Parenting

Fashions come and go but the one irrefutable constant is that parents have to prepare their child for entry into their society. As communal animals, whilst other aspects may or may not be true, to be socially acceptable as a minima the child has to acquire the skills of knowing when and how to get what it needs and judging when to let others have their way and to fit into this society to be able to queue and wait for a turn.

How best to pass on those skills depends on circumstances and absence of economic necessity. A well provided for parent with boundless time, energy, patience and an overwhelming passion for mothering may well be able to devote 24/7 to explaining, educating and showing the child by example how to progress, to the career mother who may only be able to grab a five minute slot to cram in the maximum impact into the child's development. Neither is right or wrong, one just driven from pure necessity and the other from an obsessive maternalism, with others occupying every possible degree inbetween these extremes.

Whatever the approach the inescapable factor is the child mind is not a mature adult mind. I will have to leave it to better authorities to mark out the development phases of the developing mind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_cognitive_development Suffice to say as the child grows so do the skills of recognising space limits, reasoning, understanding of the unseen, awareness of others and their objectives, to the explosion of emotional responses, through to the blossoming of planning and strategy to, I would argue the final unrecognised phase of contemplative experience. A child cannot respond to the adult world until it has developed adult mind skills. A child can and does from within the womb, to the trauma of birth, from the earliest cries to the eagle eyed teenage exploitation, experience the outer world and learn how to manipulate it to its singular benefit and advantage. Woe betide the starry-eyed mother besotted with visions of immaculate innocence!

The good parent will be responsive to the child's manipulations and divert it to support the parents own agenda. Though there haven't been blind controlled trials and therefore it isn't science, therefore not proven, therefore can be tossed aside, the one thing all experienced successful parents do agree on is that all children respond best to regularity, consistency, quality attention and affirmation.

Makes sense, from the child's perspective the world is huge, unfathomable and full of weird unexpected and often unpleasant experiences. What you need as a child to cling onto, as your solid rock, is certainty and security from which you venture out to explore and make sense of this world or retreat back to to recover. With luck getting encouragement and appreciation for the explorations safely negotiated and quite time to reflect and blend into to past adventures. The best sacrifice the parent can offer is to postpone their pleasures and indulgences so that their child can enjoy regularity and consistency.

Simple but effective.

Right of passage

It would seem in this unwritten democracy of ours, our historic rights are being whittled away by those seeking to have greater control over us. Once it was a matter of pride and the object of considerable efforts to keep the Queen's highway open to movement, at all times. The unwritten right of passage at all times was acknowledged as a binding obligation. Unfortunately nowadays we have no champions of our freedoms left as we succumb unquestioningly to the tottering towers of control, constraint, restriction and retribution.

To 'protect the public' the police now routinely close off the motorways at slipways either side of an serious incident. If a life is at risk or a helicopter has to be brought in, fine, no-one would raise an eyebrow knowing passageway will be opened as soon as the situation is resolved, but no, it is a 'crime scene' that has to be investigated and the risk of rubber-necking accidents on the opposite carriageway means it is expedient to close the motorway until the police investigations are complete and wreckage removed, in two hours, five hours even twelve hours as it suits them.

At vast expense this country has invested in a motorway system to take the increase in traffic, spare our congested towns and villages from the heavy lorries and ensure the essential life of this country can continue to move quickly and efficiently from one place to another. Not every trip is essential but amongst all those trips of convenience are life changing trips for some, a last chance interview, completion on a once in ten year contract, a birth, an organ exchange, all the varied minutia of every day life that is dependant on quick reliable transport between our towns. Without which our country would grind to a halt, suffocate and stagnate. It is an absolute need for modern life. Yet a policeman on some spurious justification can just close this life line, leave people stranded without any clue as to whether for one hour or twelve hours, re-route traffic which is not trapped through routes which seize up as they cannot cope with the flow and be indifferent to all the personal tragedies and traumas that ensue, left alone the huge costs that have to be suffered by the motoring public. But that is alright because they are motorists and its all their fault, if they drove properly there wouldn't be accidents, seems to be the mentality. Wrong, we have a right of passage and a right to be spared the costs and inconveniences of extremes delays.

