UNICEF says Britain is the worst country for children in the Western world | Hacker News Reader

UNICEF says Britain is the worst country for children in the Western world

city-journal.org

26 pointsksvs13 comments

I'm not sure if this is Hacker News, but the linked author isn't talking about the study's findings at all. He just uses it as a springboard to rant about a few mothers so bad they got sensational tabloid headlines. Then he works in a few predictable jabs at the welfare state for producing parasitical monsters.

This may be the study that the author is discussing, although it was released in 2007.

http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/rc7_eng.pdf

Hopefully, anyone on this board isn't afraid of real data. The picture seems kind of mixed and even the authors find it difficult to pin down the exact sources of well-being.

I couldn't agree more. I'd be interested in seeing an indepth examination of why Britain is failing so badly, particularly with their relative GDP.

This story isn't that. It's a diatribe about anecdotes combed from the media.

The basic reason is that all the services are being slowly privatised so the money is filtered up to the top. NHS has to use private services. Rail is split up into Track maintenance, and Train rental companies.. schools are being sold off with the Academies system. Basically the conservatives started selling everything off, and labour has carried on taking it to another level; getting away with selling bits even the tories wouldn't dare to.

Why do you think Britain is failing? It seems to be one of the better countries to live in the world, certainly in the top 20%.

Perhaps it is a diatribe. But Dalrymple's point is that the numbers don't lie in this case. Birthrates in the UK--as they are in all of the West-- are on a steep decline. We are witnessing the Graying of Europe.

We are witnessing the Graying of Europe.

You mean - people are moving around?

EDIT: I just foung the phrase "Graying of Europe" to be a bit Enoch Powell, perhaps it's just me. Apologies...

These sorts of studies aimed at ranking countries from worst to best are almost always pretty useless, based as they are on a points scale made up of some poorly-chosen metrics of goodness assigned arbitrary weightings. They're even more useless when just used to compare the twenty or so rich "western" countries of the world, all of which are fairly similar in terms of their absolute quality of life.

I like the way the author here acknowledges that he wouldn't usually believe this sort of study, and that he doesn't know enough about the other 20 countries to really judge, but since the study agrees with his prejudices he's inclined to believe it. I applaud his honesty here.

Useless? Huh? How else are we going to reinforce our strongly held cultural perceptions about those awful foreigners?

My Mother is a health visitor, and she says there's too much NHS red tape in an otherwise good concept. Health visitors are unique to Britain, she tells me, and they look after developing babies and give parents advice.

As for the welfare state, it paid my way through University by a legal quirk, helped me develop software without worrying about bills, and will hopefully pay me through a Master's degree.

[Edit] - It wasn't a legal quirk, I was fully entitled due to illness, it was just unusual.

Since mealtimes are usually when families get to converse, the children do not learn the art of conversation

Children learn the art of conversation from television and practice it with their friends at school. From their families, they learn the art of neurotic bickering.

If being a kid in Britain means being a chav, as I have been lead to believe, that is sufficient to explain why it is the worst childhood in the western world.

What a great way to start a sentance "The British, never fond of... seriously, how can a country not be fond of children, wtf.

This article offers nothing constructive whatsoever and the title is misleading.

http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/34/2/333 "This article discusses the founding of the Manhattan Institute as part of a wider mobilization of conservative ideology and activism in 1970s New York. Important to the success of this mobilization was the concerted effort to reframe the "urban crisis" as a problem of values and culture and to construct a narrative of moral decline—and ultimately of conservative redemption—based in liberal New York."

- So thats where their coming from then.

Interesting, but: "Since mealtimes are usually when families get to converse" is not true. You can complain about lack of eating together, but don't make up reasons why it's bad.

But the rest of it was quite insightful.

Where's a link to the report from UNICEF? This is the stupidest thing I have read on the internet for a long time (like, 28 minutes and counting)

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