Banging his head...

The Anglican Archbishop of Wales - Dr Barry Morgan - has a significant capacity for stating the obvious.

Addressing the Governing Body of the Church in Wales, he stressed that parenting was a serious commitment and that parents needed to work hard to stay together and to spend enough quality time with their children. He added "(We need to) to teach young people that parenthood is an awesome responsibility that requires both love and self sacrifice from parents committed to the child and to one another. We need to be teaching these basic concepts as well as parent-craft, in our schools from an early age, particularly to those who have not experienced it first hand, and not simply informing them about the mechanics of a sexual relationship and contraception divorced from the basic concepts of love, responsibility and self-respect."

So yet another responsibility to be assumed by the schools? Barry, old chap; let us explain. The only people who can teach children about parenting are their own parents. Not teachers, social workers, Bishops, firemen, doctors or plumbers. Parents. They know how it's done, they've rehearsed for years and they become pretty good at it. The problem lies with those parents who don't, can't or won't. They're the ones that cause the problems, they're the ones that have kids while they're still kids themselves, and they're the ones that have to be dealt with. Perhaps it's becoming time to think about radical action. Maybe the Chinese have it right.