Yahoo Finance Yet another cost of raising a child: £800 'parenting lessons'
As every parent knows too well, bringing up children is expensive.
If you want a precise figure, try £231,824 – that’s what insurer LV calculates it costs to raise a child from birth to age 21. That’s roughly the price of the average British home.
But families are increasingly opting to add another expense to the endless list: parenting lessons, which can cost anything up to £500 per person per course. Parents who wish to do it together can be charged up to £400 each.
While parent coaching has long been around – David Cameron, controversially, once wanted lessons to be made available to all – there has been a recent increase in uptake, providers report.
Children have basic needs; they need food, consistency, patience and love. It's not rocket science
Rebecca Chicot, The Essential Parent Company
One private provider told Telegraph Money its business had tripled over the past decade. So are these lessons becoming just another, indispensable expense associated with raising offspring?
Victoria Lugton, mother of two-and-a-half year old twins Alfie and Teddy, spent around £300 for four sessions run by the National Childbirth Trust, the UK’s largest charity for parents, because she felt under pressure to be the “perfect parent” as soon as the boys were born. She said she “knew next to nothing about babies”.
She said: “None of my friends had babies and I didn’t know the first thing about looking after one, but I felt like I had to know it all straight away.
"People think motherhood should come naturally but I worried about what people would think of me as a parent if they turned up at my house and I’d put a nappy on the wrong way round.”
Ms Lugton, 34, was offered free classes by her hospital in Chichester, where a midwife would teach her how to breastfeed and specifically look after twins.
However Ms Lugton, who lives in Arundel, West Sussex with the boys and her husband Alex, said she still felt anxious about the “practicalities” of bringing up two babies.
“I’ve always been obsessed with whether they were too hot or cold,” she said.
“It sounds silly but I wasn’t sure what to dress them in when they slept, or how hot the bath water should be. I never wanted to be a paranoid mum but I worried about so many things going wrong.”
Ms Lugton said the NCT classes were run by a parent who had several children and was able to offer “invaluable” practical information.
The other benefit of the course was the other parents she met who became part of an important support network and who she still sees today.
“I was essentially paying for peace of mind,” she said.
Why are so many parents spending hundreds of pounds to be reassured?
There are numerous reasons, according to Rebecca Chicot, a parenting expert and one of the founders of The Essential Parent Company, a free educational resource.
Dr Chicot suggested we are now much more likely to enter parenthood later in life.
She refers to this as “ghettoisation” where, after years of higher education and pursuing a career, new parents discover they’ve had nothing to do with children when they decide to have one themselves.
When the time comes, Dr Chicot, who has a PhD in parenting and child development, said many parents may approach having a child as they do their work or education – with books, apps, online resources and courses because of their lack of experience.
Separation from families is likely to be another reason why parents are paying for advice.
Whereas in previous generations new parents may have benefited from nearby family, Dr Chicot said research she conducted in 2012 found new mothers in the south east of England were living 96 miles away from their mothers – the new grandmothers.
Dr Chicot said: “We are much more distant from our families now.
“There used to be much more of an overlapping of generations which saw mothers, grandmothers and siblings all lending a hand in helping with the baby.
"Learning from family members has all but disappeared, especially for those who leave home early to pursue careers and have children later.”
Classes to help parents understand their children better, such as Positive Parenting courses, are much more important now as we are now much more concerned about a child’s emotional health, she added.
A lack of free parenting courses may also be pushing those who can afford it to private providers.
Back in 2016 David Cameron proposed state-funded parenting classes for all families, remarking that “all of us get so little guidance” and adding that children “don’t come with a manual.”
Dr Chicot said she supports lessons where the aim is to boost parents’ confidence. But she expressed concern about those seeking to be the “perfect parent” with the “perfect child”.
“Children have basic needs; they need food, consistency, patience and love. It’s not rocket science.
“The practical skills take time to develop but most parents get the hang of it eventually.”
