Take it easy with your children

My daughter and our neighbour’s child, a year younger than her, are playing together. Within a few minutes, a fight has broken out over a toy one refuses to share or something the other has said that has caused serious offence.

“I’m not your friend,” says my daughter and turns away. Her friend, meanwhile, is already walking towards the door in what is sure to be the first of many exits from our house in a state of intense indignation.

I watch them, bemused, too used to this routine to make any efforts at reconciling the two warring sides. I know that in a matter of an hour, they will be back playing (and squabbling) together.

It suddenly occurs to me that in children’s fights we see a reflection of true human nature: selfish, belligerent and quick to take offence (and give it). It’s obvious that we are programmed to be mean, grasping creatures — that being caring, generous and willing to share our goodies doesn’t come naturally to us.

Is it any surprise, then, that so many wars have been fought throughout human history over scarce resources and imagined slights?

That we have lived amicably at all must have something to do with upbringing, with learning to hide those nasty feelings and creating a better nature out of nothing at all, because please don’t try to convince me these kids have a single unselfish bone in their bodies.

What puzzles me is how much of this learning needs to be given to them in bite-sized portions at the mother’s knee and how much comes through observation. I am not a huge fan of sitting kids down and teaching them salutary life lessons, having always been deeply suspicious of people who say “My father always told me (insert important life lesson)…” I don’t see how you could possibly remember, and I don’t think you would have paid enough attention anyway.

At the same time, it surely won’t do to just sit back and trust their powers of observation and your own fallible self as a model. I may have a hundred incurable bad habits, but surely I can make a push to ensure my daughter doesn’t emulate them?

There has to be a middle ground between being preachy and being the kind of cool parent who thinks children need to be ‘self-guided’.

I have discovered that talking about right and wrong is best done casually and in context. Introduce topic, talk about it for a minute and step back. Give the child time to think about it and digest it.

Uncomfortable and often unanswerable questions of a moral nature may follow, but I find this approach much easier to handle than making heavy weather of teaching the child that it’s NOT nice to say ‘I’m not your friend’ ten times a day to a person she continues to spend the better part of her day with.