View Full Version : Welcome to the breakfast club
I read in today's Caithness Org that schoolchildren in Thurso and Wick are to be given breakfast in school via "Breakast Clubs".
Thurso will receive 200 pounds worth of taxpayers' money to lay on the food; Wick will receive 800 pounds worth. (Does that mean that more juveniles are starving in Wick than in Thurso or are Wickers just more adept at scooping the pot?)
There is more - lessons will be provided in childcare, socialising and health promotion activities such as tooth brushing.
The grants are for one year only so the children of Caithness had better gobble up breakfast while it is available and diligently pracice brushing their teeth because in the brave new Scotland of the wee parliament nothing is for ever.
You don't have to be a raving Thatcherite to see that there is something radically amiss in this state of affairs. Are Caithness families too hard up to provide a toothbrush for the bairns, too self-preoccupied to feed the poor wee creatures breakfast?
In 1945 schoolkids had to bring a spoon to school to get dosed with cod liver oil. But that was after six gruelling years of wartime rationing.
Now, about these breakfast clubs. Let me ask, can anyone join? Or is there to be a means test?
Finally is the whole Caithness population so feckless, gormless and generally glaichit that they can no longer feed their children properly?
Jonathan Swift had the solution.
Feed the offspring of these ignorant wretches to the middle classes - once they have been fattened up at the breakfast club.....
In the meantime the population of the Highland region should be hanging thier heads in shame.
I of course should have been at the breakfast math club. Wick got 1930 pounds and Thurso 1250 pounds.
The point remains....
Rich
In this county of ours any sort of childcare is both difficult to get and expensive to pay for. ANYTHING which improves this situation is to be welcomed.
It is alright for you to sound glib about this but there are children who do come from families where "breakfast" is low on the agenda. Many families NEVER eat a meal together. This is not something which is peculiar to caithness and if you had read further on this subject you would have realised that Breakfast clubs do form part of the Childcare strategy of the government and are springing up everywhere in the UK. They are particularly important in deprived areas from a social point of view. Maybe we have less of those sorts of problems in Caithness than elsewhere but the fact remains that anyone wanting childcare in Caithness does face an uphill battle. Some areas are well catered for - there are out of school clubs in Thurso and Castletown but Wick is particularly badly served from this point of view. I also think that Breakfast clubs are also part of the Community School initiative although i may be wrong about that. Teh more of them the better. There are times i would have given anything for affordable, available childcare which didnt involve me in stressful juggling routines.
Mr Sensitive
28-Aug-03, 11:07
Dinna let 'at ould mannie get til ye squidge. Seems lek a lifetime o' cod liver oil doesna smooth 'e pain o' being picked on by 'e poor kids in 'e postwar primary 1 playgroun'.
Squidge, you are outlining a situation in which the family is giving up its basic responsibilities and letting the state take over. This is a prescription for irresponsibility and threatens the freedom of everybody. What next? Collective farms?
You say there are families that have NEVER had a meal together? OK let's hear from one. Is there anyone out there who can't make time to have meals with the children? If not, why not? Are there any parents who can't make time to show their kids how to use a toothbrush? Where are these harried souls ? Let's hear from you. (Oh, sorry you don't have time....)
Meanwhile the schoolmarms and social care workers beavering away at sustaining the illusion of their professional indispensibility.
Caithness is a proud county in a proud country that built the world's first great industrial economy. In those far-off times of the industrial revolution the family was the basic survival unit. Looking back still further the whole basis of constitutional law since the times of the Ancient Greeks has been based on the idea of responsible citizenship based on the family as a unit.
Niow let's replace all that with the "caring" professionals - a sleek and well-pensioned bunch of sharks.
Of course in cases of extreme hardship, the state should provide basic nutrition. But do these conditions prevail in today's Caithness? Give us a break! Why not go down to Scrabster harbour and catch a couple of mackerel for dinner.....And then check in on web site for information on how to brush your teeth......
Rich,
You seem to be looking at this issue from a very narrow perspective. Your definition of family seems to discount any unit that does not contain a mum, a dad, and (just to make it complete) 2.4 children.
