It was a familiar story but no less sad for that. At an inquest in Dublin last week, the circumstances surrounding the suicide of a 16-year-old boy were laid bare.
Like many teenagers he had developed a bad case of acne, so bad that he became depressed. He was a bright kid, but that didn’t prevent him from falling in with an older and wilder crowd. Under their influence he experimented with cannabis and was arrested for possession.
Many parents of teenage kids, especially boys, will recognise that painful rite of passage. It is the sheer familiarity of his exploits that makes the boy’s story all the more terrifying. They are so commonplace that they leave no clue for parents picking over the details in an attempt to identify the one incident that marked him out as a suicide risk. There’s no point listening for an alarm bell when it isn’t there.
Even when he occasionally muttered about wanting to kill himself, his mother didn’t believe it for a minute. Even if the threat had been taken seriously, it is difficult to know what any other parent, in the same situation, might have done differently.
The boy’s parents had his acne treated by an expert. When he became depressed they sought help for that too, and had him placed on antidepressants. They sent him to the most expensive fee-paying school in the country to give him every chance of fulfilling his considerable potential. When school was no longer a challenge for their high-achiever, they agreed that he could switch to another school, thus avoiding transition year and moving more swiftly towards university. When a drug dealer started hassling him for a cannabis debt, they paid it off themselves.
Their relationship with their son was healthy, but the parents weren’t pushovers either. Their last row was over a party he’d been told he couldn’t attend, because of their concerns about his unsuitable friends.
Many parents of teenage boys, mindful of suicide statistics, will admit to walking on eggshells where their children are concerned. Still, discipline has to be enforced. Children have to learn boundaries and respect for authorities, and their moody melodramatics have to be withstood. What more could these parents possibly have done? Faced with a tragedy that is replicated in hundreds of households across the country every year, we should ask if there is something in the early experience of children these days that makes them vulnerable to unremarkable pressures later in their adolescence. Changing attitudes to discipline, as well as the status and even duration of childhood, have certainly impacted on the way we raise our children.
Some commentators believe that we have become too soft with them, too keen to indulge their whims and fads, so anxious to see them mature that we give them liberties and responsibilities for decisions they’re too young to make. Instantly gratified and rarely punished, adolescents are then poorly equipped to cope when life and the outside world prove less indulgent.
What are the alternatives? The consensus on corporal punishment, for instance, is that it’s a bad thing and that tough chastisement brings no long-term benefit. Just a generation ago, when teachers and priests were free to leather other people’s children, you’d rarely have heard any debate on this issue at all. With little certainty or direction on parenting issues any more, parents are left to their own instincts and devices when it comes to children who may be difficult.
The “naughty step” and positive reinforcement beloved of Supernannies is all very well, but is it always wrong to slap a wilful child or a mistake to be less than firm? Nobody seems sure any more. If your child grows up to be wayward, depressed, brilliant or contented, will you put that down to the fact that you might, or might not, have given him the odd smack as a kid? The confusion and ambivalence towards this issue was apparent last week in a survey on proposals for a legal ban on slapping children. Most of the 700 parents surveyed, almost 90%, said they believed that slapping was a bad idea and did not work long term. More than half claimed they had never slapped their children, and only 1% admitted regularly slapping as a punishment. Still, more than two-thirds of those polled disagreed with the proposal to ban slapping entirely.
So, corporal punishment is a measure that almost no parent agrees is a good idea, yet most would like to see retained as an option. The rationale for this ambiguity may be the belief that, while your children should never be slapped, other people’s kids certainly should. We are all experts on the errors others make in the parenting process. It is a popular notion that troublesome children are invariably the result of parental, rather than societal, shortcomings.
Just last week, the MEP Jim Higgins floated the suggestion that parents whose kids receive antisocial behaviour orders (Asbos) should have their children’s allowance payments withheld. That might prove a popular suggestion. It may even be effective. It would be easy to enforce and a direct rebuke to the parents of wayward youngsters. Ultimately, though, it will be a sanction against poorer families, and the only ones to suffer will be the children themselves.
Children from poor homes aren’t the only ones whose lives can go tragically awry. Whatever stratum of society they come from, and no matter how well-intentioned they may be, parents need support, guidance, reassurance and direction. They need useful disciplinary techniques and the confidence to enforce them. They need expert advice on spotting and responding to warning signs, and an acknowledgement that parenting isn’t a discrete pursuit that impacts on none but the immediate family.
It’s still common for many engaged couples to do pre-marriage courses, but signing up for a parenting course is viewed as an admission of failure. Such courses shouldn’t be fire-brigade measures for families in crisis. State-funded parenting courses should be a matter of priority and routine. We need to start taking collective responsibility for the next generation.
