‘Fat bucket’ isn’t the worst thing you can call a child. ‘Bigot’ is

MOST old adages are worn so thin with age that we lose sight of the truth in them. One such maxim would be: ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.’

I bet your mum taught you that when you were small. And I bet you still remember clenching your fists and spitting it at a bully and then consoling yourself with the same words, even as you shed hot, vexed tears at home.

But I’d bet money on you not being able to recall the details of what made you a victim. A dredge of my memory comes up with being picked on for having red hair, freckles and a posh voice – a holy trinity for playground hell. But beyond that, I’ve forgotten.

I imagine it is the same for the kids who did the name calling. Actually, I might check because some of them are still my friends even though it’s 40 years later and I was just as rude to them. I mean, we were only little and children will be children.

What children will not be, not naturally, are bigots. They might wonder aloud why someone has a different colour skin. They might speak the truth as they see it about someone being fat or ugly. They might not be super-sensitive about someone who is disabled or disfigured because they don’t self-censor the way adults do.

But they are not prejudiced. A child’s world is a small, absolute place, whereas prejudice requires evaluating one belief system or characteristic against another and thinking: ‘Mine’s better so that makes yours worse.’

Which is why it was gobsmacking to learn last week that children as young as three are being branded racists, homophobes and bigots and blacklisted by schools for ‘prejudice-related behaviour’.

Among the insults logged with Local Education Authorities (LEAs) were ‘ doughnut’, ‘fat bucket of KFC’ and ‘gay’, while the more innocuous ‘Somalian’ and ‘Chinese boy’ were listed as racehate crimes. Gosh, this recording of every playground taunt is so Orwellian, it’s hard to know where to start. It’s far more cruel than a kid calling another ‘a girl’, which to some benighted, target-friendly, pen-pushing PC bureaucrat is now apparently an example of ‘gender image prejudice’.

IT’S ALL so miserably misguided it’s worthy of the twisty, mad mind of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s Child Catcher himself. The recording of racist incidents by schools for LEAs was launched by the Labour Government. The Coalition told schools they were no longer under any obligation to do so.

However, data gained under the Freedom of Information Act by civil liberties group the Manifesto Club shows reporting and recording has continued and expanded to include any incident of ‘prejudice’. Which is why 4,348 cases of childon-child hate crime were reported to 13 LEAs in the year 2012-13, some involving children as young as three or four.

This is not the kind of concerted bullying campaign which destroys teenage lives and for which the ‘sticks and stones’ argument is clearly wrong. Words can be deadly weapons – but not in the sticky hands of a reception class child.

Parenting expert Nigel Latta describes the full stop as the best weapon in the entire arsenal of child discipline. Anything which comes after a comma, he says, is nagging. But I am quite prepared to make a whole list of reasons – with clauses and commas – for why labelling small children as bigots must end.

Children can only find their place in the world by pushing at its boundaries – either verbally or behaviourally. We only know there are limits once we overstep them and overstepping them is a fundamental part of growing up.

Anyone raising children nowadays faces a cacophony of ‘expert’ commands, instructions, tips and analysis that drowns out the real sound of childhood, which is usually the crash of mistakes.

WE, AS parents, have to know how to put them right, pointing out gently and privately to our children why others might be hurt. It has to be about education, not legislation and censure.

We need to have faith in teachers to know the difference between something requiring a quiet word as opposed to state intervention, and we need to have faith in a generation’s worth of sociological focus on applauding good behaviour and ignoring bad.

Schools label children enough already – the troublemaker, the brainiac – without adding bigot to the mix. And that’s a devastating name to be called – with greater consequences than ‘doughnut’.