YESTERDAY, my wife and I met our two-day-old granddaughter – a tiny, fragile miracle reminding us how precious children are and how carefully they must be nurtured. Today, I read about Labour’s plan to roll out nationwide breakfast clubs, and the contrast struck me deeply.
On one hand, the intimate bond of family; on the other, the cold efficiency of state-run childcare. This isn’t just about scrambled eggs and toast. It’s about who gets to shape childhood: parents who cherish their children as irreplaceable individuals, or a system that views them as units to be managed.
Sir Keir Starmer’s policy is framed as ‘help’ for working parents, but it’s another step toward outsourcing the heart of family life. Like a ship leaving harbour just one degree off course, small shifts in parenting – who feeds a child, who shares their first moments of the day – compound over time. A ‘convenient’ breakfast club today becomes a generational drift toward disconnected families tomorrow.
Over 33 years, I’ve cooked roughly 30,000 meals for my family. These weren’t transactional events: they were the bedrock of our relationships. You could call it ‘the soul of the family meal’. Research confirms what I’ve witnessed first-hand:
• Children who eat family meals regularly perform better academically (Harvard, 2012) and exhibit lower rates of depression (Columbia, 2015);
• Shared family meals build emotional resilience, foster healthy eating habits, good behaviour and create traditions that span generations.
None of this should surprise. Yet Labour’s policy isn’t interested in this evidence. Breakfast clubs don’t just replace a meal; they replace (or rather don’t replace) critical daily interactions between parent and child. These morning exchanges – observing a child’s mood, ensuring he or she has eaten properly, addressing concerns before school, reinforcing family values – build the foundation of trust and understanding that no institutional setting can replicate. These aren’t sentimental luxuries but essential components of effective parenting.
Starmer claims to ‘ease burdens’ but the subtext is clear: the state increasingly sees itself as the rightful architect of childhood. Consider the trajectory of the state’s quiet takeover of children:
1. Breakfast clubs (state-fed mornings);
2. Extended school hours (‘wraparound care’);
3. Digital encroachment (screens replacing conversation).
Each step pulls children further from parental influence. State employees may meet nutritional requirements, but they lack the intimate knowledge of a child’s individual needs, temperament and development that parents naturally possess. The subtle cues and patterns that inform effective parenting cannot be replicated in institutional settings, yet policy increasingly treats them as interchangeable.
We need only look to Sweden, often hailed as a progressive utopia, to see the unintended consequences of state-led parenting. Despite generous parental leave and childcare subsidies, Swedish teenagers now report among the highest rates of anxiety in Europe (WHO, 2023). Psychologists attribute this to ‘premature institutionalisation’ – children spending more time in collective care than in one-on-one family bonds. Meanwhile, family meal frequency has dropped 40 per cent since the 1980s (Nordic Journal of Social Policy 2021), paralleling declines in child mental health. The state can provide calories, but it cannot replicate the emotional nutrition of a parent’s presence.
Sweden offers a cautionary tale for the UK where, already only 25-50 per cent of families engage in family meals several days a week although ‘beneficial nutrition-related outcomes have been cross-sectionally associated with family meal frequency, including increased fruit and vegetable consumption and weight status’. Better-off families and those with mothers at home are also ‘associated with’ family meal frequency.
Critics will say breakfast clubs are optional, saving children whose parents can’t provide due to early shifts, tight budgets or neglect. I hear them: one in five British children face food insecurity (Food Foundation, 2024). These are legitimate concerns. But even voluntary state clubs blanket families with a one-size-fits-all fix, normalising dependency and sidelining poorer parents who want to provide. Freedom is empowering such parents to provide, through tax relief or flexible hours, not replacing this role. For the few who truly can’t, expand free school meal eligibility, don’t incentivise every parent to outsource every child’s early morning.
If the goal is truly to support parents (as opposed to Bridget Phillipson’s choiceness offer), here’s where to start:
1 Tax relief for stay-at-home parents: Stop penalising single-earner families. Value caregiving as essential work;
2 Flexible work policies: Let parents prioritise mornings at home without career penalties;
3 Community networks: Replace state-run clubs with neighbourhood meal rotations (for example parents taking turns hosting breakfast).
This isn’t nostalgia for the 1950s. It’s about recognising that the stakes are high for our children. Children raised by systems grow into adults who trust systems, not people. The Labour policy whispers a dangerous lie: that parents are replaceable.
I look at our newborn granddaughter and wonder what world she will inherit – one where family bonds are sacred, or where the state increasingly inserts itself between parent and child? What we decide today will shape her tomorrow.
Hold the line. Fight for a world where families, not the state, shape the next generation.
‘Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.’ (Proverbs 22:6)