Do you live in such a fortunate area that nobody you know is part of a single parent family? Or where one parent works away from home five days a week (or even longer)? Know anybody who works on the rigs?
I don’t believe there are many people left who do not see the benefit of after school activities and clubs. The notion of ‘latch-key’ kids is an uncomfortable one with most (I hope) and we would all like to see a utopia where no parent has to work after school closing time and no child has to fend for themselves whilst their parents work to put the food in the cupboard and the clothes on their backs. Would you condemn the school that opens a classroom to these kids until their parents get home?
Why do you see the same situation in the mornings any differently? There are parents who have to leave for work early every morning, just as there are those who have to work late. There are children who have to get themselves out of bed after their parent(s) have gone to work, who have to get their own breakfasts every morning, who have to make their own ways to school.
Would you not say that a parent having the option of dropping their child off at school an hour early knowing that their child is being provided with a healthy and nutritious breakfast is a better thing than the alternative?
It isn’t because of the need for clubs such as this that the Highland Region should hang its head in shame… I say it should hang its head in shame because it still houses people like you who would condemn parents for raising their children as best they can in a society that doesn’t simply say, ‘Oh, you’re having a baby, here’s £60k to see you through so you can give up work until they are eighteen.’ In the real world parents have to work to pay for their children's upbringing - is it different in your world?
George Brims
28-Aug-03, 17:49
jjc you're giving rich too much credit. I don't think he was suggesting we hang our heads because there's a need for the breakfast clubs. He's actually ashamed he lives in a society that attempts to look after its less fortunate citizens, and the need is to be met. He's bought into the old Thatcher/Reagan era cliche that doing anything for the people you were elected to serve is "nannying", and will somehow turn people into witless drones incapable of trying to help themselves. Apparently this "threatens the freedom of everybody". What puerile sixth-form Tory club drivel.
Having kids start their school day with a nutritionally sound breakfast, so they stand a better chance of retaining what they're supposed to learn, benefits society as a whole. But perhaps Rich is only concerned with Rich, and not society as a whole?
I just had a look and it appears that up to 20%of children do not get breakfast before they go to school. In addition one in six children does not get a hot meal at night. The statistics are worse, of course, the more socially deprived an area is.
Families are not the same as they were Rich, many children need the care and support that good professional teachers and social workers can give. For that matter many parents do too. The more deprived their own childhoods were the greater the need for support.
I though it was interesting that you never mentioned the "affordable available childcare" issue in your post. In Caithness we may be less socially deprived than some other places but we still require childcare facilities. Throughout the time i have lived in caithness the lack of childcare has been one of hte most difficult hurdles to overcome. It remains a frustration and a cause of considerable stress to me. An over reliance on goodwill and unregistered childcare is not a satisfactory way to deal with this issue. The amount of stress that this lack of facilities causes to working parents is considerable and impacts not only on those families but on employers and the economy as a whole.
As for lessons in brushing your teeth well, I remember the fun we had with disclosing tablets as children and how we developed an understanding of how hard you had to brush to clean your teeth. t is worth nothing that something like 50% of children between the ages of 5 and 15 have tooth decay and therefore do not brush their teeth properly. Surely anything which schools can do to increase awareness is important.
Mr Sensitive
28-Aug-03, 19:13
Rich, the more I read of your stuff, the more I liken you to present-day Billy Connolly. This is a compliment (very clever, observant, funny), but it's also a minor insult (superior slightly patronising literary style, perhaps born of too many years spent in the former colonies). I never know what either of you really think. :confused
You have both gone to pot, but at least you are still funny! Must be that stuff on your roof. Can I have some? Can I join your breakfast club?
But, most of all, thanks to all for bringing this place back to life. It's been pretty dire recently.
"Families are not the same as they were Rich, many children need the care and support that good professional teachers and social workers can give. For that matter many parents do too. The more deprived their own childhoods were the greater the need for support. "
I get the feeling from quotes like the above that Caithness families are going down an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole.
Who the hell decides that children need the care and support that good professional teachers and social workers can give? I'll tell you who. The teachers and social workesrs do. Scarcely a disinterested group!
Who in Caithness has had a childhood so deprived that they require state intervention to teach their kids to floss their teeth? Come on now! Lets cap this great gusher of human kindness that that may not after all be much of a kindness at all.
