Selfish Mother

Dan’s story

Dan is a single dad to his son Carl, who’s nine. Carl has not seen his mum for five years.

“Carl’s mum got pregnant two months after we met. We were surprised but he was a wanted child. Me and his mum, we clicked, we had a good time for a while but the relationship didn’t last.

To complicate matters, I was ill with a hereditary condition, I’ve had major operations and a rough ride. For one of the operations there was only a 15% survival rate. I was in hospital for three months.

Carl’s mum never visited. I knew our relationship was over but I wanted a civil split for our son’s sake. Carl was five when his mum and I eventually separated. Carl was a daddy’s boy. His mum left and she didn’t fight for him. Carl wanted to be with me. I got full custody and she was only allowed to write.

Single dad

So I became a single dad. I’m not sure I realised quite what I had taken on. I surprise myself at times. My life is so different now to how it was ten years ago but I couldn’t imagine it any other way. My purpose in life is my son.

ROUGH RIDE

Jonathan has been single dad to his six-year-old daughter and three-year-old son, since his ex-wife left the family two years ago.


When my son was nine months, my wife bought a ticket back to China and left us. Nobody knows what I’ve been through, it was hell.

I’ve had a rough ride. I was working full-time for the NHS and explained to my line manager that I needed to cut my hours. But she was abrupt and unsympathetic.

I was leaving work, rushing to pick up my son and daughter, give them their tea, they were tired and stressed, so was I. Also, my son got very ill, he was affected by breastfeeding stopping suddenly.

Eventually I took early retirement from my job, I  set up an electronic engineering business but again found it too much combining work and kids. Now I’m on income support and will be until my son starts school. It’s the first time I’ve ever lived on benefits.



I try to blend in but I am unusual, being a single dad in a small village. I sympathise with other single parents, keep your chin up, I say. I don’t have any family around me to help. But by now I’m used to pulling my socks up and getting on with it, so that’s what I do.



So young


My little boy needs a lot of attention, he’s still so young. With my daughter it is getting easier now she’s older. She washes and dresses herself now and is learning how to make breakfast for herself. I’m proud of her, she’s very independent. When my wife first left, my daughter cried when it was time for school and she was still shy and withdrawn this time last year. Now I wait at the school gates and she walks confidently into class.


Thirteen Year Old Son Depressed – in House Alone as Single Mother Works Like a Dog to Survive

joannafromwales

28 October 2010 08:52

I understand and support what Ann is saying. I have one 13 year old child and like Ann, have no support from family or my son’s father (although he expects support from me!!!) I conform to govt policy by doing 3 jobs, from 6.00 am to 6.45 pm every day to pay my mortgage and bills and keep out of debt.

I just called Parentline because I get exhausted/depressed to the point of being unable to go on because of the strain of trying to work/parent (13 year olds are hard work, not yet old enough not to need parents!).

I also think my son is depressed, he is on his own in the house most of the time inc. school holidays and when I get home I am too tired to do anything except go to sleep.

Ann is right, one person can only keep on going so long without being ill and without serious knock-on effect for the children. There isn’t a solution; my son is, as I say, 13 so I go to work. But good luck to Ann and anyone else in her position, the future is very tough for single parents and children and most of the time life doesn’t seem worth living.

Refugees flee the tyranny of social workers

By Christopher Booker


Published in the Sunday Telegraph 7th November 2010

Refugees flee the tyranny of social workers

There was a time when Britain took pride in offering a safe haven to the victims of tyrannies in other countries. Today we see this in reverse, with scores of families each year fleeing this country as the only way to escape a vicious system bent on seizing their newborn children for no good reason. Last week I heard two more such horror stories and this week I will relate the first, in which I am legally compelled to disguise the names.

Roger and Carol lived happily in Doncaster with their five-year-old daughter. One day last November they had a marital disagreement, involving no more than raised voices. They were overheard by a neighbour who called the police. The couple were arrested and held for nine hours before being released without charge. But the police had summoned the social workers to remove the child, who had not been harmed in any way other than hearing her parents having a row – as countless children do every day.
 
