20-02-12 Love Politics Blogs Weekly Showcase

20 February

Hello my lovelies! Thanks for joining us again for this week’s Politics Showcase. I can’t wait to get stuck in and I hope you enjoy it.

As a mum of two little ones I have been thinking this week about when you start introducing children to politics. I really hope it’s something the boys are interested in but I don’t want to push it. I also worry that to understand politics you have to try to understand all the negative things about society. Crime, poverty, inequality, the list goes on. My strongest instinct as a parent is to protect my kids from experiencing these things. While they are little I also feel the need to protect them from even recognising that these things exist. I feel like starting to have these discussions will somehow mark the end of their innocence.

Thanks to the birth lottery my kids see the world as somewhere safe and fun, full of people who care about them and their feelings and who always treat them fairly. The worst they have to deal with is that we can’t always buy all the things they want and sometimes the weather stops them playing outside. I don’t want to explain to them that the helicopters that regularly fly over our house are taking wounded soldiers to hospital or that the man in that shop doorway isn’t camping for fun.

How do we begin to help them understand things that are outside of their experience? My oldest is only 3 so I suppose I’ve got a little while to figure this out but I’d love to hear about your experiences of discussing politics with kids. You can catch me on Twitter (@catparrott) if you’ve got any advice. Should you so desire you could even write a post about it (or anything else political that takes your fancy) and link it up for next week by clicking on Join In up at the top. I’ll see you back here next week and in the meantime don’t forget to check out this week’s posts and leave some comment love.

Cat, Yellow Days & Political Mummy.

Blur of Woodsmoke – Marching for Equal Marriage

I’ve never been a big fan of Valentine’s Day. I won’t bother going into the reasons, because they’re all the usual ones. But this Valentine’s Day was very different. I went on my first ever march! – the Love Equally march for marriage equality. Over 1000 people marched through Edinburgh to deliver a Valentine’s card to Alex Salmond that said “Roses are white, thistles are blue, we believe in equal marriage and we hope the Scottish Government will too.”

In A Bundance – Tax breaks for cleaners sweeping up

At last, a very tidy idea from a government. Tax breaks for cleaners.

David Cameron has been in Stockholm getting pally with the Swedish PM and learning how they do things there. Apparently, as well as saunas and pickled fish (insert other stereotypes) they have a system that gives households cut-price domestic help.

The point of this is to free people up from the sheer tyranny of housework so they can spend more time doing jobs they enjoy and are better at. And cleaners and other domestic staff get more work.

WAHM-BAM! – The Year 1 Phonics Screening Test

The government has introduced a new Phonics Screening Test which comes into play this June for all children in Year 1, after a one-year pilot. In the one year pilot, only 32% of six-year-olds who took the test reached the expected level. Is this because they couldn’t read? No, it’s because most of them could read well and taking a step back to decoding nonsense words and reading a list of words instead of a story, is not at all helpful or indicative of actual reading levels.

Yellow Days – Footballers as role models: Asking for trouble.

I’ve been a bit surprised by the flaring up of the ‘Racism in Football’ issue this week. Not that it wasn’t horrible, it’s just that it doesn’t come as a surprise to me. Time after time these over grown, over paid schoolboys behave atrociously and there’s a little outcry, a slap on the wrist and then everything goes back to normal. It’s not just racism though. You get stories of them cheating on their wives, hitting their girlfriends, sleeping with hookers, speeding, drink driving and getting in fights. That’s just the stuff we hear about.

Like this?Read more… // Find Yellow Days on Facebook // Find Yellow Days on Twitter