There’s also a lesson to be learnt from this documentary in that all but one home was, by the look of things, a single parent family.
Meaning that for some, the boys, there was no male role model living at home, no one to do Dad things.
It seems to fall to the Dads in most families (?) to do the discipline and maybe this is where some of the glue is coming unstuck.
Re-emphasising the fact that many of these Mums are finding it hard or too difficult to run a tight ship with the limited skills and knowledge they posses, giving in to the childrens' behaviour. Witness that Grandmother giving the young girl a bottle so soon after seeing her own g'son under the surgoen's knife.
We saw the Mum in the car scrounge a light for her death stick from one of her son’s pals, perhaps again illustrating the severe lack of boundaries that exist between some of these parents (I didn’t believe the child drinker for one moment when he told us he’d stopped drinking either) & their children.
In fact, this thread of tobacco that these families seem to use was clearly demonstrated & specifically isolated by the documentary maker, and in 2010 we are as a nation increasingly aware of the social conditions that seem to be present where adults choose tobacco for their families.
