Interesting Links for 28-07-2016

[andrewducker]

Remember the ice bucket challenge? It just funded an ALS breakthrough (tags: charity research genes meme ) Vitamin D levels predict risk of brain decline in Chinese elderly (tags: vitaminD china brain age ) Bill Clinton wore a fetching navy pantsuit to honor Hillary Clinton's nomination for US president (tags: fashion politics usa funny viaElfy

Comments

[momentsmusicaux]

Interesting article about the Named Persons scheme!

But what is the CI's big beef with this anyway? Why do they feel it affects them? (Their website just says something along the lines of 'this is awful!'.

Also, is it unreasonable of me to feel rather unimpressed with the Scottish gvmt not managing to set out legislation with a bit more thought put into it? I mean, they've basically been told to go away and redraft it. Shouldn't they have done that as part of their own processes?

[skington]

They feel that it's the State interfering with families, AIUI, and telling people how to live their lives / bring up their children. Which of course it is, because some people are terrible parents.

[momentsmusicaux]

> Which of course it is, because some people are terrible parents.

I'm in complete agreement there!

Is there some particular angle they have as christians?

[skington]

This popped up in my twitter feed because I follow Ruth Davidson: Named person scheme ruled unlawful.

The significant quotes are "Simply put, the SNP does not know better than parents when it comes to raising their children" and "Scottish parents who rightly want to be able to raise their children without state interference". There's some stuff about privacy rights and so forth, but given that she also mentions that Labour and the LibDems voted for it (so therefore the privacy rights issue is merely an adjunct, otherwise the LibDems wouldn't have voted for it), clearly what the Tories care about is being able to bring up your kids without state interference.

[drdoug]

But what is the CI's big beef with this anyway? Why do they feel it affects them?They give a fairly reasoned account here: http://www.christian.org.uk/wp-content/downloads/named-person-briefing-2016.pdf [PDF

[cartesiandaemon]

That makes a lot of sense, thank you.

It does feel like maybe a less-intrusive thing where society at least offers helpful advice about what might be useful child rearing strategies might be useful -- it's easy to get stuck choosing between either "full time daycare" or "no help, just figure it out". Especially if it were only offered, not imposed. But it should be a very very different sort of thing to existing "are you doing something wrong" services. I also thought "single point of contact" sounded good. But I'm very cynical about it smuggling in so much detail. Like you, I can easily imagine a check-box approach that ignores "does it seem to be working" in favour of "you departed from the orthodoxy on more than 3 points, we will begin a formal investigation"

[skington]

Here's a thing about Named Person that I'd like to hear an answer to

[drdoug]

It may be the latter. The No2NP site is certainly full of tales from the pilots that are pretty much "see, it's as terrible as we said it would be", e.g

[momentsmusicaux]

That does sound like far too much detail -- colour of their room, football and so on. It's a bit alarming how the idea of this legislation has gone from the idea of how to fix the problem of children 'falling between the cracks', where different agencies and professionals each have only part of the whole picture, and so miss the problems with a child until it's too late, to monitoring the minutiae of kids' lives!

(As an aside, it seems to me that this sort of thing needs a similar term to bikeshedding and scope creep. It's slightly related to scope creep, but it's piling on way too much detail to a plan.)

> my moral universe it's more important to do the right thing than to do the thing that makes you happy

Well quite. Beer and crisps make me happy. Endless trips to McDonalds make kids happy.

[naath]

Yesterday's TV news contained both this court case and the case of a child murdered by his mother's boyfriend (aided and abetted by his mother).

Some people are VILE to their children. I don't know how much privacy-intruding we have to do to catch all the vile people before their vileness kills or seriously injures their children, but I'm willing to put up with quite a lot.

I don't think the "named person" will magically make the system work, but they are likely to have some idea about how to prod the system, and what the system OUGHT be doing. Poorly educated/informed parents with no time or tuits might not know where to turn for help they desperately need or even what help there might be and having a specific person they know to go and talk to plausibly helps with that.

I don't know what "what colour paint they have" has to do with child welfare. Maybe "gives helpful advice when asked about random things" is a key aspect in being seen as a useful and trusted helper for parents-in-need-of-help?

[drdoug]

I don't know how much privacy-intruding we have to do to catch all the vile people before their vileness kills or seriously injures their children, but I'm willing to put up with quite a lot.I would be too, but I'm not at all sure that it's a tradeoff. I fear we may end up with ever-increasing amounts of privacy intrusion and parental distress *and* no material improvement in the number of serious abuse and murder cases