Childhood dangers: then and now

We said a bizarre prayer asking Our Lady to pray for us as we rolled around in pain, “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears”. Nuns and brothers would whack us with the cane for various imagined misdemeanours. We would compare our beaten hands and show our scars. Maybe we thought that was the way life was meant to be, martyred and copiously bleeding. Meanwhile in state schools children heard about explorers like Cook hacked to death by barbarous savages.

Today the streets are full of danger, as any decent parent knows. Every man is a suspected child molester. I said “Hi” to a child in the street next to mine and before he could reply his mother yelled “John! I told you NOT to speak to strange men!” And so we get the helicopter parents who hover around their little darlings. At private schools near me, parents queue up in their massive four-wheel drives to pick up their precious Samantha and Jared. On the weekend, parents take the children to football or netball matches halfway across our capital cities. They are big cities, and the drive can take an hour or more.

Some parents spend the afternoon in the pub or club. I spoke to one man whose father locked all the children out of the house when he went to work at 7am. He took better care of the greyhounds than he did of his own children. Some parents would make anyone wonder about humanity. Many dads are so busy driving to and from work or attending meetings that they don’t get around to showing boys how to use tools safely. And mums - are they busy balancing work, household chores, supervising the children, let alone keeping a partner happy? Don’t even ask!

And we hear of parents who want to keep the child indoors. The child returns from school, at which teachers are scared to touch any child for fear of accusation (I do not mean to make light of actual sexual abuse, which is a serious matter). The carer parent (possibly a mother) sets the child down with his or her afternoon tea and the child dawdles through some homework before looking at YouTube or Googling the name of the starlet they heard about at lunch.

And so Jamie or Melissa learn all about the latest doings of “love rat” Tattooed Mick, or the escapade of Billy Joe in yet another nightclub. The child may be technically safe while someone attends a late meeting or cooks up a gourmet meal, but children might be safer playing on the footpath than leering at some lurid photos taken in a love nest in the Caribbean; or talking to unsavoury people in another country who are pretending to be interested in their problems. There are some scary people out there preying on children.

And all the time we parents are tortured by guilt. We are not good mothers; or we are neglectful fathers.

It’s interesting that when I ask women what’s the worst thing I can call them, the answer is usually a bad mother or sometimes a slut. For men it’s “wuss” or “poofter”. The media always need new villains and victims. A “bad mother” will do nicely as a villain; or maybe a father who hit his child. We can’t seem to distinguish any more between a careful slap and wholesale beating. Will parents never again be able to give a child a considered physical punishment?

I recall my mum saying that when children were raised in houses which had fires, the well-tried remedy was to make sure that each child got a small burn so that it learnt very quickly what fire was. Imagine anyone even saying that today! Nobody is free from the pious accusations that the media bring against bad parents. As if they really cared!

So where do parents turn today to find out what their parents taught them - how to raise children safely? There are best-selling books on how to raise boys. A friend’s son found such a book and the boy said indignantly “What’s this doing in the house? Doesn’t she know how to raise children?” And we have Brat Camp TV shows and Nanny who knows best. Back to the media again.  Are we seriously going to raise our children by the crackpot ideas we find in  the media? Far better to lean on the wisdom of earlier generations, surely.

And you know, children grow up somehow. I’ve seen them playing much the same games in Brazil and France and Germany. Usually the boys run around and yell while the girls sit down and have in-depth conversations, but children come in all shapes and types. I’ve spoken to children in poorer countries like Peru who get about two hours of schooling a day and spend the rest of the day working. Some children are still exploited by parents for gain.

The miracle is that so many children manage to laugh, have fun and grow up. And then they can annoy the hell out of us poor old parents. “Oh God, dad, you’re not going to put THAT on!”

We can’t keep our children under glass. All we can do is try to protect them from some of the nasties. The rest is up to fate.