Its a balance, inconvenience to a great many to save a life or avert a national crisis. A crime scene report! When has any report been issued that illuminates the sequence of events upto an accidents or leads to all those numerous arrests of criminal drivers? Public rights and goodwill has been usurped by bureaucracy abusing what should be essential last resorts, because they can get away with it unchallenged.

It gets worse. Now roads are being closed for a day, a week, five weeks so it can be repaired. There must be the odd stretch of road where the only option is closure, exceptional. Most do not have to be but it is a money thing. Cash strapped council can save really large sums out of very hard pressed budgets by giving themselves and their contractors a closed road to work with. All those additional costs such as converting a stretch of road to two-way flow, traffic controls or night time working, all magically saved. Except of course the real cost is hidden, off anyones budget and can therefore be disregarded, it is huge and is borne by all those motorists and companies reliant on good transport and whose journey has now becomes a nightmare, trying to squeeze the diverted traffic through tight restricted congested towns with huge delays. By an administrative stroke denied their right of passage along the Queens highway with not a whimper in protest.

Insurance Scam

For any one type of risk, over a timescale the number of events and the costs to settle are averaged out and for a given pool of contributors the premium necessary to make a profit and pay out on the claims that will arise are calculated. Some years will be good with few and small claims and some years will be bad with many or very expensive claims. Just like roulette, over a period of time the banker, or in this case insurance companies, will always win because that is how the figures are stacked up. Fine.

Not content to make the just profit they anticipated increasingly nowadays the insurance companies are now arranging to cream off more than just a fair share of profits. If you tilt the average occurrence of events in your favour, by for example excluding know frequent or costly occurring events, cracking or water ingress in a property, young drivers or cancer, they win hands down. Just like stacking good cards into a hand, they can even further improve their profits by playing hardball with the small print, "fully reveal whatever reasonably might influence decision to insure", "only securely locked and alarmed premises or cars are insured against a break-in", "providing you have never ever discussed with your Doctor any health issue are you insured for a health problem". Even worse still, having put every word and clause firmly into their favour now, if you have to claim, your renewal premium will go through the roof, forget about protected no-claims discounts, in todays world they have become meaningless.

Is it so unreasonable that when an insured person experiences something extra-ordinary they should be able to claim in a supportive, not openly hostile and adversarial climate, for a speedy settlement, of, no more than what the words offered to do at the time the insurance taken out? Surely that is why they took out insurance, paid insurance premiums, all for the peace of mind that they are covered incase of the dreadful unexpected event actually occurring, even if, horrors of horrors, the event was triggered by an act human error. We do after all, all make mistakes from time to time and look to insurance to protect us from our own culpalbilty.

Now we know there are people who set out to abuse and claim for far more than their entitlement and make it their life's work to create and extort extravagant insurance claims. There are no doubt solicitors out there that will aide and abet them in their extortion. I fancy the insurance companies have the nonce and legal clout to see off multiple claims from self-evidently fraudsters but why should the ordinary man in the street be made to suffer and endure the harsh treatment metered out to cheats as if they too were a cheat.

It has reached such a pass where, if you have the misfortune to experience a claim event, your claim will be refuted, or even worse your insurance will be retrospectively invalidated, by hindsight manipulative interpretation of words, hiding behind a host of concepts such as "prior knowledge", "exclusions", "failure to follow notification procedures", "lack of corroborative evidence" or "failure to maintain or implement security".

A compassionate, supportive and a fair appraisal, all gone. Instead narrow and mean minded wriggles to find only the get out words and not that sympathetic look at the whole holistic picture. So instead we have total absence of certainty and full doubt whether the cover anticipated actually exists and will replace the loss. Why indeed pay the premiums, why take out insurance if, when it is needed, it fails to deliver the glowing all-embracing rosy promises of the insurance offer. Better off putting the premium money in a sinking fund and hoping your averages wont turn up for a few years, scarcely worse than taking out an insurance that, odds on, isn't going to pay out in anycase.