It is a characteristic of western society that more and more responsibilities that were once associated with the family are now taken over by the state. I think this is a great loss. And, (stand up George Brims!) not because of any Regan/Thatcherite regessive rendencies that I might have.
Let me be a little fanciful here.
I think there is a prallel to be drawn between the erosion of the family in today's Nanny society and the spread of genetically modified crops. The one is a metaphor for the other.
The family, whether an extended model or a 2.5 kids job produces a rich and rare human crop. Largely without too much assistance from the state. Each family is like a wee Caithness croft with some hens running around and some home grown oats. And 30 channels of television but what the hell, you get my drift.
Now compare those hardy oats growing on the hillside, the weeds, the stinging nettles, the sheer enjoyable inefficeincy of everything and what's the alternative?
It's a one model fits all scenario. Interfere early. Keep the weeds down. And who needs the songbirds anyway?
The family is like a wild and unusual hillside with the place where kids learn their place in a world that is at once much broader and more pregnant with creativity than the sad substitutes created by civil servants in Edinburgh and London.
What we are creating in today's Scotland, possible from the best of motives, is a society that is both imaginatively and culturally dead. One where the notion of responsibility counts for nothing. Sterility rules ,OK.
You sign on at the Gyro to be paid for work you never did or couldn't do. You send the kids to school to get breakfast. You eke out a living permanently on the dole, drugged with television and assorted other recreational substances. You have this sense that somebody, something is to blame for your narcoticized life. God and Marx (even the Labout party) are dead. I think that's a pretty fair example of life in Wester Hales. But Caithness????
Here's an alternative. If your off[pring are running around in rags with snotty noses throwing bricks at the traffic then you should be jailed and the kids put in care. That's what I would call targetting the problem.
What's wrong with breakfast programmes is that they are being applied in places where they have no business being. Like Caithness.
If youre boss wants you at work at six in the morning then tell him to stuff it. That's the traditional British way. Before we had a surplus of professional carers needing to find a mission in life to justify their fat pay packets......
OH Rich
I KNOW this is Caithness I KNOW it isnt as deprived as many areas but there are still issues which help and support can overcome. Breakfast clubs are not a Caithness idea solely they are a National initiative - some areas need the social support more than others - CAithness needs the childcare facilities more but Rich this isnt some northern utopia - Caithness has problems too.
As for who decides - well rich - thank god someone decides - seems like you would just leave it to being no ones responsibility. Doctors nurses policemen magistrates neighbours health visitors all have a role to play in this. If there is a family who is struggling what happens in your idea of utopia then? NO one bothers they just say "well leave them be - they will sort it out in the end" Then we have one dead kid or one kid who everyone thinks is a loser and hey... guess what Rich - they turn into tomorrows unemployed!!! Children can only be creative and expressive when they are safe and nurtured and given room to grow and be themselves. If they are bullied, stifled and ignored then they will struggle to reach their potential and often get lost along the way.
To pinch your fancifulness - the oats will grow on good soil they will reach their potential but what happens to those seeds that have not such good foundations, that fall on stony ground or that is planted where the ground is less than perfect? They either wither and grow small and stunted if they grow at all or a lot of work has to be put in to enabling that crop to reach its potential.
And as for telling your boss to stuff their job - you can walk into another one tomorrow can you? I cant get a registered chilminder for my child that allows me to be at work for 9am and allows him to be at the school he goes to. The monday before school started I still didnt have a childminder. It is only throught he good will of a neighbour that i managed but to be frank i was at my wits end. I know lots of mums who cant afford a childminder. Who cant even begin to go out to work though they may desperately need to - because they cant get or afford childcare. Dont you pontificate about telling the boss to stuff his job - many of us dont have that choice.
And as for your view of those who are on benefit - I am not even going to go there. Your ignorant and insulting comments simply underline the fact that you know absolutely nothing about this issue either!!
You sign on at the Gyro to be paid for work you never did or couldn't do. You send the kids to school to get breakfast. You eke out a living permanently on the dole, drugged with television and assorted other recreational substances. You have this sense that somebody, something is to blame for your narcoticized life.
