Yesterday the Liberal Democrats held what seems to have become our almost annual one-day January policy conference, this year on the theme of a progressive future for Britain.

Perhaps the most constant theme across the day, or at least the sessions I was in, was a consensus about the importance for that goal of investing in education, at every phase from early years right through schooling and up to further and higher education (actually further education didn’t get much of a mention, though it should have done). There was a strong consensus that education must be at the heart of achieving the liberal idea of empowering individuals to - as the preamble to the party’s constitution puts it - not be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity. And indeed our spring party conference in six weeks’ time will have a whole raft of proposals in each of these three phases, including significant plans for additional investment in each.

But the point that got me thinking most was one made in the final session, about the importance of parenting skills.

We all agree now, it seems, that investing in the education of children, the younger the better, is the most effective way of helping them to develop, so that in due course they are in the best position to make their own choices about their lives and indeed their world.

But what about the far greater part of their lives that young people don’t spend in school, nursery or any other kind of formal setting - but at home? Surely that must also have a huge impact on how they develop (and indeed there is evidence to support this)?

I always think this is a fascinating dilemma for liberals.

From one point of view, liberals are exactly about supporting and empowering individuals. And if their background has an impact on young people’s life chances, as it undoubtedly does - in the cases of disadvantaged young people, holds them back - then shouldn’t we as liberals be trying to use the power of the state to free them from that? Yes, surely we should - and this is well established: everything from long-standing state provision of education and requirement that a child be educated to the state’s growing (and right) intervention in early years services in recent years, demonstrates this.

But one of the key elements that affects young people’s development is of course the way their parents carrying out that parenting role. And so, wouldn’t it be logical that if parents are holding back their children’s development by exercising parenting skills badly, that the state should then intervene to take over children’s parenting from them? Of course, the state does do this in extreme cases where the child is seriously abused or neglected. But parenting holding back children’s development of course goes much wider than that - indeed in some form, of course, it applies to every parent and child there is.

So of course the state can’t take over parenting of a large proportion of our nation’s children, and I’m not for a moment suggesting that it should (before someone tries to misrepresent entirely what I’m arguing!). The idea that the state should look after all its young people, rather than their families, is a platonic one which surely its most comfortable (or at least, least uncomfortable) place in modern political philosophy in socialism, not in liberalism.

But the point that the liberal state’s duty to do its part to help empower ordinary young people (not just those at extreme risk) conflicts with the notion of the family, seems to me an interesting one that doesn’t get at all the interest and discussion it should do.

For liberals, committed to allowing individuals to take decisions over their own lives, children, who are not yet fully formed individuals in a position to take that kind of responsibility, seem to me to pose a uniquely difficult set of questions.

I was reminded of all this yesterday afternoon when one contributor talking about the importance of getting parenting right - the well-known but vital fact, for example, that one of the most effective things that parents want to help their children get on is to read to them as children, for example - went beyond this. She said that there are now well-established ways in which it has been shown that you can improve “parenting skills”. If it is true that - to put it in social scientist speak (which is what people were mostly speaking at this event!) - there are interventions which we know do work, or at least have a measurable positive effect on improving parenting, then I think this is really good news. I had always had the impression that this was actually quite difficult to do - and especially that, as one other contributor to the discussion put it - if you put on things to try and improve parenting skills, as so often in life, it’s the over-eager ones who don’t really need it most, who turn up. But our speaker said there indeed proven such interventions, and if that’s true I’d certainly like to hear more about them. She mentioned a DVD on parenting skills produced by the Australian government which was very popular and which as a result is therefore now sent to all new parents.

So is it really true? Are there really things that we as a country to do to help young people achieve their potential, and to help parents who often want help to assist their children in doing so, which we know are effective? Why don’t we hear a lot more about them? What are they? And shouldn’t liberals, more than anyone, be enthusiastically championing them?