I am with you FAEbGBD. I work with separated parents and the issues they have raising their kids and have been doing this for the last 8 years. There is nothing wrong in principle with educating parents who have poor parenting skills to give them a clue as to how they might raise them. And I am all for marriage counselling before during and after marriage. However as with most plans that have good intentions, it’s the philosophy and implementation of them that is the part I take issue with.

The parents that don’t give a damn won’t participate and from my experience that’s the majority of those parents that are failing their children because of poor parenting skills. Its not that they don’t know how to raise kids, in my opinion, for the most part, they simply are too selfish to care how their kids turn out. They have no long term view and are only concerned with their wants and needs and whatever makes their lives easier today. No amount of education will help this group, even if it is made compulsory. I know it’s a general sweeping statement but that is my experience and I have worked with a lot of families both intact and separated ones. So the education will, for the most part, miss the targeted audience or have little to no impact on them.

Also there is a conflict in priority as most governments have targets to get full employment to reduce reliance on state handouts and benefits and this competes with the priority of being hands on effective parent especially if both parents have to work full time and try and raise kids. This is especially difficult for single parents which again in the UK are a growing demographic.

That’s not just my opinion. In the UK the government have invested nearly 5 billion pounds into early years provision by state sponsored organisations such as the "Sure start project " but there is no evidence it has changed a thing in terms of the target audience it has been aimed at . Pre school children are still left without basic social skills and values. No is a word they have hardly ever heard!
But politicians have run out of ideas and simply keep pumping money in because the side effect is they get parents back to work who make an economic contribution through their taxes and provide cheep labour to keep the economy going.

However the flip side of having state sponsored parenting courses and general parent substitution such as before school and after school clubs and the culture that brings is that they are run by and large by academics funded by government departments ( with a bias to reduce unemployment ) who actually rarely understand the day to day experience of raising children . However they start to set the definition of what is normal and “in the best interests of your child” with out reference to you as a parent. To them putting a child in a nursery at 3 and having them spend the whole of their early childhood being raised by so called child professionals is preferable to having those children raised by their natural parents. To them, any form of physical chastisement is “child abuse”. Even telling off a child can be viewed as “emotional abuse”.

As I have said I deal with parents who after separation struggle to see their kids and parent them in the way that most parents take for granted because they are constantly fighting a legal system that is informed by professional child care experts who believe they know what is best for your child. In most cases, they have never met your child, have never met your child’s extended family, never attended your child’s school or nursery but based on their well intentioned "research " can conclude that time spent in nursery or after school events are preferable and more beneficial to your child than that same time being spent with the child’s natural father or mother or grand parents. They can conclude that your style of parenting does not match their state sponsored academically driven style of parenting and therefore your style of parenting is suspect.

I see this argument used regularly to prevent a non resident parent from having any extra contact with their own child.