Pushy parents are 'damaging children', says Archbishop

Archbishop says pushy parents are 'damage children'

Last updated at 13:05pm on 15th September 2007 Comments (1)

Dr Rowan Williams: Society is 'broken'

The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned middleclass parents damaged children by pressurising them to achieve and take extracurricular activities. He urged parents who both work to put their children before their careers.

Dr Rowan Williams said in an interview: 'Two working parents can be fine if they know how to structure the time the children need. It's not so much the fact of working, it's the allconsuming nature of a lot of work expectations.

'Children live crowded lives. We're not making their lives easy by pressurising them, whether it's the claustrophobia of gang culture or the claustrophobia of intense achievement in middle-class areas.'

The Archbishop also called for tighter abortion laws as he signalled a tougher stance on moral issues by the Church of England.

Dr Williams said Britain was a 'broken society' that could be fixed only with urgent action by the Government and the Church to restore a sense of moral integrity.

He added: 'The nation generally is getting more unhappy about the high level of abortion in this country. People are not happy about abortion as a back-stop to contraception. It's not like having a tooth out.'

The Church of England has been criticised for failing to speak out on abortion. Its new stance comes after it emerged that most women oppose efforts to liberalise the law.

A survey showed seven out of ten want to see the time limit at which abortion is allowed to be halved, cutting our 24-week limit to the European average of 12 weeks.

The poll, carried out on behalf of the antiabortion group Life, also revealed that six out of ten are against plans to make it easier to get abortion early in pregnancy by cutting the number of doctors who must give their approval from two to one.

It also found nine out of ten women want doctors to be legally obliged to offer counselling and alternatives to abortion for pregnant women seeking a termination.

Last year the number of abortions in Britain topped 200,000. Around one in four pregnancies ends in termination.

Dr Williams also called on Gordon Brown to impose tough constraints on medical experiments on human embryos, adding that he is against euthanasia both 'morally and religiously'. He praised Mr Brown for reversing Tony Blair's plan for supercasinos and promising to review 24-hour drinking.