Social Policy and Young Parents

http://maggidawn.typepad.com has a heartbreaking and thought provoking post about parenthood and how our 'education' of young people that getting pregnant is bad can lead to women feeling so much that they want their 'life' before they have their baby that they leave it so late they have problems conceiving.

Having been reading social policy this term (and currently writing an assignment on it) it got me thinking about how this is contributed to by our government. If a young person is NEET (not in education, employment or training) the social exclusion unit have a very structured strategy to turn said young person into EET (In employment, education, or training). It would seem that in our world of targets, development, hoop jumping and achieving 'hard outcomes' there is little space for the developing of 'soft skills' or making space for individuals to take their life journey which is right for them. The government decide whether a young person is not following the 'right' life path and try to push them back onto it if they are not. While this is all very noble in terms of working to reduce social exclusion, it is all to their very structured and boxed agenda. In thinking through this my mind flicks back to Frieire and other liberation thinkers. If we try to liberate people by riding in to rescue them then we are simply becoming the new oppressor ourselves.

Maybe by trying to push young people and others to go through the hoops in society that someone has said are the 'right' ones and disuading people from 'bad' paths in life (whichever nominal cabinet minister decided which were good and which were bad) we are in fact oppressing them.

When we consider the young parent, maybe rather than trying to automatically 'get them into Employment, Education or Training', we should allow them to say that what s/he wants in life could be to be a parent and get their identity, sense of achievment and contribution to society from bringing up their baby? When we consider their contribution to society, maybe rather than measuring it in terms of benefits recieved or work output we could think about what society might gain from the unique contribution that someone who has the challenging painful fulfilling beauiful heartbreaking wonderful person building insight gaining experiences of parenthood at an earlier age than is considered normal or appropriate.

Would love to hear of people's thoughts or experiences on this.