If youre boss wants you at work at six in the morning then tell him to stuff it.
Hmmm... You want to decide which side of the great social divide you want to come down on here, Rich old bean? :confused
Either people have the right to pick and choose the type of work they do (and under what conditions), or you remove the state aid and tell people they must take any job going in order to survive. You can't have both, it’s just plain greedy.
The fatal flaw in your reasoning is that you assume that anybody in need of assistance from the state is simply bone-idle. You assume that with the right motivation (I guess you would suggest removing their assistance) they will get right up off their lazy backsides and get themselves off to the job centre quick smart. That’s just ignorant, Rich.
You yourself raised the prospect of an imaginatively and culturally dead society. I wonder just how much of a rounded understanding of our culture you must possess if you are entirely unable to imagine the terrible ordeal that many people go through on a daily basis to ensure that their kids have the best possible start in life? Culturally and imaginatively dead? I think that might be you.
And the fact that you believe that there are no families in Caithness who would benefit from a breakfast club for their children just begs the question ‘How small do we look when you peer down from your pedestal?’
Jed-aiiiiii
29-Aug-03, 15:42
Rich, please get a life and as they used to say in Why Don't You?........go out and do something less boring instead! If you want an argument go to the pub, at least it would involve real conversation.
JJC, you have a vivd imagination and who am I to disparage that quality. But just whoa back there a minute and spare me the tear drenched images of starving bairns with gum disease.
I'm making a perfectly valid argument against what appears to be becoming a BAR CODE society where more and more of us end up being tended to by various social agencies. Of course we need to look aftet the sick and infirm and make sure that old folk get a decent pension etc etc. But there is an almost pornographic quality to the visioon being presented here of juvenile misery in the North of Scotland.
I think some of my critics might benefit by looking through the old school photos on the Caithness. org.
Let us take for example the Miller Academy - 1955-56 Football Team. There's a group of lads who could clearly benefit from a breakfast programme. Poor frail creatures. It's a wonder they didn't all blow away in the wind. Poor souls. They look like concentration camp survivors.
No of course they don't!
How many of them had breakfast the day that photo was taken? Does it even matter?
Evidence of malnutrition is scarce to the point of being non-existant in Caithness.
If there is no malnutrition to relieve then what is the point of a breakfast programme?
Could it be to meet some dubious pseudo-scientific theory dreamed up by the social work establishment?
But of course.
There is,we are asked to believe, a correlation between kids having had breakfast and some pseudo-disease called Attention Deficit Disorder(ADD)
Apparently ADD can be kept under control by compulsory breakfast.
Likewise there is - we are asked to believe- evidence that kids score higher on exams if they are part of a feeding programme.
The statistical evidence for this is a sad, tatterdemalion mish mash of zero epidemiological value reminiscent of the worst of the IQ debate that for so long bedevilled social policy in the UK.
Let us maintain a sense of proportion here. Let's put our charitable impulses to work in Africa where people really are starving.
Anonymous
29-Aug-03, 16:34
Rich,
I am right with you up to the point of sending aid to Africa. That is slightly to bizarre. Africa is quite capable of feeding itself. All it needs is recolonalising. Let us remove all the African leaders that we imposed upon these poor wretched souls and re-establish a benevolent dictatorship, as was the case previously. No British Administration ever let their workforce starve, that would be extremely bad management.
As to the bairns of Caithness; yes, by all means provide a Breakfast Club, but do not do it under the patronising idea that other people can provide for children better than their mothers can. Give mothers (and sometimes fathers) the option to decide what is best for their own circumstances. Empower them by giving them the means through a decent job, which may entail early mornings or late finishes, but do not throw money at a problem in the manner of Ernest Bevan who admitted he would not be around to pick up the pieces.
Social work is an admirable gesture but it should be limited to cases of neglect or abuse, and performed by middle-aged, middle-class ladies who see it as a service, not as a step towards promotion to Haringey Social Services Board (does that exist?) and some grossly inflated salary and enough minions to pass the buck to.
Paddy (ranting again)
If there is no malnutrition to relieve then what is the point of a breakfast programme?
