The problem of children: From child welfare problems to the problem child
By Ann Farmer | 10 September 2025
In an age when, overall, we have never been better off, we no longer see the poverty and deprivation that Dickens so memorably depicted in Oliver Twist.
And yet child welfare problems abound. There is school non-attendance, and upward of a million 16–24-year-olds — 12.5 per cent of that age group — classed as “Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET)” from January to March 2025.
Apparently, some Generation Z-ers see being a NEET as neat, unfazed by the prospect of a life on welfare benefits.
And although physical health has improved since Dickens’s day, there is constant talk of young people’s mental health. However, normal human responses to life are now treated as mental health problems, and a significant factor in the increasing incidence of mental health problems among young people must be incessant talk about the increasing incidence of mental health problems among young people…
Add to this, teaching children about the “crimes” of our ancestors and sidelining their achievements (while somehow maintaining silence on genocidal Communist leaders like Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot).
Neither can it help to hear constant warnings about climate change. “Overpopulation” scares have been overtaken by environmentalism, but just when young people are considering their future, they discover there is no future — and that they themselves are the problem. Environmentalists have been prominent in the population control movement, a movement that would be heartened by the Bills currently going through Parliament to curb numbers at the beginning and end of life. Meanwhile, mass immigration is seen as necessary to fill “employment gaps” — “gaps” caused by decades of the very same population control approach.
To acknowledge such realities might encourage young people to be more politically engaged, rather than leading socially isolated lives, addicted, it is said, to their phones.
But if they do, it may not be to promote wokeness. One study found that students outwardly conforming to this new orthodoxy were seeking a “safe space” away from it, fearing to voice their dissenting opinions and true feelings. No wonder the governing classes are now policing tweets instead of the increasingly violent streets — and if the Government’s “banter Bill” goes ahead, it will freeze an already chilled public discourse.
For many children, the family is no longer a “safe space”. The broken family looms large in much of child welfare news, especially cases of child cruelty and child killing, in which the “new partner” often plays a lethal role. Even the progressive’s iconic “modern” families — those with “two mothers”, which must, according to forward-looking feminism, be twice as good as their antediluvian, opposite-sex counterparts — are not immune to such crimes.
Of course, progressives have the same answer to the problems of both traditional and non-traditional marriage: ever-easier divorce. But the decline in traditional marriage has been a factor in children’s declining educational achievement, not unconnected to the fact that “among parents of first-born children, 60% of cohabiting couples who never married had separated by their child’s 14th birthday, compared with 21% who married before the birth of the child”.
The “care system” must pick up the pieces of the broken family, but the State makes a poor parent: according to the Office for National Statistics: “More than half (52%) of children in care had a criminal conviction by age 24 compared to 13% of children who had not been in care”; that this “includes minor offences such as speeding and graffiti” is scant consolation.
But the care system deals with already damaged children — wayward, often violent young people who are a danger to themselves and to others. As with so many other social problems, the closure of the old institutions and farming out of vulnerable children to private “care”, some of it unregulated, has caused serious harm.
Far from saving money, even with providers unregistered with Ofsted, one council was paying “as much as £20,000 a week per child for round-the-clock care” for difficult-to-manage children. “Deprivation of Liberty” (DoL) orders may be issued by High Court judges, allowing children to be “constantly monitored by at least two staff” who may lock them up and “physically restrain” them if they try to escape. It is unlawful to place children in unregistered homes, but judges can allow such placements, with “restraint” if there is a risk that the child “might otherwise ‘kill or be killed’”. And ‘in the past three years’, the cost of one local authority’s children’s residential care rose “from £7.5m per year to an estimated £16.5m”.
No doubt the private providers’ initial quotes are lower than the cost of directly employing care staff, but once these have been dispensed with, costs rise. The price paid by children who endure the system is yet to be calculated. Clearly, the “child containment” industry is highly profitable, but despite their left-liberal leanings, the progressive classes fail to object to capitalism profiting from the misery of children.
Meanwhile, the number of foster carers is dwindling, possibly because of a rising incidence of difficult children — some affected by fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) — and demands that children’s “gender preferences” be respected.
Blaming parents for children’s problems while ignoring social realities like the decline in marriage hardly helps, although it does promote the eugenics view that inadequate parents are breeding inadequate children generation after generation.
The progressive’s interest in child welfare may be genuine, but so is their prioritisation of pre-birth child extermination — abortion on demand, for any reason, up to birth (and a bit beyond, just in case).
This is justified as a compassionate measure, but once normalised, it becomes the answer to all child welfare issues. The solution is seen not in adults behaving better — rather, that it would be better if such children had never been born. Thus does abortion become the solution to the problems it creates. How this brutal and bloody “solution” harmonises with another progressive preoccupation — “health and safety” — is anybody’s guess.
The Government’s approach to child welfare is to remotely monitor every child, even though spying on children is more in line with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four than a liberal democracy. According to one commentator, “Bridget Phillipson’s inappropriately named Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill” allows “much wider information-sharing through ‘consistent identifiers’ (CI) for every child. These will be assigned to children from birth”, although the Department for Education is already “trialling the use of their NHS number for this purpose”. These proposed CIs “will serve to drive a larger wedge of state oversight between parents and their children, promoting as it does not wellbeing, but surveillance”, weakening the child’s “rights to privacy, family and home”, and facilitating “the state’s underlying desire to oversee the whole of a child’s life.”
Not quite. The state would draw the line at staying up all night with a sick child, calming their fears, comforting them in distress and most especially disciplining them; all such mundane and minor duties will, undoubtedly, be delegated to parents.
It seems the progressive intellectual classes are not so much interested in children for their own sakes, as in seeing them as a problem to be solved. Apparently, their “higher wisdom” qualifies them to tell everyone else how to raise their children, while minimising the problem by ensuring that as many as possible are not born.
And yet, from every angle, young people hear the upbeat message “you can be whatever you want to be”; but if their dreams fail to materialise, their options are to blame “society” or themselves — to fall into anger or despair.
The only surprise is that we are so surprised that so many children are failing to thrive, or even survive, in this nightmare “progressive” world. Reluctant to solve the problems of progressivism that they themselves have created, instead they have made children problematical, swiftly going from how to solve child welfare problems to the intractable problem of the child. And the answer to that problem is the answer to every problem, death — in this case, death before life — the logical, final step.
As if to follow their example, just as a swathe was cut through their own generation, roughly half of all Generation Z pregnancies end in abortion.
Despite his courageous literary dives into human evil, confronted with the savageries of our modern, child-unfriendly world, even Dickens’ pen might fall from his nerveless fingers. Rather than trying to solve child welfare problems, we have created “the problem child”, which we “solve” by elimination. It is, after all, the final solution. We no longer need to worry about the problems of Oliver Twist, for he will no longer be born.
But the problem with this “solution” is that when we dehumanise the child, we dehumanise ourselves. Exercising god-like powers of life and death over the weakest does not make us gods, it only transforms us into demons. It is only when we acknowledge that we are made in the image and likeness of God that we become truly human.