January 12, 2024 - 7:00am
There is one area where the UK is outperforming most European countries: in the production of fat kids with bad teeth. According to the Labour Party, “British children today are smaller than Haitian children, fatter than the French, and less happy than the Turks.”
To tackle this, Sir Keir Starmer has announced that, under his party’s Child Health Action Plan, there will be restrictions on junk food advertisements, a “young people’s mental health hub for every community”, and supervised toothbrushing in schools. The Labour leader warned that tooth decay was the top reason children between six and 10 go to hospital and that the Government had to act. That was why a national toothbrushing programme for three- to five-year-olds would be added on to “fully funded breakfast clubs” in schools across the nation.
But is poor dental hygiene something that educational institutions should be expected to address? Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT, even admitted that he was “somewhat sceptical about how this will work in practice,” raising questions about the viability of the scheme. After all, it is not so much the toothbrushing (or lack thereof) that is the problem; rather, if children are turning up to school hungry, or without having brushed their teeth, that’s a sign of neglect and poor parenting. Brushing teeth would hardly fix those things.
Mitigating the symptoms will only get us so far. Arguably, the next step would be to have staff show children how to cut their food up to prevent hospital admissions from choking, or explain to their charges how to sit on the toilet.
The reality is that if children are being admitted to hospital with tooth decay or suffering from severe mental distress, that points to problems that exist outside the school gates. The cost of living crisis has left parents working longer hours with less time to read, play, and cook healthy meals with their children.
Meanwhile, exposure to online pornography has “normalised” criminal behaviour among a minority of youngsters; a recent report found that over half of child sexual abuse offences reported to police forces in England and Wales were carried out by fellow youngsters. Families have a raft of new online threats to contend with, and less time than ever to do it. Toothbrushing at school won’t stop this sort of social rot.
It should be remembered that these are life skills that ought to be imparted by parents. And yet, Labour appears to have very little faith in families to perform such duties. The Party has also, for instance, pushed ahead with plans to introduce a “modernised childcare system” available from the end of parental leave to the end of primary school. Such catch-all policies shift these most primal responsibilities from mums and dads to the State, which ultimately won’t help children. Rather, it implicitly treats all parents as if they themselves are incapable infants.
There is something faintly depressing about the Labour Party staring into the mouths of the nation’s tots. Rather than offering a bold, unifying vision as an alternative to the last 14 years of Tory rule, Sir Keir is focusing on the minutiae of what should be family life. Someone ought to remind him that the “ahhh” of the dentist does not fit within the “three r’s” of the curriculum.
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SubscribeThere are some fairly strong but completely unfounded assumptions in this article.
“The cost of living crisis means people don’t have enough time to cook to their children”. This is preposterous. You can cook a healthy meal in less than 30 minutes, which is about 1/10th of the time most people spend looking at their phones. Many healthy snacks (fruit, cheese etc) require zero time. I would understand an argument that some people cannot afford healthy food, but lacking time to prepare doesn’t hold water. A far more important factor is culture and lack of health awareness. My kid’s school is in a relatively affluent area; most parents give their kids junk food for snack, and there’s pudding on the school menu almost every day. Another critical factor is the abysmal support for dental care in the NHS combined with an extremely high cost in the private sector (plus a national culture where dental health is a non-factor, unlike, say, the US).
“Pornography is responsible for the increase in sexual offences”. There is no solid research to support this, and in my view is just an argument in the government’s effort to control the internet. First, the data itself. Have rapes really increased, or more are now reported (nobody can tell). Is the definition of “sex attack” the same today as it was 20 years ago (it is definitely not). Second, extreme violence and death have been perfectly normalised through films and video games for decades. Remember the hysteria in the 80s about how they create murderers and criminals? Right…
Good points regarding food.
I’ll add to that a couple: buy a slow cooker (they’re not expensive) and do the food prep at breakfast and leave them going through the day so you can have something ready in the evening.
Cook more at weekends, doubling up, and freeze the left overs. Curries, stews, chilli etc works great as they can be microwaved with pretty much no loss in quality. On a work night, a pre-made curry would take no more than the 15 minutes to make the rice (which is too much hassle to pre-cook for little gain). This gives you control over ingredients for both cost, flavour, quality and health.
but when are you going to be able to binge on Netfix and gaze endlessly at your smartphone to see how many likes you have?