I thought that the 'point' of the breakfast club had very little to do with the actual breakfast and more to do with the provision of an early morning haven where parents who have to go to work earlier than most can be assured of their child's safety.
Don't get me wrong; I see where you are coming from here. Every day I read the paper or watch the news and get frustrated at another story where somebody absolves their responsibilities by blaming their situation on the government. As adults we have responsibility for our own actions and we shouldn't be able to turn our backs on that responsibility just because we believe we are entitled to unlimited assistance and second chances.
You are right that the 1955-56 football team almost certainly had a harder life than the 2003-04 team will. They won't have had a breakfast club to go to, but then it was also a lot less common to have both parents working. And as for single parent families…
The society we live in today has moved on from those heady days. Maybe it is for the better, maybe not. I'd be a fool if I were to try to pretend that the way we live our lives now, driven by consumer desires in an increasingly commercial world, is an improvement. But there are many aspects that are definitely for the better.
Perhaps it is true that our society would be improved with a return to a more family oriented structure. God knows we have moved away from it. But we will always have those who are in a situation through no fault of their own. It was you, not I, who conjured the emotive images of malnourished children. Perhaps, then, you will forgive my own emotive image.
Imagine a woman whose husband is dead (killed in a tragic accident or taken by an illness). She has a son of school age. Up until the time of her husband's death he was the main breadwinner for the household. She had office skills, but had never pursued her career, choosing instead to take time off work to raise their son. Now, with her husband gone, she is forced to take whatever job she can find in order to feed and clothe the two of them. She has to leave for work (20 miles from home) at seven in the morning and, as her son is too young to stay home on his own, needs to drop him off at the new breakfast club before school. She hated doing it, but it was the only job she could find with her lack of experience and she has to earn money somehow.
An emotive image, I know, and I apologise for that. But now that you have her in your mind, let me ask you this. Would you be prepared to tell her that she will no longer have that place in the breakfast club, forcing her to quit the only job she could find? Would you be able to explain to her that her hardship is for the good of society? Could you explain it to her son?
I know that things now aren't perfect, but they never have been. If you have a sensible suggestion of how to make things better then let's hear it, but a step back in time to the fifties can't and shouldn't ever happen.
JJC - re. your single Mum.
It is a sad fact that difficult cases make for bad law.
What this women needs is an automobile to get her to her work, some employment counselling and all the help she needs because she is doing valuable work raising her kids.
What she needs above all is assistance tailored specifically to her needs and assistance aimed at getting herself in a position where she is self-supporting.
I really can't see though where the breakfast club would be particularly helpful to her other than as a stop gap measure.
I suspect that what's being developed here is the idea of the breakfast club as a universal social panacea. And I think that's wrong and harmful and I also feel that the contributors to this thread who are expressing their concern about the misfortunes of kids not getting breakfast have been conned by an imperialising social work/schoolteaching establishment.
Sorry, guys.
Paddy, your call for recolonizing Africa represents another type of imperialism - one that I am not totally out of sympathy with. I know that historians like Niall Fergusson take the view that the real tragedy of the British Empire in Africa is that the British scuttled way way too soon. They should have stayed and made a real difference, say Ferguson and a certain section of the Neo-Con establishment currently advising George Bush and advising him on the future of the Middle East.
I think it's too late for this type of nuevo-imperialism. (Although it is an incontrivertable fact that the Rwanda genocide would never have occurred had the Western world shouldered its international responsibilities in the spirit of the White Man's Burden.)
Finally let me remind you there are worse things in the world than a few kids in Caithness with rumbling tummies in the morning because of the incompetence of their parents.
Go check:
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/ng/
****shakes her head in despair and disbelief at the lack of awareness and tunnel vision demonstrated in this particular thread by men who appear to be intelligent and articulate but are just ignorant and intolerant***
Anonymous
01-Sep-03, 18:47
Ignorant and intolerant of what?
Ignorance implies that we are unaware of the facts.
Intolerance implies that we are not prepared to put up with the facts.
