head) was delayed. Then the UK riots happened and I sat & waited for the inevitable. It didn’t take long. Commentators & politicians in the media there started blaming ‘single mothers’ & ‘fatherless families’ for the breakdown in morality etc even while the burning & looting continued. And of course the usual suspects had to follow suit here. Messrs Myers & Waters erupted as they always do. In case you missed it Fergus Finlay quotes them both in The Irish Examiner on August 16th.
I am really pleased and personally grateful that Fergus Finlay, based on his experience of being the boss in Barnardos, has used his weekly Examiner column to take those journalists to task. It is really important that people in his position do so.
Myers & Waters need to be answered. I barely take them seriously to be honest. But other people do.
The ones I take seriously are the ones who, at times like these feel the need to row in or indeed remain eerily silent while a huge go is had at our families.
So, this is addressed to you:
You appear to genuinely believe that my family is bad for the very fabric of our society. Some of you are coming from the same place as the two fabled journalists, but many of you seem to feel concern for my children. Well thanks and all, but my children are just like you and yours. Like most children in one-parent families they have not grown up ‘fatherless’. Let me say though that I know some who have, and others who have been reared by two mammies, and you know what, they’re just like you & yours too. Not from Mars or Venus, we’re earthlings, just like you.
I respect your right and claim it too, to ask hard questions about parenting, about irresponsible parents, of any gender, in all family types. But actually I don’t need you to focus exclusively on my kind of family.
Whenever I have challenged people who talk in negative terms about lone mothers, I am greeted with howls of ‘Oh Frances, we don’t mean you, for God’s sake!!’ No they mean the ‘feckless teenager’ – less than 3% of us are under 20 by the way. They mean the ones ‘popping out babies every year to get benefits etc’ – 58% of all of us have one child, 32% have two, by the way. They never mean tragic, but respectable, and has never been a burden to the state, me. They aren’t in the least bit embarrassed by how blatant they are being, by the way.
Well, please don’t differentiate like that on my behalf. I don’t identify with you & your thinking. I identify with the mothers & fathers (nobody ever mentions the 26,000 or so Dads rearing children alone) who have ended up like me rearing children on their own, but in the most difficult of living circumstances. The ones people really blame for the riots. Who, like me, worry about the impact of their family situation on their children, as Fergus Finlay describes, but have poverty thrown into the mix as well.
Our families, all of us, especially those in poverty, need you to stop and think about your motivations & concerns. We need you to consider the language you use about our families. We don’t want to be treated like laboratory specimens for your personal sociological study.
If you want to help, then the next time someone makes a negative or patronising remark about us, please speak up for us: our diversity, our ordinariness. Yes we can claim children who grew up to be Barack Obama and several other Nobel winning geniuses. But look around you. Myers & Waters are right, we’re everywhere. Ordinary mortals, rearing our kids, just like you.
Or get yourself acquainted with some facts & figures about our families. There are plenty on the CSO website or on www.oneparent.ie.
Or better still when the time comes, and it looks like it will, for the poorest of our families to take another social welfare cut, write or ring your TD to express your genuine concern about this. 65% of children living in poverty do so in our families, by the way.
Frances Byrne, writing in a personal capacity, is the CEO of OPEN and the very proud mother of two children who are just like your sons/daughters/grandchildren/nieces/nephews/cousins/ friends/neighbours.
Well done Frances. Myers and Waters are not harmless old farts, best ignored. I saw plenty of my lone parent friends hurt by those comments. It’s important that the argument against this kind of bigotry prevails and is seen to prevail.
Open FM » Today’s Links // Aug 17, 2011 at 09:34
[...] Guest Cluck: Earthlings, just like you I saw the invitation for guest posts on this, one of my favourite, blogs & I asked if I could send in a rant about media treatment of the social welfare system. The lovely blogger agreed. Life intervened and the piece which was about half written (in my head) was delayed. Then the UK riots [...] [...]
Thought provoling piece. Would love to hear comment from ‘Messers’ Waters & Myers
When you write ‘Myers & Waters are right, we’re everywhere’, do you perhaps mean ‘We’re right. Myers and Waters are everywhere’?
My smartarsery aside, this is the kind of solid message that really does help bring clarity and a dampening of daft hysteria.
Excellent writing. Keep chipping away.
Lovely piece indeed that questions the stigmatisation of family forms that don’t ‘comform’ with this imagined hegemonic norm! As you write, if only people read CSO stats… Likewise, on the two journos, you have to ask how/why mainstream media feels it fit to employ them. I’m appalled by the criminal damage like most people and by the deaths of people who were caught up in the mayhem.