10,000 Households currently in B&B temporary accommodation – Govt own stats so almost certainly understating the reality. Not so easy to cook much at all when you don’t have a kitchen or have to share with it with other households. Ever left food in shared fridge?
I do agree with some of your points though and personal responsibility has to play a role, but I think you may also be unaware of how for a minority but nonetheless a growing number the experience is v different.
10000 households out of something like 20mil. One of course shouldn’t forget them, but they are not statistically significant.
There are 30 million+ dwellings in the UK. 24.9 million in England. Of which 33% are owned outright but the occupier. 29% are owned with a mortgage. 20% are privately rented and 17% are “socially rented” which presumably includes people in temporary accommodation.
20-30k kids potentially as it’s Households. May not be statistically significant to you but…
But the internet should be controlled by the government, pornography is a disgusting vice that should be stopped because it is inherently immoral, regardless of its effects.
No, it will degenerate into censorship by the government in short order. Any time government gets involved in our lives things go from bad to worse.
So what? There’s nothing on the internet worth reading anyway. Turn it off for all I care. There is nothing the government can do that is worse than the porn industry anyway.
My wife is a nursery teacher. Unfortunately teaching kids how to use the toilet is now a regular part of the job. In the past children would in the majority be potty trained before starting school at 3. Regrettably now apparently many parents can’t be arsed to do this fundamental part of civilising their own children and like everything else feel this can be left to the state to sort out.
Parents too busy working.
Nonsense
Indeed. Both my parents worked throughout my childhood. My husband and I worked throughout our kids’ childhoods. Just like me, they got good grades, had loads of extracurriculars they never missed: music, dance, sports. We had dinner together every night. Oh, and our teeth are dazzling.
Both my wife and I worked. By the time they attended nursery school both our kids were potty-trained and brushed their own teeth. They’re now in their mid-30s and neither has a hole in their teeth, and both are highly qualified professionals. That was our doing, not the state’s.
Just stop. By any measure, life today is far easier than it was generations ago and hygiene stopped being a mystery some time back. Having kids is a responsibility, not a cosmetic accessory.
Don’t get me started on primary schools; they have become small prisons. In one that I visited (to support a child excluded for being boisterous), the children had to walk into the playground at break time, in single file, with their hands clasped behind their backs. During lessons, you could’ve heard a pin drop: creepy and weird.
If you are a Socialist having the State ignore parents and look to ‘raise’ children in the ‘approved manner’ is not a bug, but a feature.
Oh won’t somebody please liberate us from this oppressive socialist state cruelly with its iron fist forcing our poor children to… brush their teeth.
Of course, every parent has the right to neglect their children in the free Tory utopia but what choice and freedom do the children have?
They could become pickpockets, like Oliver Twist, if they have any initiative
Don’t the children who have brushed their teeth have a right to do maths and reading at school instead of re-brushing their teeth? The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s time.
“other people’s time” – And money! Mind you, this so-called tory government seems to be catching up.
Absolutely. This thing about caring for the children in your country (not just your own) and being concerned about what becomes of them is part of an outdated idea called “national identity”. The sooner it dies off the better. Then we can get on with leading our selfish greedy lives without a thought for our neighbours and countrymen.
Why on earth given their abysmal track record do you think the government will look after children better than their parents? What evidence do you have that the government does anything very well?
That’s your argument? Brushing teeth takes 2 minutes. Maybe 10 minutes with messy fussy kids.
Let’s eradicate playtime too. And lunch! Shouldn’t they be learning instead of eating?
That quote you’ve contorted is bizarre when capitalism rests on using other people’s time just as much or more than socialism. Maybe you should have spent less time brushing your teeth as a kid!
2 minutes? Do you know any primary school children? Getting them to line up and wait for a sink to become available will take more than 10 minutes. Typical of a socialist not to know anything about the real world.
capitalism ‘rests on using other people’s time’? – At least they’re paid for it, & can change course if the money’s no good.
The fundamental problem with extending the role of the state into managing the minutia of people’s lives is that it’s a bit stupid.
State driven tooth-brushing programmes surely must seem ridiculous even to the most naive & simple-minded of people
The fundamental problem with extending the role of the state into managing the minutia of people’s lives is that it’s a bit stupid.
Is this what is meant by bathos?
brush your teeth
Maybe you’d like the state to wipe your ar2e as well?
We are all products of our parentage. That’s just life and no amount of forced equality can ever change that. Incentivising parents to take responsibility is what a free Tory country should do, rather than having the state take responsibility in a Labour socialist country.
