MARIA Williams (Miss Information) throws the baby out with the bath water when she rejects the idea of parenting classes (although given the Con/Dem government’s capacity to economically and socially penalise parents with benefit cuts I can understand her distrust of any such proposals from Cameron and co!) Ethically-sound parenting classes would be a very good idea because, hopefully, it would teach people that bringing up children is not easy and can be hard work. It’s obviously also joyful and rewarding. Perhaps such classes would help to eradicate bad practices such as smoking, drinking and taking drugs while pregnant, eating a bad diet, parents letting their babies cry themselves to sleep, parents hitting/abusing their children, not giving their children breakfast, forcing their children to have female genital mutilation, forcing children into an arranged marriage, brainwashing children into a particular faith, etc.

That we need such classes reflects a society that’s been subjected to the “tough love” of consumer capitalism and religious superstition.

Terry Banfield, Cardigan Crescent, Cwmbran