Is that good or bad for kids? No.

By alice | November 24, 2009

There’s a common error about parenting (well, most things in life really) which states that each action is either Good or Bad, and we should stick to good ones and avoid badness like the plague. The problem with this dichotomy is, it fails to take into account what happens if you do nothing in the same situation.

Sometimes nothing is a disaster, other times it’s fine. But everyone knows it’s more important to do A LOT than to avoid making mistakes, (sticking to definitely Good things only), if you want to learn- and most of us start out as parents highly ignorant of what the job is about.

Q. Should I get a tape-recorded “How to be a baby brain surgeon” course and play it to my foetus throughout gestation?

If you’re not sure whether this is good or bad, doing nothing instead would be perfectly fine.

Q. Should I hit my kid if he smashes up the china dinner service?

Whereas if you stand there and let him destroy Granny’s Wedgewood, that’s definitely an irresponsible thing to do.

In the second example, action is imperative: but either whacking your kid or doing nothing are undesirable: there are better options which would involve communicating responsible messages, demonstrating responsible parenting, taking charge of the situation, and teaching your kid to be a nice person, which don’t involve bashing them. I used to do this mostly by letting my kids know if an action was antisocial- “we don’t do that” (sometimes explaining why, sometimes not, sometimes just letting them know that people don’t like it). This method works when kids respect you and want to be good group-members, because then they have a desire to please you which is about love, respect and all that stuff. It also works when they want to be members of society, which they naturally do unless they have been messed around in that area already, but enough of that (other than to note that one reason why there’s no one-size-fits-all correct response to every child in every situation is, some of us have absorbed more damaging messages already than others).

Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say: the newspapers will always ask things like “Do parents’ white lies hurt children? Yes or no?” as if it’s a good/bad issue, but it’s not. The right answer to every yes/no parenting question is always, Well, what’s the alternative in this case? And it’s OK to pick the lesser of two evils at any time, because you can always deal with the results later and put some effort into improving your ideas before the same thing happens again. That’s the kind of flexibility you need in the real world, often called “good enough parenting”, the only way to be realistic and therefore actually deal with real issues. Hard-liners rarely ever keep learning: they think they found all the answers already. There is no single Correct Way Forward.

And as in parenting, so in the rest of life, of course.

1 Comment »

One Response to “Is that good or bad for kids? No.”

Shefaly Says:
November 26th, 2009 at 2:05 am

Last week, the child of someone I know lied for the first time but quickly admitted it. It led to a lot of non-shouty, calm conversations with him about consequences for others and for him, of course, but parents and other adults in his life were very distressed by the occurrence. I’d say that he admitted shows he is fine and understands basic but important things but I can’t quite figure what to make of the adults’ upset. Adults do project themselves rather a lot on children’s behaviour…

PS: the child is five.