A new mental condition – ‘Conduct Disorder’ – was invented yesterday in a report commissioned by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).
‘Antisocial Behaviour And Conduct Disorders In Children And Young People – Recognition, Intervention And Management’ is National Clinical Guideline Number 158 and was jointly written by the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health and the Social Care Institute for Excellence.
Pages 29 and 30 offer advice to parents, who are told to ‘encourage wanted behaviour rather than criticise unwanted behaviour’. ‘Shouting at a child to stop being naughty does not tell him what he should do, whereas, for example, telling him to play quietly gives a clear instruction which makes compliance easier,’ they say.
This ‘positive parenting’ model is very fashionable and sounds fine in principle but it may not be too firmly anchored in reality. The advice says of good parents:
‘For example, instead of shouting at the child not to run, they would praise him whenever he walks quietly; then he will do it more often. Through hundreds of such prosaic daily interactions, child behaviour can be substantially modified.’
NICE assert that when parents ‘find it hard to praise, and fail to recognise positive behaviour when it happens, the result is that the desired behaviour becomes less frequent’.
It isn’t too clear if there is any evidence to support this model. Telling a child hundreds of times a day that he is doing things well amounts to at least a dozen times an hour, or once every five minutes. Such a relentless barrage of praise is highly likely to exasperate the child, even if any parent in the real world actually has the time.
‘You are reading that book nice and quietly, Samantha!’
‘Yes, Mum, you told me that five minutes ago. And five minutes before that. …’
Andrea Sutcliffe, Chief Executive of SCIE, defended the report on the BBC Today Programme yesterday morning against a skeptical John Humfrys and a down-to-earth psychiatrist Dr Sami Timini, author of ‘Naughty Boys – Anti-Social Behaviour, ADHD and the Role of Culture’, who objected to the invention of a new medical condition.
The interview is well worth listening to; move the cursor to 1:33:45:
Professor Timini said that diagnosis in mental health ‘only provides a description of a set of symptoms’ and that diagnosis is ‘a poor indicator of outcomes’. Naughty children had a variety of backgrounds, he said, and the guidelines ‘flew in the face’ of the research.
John Humfrys wondered if parents actually needed all the state agencies named in the report to fly to their aid.
Stephen Green, National Director of Christian Voice, said today:
‘No-one could be against praising children and building them up, but to contend that there is no place at all for correction and discipline, as the NICE report does, is to propose a simplistic and one-dimensional framework of parenting which only works in the imaginations of social workers.
‘Add to the mix the idea that anyone delinquent must be labelled with a mental condition and the full machinery of the state is starting to swing into play whenever a child is playing up.
‘I don’t want to be mean, but Ms Sutcliffe of SCIE, whatever that is, is exactly as I imagined her. In fact the whole executive of SCIE are much as one would imagine them: short-haired, greying, smiley women and a token man all committed to the idea that the state knows best.
‘Ms Sutcliffe is a member of the Department of Health’s Transformation Group and Care and Support Implementation Board. Did anyone know the DoH actually had such a body? And yet we are paying for it.’
Andrea Sutcliffe lives in Crouch End with David Stout, deputy chief executive of the NHS Confederation, the membership body for health service organizations, according to the Guardian. It is very much an NHS insiders enclave. Another Guardian report gives the impression that there are no children in the Stout / Sutcliffe home upon whom to try out the ideas in the NICE guidance.
(The title of this article is based on a quote from the song ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ from West Side Story in which the Jets mock the kinds of medicalised excuses liberal authorities use to rationalise the existence of hooligans like themselves. Full lyrics here.)
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It sounds to me like more beaurocracy implemented from Europe, probably affiliated with Common Purpose! To create more unnecessary jobs which we, the tax payers, have to pay for! We MUST vote for UKIP and tell all believers we know about UKIP Christian Soldiers
Haven’t the government got anything better to do than try and invade the lives of parents and tell them how to bring up children? Parents have been bringing up their children for thousands of years without state intervention, so why do some people feel that we need state intervention now?
I don’t have kids, but if I did I’m pretty sure I know how to bring them up. As much as the state says it’s wrong, my parents had no aversion to giving me a light slap when I was a kid to tell me off. It did me no harm!
We should indeed praise children when they are good, but there is nothing wrong with discipline when they are naughty.
Yes go for the wonderful new methods of raising children and continue to see a lack of respect for authority figures, poor discipline at home and the class room with a knock on effect into broader society.
Proverbs 29:15 The rod and rebuke give wisdom, But a child left to himself brings shame to his mother.
Sounds like any excuse not to discipline a child.