Support for Children and Families: Covid-19

Debate between Christopher Chope and Andrew Selous

Tuesday 20th October 2020 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I hope you are joking, Sir Christopher.

I want to thank The Sun newspaper and their agony aunt, Deidre Sanders, for flagging up today’s debate with their “Sort It Out” campaign. So let us sort it out for Louis, aged 8, who said:

“My mum and dad spend so much time hating each other, they don’t have time to love me”,

and for Shakira, aged 14, who says:

“when she picks up her phone and sighs and rolls her eyes, I know it’s my dad. I’d pay a lot of money to stop that, she just forgets that I love my dad too and I’m stuck right in the middle”.

I agree with what was said earlier on in the debate that the mums are bearing the brunt of so much of the ghastly covid pandemic. We have too many mothers out there forced to do everything by themselves. Those mothers are doing a heroic job, often under trying circumstances, and they deserve a lot of credit, but they should not have to do that alone as often as they do. Raising children is the most important job in the country and it is the responsibility of all of us as mothers and fathers.

As President Obama said in his 2010 father’s day address, our children

“don’t need us to be perfect. They do need us to be present. They need us to show up and give it our best shot”.

Too many fathers are missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities and acted like boys, not men. We need fathers to realise that responsibility does not end at conception. What makes someone a man is not the ability to have a child, it is the courage to raise one and then enjoy the most rewarding and joyful experience of being a father.

A third of children see their parents split up before they are 16, and 1.25 million children are exposed to conflict between their parents. Efforts to support healthy relationships between parents are vital and we know that children benefit from loving parents and strong, loving and respectful marriages and relationships as well. We pass on empathy and kindness by living it; we are not strong by putting others down, but by lifting them up. That is why the work Patrick Myers is doing at the Department for Work and Pensions is so important with his Reducing Parental Conflict programme and why the work done by the members of the Relationships Alliance—Relate, Tavistock Relationships, Marriage Care and OnePlusOne—is so vital, as is the pre-marriage course, the work of Jonathan and Andrea Taylor-Cummings and many others. Also Care for the Family is a fantastic charity that teaches so much, telling parents to stop scoring points and stop thinking the worst.

[Sir Christopher Chope (in the Chair)]

Order. I am going to have to interrupt the hon. Member, otherwise we will not have time for wind-ups.