Being The Best Parents Possible

 

          My previous blog post on Jean Hendy-Harris Writes - Something to Cry For, elicited a surprising amount of comment overall and it’s very clear that the way we bring up our children has significantly changed since the dark days that followed World War Two.   As a society we are not nearly as punitive as we once were and we’ve largely given up physical punishment altogether in favour of appealing to children’s own sense of what is acceptable and what is not.  Of course a considerable proportion of reasonably intelligent youngsters react well to the change but some do not and perpetually test the boundaries making the lives of many parents harder than they need be.   Schools have long since dispensed with straps and canes in favour of deprivations and detentions which many students applaud but again, some do not.

          I was usually reasonably well behaved at school because I was quite wary of punishment.  Nobody liked being caned although for the most part it was the boys who were and I can only remember one occasion when I seemed to be firmly in the firing line.   Eventually, however, the frustrated Mr Clarke who definitely did not cane on a regular basis, slapped me instead.   I no longer remember what my indiscretion had been but doubt if I repeated it.   However, being a paragon of virtue did not ever extend to my home life and I can well recall a number of unpleasant confrontations with my parents where the problem was invariably what I said rather than what I did that so enraged them.   My long-suffering mother said I was for ever giving her Old Lip and my grandmother agreed that I definitely had a Mouth on Me.  My father did not go in for warnings and when he felt I had gone too far he was inclined to immobilise me with one hand and take to my bare upper legs with the other, saying it was the Thrashing I’d been asking for.    This was both painful and humiliating and once, following such an incident I furiously and foolishly asked what made him think he had the right to beat me.   Old Nan, standing by with a teacup in her hand observed with some satisfaction that if I was Hers, she’d give me another walloping for being a Cheeky Mare.   But he decided not to do so and I was glad.

These days despite our very best parenting efforts, and no matter what strata of society we come from it appears that we should all have worked a lot harder to meet the standards expected of us as from our now fully grown progeny.   No matter how many hours we worked to make sure the best schools were accessed, no matter how much money we spent on toys, books and interesting holidays, like it or not some of us will still come in for a lot of criticism.   It’s abundantly clear that doing the right thing does not always come easily and many of us have failed quite spectacularly.

 I have to be honest and say here and now that I lay a great deal of the blame for the rise of this condemnatory attitude squarely at the feet of Philip Larkin for his particularly divisive This Be The Verse from round about 1970.   Greatly loved by fourteen year old boys and many of their English teachers it has put a lot of their parents off Larkin altogether.   The very fact that permission was given use to obscene language within the walls of Gravesend and Northfleet classrooms, and many other places as well of course, and within the hearing of adults was clearly thrilling to the young of the 1970s.   Little wonder he became the poet of choice for a whole generation and that students who had previously shown no interest whatsoever in verse of any kind suddenly saw themselves as aficionados.  Unsurprising that he was offered the position of Poet Laureate following the death of John Betjeman.   In my mind there is little doubt that Larkin must shoulder some of the responsibility for the ever-growing group of middle aged victims of parental ineptitude.

But we parents of the seventies and eighties should have worked more assiduously at providing less flawed environments within which our children might have grown up without the traumas that have blighted their lives.   More generosity of spirit was perhaps required.    If we are now called insensitive we have only ourselves to blame though there is a school of thought that dictates that working excessive numbers of hours in order to pay for the things in life they seemed to need, was not as essential as giving them sufficient Quality Time.   On the other hand those who abandoned long shifts and did give Quality Time are also falling short of perfection.  Forty year old Sebastian’s non-working mother was recently described by him as Smothering whilst his father who worked extra hard was said to be Distant and frequently Absent.  It’s sad really that between them this highly motivated and intelligent couple could not get it right because had they done so they might have a better relationship with their son now.  

However,  there is a school of thought that says accepting too much accountability for the various failures proliferating the lives of our children is to head towards a slippery slope that Josie says at worst leads towards a form of Elder Abuse which she agrees is something else we didn’t have years ago.  Emily, her 38 year old daughter still blames her for refusing to pay for her to attend Drama School  but Josie argues that there was nobody to pay for her own teenage dreams after all and in the final analysis becoming a shorthand typist, a job she hated at the time, was not the end of the world.

She even adds that she finds herself greatly buoyed in this belief by the recent behaviour of Prince Harry who was briefly mentioned in a previous blog post.  Harry at the age of 36 clearly feels his lot in life is so bad that neither the millions inherited from his mother nor living in a Californian mansion with 16 bathrooms excludes him from complaining that his father was recently merciless enough to cut him off financially.    There is no doubt whatsoever that we are expected to feel compassion for him and little wonder that a host of other thirty-somethings now feel quite at liberty to emulate him.   Laura has also been enormously sustained by Harry’s story and looks more closely at her middle-aged son’s grievance regarding his father refusing to raise his pocket money all those years ago – and might even re-examine the trauma he claims to have suffered when she forgot to pick him up from school on more than one occasion.      

That said, all of us would still continue striving to ensure our children have better lives than we had ourselves.  More toys, more books, more time were all invariably on the agenda no matter what the state of our individual finances were.   Sadly the syndrome we are examining seems to only intensify with affluence so that the offspring of the successful brain surgeon and defence lawyer are likely to eventually air the most poignant stories of emotional mistreatment.   

Happily, neglectful mothers like Laura and Josie optimistically maintain that money can sometimes do a great deal to alleviate the pain experienced by what was lacking in the past.   They both agree that parents who courageously shoulder their guilt and do their best to atone for it with expensive meals out for the whole family and Ipads for the grandchildren, may well find the accusations of past misery and neglect diminish somewhat – for a while at least.   And should mortified parents be in a position to provide it, large sums towards smarter homes in more upmarket suburbs might also work wonders with some complainants.

 Katie had tales to tell that supported the spectre of Elder Abuse but was definitely of the opinion that those not in a position to finance the wants and whims of middle-aged malcontents were ultimately better off.  I was personally relieved to hear that because we were definitely a family that didn’t have money to burn all those years ago, as were most of the families around us.  Lack of excess finance was happily the case back in the Bad Old Days when parents beat their children without thought thus laying the foundations that ensured they would undoubtedly grow up destined to over-indulge the next generation. Where does the ultimate responsibility actually lie I now wonder?   And do we always need a poet to explain it to us?