Lessons from The Slap: My child is perfect... or not.

As I wander around the internet reading blogs, advice columns and news articles about bringing up children, I often have cause to stop and cringe. 

Of course, I often have cause to stop in my tracks and say 'AHA!', too.  There is some brilliant parenting advice out there.  But sad to say, there are a lot of dodgy recommendations out there masquerading as good parenting advice. 

I don't mean the sort of 'whack-'em,-silence-'em-and keep-'em-in-line' advice that lacks respect for children as human beings; I scan that, shaking my head, and move on, because some people are just lost and will never see the light.  There's a lot of it on the forums.  I drop in my two cents' worth of rationality, hoping to balance the scales, and move on.

No, I'm talking about the sort of advice that is so fulsomely positive (and I use 'fulsome' with its original definition) that it gives children a false view of the world.  Your child is perfect. Let them follow their desires or you risk stifling their creativity.  Praise everything you can, to boost their self-esteem. That sort of thing.

Poor, confused parents.  Good parenting, like truth, is such a subjective thing. It falls somewhere between 'too much' and 'too little', and nobody will agree on the location of the line.  In fact, people will argue till they're blue in the face about whether the line's over HERE or over THERE. (They can get quite nasty about it, actually.)  Parents who are struggling are not helped by vague, extreme advice.

That's probably why the ABC TV drama 'The Slap', about a 'spoilt' child who is slapped by a non-parental adult at a party, is causing so much debate.

The myth of the perfect parent/carer

One of the easiest traps I could fall into when writing this blog is to make parenting sound easy.

I am NOT here to make you feel inadequate.  Ladies and gents, parenting is NOT easy.  And carers, looking after other people's kids is NOT easy.  It's full of split-second decisions that you have to make when you're tired, distracted and irritated, when your own relationship with your partner or your self-image or your financial situation might be imploding, when you're surrounded by conflicting 'good advice', ridiculous rules of the centre, myriad unrealistic expectations... it's sometimes like parenting in the jungle, with a hungry tiger in every tree.

Carers are usually trained in everything except what they really need to know- HOW to form a relationship with each member of a disparate group of kids- and parents are no better off.  Nobody offers you training in parenting your particular child BEFORE you take the plunge (how could they? -your child will be unique).  On the contrary, there's a myth out there that it'll all fall into place due to your natural instincts.  After all, we're all here on this planet to reproduce, aren't we?  It's natural!

Bollocks to that.  'Natural' my *rse.

Let me give you an example that has stuck in my brain for the last 26 years.