Raising the child and child rearing
Occasionally, an upbringing has to be endured. Parents are keen to rectify the follies of their own childhood, so their children become test cases for ‘a different path’. No one would ever label them unbalanced but sometimes, through a child’s eyes at least, parents appear to be over-thinking the business of getting the balance right.
Take Mondays to Fridays, for example. Everyone growing up knows these are drudge days. Wake up in the morning to the unpleasant trilling of an alarm, put on your uniform, go to school, open the mind wide, allow the teachers to fill your ‘inbox’ with theorems & thought, take exams, answer some of those theorems incorrectly owing to being lost in the mechanics of momentary distraction, bring home a report card that elicits more frowns than grins, then do it all again when Monday comes around once more.
My parents — who were my grandparents, really — adopted bringingup-Kevin tactics which I was told were different from their time as children. After listening to their accounts I desperately wanted to be a child in their time, not mine. It sounded like they were having a ball — an Alice-inWonderland romp through life which they were hoping to stem with my arrival. Things were going to be different, ‘because we missed out so much and you’re not going to miss out,’ said my grandmother with determination.
Tummy churn
So Mondays to Fridays post-school drudge were tempered with ice-creams and sweets after dinner (bribery in retrospect). The balance of all these excesses was redressed on Saturday. A spoonful of (ha ha ha not sugar, Mary Poppins!) but a spoonful of castor oil was force fed down my resisting gullet and I spent the day enduring a biology lesson of a varied kind: experiencing the tummy churn, hear it go ‘bubble bubble toil and trouble’, then when the churning became unbearable sprint for the smallest room in the house crouch and pray you never encounter Saturdays again, especially when your school mates are out on the maidan playing.
“You’ve got to wash out of your insides.”
Somehow, we survive. I have to say, also in retrospect, I lacked a lot of intelligence in finding ways around situations such as that, as well-intentioned they may have been.
I was in conversation recently with two younger parents in Sydney who have two boys. As with most children, getting them to eat their veggies is one of the big challenges especially if the veggies sit adjacent to pieces of tasty meat. (I actually think we as parents fail to respect a child’s early insight
all that muck into blandness but that is another story for another time.)
The child’s mother says she found a sneaky way to get the older boy to eat his carrot rings and broccoli. She’d put a smidgen of tomato ketchup – a tiny red dot like a bindi (forehead decoration)– on each veggie and this, like the aforementioned spoonful of sugar, helped the medicine go down admirably. This older lad in fact has grown into a champion veggie consumer. I guess he’ll forever associate every veggie with the taste of ketchup.
The younger son for sure is cannier. He sits in his little high chair, looks his mum in the eye, picks up each carrot ring, licks the ketchup off, places the carrot ring back on the plate and says, ‘More.’ Parenting, in the end, is also about evolving new strategies.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.