The social workers obtained an interim care order, on the grounds that the child was “at risk of emotional harm”, and gave her to

EXASPERATING AND POINTLESS STATE SCHOOL SILLINESS IN PREFERENCE TO ACTUAL EDUCATION

stupid-homework-instructions-by-stupid-teachers
This is a letter I sent to my son’s school in response to their exasperating and pointless barrage of letters they keep sending me about all sorts of things that the new government inspired bureaucracy has created to consume all that extra money thrown at State Comprehensive schools so it isn’t actually spent on improving the kid’s education.

Dear Mrs R (The Teacher)

You sent me a letter dated May 20th about my son not making progress in English, and about a meeting you are having with him at 3 p.m. today. I have some comments to make.

I discussed this with my son in some detail. He has always previously been good at English and it has been one of his best subjects that comes naturally to him as he is literate and quite communicative etc. He tells me he was more or less at the top of his class in English prior to changing classes and teachers. He tells me that the traditional aspects of English teaching, i.e writing essays in particular, were enjoyable for him and he was enthusiastic about writing, but that part of English lessons currently seems to have gone missing from his English lessons, he tells me.

He tells me quite categorically that he knows he is not doing well in English now because, he says, he is bored witless in class as he finds the lessons pedestrian and uninteresting. He explained to me, for example, that during the last English lesson he had spent the entire lesson listening to other pupils giving ‘presentations’ of their opinions about something or other.

This does not quite strike me as a lesson that I recognise as an English lesson, and I cannot relate it to any English lessons I ever had as a child. But, having said that, I am not making any direct criticism because I am not sufficiently aware of the precise detail of what actually goes on in the teaching processes at the School. But I do hear consistent rumours that the curriculum and exact style of teaching has been imposed on all schools and all teachers by a lunatic central Government bureaucracy and this has the effect of preventing teachers using their individual skills etc and generally stifles any prospect of good or even adequate teaching methods.

It may be that it is this problem which is being inflicted on my son, which is making it difficult for him to actually learn anything as I know he would wish to do.

I do know that my son is most definitely anxious to learn in all subjects, whether he particularly likes them or not. He frequently says he learns more from a thirty minute conversation with me than in a whole day at the school; something I find perplexing, particularly as that thirty minute conversation is rarely ’me specifically setting out to teach him something’. But what his comment does indicate is that I am engaging him and that is why he is learning from me and the school frequently fails to engage him and therefore he fails to be able to learn anything accordingly.

He says he feels the school dehumanises him to become a mere cypher, a box to be ticked on a form and a statistic to be manipulated into the corporate doublespeak of the school’s meaningless league tables etc.

Of course these are my words because my son is only an eleven year old; but he is using his eleven year old words to quite accurately describe what I have used adult words to describe more clearly. He simply says he just feels the school thinks he is a number, not a person and there is a huge vacuum of inscrutable non-communication between teaching staff and pupils in general, particularly expressed by the school’s manic obsession with turning every minute human activity into a bureaucratic process involving much box ticking and form filling out – and the application of insanely unnatural ‘rules’.

This is a consistent message I get from my son across all his time at the school in general. It highlights a fundamental difference in the quality of education between the best available in the private sector and the well known shortcomings of the public sector. The private sector is recognised for engaging pupils more for a variety of well known reasons.

The consequence of alienating pupils in this manner is that they become increasingly disruptive and a pain in the backside.

It is a fact that my son is mentally hyperactive and needs constant engagement and that this is exhausting for any adjacent adult, whether parent or teacher. Despite my own strenuous efforts to persuade him to be able to follow instructions to engage in any task to completion on his own, independently of my involvement, I observe what seems to be a complete inability of him to be able to do this.

I can only assume this is due to his current state of mental development, and I presume it will gradually improve.

So, I know that my son can do well in English if the lessons are made interesting for him. But I also know that your time has to be divided amongst the other pupils in the class too. Having said this, I still do not understand why it should be the case that a teacher cannot stand in front of thirty odd pupils and engage them all at the same time and make the lesson interesting so they learn something useful. That is the fundamental job of any teacher.

Remembering my own experiences as a child in a wide variety of schools which included state comprehensives as well as private schools, it is a complete mystery to me why state sponsored education has such an abysmal reputation. It is even worse today than it was when I was a child.

