He wanted to work, and realised the opportunities he had missed.

"So what went wrong – why did you drop out of school?" I asked him. "My Mum was just liberal about schools," he said. "She never made me go."

Most people learn their parenting skills from their own parents.

From who else but your own parents do you learn how to say no? Or when to punish?

Or when love and affection are needed? Or about the importance of getting up and going to school each day?

But what happens if that inherited knowledge simply
isn't there?

What happens if your own parents lacked parenting skills?

Those skills can quickly disappear.

In many of our most troubled areas, the generations pass pretty quickly. Thirty-year-old grandparents and 45-year-old great-grandparents are far from unusual in today's Britain.

And when you overlay the challenges that many people in our most deprived areas face in their daily lives, then good parenting skills can disappear very quickly.

It's not an issue of lone parenting. Sometimes my Party has seemed too hostile to lone parents over the years. Many do a heroic job in the face of all the pressures of family breakdown.

No – the parenting challenge we face is much more complex than family breakdown alone. There are too many communities where parents no longer know what good parenting is.

We live in a country where in many places Frank Gallagher style parenting – as in the Channel 4 series Shameless – has become the norm and not the exception. Where children are largely left to their own devices as they grow up. Where there's no experience of going to work in the mornings. Or of the importance of going to school. Or of parents who set boundaries for their children. And where, in many families, childhood-destroying addiction is a
way of life.

For many families, worklessness caused in the last century has become dependency in this one. Generation after generation does not work. Parents no longer know how to help their children build positive ambitions for themselves. Benefit dependency is a way of life.

But the problem is far broader than worklessness.

I remember a headteacher in an old mining town explaining the challenge to me in the starkest terms. "I have," she said, "many children coming here who can barely string a few words together because no one has
ever really talked to them.

"I have children who've never had a proper meal, or eaten with a knife and fork, or sat at a table."

We know of schools having to deal with children arriving in nappies.

Parental addiction also kills good parenting.

In a disturbing number of homes in our most deprived areas, addiction is a way of life. Much of the family's income disappears to fuel a drug or alcohol dependency. The consequences of addiction can be an empty fridgethackur or barely enough clothes to wear. Parents focus on their habit, not on their children.

And like so many other of the social challenges we face today, addiction seems to rush headlong from generation to generation.

So how do we break families out of this generational cycle?

Firstly, let's recognise the limits of politics. You can't just pass laws instructing parents to be good at their job. That doesn't mean that the state is impotent, but that cash transfers alone cannot get rid of poverty.

But there are some areas where we can and must seek to make a difference. I think there are four priorities that must head our response to the challenge.

To start with, we have to end the blight of generational worklessness. That's why we published in January plans for the most radical reform to the welfare state for half a century. We aim to dramatically improve the support people get when they seek to return to work, but we will also remove entitlement to out of work benefits for those who refuse to take responsibility for their own fortunes and who refuse to take part in the return to work process.

Secondly, we need zero tolerance of truancy, and early intervention in schools and by health visitors to help troubled parents and the children whose family circumstances mean they are being left behind.

Thirdly, we need a welfare support and benefits system that protects families' stability. The tax credits system should not make it more financially attractive for some couples to live apart rather than together.

Finally, we need to recognise the limitations of politicians, and place more responsibility in the hands of local communities and the voluntary sector to tackle the challenges we face.

If we are to tackle the endemic problems in too many parts of our most deprived towns and cities, then better parenting will be a vital part of the solution.

Good parenting must be a part of their future and not just of their past.