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.

Helping your children hear praise and gratitude

Today I want to tell you how I knew I really loved my current partner.  I can say with confidence that it was the first time in my life I'd really loved, rather than being 'in love' or 'in lust', and I think it's worth sharing how I knew that.

You might wonder what that's got to do with childcare. The link is that word 'love'. For many of us, the love for our child is the most intense and unconditional love we'll experience; some parents describe being 'in love' with their new baby. Yet I can see that many parents and carers' loving intentions get lost in the process of trying to fit the 'perfection paradigm'- the perfect amount and method of encouragement, the perfect level of boundaries, the perfect number and type of activities, and so on. 

Relationships can be like that, too.  We can lose the love in a pointless quest for perfection.  Maybe if I share this little story, I can toss a bomb at some habitual behaviours which are totally counterproductive when we really love someone... like our child.

Being a role model: a 24/7 challenge for parents and carers

It's easy to forget that those little eyes are always watching us.  It's even easier to forget that those little ears are always listening to us- especially when children get to the age where they seem to develop selective hearing. (Believe me, selective deafness is about lack of response, not lack of hearing.)

Because I work as a casual at the moment, I've been quite transient in my contact with some groups of children.  This can be a challenge for the children, for the regular staff and for me.  And it also opens up some huge holes in the role modelling by the adults involved in the childcare equation.  Often, adults are downright rude to each other in full view of the children; all that time spent telling the children to be kind to their friends (hmm, you can read what I think about that use of the word 'friends' here), and yet they themselves sometimes treat the other human beings around them with blatant disregard for their feelings and rights.

It seems to me that many of my reflections about those 'holes' also apply to parenting; the way our children's primary carers behave in front of them is crucial to their future behaviour and attitudes. So let's have a look at a few aspects of adult behaviours, through the eyes of the children.

Physical challenge versus physical safety: the dangers of boring an active child to death

Yesterday I watched a 3-year-old indigenous boy- let's call him Jimmy- climb a tree in the preschool yard with the speed and skill of a cheeky little monkey.  He climbed far higher than any of the staff would have imagined a small child could, and put the staff into an unexpected dilemma.

We realised immediately that the tree was close enough to the fence to allow Jimmy to jump over and 'escape' if he chose, not to mention that he had a good chance of breaking a bone or two if he fell. It wasn't a danger we'd foreseen, because it simply hadn't occurred to us that any of the children (let alone a 3-year-old) could climb that high on a tree which appeared to have minimal footholds.  Before we could reach the tree and 'rescue' Jimmy, he made a decision and simply jumped back into the yard from a height of nearly two metres, landing safely with a slight roll like an expert.

He probably was an expert.  In my experience, most indigenous parents are still happy to let their children experience the highs and lows of 'normal' risky childhood behaviour like climbing trees, and the odd broken bone as a result doesn't phase them particularly.  There was a time when most parents felt like that.

Where do you stand? What's your reaction to that story, and what would you do if you were a carer or the parent of that child?