The reality about education is that it’s quality is more or less entirely down to the ‘quality’ of the teachers and ‘other’ people involved, and that education has almost nothing to do with ‘resources’ involving ever increasing expenditure etc. You only have to look at some of the excellent educational results achieved in a long bygone era when schools of any sort had none of all the mass of modern ‘resources’ schools expect now.

It is a fact that in the best of those situations and at a time when education was much more basic, with the best of those teachers, quite spectacular results were sometimes achieved compared with what appears to be the expectation in Modern Times. Those good results were entirely down to the influence of good teachers doing a good job.

It is as simple as that.

And it is becoming apparent to me that the bureaucracy poisoning State schools makes it difficult for teaching staff to do a good job. And this comment of mine reminds me of a previous Head of the Camden School for Girls having lengthy conversations with me about this very subject where he explained his own very bad experiences of the system to me in some detail, so I am not just expressing my own opinions here, but those of many other people, including experts such as other Head teachers and many other parents too.

Moving on to the matter of my son’s homework.

I have persistently nagged and generally persecuted him about all his homework with a total lack of any success. It would be easy to blame him for failing to do his homework, and I do blame him as do various teachers who have not received completed homework back from him.

However, there is obviously a problem with all the school homework which I find when I look into the subject in some detail. It soon becomes clear that my son cannot really be blamed for not doing his homework because all the homework across all subjects appears to be strangled in a mire of computerised gibberish (what, for instance is VLE ? It’s just meaningless gibberish, of course. See if you can work it out and work out just why it is utter nonsense.) in which I find it virtually impossible to discover for myself what any homework task actually is.STUPID HOMEWORK INSTRUCTIONS 2BY STUPID TEACHERS
My son gives me a clear indication that the teaching staff seem to rely on the existence of a homework website to communicate homework requirements to pupils and therefore do not appear to properly deal with the setting and return of homework in actual classes. So, a distinct lack of communication appears to exist.

It doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone how muddled and inscrutable the homework website is.

If I cannot easily grasp what a simple homework instruction is from the utter confusion of random and meaningless information scattered like confetti all over the homework website, no-one can reasonably expect an eleven year old to do so either.

Computers are just electronic substitutes for old fashioned bits of paper. It is inexcusable that computers should be so misused just because they offer a different, improved, flexibility of use than bits of paper. Everyone complains about how ghastly computing and the internet is and blames ‘computers’.

It is not computers at all, it is the appalling manner in which people just randomly stuff vast amounts of useless information all over the place and completely abandon any efforts of graphic design as website owners try and cram as much rubbish on webpages as possible with a complete disregard of how readable it is and how it just produces incomprehensible muddle and confusion.

As I started marketing and writing about computers 31 years ago with a mainframe manufacturer , and have been similarly involved in writing about leading edge computing ever since, right up until quite recently when Microsoft asked me to write something for them and, as my lifelong business has been in communications as a journalist, marketing consultant, PR consultant etc, I think I am qualified to know exactly what I am talking about here.

It is a complete disgrace that children as young as eleven are just abandoned to the typical confusion of a badly designed website where understanding and finding the actual homework seems quite impossible. I suppose I could just about struggle though it, wasting a lot of time trying to find the relevant instructions, but expecting eleven year olds to do so just seems ridiculous.

The school’s Head Teacher recently announced a new school website as the ‘old’ one was in her own words ‘not fit for purpose’.

Nothing much seems to have changed; excepting, no doubt, the consumption of a certain amount of public money wasted on paying people’s wages to fiddle about to produce another website pretty much exactly as useless as the previous one.

I have expressed here my (obviously) extreme dissatisfaction with various issues concerning the quality of education at the school. In no manner is any of this directed at you personally or intended to be any personal criticism of you. It is a whole system of mismanagement and waste and incompetence and political interference which has brought this sorry state of affairs into being.

I just find it a shame that teaching staff don’t seem to be able to circumvent the worst of this nonsense and be able to a better job than they do.

SOCIAL SERVICES PERSECUTING FAMILIES – AGAIN, AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN !

Busy little hare brained internet forum poster Yvonne, said ‘Boz, you must have no vocabulary or brain ! I guess you enjoy insulting people instead of giving your opinions’.

