“Bollocks!” That was the reaction this week from a mum friend of mine to yet more guidance about the “correct” way to parent your children, and the mistakes that we make when trying to successfully grow a stable and happy child (which is much harder in practice than it sounds on paper.)
Guiding a mini human to become a grown-up human, in the hope that they will be a fully functioning member of society, is hard. The problem is that God the creator didn’t think to make these beings arrive out of wombs with a personalised guidebook attached (incredibly thoughtless if you ask me), so the majority of us are simply making it up as we go along. If God was a woman, perhaps she would have had the foresight to provide such things – it makes logical sense.
Anyway, I digress.
My friend Rachel was reacting to a recent interview with the presenter Kate Silverton, during which it was suggested that the concept of a naughty step wasn’t helpful to a child’s development, that it encourages children to feel as though they’re bad and that no-one can help with their feelings. It was argued that there’s no such thing as a naughty child, just a child who cannot properly express their feelings. Now, there’s a lot of there which I agree with, and parts that I disagree with, but it made for an interesting debate with the rest of the school-mums over wine and vodka sodas. It encouraged us to not only think about the way we parent our kids, but also the way in which we were parented.
I would say that I had a very 80s/90s experience of being brought up by Jamaican parents. There were raised voices when we were misbehaving, the odd spot of smacking, and fundamentally the very real notion that if you were naughty, especially in public, there would be consequences when you got home. Discipline ruled our house, and it would fascinate me when I would visit friends whose homes were not run in a similar vein – especially those where swearing was prevalent or kids answering their parents back was the norm. I was never very good at hiding my shock when I saw it happen. To me that was WILD. It still is.
But what my parents and none of my friend’s parents had time for was the endless parenting advice that would come from the likes of Gina Ford and Jo Frost. When you’re working countless hours while also trying to successfully parent, run a home, and ensure your kids are getting a good education, pausing to read advice from someone they have never met didn’t come into the equation. Everyone is just trying to survive and do their best.
As I remember it, my parents would laugh at the middle-class notion of a “naughty step”. They saw it as a method that people with too much money and time on their hands choose. The rest of the world sends their kids to their rooms. There are many parenting techniques that I didn’t take on from my parents, but as working parents, sending the kids to their room is something we still do at home.
What’s easy to forget sometimes is that a pause in a moment of anger, frustration, upset, confusion and tantrums is the best option for both parent and child. The parenting technique of lashing out is thankfully one which has died a death in terms of being socially acceptable. But when we’re all in the midst of just trying to survive, pay bills, do the school run, parent, and get your shift done at work, the idea that you can also immediately and calmly deal with naughty behaviour on every occassion is just not always going to be possible. Which is why a sending to the room so both sides can take a breath works for us.
But this is also a conversation about discipline. I was raised with a lot of it, and we parent at home with an element of it too. I have no issue with discipline – why it became a dirty word in some circles is beyond me. Discipline, love and structure, I believe, prepares kids for their future as-yet-unknown, surely that’s part of our job description, right?