Open Writing

Since I gave birth to our five children, it astonishes me how anyone, let alone a male, dare tell others how to bring up their children. Dr Spock tried it forty years ago – years later he had to rewrite it.

Surely coping with our fifth must be easy after the other four, ‘experience is the name men give to their mistakes,’ as Oscar Wilde said, but I haven’t felt myself brimming over with parental confidence yet. In fact does there ever come a stage in their development where you can step back and say to your partner ‘That’s it love, our job is completed,’ then resume your own life again?

‘Whether children grow up to be lifelong optimists, warmly loving or cool, trusting or suspicious, will depend to a considerable extent on the individuals who have taken the responsibility for a major portion of their care in the first two years,’ so prophesised Spock. In other words another way of blaming parents when children ‘go wrong.’ So providing both parents are perfectly balanced, loving, faultless characters, they have nothing to worry about. But how many of us are?

‘There is no such thing as a bad child,’ I heard Spencer Tracey say to Mickey Rooney in ‘Boys Town’ years ago, and I believed it for a long time. After studying characteristics in young and old alike, I now believe, although mums and dads are responsible for a large percentage of their children’s personalities, there is another essence of something, call it what you will – that shapes their ends.

For example the child from squalid beginnings who rises against all odds to become a great success. Charles Chaplin spent his early life trying to scrape a meagre living for himself and his mentally ill mother in a London slum, but he became a genius. Conversely – reported in the Press - a glamorous and wealthy young woman from a loving and secure background drugged herself to death.

I always found the advice on telling small offenders you love them even when you’re feeling violent hard to swallow, and confess I never managed it.

I could not say ‘I still love you although I’m belting you,’ to a child. When the rebel has reached an ‘I won’t do it again,’ mood, the loving comes naturally. I’m waiting for someone to write a book that does not automatically assume that once you give birth you become a paragon of unselfish perfection. A book, which accepts I wax neurotic occasionally and am not always in the mood for humour, when a swipe would be quicker. One with some words of wisdom to tide me over that ‘I don’t care if I never see another child again’ period.

‘They don’t owe us anything,’ some parents are fond of excusing their off-spring. Whatever mistakes we have made in our humble efforts to produce five respectable members of the human race, I believe my husband and I are entitled to one thing, if nothing else – respect. I shall always demand it!