How to be good

In the poem The Good Little Girl from A.A. Milne’s Now We Are Six (1927), Jane takes the mickey out of her parents. Whether she is coming back from a party, or tea, or a week at the sea, her parents routinely greet her with the question, “Have you been a good girl?” Like Alice, half a century before, she sees through adults and their foibles.

A parent cannot make a child do anything. A parent can, however, stimulate positive behaviour through love, encouragement and respect

So, when Jane comes back from the zoo and they quiz her yet again, she asks the reader: “Well, what did they think that I went there to do?/And why should I want to be bad at the zoo?/And should I be likely to say if I had?” Subterfuge is, evidently, not the prerogative of the adult.

As psychologist Rudolf Dreikurs makes clear in his classic text Children: The Challenge (1964), “children tend to outsmart us on many occasions”. Yet adulthood is so often equated with the absence of childlike qualities that childhood itself is belittled in the process.

The adjective ‘childish’, in turn, has negative connotations and no adult (or child, for that matter) appreciates being thus called. This seems to imply, therefore, that to become an adult, an individual must disown all that is childlike.

According to Peter Holindale, “this practice of devaluing childhood …when we are really protecting our concept of adulthood (and exposing our unease about it) is extremely common”.

People who are raising children may inadvertently tackle the challenge of parenting in ways which serve to protect their faltering sense of self. It requires a certain amount of humility for a parent to realise that they are not superior to the child they are raising.

“Adults,” Dreikurs points out, “are usually deeply disturbed at the notion that children are their social equals”. He believes this discomfort stems from, first of all, the hierarchical set-up of society.

In spite of the fact that social divisions are not as marked as before, adults are influenced by a cultural heritage according to which “people are inferior or superior according to their birth, their money, their sex or colour, or their age and wisdom”.

Secondly, adults – like children – experience feelings of insecurity. Parents doubt their ability to succeed as parents. “We (the adults) may have a hidden doubt,” Dreikurs explains, “of our own worth (and) a child, in his or her helplessness, makes a delightful object of comparison by which we can feel grand”.

Take the case of a child who makes an effort to do the bed every morning. If, once the child is done, the parent – with an evident flurry of drama – feels the need to add the finishing touches, like tucking in the sheet tighter or re-fluffing the pillows, it is as if the parent has said, “What you can do, I can do better”. Even if the parent has verbally commended the effort, the non-verbal message is one of discouragement.

One common area in which the parent tries to show they are superior is the moment they fall into the trap of the power struggle. The parent mistakenly assumes that parenting may take on the form of an autocratic set-up where the older member can act like a wilful dictator and expect everyone else to heed their orders. The skilled parent, however, is the one who stimulates – rather than forces – the child to comply with the ground rules at home.

According to educational psychologist Jane Nelsen, author of Positive Discipline, “children who are into power are usually involved with an adult who is into power”. It is up to the adult to create the conditions required to defuse this competitive atmosphere and eliminate, therefore, that parent and child are routinely locked up in one power struggle or other.

The parent must, first of all, make the decision to withdraw immediately from a power struggle. This may require a radical rethinking of what parental skills are all about. The parent may need to consider the following two questions:

Do I feel empowered when my child (temporarily) admits defeat and gives in? Or do I, perhaps, find myself caught up in a crescendo of rage as my child and I exchange heated words and get practically nowhere in the process? Do I shout, bang a fist on the table or slam doors?

Consider, then, a different case scenario. The parent – whose duty it is to represent social order on the domestic front – makes a conscious decision to withdraw from a situation of conflict.

The child is left standing there, mulling over the cool and collected manner in which the parent has retreated from what could have turned into an undesirable exchange.

“Since children have a deep desire to belong,” Dreikurs concludes, “they find an empty battlefield most disconcerting. It doesn’t take them long to modify their behaviour to avoid the useless exhibition of ill temper.”

“Aħjar kelma nieqsa milli kelma zejda” is the better policy when a parent-child relationship is bogged down by a struggle for power. It is more profitable to hold one’s breath and wait for the right moment to thrash out a problem.

A parent cannot make a child do anything. A parent can, however, stimulate positive behaviour through love, encouragement and respect. Demanding ‘goodness’ simply isn’t good enough.