But while the British msm are featuring the ‘dysfunctional’ family thesis, I did note how the rioters *also* seemed to explain their behaviours being due in part to boredom and lack of good parenting (parroting the msm argument). This appears to result in the media digging no further on the causes of the riots in particular, the issue of poverty and the issue of consumerism’s place in identity in late/liquid modernity. To be a citizen, you have to have a lifestyle and consume, so those who cannot do so will, eventually, be driven to ‘take’ if they are deprived, pauperized and excluded/left with no moral guidance/leadership.
There were certainly instances of young kids running wild reported in the media, and all the ‘parents not knowing their darlings had slipped out the house’ etc., but my take on that point was that the msm highlighted the parents’ shock that children were out robbing because they came from “good homes”… so you gotta ask how ‘normal’ parents were so naive, no? But no, msm chose to just label everything as ‘dysfunctionality’… sloppy, politicised journalism!
The ‘bad parenting’ focus – or, rather, the ‘gloss’ – thus neglects to map how the impact of Tory cuts are pauperizing young people, esp. black youth, so stealing is away of becoming ‘consumers’. The bad parenting thesis also ignores, if you look at the zones where riots occurred, how they mirror areas that were Labour electoral heartlands – so I wonder what ‘New Labour’ actually did for deprived areas/families over 14 years in power.
Underneath it all, I suspect that these ‘labour’ areas are being particularly targeted for cuts by the Tories… but is anyone looking at that issue?
Ah the translation from word doc and html buggering up things…i’ll sort it
Excellent piece Frances.. It’s a shame that the likes of Myers and Waters don’t deal in hard facts and figures- I suppose they just get in the way when all one wants to do is scapegoat, stereotype, malign and incite hatred.
Let me join those who say this is an excellent piece, well ballanced, which is more than I can say for Myers and Waters. Some people call them intellectual! I can not understand this. To me they are just grasping at straws to feed the own prejudices. Really intelligent people know there are no easy answers to many social problems
Thanks for the lovely comments. Really appreciate them.
Good piece Frances, heart felt and eloquent. Keep on trucking – I’d like to see those two manage bed time as a lone parent for even a week.
Brilliantly said Frances! I have lots of lone mammies in my family tree, through death, separation, abandonment, going back generations. I’m watching J.K. Rowling on “Who do you think you are” or whatever that family tree programme is called and she is struck by the number of single mammies across her family tree (in France) again through death, abandonment etc. There have always been lots of us about.
I am so glad my son isn’t old enough to read the newspapers and I don’t have the radio news on around him so that he doesn’t have to hear that our family is somehow instrinsically deficient, that he’s likely to grow up to be a a flawed, damaged person by virtue of the fact that he is being brought up by me.
Do we even have a name for this stigmatising of our families? Misogyny probably does cover it (as you say it’s never male-headed lone parent families that are singled out as a problem), and it’s class prejudice as well of course, but I’d like to have a name so that it can be seen for the particular hatred that it is.
Absolutely brilliant piece Frances.
And as the daughter of one of those 26,000 fathers raising children on their own, I’m glad to see that we got a mention.
Bravo Frances, the sooner people stop pointing the high-falutin’ finger of blame at those doing their level best the better.
I was 18 when I had my child and endured all maner of vitriol in the early days, but by golly I raised her and raised her well to be the fine 20 year-old she is today. It galls me to listen to tedious muppets spout Daily Mailisms without thought, it really does.
Great piece, as always, Frances.
Some other points that have struck me over the last while:
1. any argument which starts ‘we have riots because X has changed’ ignores the fact that London, like most big cities, has had riots every generation since records began. They are probably less violent now – so what has improved?
2. The societies furthest from the fictional notion of the traditional family, particularly the Scandinavian societies which have committed the additional sin of reflecting this in their welfare states, are the least violent in Europe (should not be idealised, because they have their problems too, but they are not the battle grounds they should be if Myers and co were right
3. the traditional family with two committees parents and 2.4 kids is a myth – there are probably more families with two involved parents (in fact with one involved parents) than at any time for generations
4. Despite what we read in most papers, most Western societies have become considerably less violent over the last few generations. Anyone remember the gang wars in Dublin (and Bray) in the 60s?
The only thing that historians agree about riots is that they never have a single cause. Poverty, social divisions, alienation, boredom, consumerism, opportunity and youthful rebellion, greed, etc etc. probably all play a part for different people, with lack of respect for young people from police (and adult society generally) the only constant that we can be fairly sure of.
anyway, congrats again Frances
And then David Quinn got in on the act….
Thank you Frances. This is an excellent piece of writing, so truthful! You have succinctly what I have felt and was unable to put into words. Keep up the good work.
Got a notification re Lynne’s comment, for which a big thanks. And Oonagh, Dee, Paula, Arlene & Robin. You’re all too kind indeed.