Should you give your children tough lessons? NO

As a dad challenges his nine-year-old to open a tin of beans or starve . . .

ONe Sunday morning when I was nine, my father summoned me into his study, sat me down and instructed me to write down all the seas I could find on the globe that had been my birthday present that year.

as a bright and inquisitive man, I have no doubt he thought he was teaching me a valuable life lesson.

I can’t remember any of the names of those seas, but I can still see the tear- stained sheet of paper in front of me three hours later, when he kept telling me that I still hadn’t found enough.

I am sure if he had suggested it as a challenge that we could have tried together, it would have been a lovely childhood memory of discovery with my late dad.

But even now I can still remember the sense of betrayal that the man I relied on to look after me could be so harsh.

So I am wondering what the nineyear-old daughter of U.S. musician and Twitter personality John Roderick will think when she grows up about how he first ‘taught’ her to open a tin of baked beans.

While it might otherwise have been a fun experiment for ten minutes, until he showed her how it was done, making this hungry little girl persevere for six hours until she wept tears of frustration — and then crowing about it on social media — is, in my view, emotional cruelty.

This is the worst kind of authoritarian parenting — all about the power trip of the adult, and nothing to do with the developmental needs or feelings of the child.

When they are small, research shows children exposed to this brand of ‘tough love’ grow up feeling ashamed and too scared to ask for help. When they are teens, they rebel. They become secretive to avoid more punishment and pull away to avoid more criticism.

a host of studies have also shown they are more likely to bully others in the way they have been bullied by more powerful adults and even become depressed in later life because their needs were ignored.

The contract you sign when you are a parent is to love, comfort and teach children how the world works, not throw them in at the deep end.

When my teenage daughters were little, I didn’t expect them to work out for themselves how to tie their own shoe laces or ride a two-wheeler bike, while I watched them struggle from the sidelines.

I showed them how these things were done so they could practise them and do them independently.

We need to remember that parenting needs to be a partnership. Not a power struggle.

This type of parenting is about power adult’ for the