The more responsibility the state takes, the less the individual does.
Fine, if it, and your parents have treated you fairly. Otherwise, not so much. And giving breakfast to a kid who otherwise wouldn’t get one is not “forced equality”.
That’s never where it stops though, is it. The government in England is insidious in people’s lives today, a nanny state. You have given them a little and they’ve taken a lot. They’ll never cease taking as long as you think they’re the answer to problems they actually created in the first place.
That sounds like the slippery slope fallacy. Where do you think free breakfast will lead? Free lunch?
Free all-day buffet.
Looks like you have fallen into the trap.
In the Tory utopia you refer to it is the parents responsibility to look after their children. It is only in a socialist utopia that parents are freed of responsibility for their children while Big Brother takes on the responsibility for turning out model citizens.
It seems your parents must have failed you.
Here is the link to Thatcher’s no such thing as society interview that it would profit you to read https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689
So in fact there are no problems in our society, thanks to Tory government. Thanks for taking the time to let us all know.
I did not say that at all.
The rather stupid point was made that right to neglect their children was part of a Tory utopia.
I merely pointed out that the conservative philosophy is exactly the opposite and emphasises parental responsibility
Perhaps like socialism, Toryism works in theory but not in practice. Or perhaps the Toryism we’ve now had for years isn’t real Toryism.
do you know how Thatcher’s children turned out? Seems for her there were only individuals.
My parents didn’t fail me. I stand on my own two feet. They would have considered it a failure to raise a child who doesn’t empathise with the poor and less able.
They would have also been disappointed if I persisted in believing the “no such thing as society” thing when so many of today’s political ills can be attributed to people’s sense of societal degradation and a sense that many have abused that lack of society to profit massively to the common people’s detriment.
No such thing as society eh? Well I suppose you wouldn’t mind if we imported millions of immigrants? It is only individuals and their families after all.
You have fallen into that Thatcherite trap of believing there to be no such thing as society and exist in a miserable unfulfilling individualist existence for others’ profit where somehow making children brush their teeth is a huge imposition.
You evidently did not take time to read the interview much preferring the comfort of you own prejudices.
Solely for you benefit I have reproduce the key passage below
What is wrong with the deterioration? [mistranscription?] I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and [end p29] there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation and it is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate—“It is all right. We joined together and we have these insurance schemes to look after it”. That was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system and so some of those help and benefits that were meant to say to people: “All right, if you cannot get a job, you shall have a basic standard of living!” but when people come and say: “But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!” You say: “Look! It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better!”
There is also something else I should say to them: “If that does not give you a basic standard, you know, there are ways in which we top up the standard. You can get your housing benefit.”
But it went too far. If children have a problem, it is society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society. [end p30] There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate. And the worst things we have in life, in my view, are where children who are a great privilege and a trust—they are the fundamental great trust, but they do not ask to come into the world, we bring them into the world, they are a miracle, there is nothing like the miracle of life—we have these little innocents and the worst crime in life is when those children, who would naturally have the right to look to their parents for help, for comfort, not only just for the food and shelter but for the time, for the understanding, turn round and not only is that help not forthcoming, but they get either neglect or worse than that, cruelty.
Now tell me what you disagree with.
Who knew you were a Thatcherite
Oh for crying out loud, now socialists want the government to brush a child’s teeth. Might as well just hand them over to full government control according to you.
Slippery slope fallacy again I’m afraid.
It’s not a fallacy.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/slippery-slope-fallacy/
I can’t think of anything adequate enough to mock this idea.
So, after potty training comes toothbrushing. Should really attract new teachers.
Assuming they are potty trained and can brush their teeth
Here’s how it worked:
In order to guarantee the continued rule of a small Oxford-educated elite it became necessary to prevent the masses from being properly educated. The solution was ‘child-centred’ education whereby, under the pretence of a focus on ’emotional needs’, the basics were essentially ignored. The result was several generations of kidults increasingly unable to function fully as adults.
But that was a GOOD thing, because the more childish the adults became, the more government was needed and the more power accrued to the small Oxford-educated elite – to such an extent that in the end it ceased to matter how utterly incompetent they proved to be (cf: the Post Office debacle), they simply could not be challenged. Win win, as they say.
God I remember the instruction of child-centred education. “What was it like to be a chid in Victorian England?”
The children did not want to know. They were more interested in battles and wars.