From a personal point of view I am graphically aware of the facts. I have stayed in many mornings when I should have been at darts practice, to feed children who do not wish to be fed food they should not be eating. Just to give their mother a lie in. ( Thankfully my siblings have now grown-up and have a wife and husband to look after them)
As to intolerance. Do we have a choice? Men either face the facts and knuckle down or face the wrath of the CSA. If they escape both these clutches they are persecuted by born-again-virgins who chastise them for a) not being at home with their family, b) not protecting rain forests in South America c) eating butter instead of Flora.
What do we do?
Paddy
Start by stop being so flippant
Ignorance has been demonstrated throughout this thread by the complete lack of knowledge of the situations facing many children in todays society. There has been a lack of awareness shown about the way the family is changing; there has been a distinct lack of understanding of the childcare issue and how it impacts on working parents here in Caithness and also a lack of understanding of the role of teachers carers and social workers.
There has been an intolerence shown towards those people who have no work, are reliant on benefit and less fortunate than some of the folks posting here.
so there you go - ignorance and intolerence
Squidge, let's keep a sense of proportion.
Don MacKinnon
02-Sep-03, 04:27
I find this simply fascinating. Here I am sitting here in Maryland, USA and reading of a community situation in Northern Scotland that mimics ours.
Our communities, too, see to feel that they must feed the students breakfast in order that they can make it through the day. Why? Because, as several of you stated, the family is falling apart. They don't eat together and they don't talk together! And here I thought this was a problem existing only in American communities.
I'll be interested to find out how its resolved.
Don MacKinnon
Poverty is not what it used to be.
Is there a family anywhere without a TV set or a refrigerator and enough disposable income to keep the kids in potatoe chips and coke?
Those same kids who sit on their ever expanding derrieres in front of the TV will swell the ranks of diabetes patients and heart disease victims. It's what in North America we cell "TWEEN HEALTH" and the long term prospect is dire.
To deal with this new poverty - or pseudo-affluence - something more is required than the old socialist nostrums whereby money is chucked at the problem. Which is then defined as a "spcial" problem which means no-one is to blame.
But of course someone has to take responsiibility.
And that should be the parents.
How many parents would dare to unplug the TV, institute healthy eating, get the whole family exercising. Not too many in today's mainstream society.
Maybe that's the appeal of fundamentalist religion.
It leads to a healthier lifestyle. And people who are healthy are happier.
I think I have to throw my hat in with Rich here. As far as I can see he is not saying anything bad about social responsibility - but that parents should have primary responsibility for their children.
It all seems to be someones else's problem or responsibility these days.
The fact that families dont eat together or provide meals for their children is THEIR problem, they should sort it out, why should those who provide for their own have to cough up for those that dont? I am certain that you will find that the majority of those children who dont get a square meal manage to watch tv and play computer games, while their parents can afford a drink and furhter burden the National Health by smoking fags.
I help out at a breakfast club and you will be surprised the amount of children that attend. For a small fee and i mean small 20pence they get a choice of cereal, toast with a topping of their choice(within reason),fruit, yoghurt, boiled eggs, scrambled eggs, beans on toast, choice of hot and cold drinks. There is also activities for the children to do, and it keeps them in out of the cold on those freezing cold days. So you tell me were else can a working parent get childcare for as little as £1.00 a week.
I am also a working parent and my son enjoys going to the breakfast club as do alot of children, if it means their going to eat breakfast in the morning whats the problem. :D
sassylass
10-Sep-03, 01:09
......The fact that families dont eat together or provide meals for their children is THEIR problem...
May I say GRRRRRRRRRRRR [mad]
It becomes my problem.... make that OUR problem...when a child is soooo hungry that he cannot sit and concentrate in the classroom. While it "should" be the responsibility of parents to provide a nourishing breakfast for their children, that fact is that many children come to school hungry. The Excuse List is very long. Sometimes there is no food at home or they overslept or the parents believe that candy and cola is a good choice or blah blah blah I've heard a million excuses, and many are valid reasons. Wouldn't it be ideal if we lived in a perfect world, but we don't. The bottom line is that children cannot help it if their stomachs are empty and if there's a way to help children and their parents by providing good food for a reasonable fee, then GREAT let's do it.
:eek: whewwww and now I'll step down from my soapbox...
hey sass
dont get down it gets a bit lonely here sometimes
[lol]
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