Jemima Lewis: Parenting classes will improve life for all of us

My patch of London is teeming with yobbos. Half the time I'm too scared to tiptoe outside to buy milk

As if parents didn't have to endure enough squabbling at home – now the Government's at it on their behalf. David Blunkett wants to introduce compulsory parenting classes for the families of yobs and truants. But Lord Irvine has criticised the plan as "an extreme example of the nanny state" and a violation of human rights. Blunkett, not to be deflected by a wallpaper-fancying dandy like the Lord Chancellor, yesterday riposted to the effect that he should keep his pampered nose out of other people's business: "Those who have no experience of the misery that antisocial behaviour can bring should not get in the way of those prepared to introduce measures to do something about it."

He has a point. Good libertarians should be wary of state intrusions into the private life of the individual, but parenting isn't an entirely private act. Like architecture, it affects far more people than just those on the inside. Bring up your child badly and he or she will become a menace to the whole neighbourhood, not just you. And, the chances are, that neighbourhood won't be anywhere near the Lord Chancellor's turf.

I know whereof I speak, for my little patch of north-west London is absolutely teeming with pint-sized yobbos. There's a gang of 12-year-olds who lurk round the corner at the same time every day, waiting for my flatmates to come bicycling home from work. When the flatmates appear – by now gloomily resigned to their fate – the boys lob stones at their heads, accompanied by a barrage of curses.

Then there's the older gang who gather outside my front door at all hours of day and night to smoke weed and fight each other. In the summer months, they're there all the time, lined up on my front wall like pigeons basking on a wire. To add to the menacing atmosphere, they usually have a car stereo cranked up to full volume, shaking the very foundations of my house. I should be used to it by now, but I'm not. Half the time I'm too scared to tiptoe outside to buy milk, let alone tell them to put a sock in it.

The only people who could safely tell them that are their parents, most of whom live on our street. But they don't seem to see anything wrong with the way their offspring have turned out. It is, of course, a condition of parenthood to imagine that Little Johnny is quite perfect in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But modern parents suffer from this delusion to an extraordinary degree. One of the teachers' unions complained last week that parents are much too quick to back their children against schools. When a pupil gets into trouble, his family immediately blame the teacher. A deputy head recounted how the parents of a disruptive child demanded his teacher should be banned from talking to him, even to take the register.

This tangled mess of parental defensiveness and irresponsibility is utterly modern. The rules of childcare have undergone a massive convulsion over the past half-century. As a society, we have abandoned the old notion of original sin and instead embraced Rousseau's sentimental idea that children come into the world as perfect little bundles of innocence, who can only be screwed up by the pressures of social conformity. This is a great excuse for lazy parenting. If children are perfect just as they are, there's no need to discipline them. You can just slide back into the sofa with your ready meal and let them get on with robbing the neighbours.

The question remains, though: would compulsory parenting lessons make any difference? After all, childcare experts tend to be on the side of Rousseau against the disciplinarians. They have already won the argument about smacking, and lately they've been trying to persuade parents not even to shout at their children. This seems a mistake to me. My mother -– who has the lungs of an opera singer and the wisdom of Solomon -– used to shout at me so hard that it was like standing in a wind tunnel, but it never made me feel unloved. Quite the opposite, in fact.

In a way, though, it hardly matters what the content of these classes will be. Parenting is a tough job that requires concentration. The very fact of being ordered to attend a class should shake even the slackest parents out of their torpor. And there are encouraging precedents. Patricia Amos, the first mother to be sent to jail for letting her children play truant, has since said that it was the best thing that could have happened to her. "It made me take a look at my life," she said. "I realised I'd never really taken responsibility for myself, or the kids, and it was time I did. I wanted to start all over again."

Despite my liberal instincts, I'm hoping that Blunkett gets his way. And when the police vans are dispatched to round up rubbish parents, I'll be peering timidly out from behind my curtains, praying that ours is the first street on his list.

Jemima Lewis is editor of 'The Week'