Children

The Duchess of Cambridge has been out and about hosting roundtables with very important people, discussing what can be done to support the nation’s pre-school children. Royal aides tell us she consulted ‘the sector’ to find out what should be done about the children who turn up for the first day of school barely able to speak or hold a pencil. What ‘the sector’ inevitably wants is more funding.  Kate Middleton has become the first royal to set up a think-tank, the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood. This week she summoned ministers, civil servants and academics to discuss the findings of a poll: it seems most Britons want a bigger focus on early childhood.

Soft ground Sir: We have heard much over the years from the overseas aid lobby about the value of soft power. Now the chips are down, we see how empty those claims were. Aidan Hartley (‘Russia’s special relationship’, 16 April) outlined how African nations have lined up to support Russia rather than Ukraine or the West, exposing how wasted the UK’s investment in soft power has been. The same applies to aid given to Pakistan and India. The absurdity of an overseas aid target of 0.7 per cent (of GDP) must be abandoned and replaced by an 0.5 per cent spending ceiling, at or below which the UK’s aid objectives in the third world must be seen to bring results.

Joe Biden announced in November: ‘Transgender people are some of the bravest Americans I know.’ When Conservative MP Jamie Wallis came out as trans last month, Boris Johnson hailed the revelation as having taken ‘an immense amount of courage’. Mr Wallis says that he was subjected to sexual violence after having ‘hooked up’ with another man in the autumn, which raises the question of whether the parliamentarian might be plain old gay. But then, nowadays being gay is dull. In fact, homosexuality having become a big snooze is one of this century’s healthiest turns of the cultural wheel. ‘There’s something you should know’ – freighted pause – ‘I’m gay.’ OK, fine.

Britain is on a slow descent to oblivion. Scotland is even closer to the abyss, with a birth rate of just 1.29, well below the UK’s sub-replacement level of 1.65. It turns out the answer to the West Lothian question is that West Lothian will disappear. Doomsday demography should matter, but Whitehall is in no way prepared to deal with it. New research published this week found that mental illness in early adulthood could account for up to 60 per cent of future childlessness. A generation too worried to have children spells disaster for countries that need to support ageing societies. Researchers looking at the populations of Sweden and Finland have drawn a link between dozens of mental health disorders and later childlessness.

I was five weeks pregnant when I found out. At that point, it’s nothing more than a little gestational sac of potential. My ob-gyn informed me it wasn’t technically viable and, given my age and history — I’d had an ectopic pregnancy in 2019—not to get my hopes up. “How do I make it stick?” I asked. “Honey, if I knew the answer to that I’d be a billionaire with a private island,” she said. “Yes, yes of course.” I felt stupid. It was seeing that sac for the first time that I felt the stirrings of a longing in my heart that terrified me. It still terrifies me. In fact, it has always terrified me. Still in shock and trying to guard my heart, I kept repeating psychotically, nervously, “Well, we’ll see!

Well, we’ve been terrifically amused and amusing at the expense of Pope Francis, who this week declared at a Vatican audience that: ‘Many couples do not have children because they don’t want them, or have just one because they don’t want any more, but have two dogs, two cats… oh yes, dogs and cats take the place of children.’ It was, he said, proof of a ‘certain selfishness… it makes us laugh but it’s true. Renouncing parenthood diminishes us. It takes away our humanity.’ This was inevitably cue for British commentators to weigh up the merits of cats and dogs versus children, and for some to pronounce in favour of the cats.

The ‘social mobility tsar’ Katharine Birbalsingh has suggested that children, born evil, ‘need to be taught right from wrong and then habituated into choosing good over evil’. The Twitter mob is equally certain that all children are born ‘good’, and it is their environment that spoils them. Ancient Greeks, ignorant of St Augustine, did not think that this was a simple either/or question but that moral capacity was determined in many different ways, depending on e.g. age, sex, status, intelligence, chance, fate (etc.) — and nature. Greeks thought the gods had little to say about the question, since myth did not suggest they were our moral superiors, though that did not stop gods intervening in a man’s life if they so chose.

It would be weird if my 13-year-old daughter didn’t say she was an atheist. It’s what you say in our culture when you’re that age. To be honest it would creep me out a bit if she was all pious. But she is getting confirmed into the Anglican faith. This is a piece of hoop-jumping that her parents have decided to require of their children. I went for coffee with the vicar to ask if my daughter could join the classes. I admitted that she was a bit reluctant. In fact, it was a mixed picture. Whenever I mentioned confirmation she professed her atheism, but when I didn’t mention it for a couple of weeks she asked when the classes were starting. She is not entirely averse to attention, even if it is directed at her eternal soul. Her church-going to date has been patchy.