As a 7 year old I thought that teachers must be real f-wits to go along with this nonsense.
Kidults. Very nice.
I almost wish you were right. At least that would be evidence of some sort of plan. But there is none. This country is being wrecked in a fit of absent mindedness. And arguably petty greed.
Sunak’s going to stop us smoking and Starmer will make sure the kids clean their teeth. These are their big ideas.
Heads buried firmly in the sand, we wave our posteriors at the approaching apocalypse.
Sssshhhh… don’t give Starmer ideas about compulsory twerking courses at school.
My kids primary school was awarded “Healthy School” status which supposedly meant they prohibited sugary snacks, promoted healthy eating etc.
Not only did almost every child bring in crisps and sweets every day, but every child brought in packets of sweets to hand out on their birthday. Some children even brought in packets of sweets to hand out on their sibling’s birthday, presumably because their parents thought it cruel to deprive them of the giddy rush of popularity which results from handing out treats to 5-11 year olds. Worst of all though, a couple of teachers would bring in sweets to hand out on special occasions.
These programmes rarely work because they overestimate how much impact a school can have unless (a) the teachers are fully committed, (b) the parents are fully on board, and (c) the school’s is organised around an ethos of high expectations from pupils, staff and parents.
Regarding your condition (c), what we actually need is a *society* organised around an ethos of high expectations.
When my kids first started school in the US I was shocked at the amount of times ‘candy’ was brought in for celebrations. It’s your birthday, bring in cupcakes for everyone. Valentine’s Day, bring in little candies for the class (don’t forget the teacher!) etc. Halloween: buckets of candies. Christmas: stockings stuffed with candies.
There seems to be pushback against this where I live now and the teachers will put out guidelines that, yes, you can send in little cards for Valentine’s Day (one for each classmate) but no edibles. This largely started due to an increase in allergies, but I appreciate my kid not coming home with 20+ little bags of sugar.
The cause of distress and arrested development in kids is family breakdown. When divorce started to become common in the 1960s it was understood by everyone that broken homes led to unhappy children and delinquency. Now that divorce is ubiquitous (along with its sibling: unmarried parents) it is too painful to acknowledge and too hard to address.
It’s an old story. We got rid of capital punishment and everyone said the murder rate would go up. It trebled within a decade but by then, it was too hard to reverse the decision and so we just stopped talking about it.
Ditto mass immigration. Old Enoch said it would break the bonds that bind us as a nation. Look what happened. But it is unpleasant to contemplate so we brush it under the carpet.
Now, everyone knows giving kids unsupervised access to the internet and social media is having catastrophic effects but it is too hard to do anything about. So we ignore the issue.
And so it goes on.
Excellent comment
If he can’t tell what a woman is, I’m surprised he can recognise a tooth when he sees it.
Because state intervention to replace parents has worked so well in the past …
This does absolutely nothing to deal with the actual problems like poor parenting. In fact, by removing some responsibility from the parents (just as Western foreign aid to Africa does) it dminishes both their sense of duty and their own belief in their won agency to change and improve things.
This is part of the problem. Not part of the solution.
Please keep rolling our more “big ideas” like this Keir so people can see just how clueless you are.
So who was it removed from parents the responsibility to give their children breakfast and teach them to clean their teeth? You seem unable to distinguish between someone failing in their responsibility (for whatever reason) and having that responsibility removed from them.
Not so. I never said any such thing.
The point is simply that if someone else muscles in to start taking responsibility for something which is rightly yours, it can only dminish your sense of duty and care for it. The fact that this might be necessary and desirable in a small number of cases in no way mitigate the collateral damage to those who really did not need such “help”. These clumsy, “one size fits all” measures send out signals about social priorities and behaviour that we need to pay attention to.
After all, I have yet to find a field of human activity where deliberately lowering standards raises performance. Not in sports. Not in academia. Not through DEI conscience washing.
We have rubbish in the streets today and record shoplifting precisely because we no longer enforce standards and insist on personal responsibility. And accept that this means punishing the guilty.
Reintroducing personal responsibility will take time and education, perhaps even a change of culture. In the meantime, do we arrange for the streets to be cleaned, or do we allow the rubbish to pile up as a monument to our own uselessness.
I’m not disagreeing with you on whose responsibility it should be. But sometimes you just have to fix the problem, and quickly before worse follows.
