The Hand That Rocks The Cradle..

“...My sister Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up "by hand". Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand....” (Charles Dickens, `Great Expectations')

The true meaning of being ‘brought up by hand’ is quite unlike Dickens’ protagonist, Pip’s interpretation of it. I would, however,  much rather use his adaptation than the dictionary version that says it was an expression used to denote that an infant was spoon fed rather than breast fed or wet-nurse fed.

All through our childhood and that of the generation following ours, bringing up ‘by hand’ was quite the rule rather than the exception. Especially, for parents of unruly kids, a quick whack was an on-the–spot solution to enforce instant discipline and order in a potentially chaotic situation. Children learnt to respect, fear and instantly obey that hand, neither questioning it nor doubting the love of the person who dealt it.

As adults, they remember that hand with warmth, and recount the number of times they had encountered it, with affectionate humor. In retrospect, most of us do not harbor dark thoughts or analyze the psychosis of our parents. We have, as grown-ups, experienced the quick flash of anger or fear that provokes such punishment and know now, the aggravation that leads to it.

One of my cousins, seventy now, was recalling with amusement, her mother’s ‘cane’ which came down rather hard on the backs of her knees, and which naturally lost its potency by the time her third sibling was whacked, with tired arms, for the same offence. She was laughing heartily in the narration of it and lamenting the fact that, being the first born, she always had to bear the brunt of her mother’s annoyance.

Another good friend describes, with nary a grimace or scowl, his mother’s manner of enforcing law and order in the house. She kept a notebook, he said, where she would note the misconduct of each child – she had four of them. Come the week-end, the children had to fall in line. The offences were then read aloud and a cane dealt out the punishment in keeping with the misdemeanor.

Present day parents would be self-righteously shocked and offended at such a ‘crime’. Today it is a crime to enforce ‘corporal’ punishment on your child, which includes the occasional slap and is referred to as ‘Child Abuse’. Where and how did the change come about? When did it turn into a ‘crime’ to punish your child for whom you would, without second thought, give your life if the occasion demanded it?

Let me hasten to add that I am NOT referring to any form of excess that would border on `child abuse'.

In truth, when your child reminds you of the occasion on which you slapped him or whacked him, don’t you feel that twinge of conscience, which makes you cringe in shame? There is an overwhelming guilt too at the thought of that cute little mite, your child, and how the hell could you have been so cruel as to ‘slap’ him? Your immediate reaction is to hug him and say sorry for what you did ‘eons’ ago, or so it seems. In the absence of annoyance, fear or anger, the deed seems unforgivable and you yearn to make amends for it. 

Would a law, making your action a crime, have prevented you from committing it? Your guess, herein, would be as good as mine.

Parents are now leaning over to the extreme opposite. They bend over backwards to please their children and will not hesitate to gloss over or ignore lapses in discipline or even crass disobedience. The child’s happiness, they say, is more important. It is difficult for a child to even discern the line that separates right from wrong, much less adhere to doing the right thing without parental support. Leaving a child with decisions he is not empowered to take is, in my opinion, the easy way out and which unfortunately, is the norm, most of the time, among parents today. 

It is so much more difficult to feed a reluctant child with something healthy and child friendly, implement discipline or convince him to make the right choice. Parents themselves have to be regimented in order to impose discipline on their child. Moreover, it is definitely time consuming and mentally exhausting and requires tremendous mental and physical strength to bring up a child in, what one would construe, the right manner. Most parents today neither have the time nor the inclination to do it. The onus therefore rests on the shoulders of either grandparents or the teachers at school.

Grandparents are pre-warned to dump their systems of raising children and apply modern methods instead. Parents even cite various examples of lapses and mistakes made while they themselves were being raised, to prove their point. It is indeed surprising that our generation neither dared nor felt the need to point out their mistakes, to our parents. Parents since the beginning of mankind were never perfect and never claim to be so. Why then the post-mortem on how they raised their children and how imperfect they were? There are no guarantees attached to any means of raising kids. What would be ideal for one child might be disastrous for another resulting in serious repercussions. Passing judgment on a mode of parenting as an after-thought would therefore be both unfair and fallacious.

Teachers have a different tale to tell. Parents speak disparagingly of a child’s teacher in his presence without dwelling on the fact that irresponsible verbalization could well undermine the authority of the teacher and make it nigh impossible for him/her to exact obedience from the child at school. Parents also go to great lengths to ensure that the demands of their wards be met in school as well. They don’t demur in using threats to make certain of this. 

One of Britain’s top super heads, Dr Rory Fox of Ryde Academy shows how discipline can be enforced even by sparing the rod.

Dr Fox covered every aspect of a child's education and introduced a strict regimen of rules and regulations to enforce discipline. However, he rues the part played by parents in reinforcing indiscipline in their children.

One of Dr Fox’s biggest problems was not the children, but their parents, many of whom considered themselves exempt from the rules.

That said...

Whatever be your methods of bringing up a child be sure of one thing, at some point or the other in life your child will sit in judgment over them. He/she will read you your rights and anything you said or did or did not  say might be held against you in the final analysis. 

Chill!

C’est la vie, folks!