This morning BBC Breakfast reported that primary school teachers across the country are dipping into their own pockets to buy toiletries for pupils. One school is even looking into purchasing a washing machine. ‘Period poverty’ in schools has been discussed a lot of late; more than 137,700 girls in the UK missed school last year because they didn’t have access to sanitary products. The expense of sanitary products has also been recognised, with calls to scrap the ‘tampon tax’ that considers them a luxury product. Yet, clearly this issue extends to products that most people take for granted; washing powder, soaps, toothpaste etc. On watching the report, my heart hurt for these children who have all had to have uncomfortable conversations with teachers at school and have likely faced torment from other children. My second feeling was anger. Anger that in one of the wealthiest countries in the world children have no access to basic hygiene products and their (possibly free) school meal may be the only hot thing they eat that day. But this is not why I was compelled to write.
A lady sitting at home watching BBC Breakfast, just like me, did not feel sympathy but wrote in with a message to the effect of ‘these parents are spending all their money on cigarettes and alcohol’. What usually follows this sentiment is ‘and therefore we should not be providing this.’ A quick check of Twitter and it seems this reaction is the vocal majority. For example:
I have spent a lot of time in the twentieth century this year, writing on the early welfare state, the social hygiene movement and now a dissertation on children in care. What struck me was the continuity of those same discourses that were used to argue against welfare provisions in the first half of the twentieth century.
In the 1920s the Tory Party rallied against extending the school meal service on the grounds that it would ‘undermine parental responsibility’ (Stewart, 1996). They argued that providing dinners for children at school would ‘demoralise’ parents who no longer had to provide (Davin, 1978). Sound familiar?
Even in a world where the everyday choices were alcohol and iPhones or toothpaste and bread and not the more common, electricity or food, why should the children suffer for choices that they did not make? There is a real sense of punishing the children for the ‘sins’ of their parents in order to whip them into submission. As if the reasons children are coming to school hungry are entirely down to parental mismanagement of money or individual choices more generally. Trying to pin the problems of structural inequality on the individual reeks of a historical moment that we should have long cycled past.* Poverty caused by the dismantling of the welfare state and precarious employment cannot be addressed by ‘educating’ parents. Tips on budget management don’t help when payday comes and you’re still in the red – the fridge is empty, the phone bill is overdue and your shoes have a hole in them.
The word choice always comes to the fore in this debate but in such restricted parameters, is choice not quite meaningless? How does a person choose whether to put money in the meter to keep the lights on or to buy washing powder? I spend a lot of time thinking about the agency of children from a historical perspective, but their parameters are even more restricted than their parents. Providing for children can empower them. By calling for them to be punished for their parents’ ‘sins’ – and by arguing against free hygiene products and school meals on the grounds of parental responsibility this is your argument – you are complicit in making children vulnerable. You make moral judgements about the choices made by parents, but in what world is arguing against helping children in need a morally correct position? The key here is empathy. Adults are the decision makers in society so we must advocate for children as people in their own right, not merely as extensions of their parents.
*I say cycled because the idea of linear historical progression is too big a debate to be had here
Subversive Histories 
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