Mum and dad - now with sticky marshmallow centre

Today smacking: Spineless parents and their rambunctious spawn

This subject is doing the rounds on reality TV with Supernanny and her ilk, and with good reason: quite possibly the single most annoying thing in the world since Nigerian spam e-mail is when you see children, in public, out of control, whilst under the watchful eye of parents whose disciplinary skills, quite frankly, suck donkey balls.

I’ll start by flagrantly NOT providing a caveat for not having kids of my own. For this paragraph would be the part where lesser folk say, “I don’t have children, so I don’t necessarily understand what it’s like to raise them, however… ” but those people evidently have a sludge of melted marshmallow where a spine should be, and are so afraid of their own opinions that I can only conclude they believe that forming a coherent thought might cause gas to burst out of their ears, react with the opinions of others and cause an A-bomb OF THOUGHT. I will make no such apology. I may not have kids, but I have to exist in the same public spaces as them, and they and their parents have no more right to fuck up the surrounding environs than I do.

I referred to Supernanny above. Her disciplinary premise is simple. Is the child acting up? Give them a warning and a clear threat of punishment. The child acts up again? PUNISH. No ifs or buts, and under no circumstances will there be any bargaining with the child.

I have a lot of sympathy for parents, but not enough that I will go easy on them when they make paltry attempt to keep their kids under control. I do not understand this phenomenon I see of parents who have absolutely no idea how to discipline their children. Child-rearing, much to my disappointment, does not come with its own manual, but surely this one is a no-brainer: tell your kids what they have to do, and if they don’t do it, punish the fuckers. How else they gonna learn?

I was in a shop recently which is kind of like a department store except that when you want to buy something, you have to order it, take a number, and then wait among the grimy masses until some pimply kid with dead eyes retrieves it from the warehouse for you. I purchased what I needed, took my number, and proceeded to wait, but this did not turn out to be the kind of calm, glazed-expression waiting one usually accomplishes in this store. Oh, no. For in the queue, ready to raise hell, was a smaller-than-knee-high little spawn of Mussolini and her painfully Incompetent Mother.

Little Mussolini was named Zoe. How do I know that? Oh, only because, every 2.4 seconds, Incompetent Mum would call her sugar-addled, hyperactive child’s name in a futile attempt to grab her attention and stop little Zoe from doing whatever she was doing. ‘Whatever she was doing’ would be any number of the following at once:

• running between the legs of people standing in line, causing them to almost trip over her;
• grabbing fistfuls of brochures from the store’s counters and sticking them in her mouth before returning them to their receptacles;
• climbing on all furniture including the cash desk and, once there, leaning over the desk and pressing buttons on the keyboard while the stunned cashier looked on, speechless; and,
• crawling around on the grubby floor even though she could clearly walk, run, and competently organise a fascist regime in Italy.

This was all to the tune of, “Zoe, come here; Zoe, stop that; Zoe, come to mummy; Zoe, be a good girl,” and on and on. Then when these simple orders, delivered in a weak and un-commanding tone, failed to control little Zoe-lini (and if there’s anything every mother should master, it’s the “COME BACK HERE BEFORE YOU GET YOUR ARSE SMACKED SO HARD CHILDREN WILL FEEL ITS EFFECTS ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE FIFTH CENTURY” tone), Incompetent Mum then began with the threats.

What did I say above? That you have to give a child a warning and a threat of punishment if you want them to behave? Yeah, well that only works if you intend actually to deliver the punishment. So it went, “Zoe, come to mummy or you’ll not get your toy.”

Ahem; mum was actually in the process of buying the toy for little Zoe-lini as she said this. Do you think Zoe’s going to co-operate when this first threat is blatantly empty? No; this served to show the child that she could go on about her merry way ruining things which were not hers. So then it was, “Zoe, behave yourself or we’ll not go to the fair.”

Does Zoe think this threat is going to hold up? Certainly not, when mum has just picked up the toy from the counter and given it to her. So what a surprise when Zoe doesn’t even turn her head to listen as mum says, “Zoe, stop running around or we’ll not get any fairy floss.”

Yeah, uh, did you not just say if she continued to be a little streak of shit she wouldn’t be going to the fair?

Goddammit, Incompetent Mum, millions of Europeans are going to be persecuted and tortured because of your complete and utter failure to show a child the very simple and essential concept of delayed gratification. Zoe-lini will grow up to be one of those fucking horrible people who have a sense of personal entitlement so large they end up, at 15 years old, defacing MySpace with eye-gougingly horrible emo poetry; at 25 years old, marrying some testicle-free schmuck with a fat wallet and proceeding to make his life miserable; then she will have her own kids, utterly fail to discipline them, and ruin another generation.

“Really, Zoe-lini was fucked from the start,” I want her eventual epitaph to say (presumably, her own offspring kill her, motivated by their own un-sated and overblown senses of entitlement), “having never learned how to be okay with not always getting her own way.”

Let me make this clear: punishing a child for bad behaviour does not indicate bad parenting. It does not indicate a parent who does not love their children. The child will not think mummy or daddy doesn’t love them. The child doesn’t even know what this ‘love’ thing is. Kids under the age of six are hard pressed enough to see their parents as much more than taxi and food services, let alone individual beings worthy or unworthy of affection. If you teach them that the level of punishment for bad behaviours is tantamount to how much love is in the relationship, guess who is to blame when they start emotionally manipulating you later on?

Punishing a child for bad behaviour in fact indicates actually having a pair of balls instead of two dried prunes between the legs. Not only that, it indicates having the wisdom and insight to know that nobody, in the history of the world, ever benefited from getting their own way all the time and never being reprimanded when they were being an utter twat.

How do we learn not to be complete dicks? By having it very clearly indicated to us that we are, in fact, being complete dicks and that we cannot continue being complete dicks! Think of the most selfish, socially retarded person you know; you can bet your arse there was some soft parenting going on back in their history of sticky fingers and eight more rides on the Ferris wheel and all the McDonald’s they could eat. Soft parenting is not loving and sympathetic; it’s cruel and inconsiderate. An adult who does not understand generosity, respect, delay of gratification, working for a reward, self-discipline, or that life just isn’t fair sometimes, will be an adult ill-equipped to deal with their peers and the world at large. Imagine how awkward it feels to realise you’ve been the coddled kid playing in the sandpit while all your well-adjusted friends have grown up and figured out how to, you know, Deal With Shit. How angry are you going to be at your parents then?

Kids. Must. Do. As. Parents. Instruct. Okay? They can scream and kick and yell profanities all they want, but if you’re the parent, you’re God as far as a child is concerned, and your word is law. So stick the fuck to that law which is your word, and follow through on the punishments. Maybe the next generation will, despite the prevailing odds, be normal human beings after all.