RULE 14

Anything extreme is almost certainly wrong

I know parents who never let their kids watch any TV. Not many of them, mind you. And I know parents who feed their children an exclusively vegan diet. And parents who dress their children entirely in pink. I even know parents who make their children get up at 6.30 every morning, even in the holidays – which may be normal in some parts of the world, but certainly not here in the UK.

Aha! That’s the crux of it, you see. None of these things may be wrong in themselves, but it just doesn’t work to bring your children up in ways that are too much at odds with their peers. It messes with their sense of identity, and makes it even harder than it already is for them to feel comfortable in their own skin.

Personally, I think a world where no children ever watched any TV (didn’t we have one of those once?) might be a very good thing. But in a world where all their friends watch TV, it’s just not a viable restriction to inflict on your own children. Sure, you can impose more restrictions than many of their friends’ parents do. But don’t stop them altogether. Children want to fit in, and anything that makes them stand out as different will be tough for them to cope with.

When it comes to most aspects of bringing up kids – bedtimes, pocket money, TV, music practice, dress style, food and all the rest – there’s generally a range of behaviour within your social group. If your attitude and house rules fall anywhere within that range, you’re doing fine. But you want to think very carefully before you step outside the ‘normal’ range for where you live and who your kids hang out with. Move to one end of the range if you wish, by all means, but stay inside those invisible boundaries.

I used to know a child whose parents smacked her with a ruler whenever she misbehaved. They came from a different country, where such things were normal, but this poor girl didn’t have any classmates or friends whose parents punished their children in this way. She didn’t know what to think, and indeed she went through a long stage of being physically aggressive towards other children who didn’t do as she wanted. Her parents’ attitudes weren’t being reinforced among her teachers or her peers, so she was just plain confused.

One of my children goes to a school where we have to supply a packed lunch every day. Lots of his friends have chocolates, crisps, biscuits, cakes in their lunchbox. I know perfectly well that if we put the same things in my son’s lunch, that’s all he’d eat. So we like to keep it healthy. But he does get plenty of borderline healthy foods, and the occasional treat, because it just isn’t fair otherwise.^*

It’s all relative, that’s what I’m saying. Most parenting attitudes aren’t simply right or wrong. A few obvious things are wrong, but sometimes what’s right in one time or place may be wrong in another. You have to trim your style to suit your child’s world – and anything extreme is generally wrong simply because it’s extreme, regardless of its rightness in other respects.