A friend’s mother is spending time in a geriatric ward recovering from surgery after a fall. Every day she is expected to have her lunch in a communal room with semi-gaga strangers parked in front of a deafeningly loud television. “Broccoli, dear?” the nurse bellows in her ear.
My friend’s mother isn’t happy. She’s never had lunch in front of a television, blaring or otherwise, in her 84 years of life. She isn’t used to people more or less force-feeding her broccoli. She’s confused anyway, and made more frightened still by being hijacked by the kind of one-size-fits-all culture of the ward. Too much intimacy from well-meaning (but to her, intolerably over-familiar) nurses, too much inane “jollying along” when there isn’t a great deal to feel jolly about.
She’s desperate to go home but she’s not allowed to. Her shock at being immersed in this unfamiliar environment, with its entirely unfamiliar way of doing things, means she is slowing down her recovery by being a “bad” patient — not least because, in her confusion, she has taken to calling the nurses “the servants”. I do see that might be irritating, though it’s also quite funny.
I was thinking about how insensitively we treat old people, as though they are a lumpen mass rather than a collection of individuals with rich histories, when I learnt last week that apparently we treat children appallingly too. We’re obviously useless. According to a letter about “toxic childhoods” sent last week to The Daily Telegraph and signed by 110 academics and children’s experts, apparently both politicians and the public are completely failing to understand how children develop.
“They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to processed ‘junk’), real play (as opposed to sedentary screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives. They are pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults and exposed via the electronic media to material which would have been considered unsuitable for children even in the very recent past.
“They also need time. In a fast-moving, hyper-competitive culture, today’s children are expected to cope with an ever-earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum.” All of this apparently heralds “the death of childhood”, it’s a national emergency, and we are all to blame.
Really? I’m not. And to be perfectly frank I am getting really bored with experts telling us all at every turn what terrible, careless, harm-inflicting parents we are. I wish they’d shut up.
Most of us don’t dress our daughters like prostitutes. Most of us don’t hothouse our children to be academic superstars, and pity those few that do. We care about what we feed them. We make sure our children play outside, as well as in front of a computer. We make sure the computer has a filter installed, and that access to the more unsavoury aspects of the internet is blocked but all the wonderful, imaginative, mind-expanding stuff isn’t. Most of us, for heaven’s sake, have “real interaction” with our children — how could we not? We’re not imbeciles.
Yet here we are once again being told how to do something that ought to be innate by yet another panel of well-meaning “experts”, some of whom are childless (and sorry, but I don’t actually believe in childless experts on childcare).
I think the crisis in parenting, such as it is, is directly linked to “experts”. There are so many of them and they all offer such conflicting advice that you could forgive any hesitant new parent for falling into a blind panic.
They don’t have a particularly happy history, either, childcare experts. It has been argued that a whole generation was ruined by Dr Benjamin Spock’s childcare manual, first published in 1946, and that he was “the father of permissiveness”. This may or may not have been the case, but I can’t help feeling nostalgic for Spock’s mantra, “You know more than you think you do”. We seem to have lost sight of it, and lost faith in our own skills along the way.
Parenting, if it can be reduced to one particular thing, ought to be about instinct. But parents have been made to feel so spectacularly incompetent over the decades by the very existence of unnecessary “experts” that instinct has rather fallen out of fashion.
If my instinct is to run to my crying child, and I’m told by a bestselling “expert” such as Gina Ford that my instinct is wrong, and I’m unsure of what to do because the child doing the crying is my first baby, then I’m going to get confused. Especially if I’ve also read Penelope Leach, another bestselling expert and a signatory to the Telegraph letter, who tells me (rather more sensibly) that kindness is all and that naturally I must quickly comfort my baby and make it feel secure. And so it goes on, on every subject from food to vaccination to gender to long lists of what we should and shouldn’t do with our own children at every step of their development.
And that, surely, is the point: they are our own children, not anyone else’s. Their background, their circumstances, their family life, their likes and dislikes, their abilities, their strengths and weaknesses, are all unique.
Instead of allowing experts to lump them all together in one great mass we ought — surely — to be able to understand that every one of our children is an individual and the product of an individual family, and that if anyone is going to be prescriptive, it’s going to be us, because actually we are the expert, and that, medical emergency aside, means we know best.
People have raised children throughout history by muddling through and trusting to instinct. They have done this through famine, war, violence, poverty, abuse, separation, widowhood, divorce. People have loved their children, and raised them well through unimaginably difficult times. I was born to a 17-year-old who didn’t know how to boil an egg — and she was a brilliant mother.
I really think it’s time we got a collective grip on this subject and were left in peace to get on with raising our children instead of being encouraged at every turn to feel guilty, ashamed, paranoid and incompetent. I don’t believe children’s childhoods are remotely toxic. But even if I’m wrong and they’re poisoned in the extreme, I don’t think it’s tremendously helpful to make parents feel they are the contaminators.
