We parents are sick of constant advice, Your Holiness. Just leave us all alone!
UNTIL you become a parent, you can’t possibly understand... No wait, come back. I’m not going where you think I’m going with this. Until you become a parent, you can’t possibly understand what it’s like to submit to a barrage of conflicting instructions. Someone is forever shouting in your ear about how to do it.
Now Pope Francis has weighed in, saying slapping a child can be acceptable once you don’t humiliate the poor divil, and you have due regard to justice, and you move on swiftly afterwards. (I paraphrase because the various translations in the press were a bit befuddling.)
Outrage came from all quarters, including Mary McAleese, who questioned – not for the first time surely – the Vatican’s commitment to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. And it also included that cadre of commentators for whom perspective is the first casualty in an argument. These are the people who believe bum-smacking and child battery are on the same spectrum, not all that far apart. The intervention of Pope Francis, what with his childlessness and his leadership of an institution with an egregious history of child abuse, couldn’t have been more provocative. He should mind his own business, they said, while conspicuously failing to mind their own.
When you first become a parent – and this is especially true of adoptive parents, who end up suddenly, terrifyingly in charge of a two-year-old – it’s like babysitting a child you’ve never met before. You press for all the advice you can get from other parents. Help! What do they eat? What does he want? Should I stop him doing that with the bleach?
IT DOESN’T last long. Soon you begin staring flinty-eyed at people offering the most wholesome and well-meaning counsel. ‘ Are you presuming to tell me how to raise my child?’ you think. So if we give up canvassing the opinions of family and friends about parenting, why do we continue to listen to the shrill exhortations of people entirely unconnected with our own lives?
Don’t be a lone parent! Outcomes are poorer! Breastfeed! In fact, raise awareness of the importance of breastfeeding by doing it in public places! Decide whose fault it is that you’re embarrassed about breastfeeding in public!
Don’t go back to work! Outcomes are poorer! If you must work, ensure your little one is placed with an apple-cheeked grandmother with a master’s in child psychology and a sideline in cookie-cutter crafts! Don’t let your children get fat! Cook from scratch! Use non-biological washing powder! Read to them! Get down on the floor! Don’t let them play videogames! Disinfect all surfaces! Feed them this expensive source of imaginary intestinal flora!
Don’t spank your children! Believe in the reasoning abilities of a three year old! Don’t get angry! Don’t display any bad emotions at all actually! Become a Vulcan! And if your child exhibits bad emotions or behaviour, medicate them!
Now there’s a thing, as we’re being strong-armed into another discussion of children’s rights. Ritalin. Let’s say, as an adult, you’re forced into a choice between two infringements of your civil liberties, both of which are ‘ for your own good’. You can be given either a slap or a behaviour-modifying drug. Which do you choose? Thought so.
FORTY-THREE states have outlawed corporal punishment of children in the home. Ireland is not among them, and neither are the UK, the US, Canada or Australia. Germany bans not only physical punishment but psychological punishment, which must be a bitch to police. Sweden was first, in 1979, and it’s worth noting there has been no decrease in assaults on children in Sweden since then.
There are some cultures in which slapping children is still acceptable – indeed the Bible positively encourages it, so the Pope is on solid doctrinal ground at least – and there seems to be enough divi- sion on the subject in this country to make introducing a ban controversial, never mind enforceable.
But on the whole, most people who hit their children don’t do it because they believe it’s right; they do it despite believing it’s wrong. They know it’s not a just and sensible method of imposing discipline but they’re at wits’ end. They feel monstrous afterwards, and would be called monsters if word got out, but word never gets out. No one admits to it for fear someone will ring Liveline about them. Hence your bum-smackers and your child batterers are both equally covert, both monstrous.
The truth is, there’s only one surefire way to make sure you never get angry enough with your children to feel like slapping them, and that’s to spend less time with them. It’s in the small, tense battleground between feeling like slapping and actually slapping that a heroic struggle is enacted. Your finer self engages the enemy – your temper. If your goodies always win, the thing is not to crow about it but to have a little compassion for those whose baddies have come out on top from time to time.
Research into parenting methods is repetitive, exhausting and, worst of all, inconclusive. So many theories… Dr Spock says this; Supernanny says that. Tiger Mother Amy Chua bullied her daughter until she could play Little White Donkey flawlessly on the piano. Is it okay to do that? I really want little Tallulah to learn the piano… Then there’s helicopter parenting, in which you hover above your children, rotors humming, making sure nothing bad ever happens to them, and raise a 30-year-old who can’t programme a washing machine or handle rejection, and who will never grow up and leave you. (Is that what you secretly want?)
Then there’s its opposite, freerange parenting, in which you let them backpack alone across Nepal at age 11 or whatever – get the bus to school by themselves. Authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, uninvolved. Which am I? Which am I? Must try harder!
And for every type of advice there’s a corresponding study. Different styles produce different ‘outcomes’. You read them all. Then you find that, sure enough, this is the woolliest possible field of scholarship. To call it science would be the most senseless flattery. All of this stuff is based on correlational research; no one can definitively establish cause and effect. We’re tormenting ourselves over nothing.
As you already know, unless you abuse or neglect them, your children will probably turn out fairly okay, much as you probably did. And in the meantime, take some ideological comfort from the fact that the urge to slap other people’s children is generally far more compelling than the urge to slap your own.