I read the Observer article with interest on Sunday and thought that the bulk of it was interesting and reasonably well balanced. I can hear the calls of "Well of course you think that, your situation is the same as the author's". Which is true, but the substance of the article is objective fact - Gordon Brown's revolution in parental leave, the SureStart initiative, later motherhood, the huge growth in the middle class parenting pound and the corresponding growth in businesses exploiting that. Sure he's putting a personal spin on this stuff, but at least he's making it clear where he stands and not trying to pass his stance off as unbiassed (and where his interviewees are picked from the people he meets at his kids playground he makes that clear rather than pretending that they are fully representative (a frequent crime of that sort of journalism)). However, when I got to the last bit I groaned "They'll get letters" partly because the level of abuse overpowered the rest of the article (he tried to lighten it up with the flip "anything this guy's for, I'm against" comment, but it was still a big failure of tone) but mostly because people would inevitably (IMO wrongly) interpret it as a blanket attack on the childless/childfree rather than this particular bloke. In his defence, stuff I've read from the pro-childfree/anti kid movement can get very annoying. They always start with really good stuff like the appalling things people say to childfree women and the lack of flexible working for people caring for parents/spouses and end by moaning about perfectly reasonable stuff like parent and baby film screenings (at 10:30am for heaven's sake), family carriages (aka ghettos) on trains, and the demise of the Routemaster bus. I don't know whether they've been embittered by society's undoubted bad attitude or whether only someone who was a miserable git to start off with would go to the effort of starting this sort of campaign.
To change the subject - I recommend vitamin B6 - I've been on it for years and haven't knifed anybody
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chiming
Swimming against the tide
Date: June 8th, 2005 07:14 pm (UTC)From:Sure he's putting a personal spin on this stuff, but at least he's making it clear where he stands and not trying to pass his stance off as unbiassed (and where his interviewees are picked from the people he meets at his kids playground he makes that clear rather than pretending that they are fully representative (a frequent crime of that sort of journalism)).
However, when I got to the last bit I groaned "They'll get letters" partly because the level of abuse overpowered the rest of the article (he tried to lighten it up with the flip "anything this guy's for, I'm against" comment, but it was still a big failure of tone) but mostly because people would inevitably (IMO wrongly) interpret it as a blanket attack on the childless/childfree rather than this particular bloke.
In his defence, stuff I've read from the pro-childfree/anti kid movement can get very annoying. They always start with really good stuff like the appalling things people say to childfree women and the lack of flexible working for people caring for parents/spouses and end by moaning about perfectly reasonable stuff like parent and baby film screenings (at 10:30am for heaven's sake), family carriages (aka ghettos) on trains, and the demise of the Routemaster bus. I don't know whether they've been embittered by society's undoubted bad attitude or whether only someone who was a miserable git to start off with would go to the effort of starting this sort of campaign.
To change the subject - I recommend vitamin B6 - I've been on it for years and haven't knifed anybody