This intellectual giant took exception to my post here saying:

‘What nasty, evil people these social services employees are !

‘Unfortunately it seems most government employees in the UK are just as appalling – idle jobsworths; thick stupid, robotic, inhumane bastards that have spread into our lives like a poisonous disease since the labour party commenced their looting of the UK population fourteen years ago when they came to power.

‘Get rid of of Gormless Gordon Brown and his army of totalitarian control freaks who are busy destroying our lives and families’.

This post of mine was in response to an appalling story of the nastiness and evil incompetence of social services who were threatening to take a mother’s children away.

You can see the story on this website here at ‘THE VOICE OF INJUSTICE’

In a small nutshell the following is a brief description by the mother of this story.

‘This all started because of a referral from the home education officer Claire Bishton, who works for Wolverhampton Council, because we wouldn’t allow her to do a home visit.

The social worker involved, Sarah O’Connor who has lied to the courts and police in order to steal our children. The judge that allowed them to get a court order on us HHJ Hughes at the WOLVERHAMPTON DISTRICT REGISTRY, without us being there to defend ourselves or any proper evidence being shown. We would also like to mention Tracey Christine who works for the chief legal officer for Wolverhampton city council, for her disgraceful letter which came with the court order.

‘All of these people have actively seeked to destroy our family and steal our children without a shred off evidence, based on the fact we home educate. The reasons for their involvement keeps changing from home education, to your sons health , to your house is messy !! We have always done what is in the best interests of our son where his health is concerned, as his medical records will show. We are not breaking any laws by home educating or declining home visits, we have the letters from Claire Bishton, to prove she was satisfied with the eduction being provided.

Yvonne’s searingly insightful brain led her to to post her message to me, rubbishing my acid comments about incompetent social services and other equally incompetent, idle and highly toxic government employees who have been indoctrinated by Gormless Gordon Brown’s horrible and destructive totalitarian labour government to interfere and control everyone’s lives in the minutest detail.

Yvonne said to the mother who had felt obliged to flee the country before social services obtained a court order to wrongly remove her children from their parents:

‘Your post which says ‘If you had nothing to hide, why were you running? Would it not have been better to stay and prove them wrong? Just a thought…’

So, I thought I would explain to simple minded Yvonne just why her post makes me intensely angry because it is what all the dim witted sheep in life say about every power crazed dictatorship and similar things like power crazed brain dead bureaucrats – social services, for example !

It is a fact that when governments make well intentioned laws and senior government bureaucrats implement those laws, the badly paid, ignorant, disinterested and often very badly educated army of junior government employees who actually deal with the implementation of those laws at the interface with the public, mis-interpret the rules and mis-apply those very laws in an utter shambles of what parliament intended in the first place.

So it is the case with social services and their well documented talents for turning child care protection issues into a total joke with their incompetence.

Some children who need to be taken into care and away from family generated dangers are failed by the incompetence of social services and die or are otherwise harmed.

Other children who are not being harmed by their families are wrongly taken into care/adopted by social services, because social services can be venal and wicked and incompetent.

I have my own personal experience of that and I have also been privy to hundreds of other people’s stories of the wicked incompetence of social services causing immense harm to children and other people in those children’s families.

My son was the victim of social services in this manner. His mother became badly ill with bi-polar illness, behaving erratically. She was a very good mother apart from her illness driving her to behave in erratic ways.

Firstly, when I contacted social services to provide the help they were legally obliged to provide for the three children who were at risk of this illness at one point, and to provide the statutory medical and social care the mother needed at the time ( i.e. hospitalisation) they refused point blank to take any notice of my request to them.

They refused to do anything to investigate the case. Social services blatantly flouted the law and refused to fulfill their statutory duties. I then nagged them remorselessly until they did investigate the case.

Then they told me they agreed the mother was stark staring bonkers and psychotic but said they ‘couldn’t do anything about it until something happened’ – meaning the children were actually injured. Social services were also (illegally and incompetently) ignoring the deprived circumstances the children were then living in.

Meanwhile all three children and the mother had nearly been killed while the mother drove up a motorway for 200 miles slightly drunk, in the middle of the night, very tired and psychotic and fell asleep several times at the the wheel of her car. There were many other similar dangerous situations and problems due to psychoses that I was aware of.

