So Britain ranks 21 (one below the USA) at the very bottom of the latest UNICEF report on the wellbeing of children in the richest industrialised countries in the world.
I’m surprised that we even made it to the final list, judging by what we can observe around us and read about in the press every day.
As you would expect, the U.K. has the worst levels of youth drunkenness and teenage sexual relations and ranks poorly when it comes to ‘quality of relationships’.
This subject is far too complex to go into here in my little blog, and anyway, you can read the ‘experts’ opinions in every newspaper. However, I would like to comment on that ‘quality of relationships’ when it comes to parent and child, for I find that many parents in this country seem to totally ignore their children and ‘exclude’ them from their everyday activities.
Now I am not talking about the obvious case of the so called ‘underclass’ single mother and her ‘feral’ offspring, for you can see many examples of this ‘exclusion’ without going anywhere near a run down council estate.
Just take a look at the mother who is too busy gossiping to her friend in the supermarket to answer her inquisitive child’s questions: or the father who spends a fortune on toys for his kids but never plays with them, just like the mother who spends hours at the gym when she could be taking the kids for a bike ride: but most obvious of all is when you observe a group of British parents and their children in a restaurant, for almost always the kids will be segregated.
In other European countries families seem to dine as ‘a family’. In other words the young ones are included in the group and sit amongst the other family members, taking part in conversations and generally behaving themselves: unlike the British group where the parents talk amongst themselves and the kids get bored and become disruptive.
If this is how many parents fail to relate to their children in public …
… what must it be like at home ?
bigjohn 