“There is something faintly depressing about the Labour Party”
Only faintly
Understatement of year so far. I like its chances of holding on through the next eleven and half months, too.
“But is poor dental hygiene something that educational institutions should be expected to address?”
We had toothbrushing and handwashing and nutrition instruction when I was in elementary school in the early 1970s. I remember a little tablet you would chew to stain your teeth red, and then you would brush until it was all gone.
This is not a new problem, so no need to seek to ascribe it to recent political or economic developments.
Mrs U worked for the Schools’ Dental Service in Plymouth in the 1970s. The teeth of “disadvantaged” children were every bit as bad then as now.
The nanny state on full, unvarnished display. Supervised toothbrushing in schools. My god, the priorities of the technocrats among us. One might ask where are the parents, but in a time when “fully-funded breakfast clubs” are a thing, it’s obvious that they’ve been replaced by the state. I realize some kids are from challenged backgrounds where hunger is a possibility, but that’s not every kid on every campus for two meals a day. How do these students survive holiday and summer breaks without the benevolent care watching over them?
The part about fat kids IS on point and it applies to the US, too, but not because of online porn. It’s because many schools have eliminated recess and physical education. No one moves anymore, from the adults on down. A society whose collective face is buried in a four inch screen for hours on end is not very likely to be fit.
Ban the possession of those infernal devices on campus. It can be done. Really. Institute periods of activity into the school day. That can also be done. It used to be the norm. And most important, return schools to their role of teaching things like reading, writing, math, history, etc. so that young people might be something more than functionally illiterate upon graduation. If you saw results from many American high schools, you’d think the numbers were made up. They’re not. Kids can’t read, but they know their pronouns and they know that their country is a historical pox on the world.
Don’t be silly. If children are not getting breakfast then something needs to be done about it. Of course that should be by the parents, but they are failing to do so. And trotting out Thatcherisms like “nanny state” from before most of these parents were even born does nothing.
something needs to be done about it
“Do something.” The clarion call behind innumerable bad policy ideas that typically make the problem being addressed worse. What’s done during holiday breaks from school? Summer vacation? Dinner time? And this in a time when very few people believe the school system is achieving its core mission of educating children so they’re prepared for their next chapter of lives.
I’d be quite happy with supervised tooth brushing – it’s the Trans BS I would not tolerate
How about banning phones in schools and banning smart phones for under 18s
It’s easy to be critical of sticking plaster policies – but if Starmer said he was going to half the price of housing (something which would really help) everybody would scream blue murder.
It’s interesting what people are taking from this article – nanny state, creeping socialism etc.
What I took from it was political impotence, lack of vision and sheer lack of political will.
Those two lists are not mutually exclusive. Nanny statism and mission creep stem are well correlated with impotence and a lack of vision. It’s what I meant earlier by the “do something” approach that elevates activity over action.
If the trend continues, teachers will be expected to wipe the bums of their charges following supervised bowel movements.
You know how to reduce the number of children going to hospital with tooth decay?
Get some NHS dentists, which are currently as rare as hen’s teeth.
But of course, Keith won’t do that. It’ll cost money. Unlike taking 15 minutes out of a teacher’s education-imparting day, which costs bupkiss.
Now toothbrushing is the responsibility of The Nanny State and not mom and dad. How the Overton Window has shifted in the last few generations. My parents (let alone grandparents or great-grandparents) are rolling over in their graves.
Who teaches parents to cook? 40+ years ago I studied Home Economics at college, just at the time they took it off the curriculum. I was fortunate enough to have to grannies and a mother who taught me and my siblings how to cook and manage a home, boys as well as girls. Many of my age were not so fortunate but did get taught to cook at school as were childrrn for another 10 or so years. Then it stopped. We are seeing the results of that decision now with their children and grandchildren.
Now, it would seem it is more important to teach children about gender and who they really are than to give them the tools they need to live a long and happy life, feeding yourself properly definitely helps with that. Time to go back to basics with reading, writing and arithmetic as well as basic healthy cooking and eating?
Teeth should be brushed with a super-soft toothbrush (to avoid degrading enamel and causing gum erosion), with mild pressure in circular motions. Massage the gums using even lighter pressure (to stimulate blood flow); rinse occasionally with a clinical mouthwash; floss daily using a flosspick. I suggest Paradontax Toothpaste and Crest Clinical rinse. Dr Collins perio toothbrush (ultra soft) is what I myself use. Avoid sweets and sticky foods and you’re golden!