A law that will make criminals of good parents as well as bad

OF the many varieties of unappealing human behaviour on display in shopping thoroughfares, the ill-tempered parent aiming open-handed blows at a small child’s bottom is, for me, among the hardest to watch.

The smacking is generally accompanied by shrieks of admonishment from the parent whose choice of punishment often appears to me motivated more by wrath than reason. Invariably the child shrieks too and does so for some minutes afterward. It is an unhappy scene and I would like to see less of it.

This opinion is informed in part by my own experience of being a parent. At no point during my daughter’s childhood did I consider it a good idea to smack her, whether in public or behind closed doors, and if ever I had done, I think I would have felt rather ashamed.

Should we take it, then, that the Scottish parliament’s new law banning smacking is a welcome addition to the inventory of activities which constitute criminality in this country? No, we should not.

Rather, it is itself a form of assault and a troubling one. It is populist law-making which proscribes behaviour which many of us dislike and perhaps leaves many of us with a warm glow for rooting it out.

But it doesn’t make it right. Furthermore, I seriously doubt whether it will improve the life of a single youngster.

Abused

Beaten and abused children will continue to be beaten and abused – because the parent who wallops the son or daughter at home with fists or a belt was already breaking the law. This new law merely makes the mum or dad who smacks a child’s hand because they were about to stick it in an electric fire a criminal too.

What it also does is transfer further powers relating to the upbringing of our children from the parent to the state. And with what justification? The usual one – that the state knows better than us. Not just those shrieking parents outside Tesco, but all of us.

The fact is that my opinion about smacking children is, rather like the state’s, just an opinion. I have many others. Indeed parenting, by its very nature, crams our minds full of opinions about what is good and not so good for the precious offspring we have introduced to the world.

Is breast really best even if it is driving mum insane with exhaustion? Should vegan parents deprive growing children of meat, fish and eggs? Yay or nay to male circumcision at birth? The list of parental matters we have our own thoughts on is endless.

My daughter is 22 now, which means I have gathered more than two decades’ worth of opinions about what I consider good for her and – if I may be so bold – for many young people also.

Since you are here and I don’t make laws, let me share some of them.

I don’t like to see young children of three and four wearing football club colours. There is enough tribalism in this land already. Seeing parents foist identity on infants through football before they are old enough to think for themselves makes me queasy – as do tiny tots dressed up as daddy’s football fan ‘mini-me’.

Parents who prefer their children not to associate with youngsters from different backgrounds, religious affiliations or ethnic groups cause me problems too. They are also guilty of encouraging tribalism and, furthermore, wreck innocent friendships with their prejudices.

I don’t like the way these parents carry on.

Then there are the mothers and fathers who scare the wits out of their children with religious doctrine. It is unacceptable to me that some children of primary school age are still threatened in their own homes with the prospect of damnation in Satan’s fiery pits if they should displease God.

Indeed, it was with displeasure that I discovered that one child whose parents had filled her head with such unhelpful teachings later told my daughter and several other classmates that they were all going to hell.

You may agree or disagree with my examples of ‘bad parenting’, but it should be clear in each case the state legislates at its peril.

It is not for politicians to decide when children are old enough to hear their dads tell them they must support his football team or else bring shame on the family.

The state cannot – must not – try to nanny every infant through the minefield of religious and cultural diversity and the myriad parenting styles they produce. Instead it should recognise that an inevitable consequence of a diverse society is a broad range of ideas on raising children – and that the parents who believe a degree of physical chastisement is acceptable in some circumstances are far from the most worrying ones out there.

For all that their ideas may differ from mine, many of them may be excellent parents. I do not require experience of hitting my own child to understand that smacking may be an appropriate response to bad behaviour in some households and that, far from harming the child, it has brought some benefit.

Dangerous

Yesterday, a Scottish woman came on a BBC Radio Scotland phone-in about smacking and told Kaye Adams about the time in the 1950s that her mother put her over her knee and smacked her bottom for playing on a rope suspended across a dangerous river.

She said she never did it again. Nor, thereafter, did her mother ever have cause to lift her hand to her. She loves her mother and understands why she did what she did.

Who is to say that she was a bad parent or that her mode of discipline would today amount to something criminal? Not me – and nor, I would have hoped, our politicians. We already have laws which stop parents from hitting their children for no good reason and which ban outright any blows to the head, shaking or the use of an implement.

What we have now is an extra law that stops mothers and fathers from using any form of physical chastisement for any reason, however valid in the eyes of the parent.

That, it seems to me, is not a law which protects children from violence but one where the state intrudes into family life and criminalises good parents along with bad.

It is clunky, ill-conceived legislation whose test cases will almost inevitably involve mothers and fathers who think deeply about the raising of their children and love them very much. Unloved, neglected infants will still have wretched childhoods, much as before.

In households across Scotland, children will still go to sleep crying about the despicable remark their parent made to them in anger or the look of parental disdain which cut them to the quick.

Many will lie awake disturbed by the aggravated tones with which mummy and daddy communicate. Thousands will spend every day missing an absent parent dreadfully and wondering what they did to annoy them.

The truth will almost always be that they did nothing wrong, that their absent father or mother is too wrapped up in him or herself to shoulder responsibility for their own flesh and blood.

None of this, of course, will be against the law. Just the smacking. Politicians reckon it is bad for children.