7 March 2007

Remarks by the Rt Hon Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, to the Equal Opportunities Commission at Church House, London

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I know that for me, and all of you here, the family is the foundation of and the framework for our lives.

But we must also recognise that the pressures on parents are growing.

I am pleased that there are record numbers of people in work, especially women, and that over the last few years we have extended maternity leave, introduced paternity leave and expanded child care places.

But there are increasing numbers of parents who are having to balance work and family but there are also many two-way carers, caring not just for children but also, at the same time, caring for elderly relatives.

Helping parents juggle all the pressures on them represents a wide and complex set of issues, to which I intend to return again over the coming months.

As I have travelled around the country listening to parents about their concerns, I've heard time and again about the everyday pressures of family life: how tough it can be just to get the kids to school on time and to get to work on time, to make sure there is healthy food at home, and to ensure that teenagers have things to do during the holidays.

And of course we have to think how we encourage stable parenting relationships, tackle deadbeat dads, and help the thousands of families, trapped in disadvantage, out of work or stuck on low incomes, victims of social exclusion, caught in a bleak cycle of low aspiration and limited opportunity.

I think all parents want their children to grow up happy and loved, equipped to cope with the adult world, learning how to earn a decent living and look after themselves and, in time, their own families, ready to love and be loved.

I think all parents want to see their children inherit a better world and better opportunities than they had and to see them inherit the best start in adult life they can give them.

And I think every parent wants their children to enjoy their childhood, that golden, precious, unrepeatable period in life.

But let me make this observation: and one of the things I think about - and I suspect everyone in this room will have thought about - over and over again, I hear parents express their worries about the pressure culture on our children, what some call the erosion of childhood.

What people mean by this is that now almost as soon as they go to school children are exposed to the adult world in a way that seldom happened fifty years ago.

The proliferation of mass media and cheaper travel has opened up for children a far wider range of influences. Much of that is good - the internet is a great learning tool, travel allows children to see what our parents never witnesses at all - but it has also helped erode the boundaries between childhood and adulthood.

Most families now have a computer that gives children access to libraries of data and knowledge we could only have dreamed of fifty years, or even ten years, ago. Of course, much of this has been healthy and beneficial.

And the commercialisation of childhood - matched by advances in technology - has expanded so vigorously that children's food, clothes, entertainment and toys and games are billion pound global industries with huge advertising budgets that are powerful influences on children.

This has exposed children increasingly to the pressures of very aggressive advertising. But most worrying of all it has exposed children to images and depictions that sensationalise, violence, drugs, and sex.

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In the past it was parents, teachers and churches that were the principle sources of information and authority for children as they grew up.

Today parents and teachers feel under pressure as children are influenced by all these multimedia sources - TV, internet, texting, DVDs - as well as peer pressures.

So parents who want to teach their children right from wrong and standards of behaviour and how to exercise discipline and self control, as I do, often find themselves competing with popular culture which often seems to be sending out competing messages and which then reinforces all the peer pressure on their own children.

How we counteract this is a central concern for me as a parent and for all parents I know - and this is an issue we must address with practical proposals to address the challenges we face.

We want to promote a culture which favours responsibility and establishes boundaries - limits of what is acceptable and unacceptable.

Now we can't and shouldn't seek to turn the clock back on technology and change - rather we need to harness new technology and use it to enable parents to exercise the control they want over the new influences on their children.

That is why I've been talking to Ofcom about further measures to protect children from unsuitable material in the media.

We need to support all those broadcasters and providers doing a huge amount and of course we need to recognise there are global markets where we need international agreement.

We used to have the 'x' certificate which sent out a clear message. I am pleased that today Ofcom has agreed to promote a series of common labelling standards, agreed with stakeholders, providing information on the type of content, regardless of the medium concerned - cinema, TV, radio, video games, or the internet.

As part of its responsibilities for content regulation and media literacy, I am pleased to say also that Ofcom will undertake a number of initiatives to make it easier for parents to protect their children from what they are seeing:

Conduct an information campaign for parents which will let them know what parental control software is available for computers and TV set-top boxes
Work with equipment manufacturers to ensure parents have better information on how to use blocking software
Consider what can be done to assist parents in restricting access to violent and obscene material sent over the internet.

Ofcom will also work with the Internet Watch Foundation to ensure internet service providers tell their subscribers about software which blocks access to sites.

But just as sometimes children are exposed to information we as parents would rather they didn't see, so as parents we sometimes find it hard to get the information we need, somewhere to turn to, for example, when particular problems arise for the first time.

Parentline Plus is today already taking over 100,000 calls from parents a year. I suggest we look to build on this to a parents service operating in all media forms which acts as a gateway to direct parents to the astonishing breadth of support on offer from the voluntary sector. And from next year we are piloting parents' know how with access through internet, emails, telephone and on a 24 hour basis.

And I believe we need to give backing to the mother to mother, children to children, parent to parent services that are currently either in existence or starting. I have already said we must do more for Childline, and I suggest we do more to support the charities providing the services going to mums, children and young people.

It is common sense that one of our biggest challenges is now to reinforce the discipline of and strengthen the authority not just of parents but of parents and teachers when they work together.

The idea of a parent teacher associations is now more important than ever, it is the authority of both that needs strengthened. And to make this effective, parents and teachers need to link up more closely together.

I would like each pupil to have a class teacher, coach or director of studies who understands their needs, and is in regular contact with parents.

Parents need to be involved in the education of their children, I want all schools to invite parents into primary schools for reading hours.

I want to help parents and teachers tackle bullying - with all schools signing the anti bullying charter for action - and outside the school gate more resources to Childline to address the problem.

Later today we will talk about marriage and I will always be pro family and pro marriage.

We need to mobilise all of our energies and commitment to support children and families - to help parents as they do the most difficult job in the world, raising a child.

All families face their own challenges which they tackle in their own way but government has a duty to support them all.

And by that, I mean practical, sustained help, whenever and wherever families need it, in whatever circumstances they find themselves, not by making judgements but seeking always to find the best way to support every child.