I was forced to go to court to seek custody only as a means of getting the medical help the mother needed as well as the help the kids needed. There was no actual relationship breakdown.

The mother immediately told the court she wished me to have custody for the safety of the kids as she recognised the dangers of her illness, and the fact the illness made her erratic in every way.

The court gave me interim custody. I got the mother into hospital. Everything was OK excepting within the confines of having to deal with a nasty illness. The family was still together and the children had a stable home with both parents.

Social services then told the mother she ‘must fight me for custody of the children otherwise she may never see them again’. The mother was sitting with me in my house when this idiot social worker (one Conrad Barzey of the infamous Haringey Social Services Department, a total moron) just came out with little gem for no discernably logical reason whatever.

When not in hospital, the mother was quite happily living with me and there was no thought by her or me that our relationship would not continue with us living together, jointly bringing up the children.

This act of wickedness by social services led to the mother having yet another breakdown and hospitalisation. She also then abducted the kids (in a delusional state ) which was a flouting of the court order giving me interim custody for the safety of the kids, even though the mother was actually living with me.

Social services now connived with the mother to flout the court order and further interfered by employing lawyers to ‘fight me for custody’. Being mentally ill, the mother was an easy target for persuasion by the social services to whatever way of thinking took their fancy because that is a key feature of mental illness. It makes sufferers prone to easy persuasion.

Social services now took the mother under their wing and ran her life for her.

They instantly found her a Council house 220 miles away from me and proceeded to do everything they could think of to prevent me having anything to do with my son and their intention was obviously the break up of our family completely and to condemn the mother to being the single parent of three kids with a mental illness that would make it impossible for the mother to give the kids a reasonable or safe upbringing.

Despite the judge in the family Court telling social services it was perfectly clear the mother was unsafe and unreliable owing to her mental illness, and that the judge felt it was impossible to agree to social services’ demands to make a court order giving the mother sole custody, in spite of the judge reminding social services that I was an exemplary and reliable father, exactly that took place.

It took place entirely owing to the venality of the social services and their lawyers, my lawyers, together with an unconscious connivance of the judge who was so used to the unimportance or even relevance of ‘the other parent’ opposing social services’ in courts.

After a few months even social services had to take my son away from an incapable mother whose illness was being demonstrably being made worse by the activities of social services in her life.

Meanwhile social services had contrived to thwart the court order giving me unfettered access to my son two days a week and were busy trying to manufacture utter falsehoods of a completely bizarre and actually irrelevant nature against me.

Social services then proceeded to threaten me with having my son forcibly adopted ‘if I didn’t cooperate with them’. Whatever that meant.

My son was not returned to me, but put into care by social services where he was physically abused and almost certainly emotionally abused too.

I was now obliged to go to court to retrieve my son from social services and their threat to have him adopted, despite the fact that no accusation of any kind had ever been made against me of me being a bad or in some way inadequate parent. And there was also a previous court order giving me interim custody anyway; and the fact that the family court judge had already described me as an exemplary and reliable parent.

There was absolutely no legal or moral basis of any kind for social services to take my son into their care and away from me. I had, in fact, been publicly praised by the family court judge for being a very good father.

I did get my son back eventually, but social services had by now done immense damage to the family and my son’s mother’s two other children had gone to live with their father as a direct result of social services machinations in the family court.

This father did not think he could adequately look after his kids and didn’t really want to. He had already agreed with me that he was quite happy for me to have custody of them and bring them up for him together with their mother who was normally living with me.

As everyone imagined, it was a very bad idea and very damaging for the two other kids to be living with their father.

This subsequently led to the disintegration of the entire family, increased state of illness of the mother, me being a single parent, and the other two kids, now twenty, severely damaged and very disadvantaged and disfunctional as a direct result of the evils and incompetence’s of social services.

Well done social services. What a result !

Here is a link to another charming story in the Daily Mail newspaper about the social services wrongly removing children from their parents on the most insane, politically correct and deranged grounds you could never conjure up up in your wildest nightmares about brain dead public officials working for our totalitarian, useless government.