Disobedience, discipline, and other foreign words

I took part yesterday in a debate about parenting. My counterpart was about as far on the other end of the spectrum from me in her opinions as is possible, so it was interesting, sometimes unsettling and also quite limited. It turns out that when two views are so far apart, there isn’t a lot of space for nuance or even clarity. Anyway, at the end, the other guest said she felt we were speaking different languages, which was a fair assessment of the dialogue.

It’s been a long time since I have been in a conversation where the adult’s absolute right to dominate the child has been advocated so passionately. I’m sure you’ve come across this. Adults know best and children must comply. Forget decades of psychology and neuroscience—giving space for a child’s voice and feelings is soft, and it creates unruly, lazy and entitled children.

Back home, in the evening, I shared some of the things I had been asked with my children. What do I do when they are disobedient? How do I discipline them? How will they ever hold down a job if they can’t do as they’re told? They found the questions amusing and a bit shocking. Thankfully, a different language.

But, there is always nuance if you look hard enough. And so perhaps the most interesting part of all of this came from the moderator’s reflections and from conversations afterwards with a couple of the production crew. Each was trying to figure out where they were on the parenting spectrum between myself and the other guest, and there seemed to be a general consensus that parenting in a more collaborative way certainly felt best and was what they strived for, but that the practical pressures of modern life got in the way. They didn’t want to exercise power but they frequently found themselves in situations where there seemed to be no other option but to demand compliance. Whether it was about getting a child to school so that they could get to work on time, or needing to buy food before the shops closed. One parent felt caught between encouraging their child to advocate for themselves and the potential consequences they would receive from the school. I was asked how a teacher would cope with 34 young pupils if they don’t know how to be quiet and follow instructions.

How interesting that the other guest’s opinions might sound a bit extreme to many people. And yet, these are the very ones that permeate modern life. If children don’t do as they are told, we can’t do the shopping or get to work on time, other people will disapprove of us, and classrooms will be chaos. And all of that is, in some way, true. We have built a society that depends on children’s compliance in order to function. We’ve shoehorned them as best we can into our adult world and it’s all quite uncomfortable. And because we generally don’t recognise the systemic nature of it all, everyone ends up either pointing fingers or feeling painfully inadequate, when everyone is just doing the best they can within ill-fitting structures.

I guess the place that this unwieldy debate kept coming back to was whether we can be in an equitable relationship with our children or whether we must wield power over them. If you have no trust at all in children, then power-over is really the only way to go—because if you don’t take control, everything might fall to pieces. I’m reminded of an interview with Henry Redhead who spoke about his grandfather A.S.Neill, the founder of the first democratic school in the UK, Summerhill, where children live with an amount of freedom that many people would find terrifying. This quote of his grandfather came up in the interview, “We have been called brave, but it did not require courage. All it required was what we had. A complete belief in the child as a good, not an evil being for almost 40 years. This belief in the goodness of the child has never wavered. It rather has become a final faith.”

But, even when you have that faith in your own child, it is easily misplaced in a society where parents are encouraged to short-cut the relationship and insist on compliance, partly because there is just no time to do otherwise. So we’re encouraged to mistrust children and to believe the narrative that children often act out of a sort of wilful malice, so need to be corrected rather than understood, because that is far more convenient in a fast world.

There are so many things to say about all this, but perhaps the one that feels the most poignant is that by pushing children through life according to our own rigid designs, we all just miss so much. Like most families, we have had our own big share of messiness, frustration and challenging times—we are well-practised in the art of making up. Often, in those moments, I wished that people would just bend to my will. But although compliance may give short-term rewards, that’s all it does. It does nothing for self-discovery, for developing values or for deeper connection. It bypasses all the complicated stuff, all the bits that make us human and make ours and our children’s lives richer. What a terrible shame to rush through that.

I am spending the evening with two of my children. My daughter has decided to learn the electric guitar and is lounging on the sofa with my son’s guitar, teaching herself chords from an app. Her brother disappears then comes back with his tin whistle, which he taught himself during lockdown, along with a harmonica that he tosses over to me. He leads us in a few tunes and we all make a terrible noise together.

We’re fortunately interrupted by my older son calling from Japan. My daughter heads out to feed the neighbour’s cat whilst we chat. She is currently in charge of two pets on the street, and more work is rolling in for the holiday season—this will almost certainly translate into concert tickets. On the phone, my son tells me about his day—he managed to navigate a government office without resorting to Google translate which I am impressed by. He also wants to share a Catalan folk song with me that he has just discovered. Yesterday, he read me a Rudyard Kipling poem. These calls are often surprising.

My other son needs to pack because he is going camping tomorrow with a big group of friends from sixth form college as an end–of-exams celebration. He is thinking about what he needs to get from the supermarket and it’s really just beers and marshmallows. He has just earned some money and we talk about how quickly it can go when you have an interesting social life. He finds a quote by Karl Marx that seems to justify his diminishing funds, and the need to spend on beer and marshmallows, “The less you have, the more you are, the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life…”. Do I want him to express his own life? Of course. Ingenious.

Each of these three people is a marvel to me. What would I do if they were disobedient? What on earth does that even mean? I can’t imagine how it would feel to want to wield power over them. Would they even be the people they are now? Maybe they would but I certainly don’t think it would feel this good.

And there is perhaps something to guide us. When our intuition leads us to partnership with our children, but practical and social realities pressure us into coercion, maybe we can at least notice the dissonance and recognise where the systems fail us all. Maybe we have the possibility of refusing to comply, maybe all we can do is be compassionate to ourselves and our children in that moment, or maybe just in the noticing of it, some new little path through might open up. One that has more faith in children and that speaks a different language.