Problems with Parenting

I've been thinking today about parenting; not because I'm a parent myself but because I have spent the weekend in the company of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.  Such is the life of a person who attends family gatherings.  From the point of view I had at this event, it allowed me to see how three separate generations of the same family tackle the issue of raising children.  I have come to some conclusions that some of you may find annoying, particularly if you are parents.

The first conclusion was that parents have no idea what they are doing, and experience does not seem to have any major effect on this.  Okay, the grandparents, who had obviously had children of their own not many years previously, were a little more aware of what the child in this instance was likely to do; but their methods for dealing with a child who is a) displaced from its usual surroundings and therefore b) tired, frustrated and grumpy, were as equally ineffective as those of the actual parents.

In a situation where a child of two years old is able to run rampant around a room where a family gathering is being held it must surely stand to reason that the child in question is going to get tired out.  It's simple logic – as one expends energy, one becomes worn out.  When babies and young children do this, they get irritable; just like an adult who is woken at 4am by excited children on Christmas morning is unlikely to be in the best of moods (especially if you've been up until 2am setting out presents because said excited children couldn't sleep so you were up all night tiring them out).

The parent and grandparent method to deal with a tired child does not seem to differ all that much.  They fuss over the child, apparently in an effort to get it to stop crying, then try to put it to sleep.  It's an interesting method and I think the fussing is partly to reassure the child but what it seems to do is little more than overstimulate the child further.  Neither the parent nor the grandparent change their methods despite the same thing happening every time: the child cries more, gets annoyed and then falls asleep once the parents stop fussing and put it somewhere it can sleep.  Why not just do that in the first place?

In the end, I have to side with the great-grandparents' method of dealing with children: delegation.  I'd probably not follow that up with the ignoring the child to berate the parents, telling them things were done better years ago, because that's hardly going to make anyone listen to your point of view.  Based on all the evidence above, things were unlikely to have been done any differently.  People still fussed over children, they just did it in less outlandish clothing.

The second, and possibly the more interesting, thing is something I've noted over the course of my lifetime but which came to the forefront over this family gathering.  I had previously picked up on the fact that parents lie to children; as I'm sure you've all noticed as well.  What I had not quite realised what that it's not only parents who do this, it's everybody.  We are all programmed to tell lies to children, and we do it all the time; creating a strange fantasy world for children to inhabit, where the laws of the universe seemingly do not apply.  It's no wonder I had so much trouble with science as a child.

Anyone who has travelled on public transport in Britain will likely have heard of The Man.  This person may or may not be the same figure as The Man who keeps down the minorities and the underprivileged in America but given that he is a fiction I'm not certain that matters.  What does matter is that although we know he does not exist, we tell children he does and try to make them scared of him.  Is there not enough for children to be scared of already without making up more?

“Stop throwing your toys on the floor or The Man will come and take them off you,” or words to that effect, can be heard the length and breadth of the United Kingdom as parents try to curtail their unruly offspring.  These phrases are often accompanied by a point toward a nearby male stranger, who would probably rather be left out of whatever tantrum is going on.  As far as I can tell, this teaches children two things: their parents are happy to use whoever is nearby as a scapegoat to help them deal with problems; and uninterested strangers want to steal their things.  Are either of these really things we want drummed into our nation's children?  Peace, tolerance and a spirit of cooperation are traits more likely to give our kids a head start in life, not an ingrained distrust of other people coupled with lying, blame throwing and an innate sense of paranoia.  The Man is not coming to take your stuff.  You know this to be true, but somewhere in the back of your head is the voice of your mother telling you otherwise.

It is this lying to children that is the big problem.  We do it all the time because it's easier than trying to take the universe and chop it into easily-digested pieces.  It stops us having to have long and often repetitive conversations, often including multiple tangents and going over the same points again and again from different angles.  It makes us feel like we're making the world an easier to understand place for our children, but in the end we are not.  We're making it harder for them, because not only will they have to get to grips with how the world really works but they will have to unlearn all the nonsense we told them in the first place, and on top of that we only teach the child one thing: it's parents would rather lie to it than spend time explaining things.

I'm sure that's not the lasting impression we want to make.