Parenting lobby group launches website

Parenting lobby group launches.

A new lobby group, Parent.org, has launched to promote parenting to government. It will be based on the internet and can be found at http://www.parent.org.nz

"Who would have thought that the day would arrive when it would become necessary to explain parenting to government", states parent.org spokesman, Steve Gore. "From recent comments it is clear that our political leaders have no idea of the value that parenting offers society.

"Parents have clearly suffered from lack of representation. Parent.org will pick up that mantle and we urge all parents who feel that they are getting a raw deal to join us and start working towards a parenting environment where success is encouraged and resourced. We need to ask our politicians why our business, sports and cultural environments are resourced to succeed but our parents only resourced to fail. Why is government putting so many obstacles in front of parents, and giving initiatives that could empower parents to other sectors? Who do they hope to benefit by having parents fail?

His comments come in light of Prime Minister Helen Clarks recent announcement to encourage more women into the workforce.

"If she was truly interested in attracting women into the workforce, she would be rolling out support to enable men to succeed as full time fathers but this is not happening. By simply boosting childcare her concerns are clearly around satisfying the short term needs of employers, not the long term needs of children. She is simply making it harder for parents to devote the energy to their children that is needed to ensure the child does well. She is so dedicated to producing an award winning economy she is prepared to sacrifice our future to it."

Parent.org has a simple deal to offer government. Give us the world's best parenting environment and our parents will give you the world's best population. That means citizens who are productive and creative, communities that rock (not from earthquakes but from social connectedness) and men who are safe.

Parent.org is concerned that while New Zealand has half a dozen cabinet portfolios for business and has ministers for women's affairs, the elderly, Maori, Pacific islanders, the Lord of the Rings, two treaty ministers, the Americas Cup and even a Minister for Racing there is no cabinet minister looking after the interests of our nation's parents.

"If parenting was doing so well that it didn't need cabinet representation then Child Youth and Family Service would not exist." said Mr. Gore "CYFS is our ministry of failed families and its budget has increased by almost sixty percent in the five years it has been in existence. In twenty years successive governments have turned a failure focused economy into a prosperous, success focused one, and in the same time turned a functioning parenting environment into one in which hundreds of millions of dollars a year are pumped into failure. Our children have suffered under this mentality but we will all share their loss when more and more of them grow up unable to usefully engage with society. We are currently building four new prisons. How many will we be building a generation from now, and do we really need more prisons or fewer people working against society, rather than with it? While government desperately wrings its hands over our appalling childhood statistics it ignores the the solution - parents. In it's touted Agenda for Children, resources for parents get mentioned at the end of Appendix three.

Here are a few facts:
Education in the business sector is tax deductible, parent education is not - one is an investment, the other a hobby.
We expect people to undertake at least three years of university study to get on the bottom rung of a management career, but think that five visits with a Plunket nurse is the only education anyone needs to turn a newborn baby into a successful adult.
Our income tax system has three levels of tax, implying a system of "fairness". However this takes no consideration of the number of people the income is supporting, meaning we tax a single person earning $37,000 at a lower rate than we tax a family of five with an income of $39,000. In an attempt to redress this government recently turned 40,000 families into beneficiaries and made complicated hoops for them to jump through
The government is trying to increase the skills level in the Early Childhood Education sector while decreasing the budget of the PAFT (parents as first teachers) programme.
Trevor Mallard has put a bunch of money into schools to promote the push play campaign. By doing this he is giving to schools the resource that parents could better use to fund children into after school activities, sports clubs etc. How many children miss out on gymnastics, ballet, swimming lessons etc., because their parents cannot afford the $400 a year in club fees?

Parent.org has simple vision - we want the worlds best parenting environment.

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