mardi 16 novembre 2010

How To Be A Good Mother or Father: Here's The Secret: Just Do Your Best

There's a lot of tension in Britain these days about parenting. I'm not talking about the kind of parents who never should have had children, who see them as a nusiance and maltreat them. Social workers have to deal with some of those families and who'd envy them their task?

But lots of capable, well-meaning and loving parents seem to be made neurotic about raising their children - perhaps by the media and constant reports about what's 'best' for children.

Parents' worries seem to be mostly about education, health and safety. That's understandable. If you can believe any of what you read in the papers then, in lots of areas of Britain, school discipline seems to have broken down so that learning is no longer the priority. Pupils bent on causing trouble can do it easily, safe in the knowledge that teachers don't have any real sanctions to deal with them. To someone of my age, the sight of teachers being hauled into court or losing their jobs for some minor infraction, after decades of devoted teaching and on the say-so of a child still - obviously - wet behind the ears is a travesty. Have a look at what I wrote recently about school discipline when I was at school in the 1930s. I'm not saying bring back Mrs Roscoe's leather strap or Miss Gillett's cane (my teachers in Lancashire) but there has to be a balance between rigid control and chaos in classrooms. Otherwise none of the children will learn.

Their children's health will always trouble parents. But there seem to be lots more health problems to worry about now than there were when I was a child or when I raised my kids in the 50's and 60's. Lots more allergies and lots more psychological problems. On the other hand, parents now have access to health care and medicines that I, and my parents before me, could never have imagined.

And safety. When my kids were small, living in rural Surrey, they'd vanish with their pals on spring or summer days - Just William style - and I wouldn't see them till they called in for a glass of water or at teatime. They roamed about in woods picking wild strawberries, tried to catch sticklebacks in streams, played on a wood lorry left in a sort of lumber yard - who knows what they got up to. During their whole youth there was only one time that a man molested a local child. And we had an elderly neighbour who'd grab the girls and try to kiss them in a rather revolting way. Everyone just saw him as a pest. The girls, like other village kids, used to take a shortcut through his garden and I'd say "Don't let him get hold of you." If he did, they'd wriggle away and come home saying "Ughhh, ughhh, he tried to kiss me." They instinctively didn't go past him if they were on their own.
But my kids were lucky. Growing up in rural south east England back then wasn't like growing up in a grim industrial town or 'inner city'. Children did play free, outside, unsupervised, and were generally happier for it is my bet.

Still, parents have always faced worries in bringing up their children and it would be wrong for today's parents to imagine they face more difficulty than other generations. Think of this. I remember during the war that kids were hastily billetted all over the place, out of the cities that were being bombed, separated from their mums and dads for who knew how long, shoved into households where they knew no-one and were not necessarily welcome guests. One day when I was about 11 (it must have been about 1940) I remember a woman - a total stranger - came to our door and absolutely begged my mother to take her little granddaughter in because the Germans were bombing Liverpool. I still remember the woman's tragic expression and pleading. I learnt that the family were Jews though I didn't really know what jewish meant. We did take the little girl in, for several weeks - she had beautiful black hair and pale blue eyes and was called Sylvia. (We found out very soon that the beautiful black hair was full of lice. Mum had us kids and dad - and a Catholic Polish airman billetted in our house with his wife and baby because of the war - all out in the little back garden washing our heads with a soap called Derbac. It was the sole product available for head lice in those days.)

Just like children have their fears about the monster under the bed or in the cupboard, parents have their fears that their child will get ill or run over or be snatched away. But the thing is, life isn't always under our control. In the 1930s and 1940s people had far less control of their lives, health, education and safety than we do now. Imagine packing your child off to school every day with a gas mask, as my mother did for years, fearing a bomb or gas attack would mean you'd never see each other again. The best a lot of parents in Lancashire where I grew up in the 1930s and 40s could hope for, for their children, was that they'd learn to read - and find work in a mill or a factory when they left school at 13 or so.

As we all steadily got more control since the second world war, people seem to worry about any risk. That'll just ruin your life. And will probably make your kids neurotic too!

I remember taking my second child back to Washington DC in 1956. She'd been born in England and was 7 months old. (My husband, Gerry, was stationed in Washington in the Royal Air Force after serving in the RAF throughout the war.) A bunch of us went down from Washington one day to see American friends in Philadelphia. They were middle-aged, Steve and Babs Rotay, and had already raised their family. At lunch, I was slightly horrified to see my husband and Steve gaily improvise a baby chair at the table for my chubby, blonde, little baby. They plonked her in a huge 'carver' chair and strapped her in with a couple of Steve's leather belts. And gave her a chicken leg. I didn't like to say anything - the others were all a lot older than me and not long ago they'd beaten the Nazis - but I kept a bit of an eye on her. She had a whale of a time. She was in the thick of things - chatter, laughter, beer, whisky, smoke and all. She had a huge smile on her face and chortled her way through the afternoon.

I think what I'm saying is keep an eye on your kids but don't get neurotic. Whatever you do as a parent there will be events over which you have no control. In my case, I brought my 2 girls up both in the same way. One has had - so far, touch wood - pretty excellent health, the other has had illness after illness, including Hepatitis C, contracted from a blood transfusion (in 1984 I think it was) after the birth of her son, and skin melanoma. There will always be things you cannot protect your children from. And you worry about them even when they're in their 50s!

After raising two girls, having a hand in raising three grandchildren, and now having a great-grandson, here's my advice about having and raising children if anyone's interested:

Love them to bits.
Do your best for them.
Treat them equally. (They'll see that you treat them equally even when they put on a whiney voice and say "It's not fair...".)
And don't worry if you make mistakes. They'll forgive you.

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