Smacking my child made me feel like a failure

The last time I slapped my offspring was a pitiful moment. I now know there are better ways to deal with recalcitrant children

A new report says that children deserve protection from assault by adults

That definitively onomatopoeic word has been bounding about this week: smacking. The very sound of the word delivering pain. I hear the word “smack” and feel the need to duck. This time it’s doctors – the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health – issuing a report to say that smacking can be damaging to children’s behaviour, health and wellbeing.

Smacking is already illegal in Scotland and Wales and the report argues that it should be in England and Northern Ireland, too. I’m sure this is correct. There is no upside to the physical punishment of children. Nevertheless, when I hear the word, hear debate on the subject, it just makes me think – aside from the sound of pain – of my failings as a parent.

Not that I smack. I gave it up some time ago. It was a moment of pathetic poignancy and of pitiful guilt (mine). A child of mine was being naughty, irritating, consistently needling me so I slapped the back of their hand. The child howled then continued to do the annoying thing – and like the most annoying of annoying things, I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. So I said, “If you do that again I promise I will smack your other hand.” Then the child stopped, looked up at me and offered that hand.

This crushed me. I’ve not smacked since. Although, boy, I’ve been tempted to. Because I’m just a parent. I’m not a professional. I’m not trained in child-rearing, management, in sleep-deprivation coping mechanisms, in patience and anger management.

But I also shun the books, the tomes by the experts, the advice columns and dinner-party conversations. I believe in the make-it-up-as-you-go-along, common-sense approach. I mean, my parents brought myself and my siblings up without any training.

Corporal punishment at school is slightly different. I was slippered and caned at my prep school – but never at home – and it was part of the school’s fabric of daily life. Everyone knew about it, our parents knew, and everyone, including us boys, accepted it. Most of us coped and were happy little boys. If we were naughty or – in my case – lazy, we were thrashed for it and that was better than doing lines.

I’m not sure it did us any long-term harm. But, looking back on it now, the idea of a 45-year-old man beating an eight-year-old does not, er, sit well. As the Royal College of Paediatrics report says, children deserve protection from assaults from adults.

For me, the one person who elevates the care of children to an art form is our nanny, whom my wife and I employ to look after our two youngest children so we can work. For her, it is a constant and rewarding endeavour. She teaches them at every turn, using any event, however minor, as an excuse for a lesson in anything from wildlife to behaviour. She never raises her voice and seems incapable of anger, even if pelted with a missile or taunted by a young person seemingly in training to be a professional irritant.

She would agree with the writer Carla Naumburg whose book is titled How to Stop Losing Your S--- with Your Kids: Effective Strategies for StressedOut Parents (whose work I have read purely for journalistic research purposes) and who argues that one of the best ways of coping with kid crises is to “get silly”.

Which, at last, is something that I know I can do. I can be very silly. Lord, I’ve lost jobs and been at the centre of international media storms for my silliness. (Some of you might recall the time I said something silly to a vegan…)

And I have the main tool to do it, which is confidence. Confidence lies at the heart of parenting. Because we are always unsure as to the outcomes of our actions. Will our chats, our cooking, our holidays, turn out to be the thing that screws them up?

There is so much wretched advice out there, that we tread the boards of child-rearing as if dancing across hot coals. But now I know, from an expert, that I can deploy silliness, the one thing that I’m famously good at, to defuse tension, to deliberately undermine one’s own authority as a way of diverting the ankle-biting annoyance. I can do faces, voices, stupid impersonations or accents and I am a pro at walking around like an idiot pretending to bump into walls and doors.

Get ready, nippers, I’m coming for you with both idiot barrels fully loaded. This minister of silliness can’t wait for the nanny to clock off at 6.15pm and employ his big guns of anarchic foolery.

But perhaps I should also just keep a copy of this article for the future. For when my kids do a little unresolved trauma therapy and they realise what screwed them up and wrecked their ability to form relationships: it was their dad, with his ridiculous silliness. If only he had just smacked us…