A scene from The Sopranos always springs to mind when I think about disciplinary strategies for parents. Tony and Carmella Soprano are in bed discussing their teenage daughter’s latest infraction and how they’re going to handle it. Carmella says: “There has to be consequences.” Tony says: “And there will be. I hear you, ok? Let’s just not overplay our hand, because if she figures out we’re powerless, we’re fucked.” Lest you forget, Tony Soprano is a mob boss. That pretty much sums it up for me.
My partner and I have made a conscious decision not to smack or hit our children, ostensibly because we’re not cunts. I’m sure this makes it more difficult to keep them in line or steer their behaviour, but any form of obedience that comes from a big creature inflicting pain on a tiny creature is by necessity achieved through fear, and why would you want your own children to be afraid of you? Unless you’re raising a child army for a fight to the death with another child army, it’s probably best not to teach them to be angry bullies or anxious supplicants.
I can, however, understand the impulse to hit your children. No creature on earth will test the limits of your compassion or patience more than your own child. Once you’ve repeated their name, or the phrase ‘Don’t do that please’, for the eightieth time in a row, it’s hard to fight the impulse to turn green, burst through your clothes and bench-press your child through a wall. It’s worse when you’re in public or polite company, and can’t use your ‘shit just got real’ tone of voice in case everybody thinks you’re a fucking psychopath, and you have to pretend you think it’s all a bit funny and absurd, and call them wee scamps, even though you’re imagining taking them in a cage fight.
Gentle parenting is easy in theory, hard in practice, especially when you’re juggling kids with life’s other pressures, and usually trying to function with less than the recommended minimum of sleep.
It’s hard to disconnect from all of the things that hitherto have made you ‘you’, and view your children’s behaviour both dispassionately and compassionately. It’s hard to over-ride the rule book of cause-and-effect-justice that’s been imprinted on your brain, perhaps passed down for countless generations, whose main edicts could be anything from ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ to ‘you’ve only got yourself to blame’ – views that arrogantly disregard whole swathes of teaching in the fields of psychology and sociology.
A fallacy that sticks with us through childhood and contaminates our adult thinking is the belief that our parents have a single fucking clue about what they’re doing. As much as we might kick back against their strictures, at one stage in our lives we believed that their pronouncements came from a set of immutable, universally-agreed child-rearing laws, and weren’t just made up on the hoof and unreliably drawn from their own arbitrary life experiences.
I’m a parent now, and the Wizard’s curtain has been well and truly thrown back (please don’t titter at that as if it’s some sort of vulgar euphemism – you’re better than that). I’m now poised to take the Wizard’s place and perpetuate the myth of parental Godhood, certainty and competence. Except I’m not. I may be an imperfect parent – and, really, is there any other kind? – but I want to be perfectly open and honest with my kids about this very fact. I still have to modulate my responses, of course. It probably wouldn’t be acceptable for me to smash all of their toys with a mallet and then tell them, ‘Isn’t this great? What an awesome teachable moment we’re having!’ I want them to understand the arbitrary nature of my decision-making processes and how these processes can be influenced by the vagaries of my moods.
That will be my greatest gift to them: the admission that big people can get it spectacularly wrong, too: that sometimes big people need to say sorry. If I feel I’ve done my eldest son wrong, treated him unfairly or perhaps shouted a little too loudly, I’ll always apologise, and tell him why I was wrong. I’ll do the same for my youngest once he’s attained a modicum of reason and the ability to communicate through language. I can’t think of a better way to teach them to account for their own mistakes and shortcomings.
Beats the hell out of hitting.
THE END
Just a little aside: we consider the human body and mind to be in a constant state of development up until the age of 16, 18, or 21 (25 in some cases), and then we just stop bothering to hail milestones. After these ages you’re an adult, whether you’re 28 or 78. I know we make distinctions between people who are comparatively young and old, and we have loose markers to denote middle age and senior citizenship, but essentially there’s a vast adult plain populated by everyone from 18 to 80, with everyone on that plain largely expected to uphold the same norms of behaviour. Just once I’d like to overhear a conversation like this:
“Blimey, Janet’s fair playing up this weekend. That’s terrible behaviour.”
“You’ve got to remember she’s only 52.”
“Ahhhh… well, we were all young once. I’m sure she’ll grow out of it.”