I wasn't going to blog this

- but I realise I can't bear to let it slip by without commenting on it. It is, after all, quite a significant marker in the ongoing tug of war between families and government, with the poor old schools being the knot in the middle.

Punitive steps like fining parents for truanting children rarely worked, National Association of Head Teachers president Clarissa Williams argued.

(Where have we heard from her before? Something to do with a home ed debate, I think.. Can't remember.)

She also quizzed the logic of insisting young mothers go out to work.

So far, so good.

But the children's minister Beverley Hughes said: "Government doesn't raise children, parents do."

Real meaning: Government doesn't want to take responsibility when things go wrong, it would prefer parents to. Even though it wouldn't like to give them enough time to make sure they don't.

She asked: "Why do we feel the need to send children into an educational environment at the age of two? Are parents so distrusted that we want to separate them from their children at the earliest opportunity?"

- two very good questions.

But here's where we start to part company:

Ms Williams called for a benefit system which provided incentives for good parents. "What I would like to see is a benefits system that would reward parents for engaging with schools - that could be linked in some way to the benefits they get," she said.

The first reason being: we are people, not donkeys. Yes, punishing truancy is bad, but that doesn't mean we should balance it by rewarding its opposite. We should just stop punishing truancy, full-stop. No stick, no carrot. How can people ever take responsibility for their own decisions when they're constantly being coerced like this?

And secondly, there are presumably some parents who send their children to school and don't claim any benefits. How are they to be rewarded for parenting their children? Or is it now being admitted that this is a completely divided two-tier approach? If you collect benefits, you're a bad parent who needs the stick and carrot and if you don't, you're not? I'd like to see the rationale behind that assumption.

Perhaps parents who spent time reading to their children, going to school parents evenings or helping out in their school, could get higher payments, she suggested. She acknowledged it was a complex area and that there would always be some parents that would be hard to reach, but that did not mean it should not be tried.

This bit made me laugh. I usually read about 30-40 stories a day to my children, between the two younger ones and I'd like to know the going rate per story please. They'd have to make it at least 50p to make it worthwhile to those parents who only have time to read the one, which would net me an extra £100+ per week. Ridiculous! And how would they prove I was reading them? Oh, they'd have to have my children at school and be quizzing them on what had been read, I suppose. I think I'll be foregoing that particular carrot then.

This bit made me laugh too, in a very hollow way.

Children's Minister Beverley Hughes responding by saying: "Government doesn't raise children, parents do. "Our job is to give parents as many choices as possible, so they can make their own decisions on what is best for their family and their children."

But this upcoming change limits parental choices considerably. If the government's job in respect of parents really is as Beverley Hughes states above, why does it work so hard to enforce compulsory school attendance?

Clarissa Williams is reflecting the gut feeling many people - especially teachers, head teachers and parents - must share about the wholesale farming out of the nation's young children to strangers. It goes against everything we instinctively know to be good for children and the end results bear out the truth of this instinct. But I don't think the solution lies in rewards or punishments at all. Instead, I think we need to just enable British people to claim their natural birthright, which is access to enough land, fuel, food and shelter to provide for their own needs. I think if we allowed this, parents would be perfectly capable of raising their children well.

Instead, we force families to live in unnatural ways, in too small spaces for which they have to pay too high a premium. Then we make a deliberate policy of segregating the generations to facilitate the current economical structure.