Letter: Children who need help

Letter: Children who need help

Sir: Suzanne Moore's rubbishing of the ideas behind National Parenting Day (Comment, 6 May) does her little credit. As a prosperous, caring, single parent with strong middle-class social (i.e. moral) values, it is easy for her to say "people may want support when things go wrong but they don't want to be told how to do things in the first place".

What about the young mother who is a third - or fourth - generation urban savage: whose acquisition of social skills extended only to competing with her classmates to get laid by the biggest bully and, after exercising her right to give birth, being beaten or deserted? What about the youth who has never met his father; who regards girls as a commodity or a form of entertainment?

Their children are the ones who need support but they can't ask for it because the need - the desperate need - arises before they are born. This is why parenting and other basic skills of living in a civilised society need to be taught to those whose ancestral society broke down long ago. The Government must do this, if only because the resources required will be enormous.

JOHN LOGAN

Redditch, Worcestershire