I Need A Rest From Babies

I need a rest from babies, not making them, reading about them. Yesterday, I wrote that recent research suggests that the cost of rearing a child from birth to the age of 21 is just under £194,000. In Monday's Daily Mail nearly every other article seemed to be about babies and children. Here is a brief summary of those articles.

Children 'suffering from lack of two-parent family
The article claimed that children do best when brought up by two parents. This was the conclusion of a report carried out for leading charity 'Childrens Society'. It highlighted the reason for the problems as mothers going to work and the breakdown of marriages. The report claimed 50% more children from broken families develop problems in their lives than children from two parent families. 70% of mothers of babies under one year old do paid work of some kind. 70% of teenagers think parents who get on well are important to a child's happiness. 33% of parents think it is important to a child's happiness for both their parents to get on with each other. These are not new problems, as long ago as 1996 The Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported that children without two parents at the age of 15 are more likely to have no qualifications, be unemployed, use drugs, or be pregnant by the age of 18.

Call for two child limit on families
This article claimed Jonathon Porritt , the Government leading green advisor, has said that couples who have more than two children are putting an 'irresponsible' burden on the environment. It is thought he wants the Government to divert money away from curing illnesses so it can fight global warming by funding family planning services, including abortion and contraception.

How the heartwarming tale of the U.S octuplets became a seedy story of self-indulgence
This story defies belief. Nadya Suleman 33, has given birth to eight babies following fertility treatment. Miraculously, all survived. It turns out that Miss Suleman already had six children when she went through IVF treatment previously. Miss Suleman is unmarried, has no partner and no apparent means of financial support. She lives in a hopelessly small house with her divorced parents one of whom, her mother, recently filed for bankruptcy. After six offspring she had a further round of IVF treatment because Nadya wanted 'just one more girl'.

Why do green zealots think they can dictate how many children we are allowed to have?
The above headline refers to a three-quarter page article written by Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips. As you can guess from the headline this article berates the suggestions made by Jonathon Porritt in the story referred to above. One paragraph in this article reads as follows: [It is no coincidence that the country which comes nearest to Jonathon's ideal society is Communist China, which imposed a murderously cruel policy of restricting families to one child apiece. For the desire to reduce the number of children that parents produce is innately totalitarian.]

Children betrayed
The Daily Mail 'Comment' column could not resist making a further contribution:
Children fare best if brought up by two parents with a 'long term commitment' to each other, says the Childrens Society. Experts have been saying the same thing for years and the Tories are showing welcome signs of having the courage to support the family. Yet still our dogmatic Government pursues a tax and benefits system which makes it more lucrative for couples to live apart. Will Labour ever learn that 'marriage' is not a dirty word? No prizes for guessing who the Daily Mail will be supporting at the next election then!

Mother wins the right to have baby by dead husband
A widow has won the right to have her dead husband's child, even though he never gave his consent. In a groundbreaking decision, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has given her permission to use sperm taken from her spouse just hours after he died during routine surgery. The 42 year old woman must now travel to America for fertility treatment, as it is illegal to use sperm without written permission from the donor in the UK.

Premature babies 'cost £1bn extra to bring up'
This article states, according to researchers, now there's a surprise, that premature babies cost us 50% more in health and education services than full time babies. Much of this is spent on medical care and special needs teaching because premature babies are more likely to have disabilities and lifelong problems.

And two final headlines for you:

The Pages That Save You Money - Today: Children
The Letters Page - Children need a loving family, not strangers

All these articles appeared in one edition of the Daily Mail on Monday 2nd February 2009. Incidentally, I have just worked out that if all Nadya Suleman's 14 children survive (and assuming she doesn't have any more) and the estimate for raising a child from birth to the age of 21 is correct at £194,000, then poor old Nadya is going to have to stump up £2,716,000 within the next 20 years. That's an awful lot of hours doing part-time bar work!