There are many child rearing conventions that you breach at your social peril but which also do not withstand one minute’s scrutiny. High on the list is what I call performative discipline. A child of two is not a creature of reason and yet when in the playground it floors another youngster running pell-mell for the slide we have to go through the charade of explaining to it why this is unkind and wrong. Even to the extent of getting it to lisp 'sorry' the meaning of which is as significant to it as 'blancmange'.
This is not done for your child’s benefit nor even that of the other child. Instead this is for the consumption of the other child’s parents. And yet somehow when a child of 10 behaves in a completely horrid way how rarely does one see such public admonitions from the parent. The truth is when a child of 2 is a terror that is because they are a child of 2 and prince or pauper nothing will change that. When they are 10 they are no longer doli incapax and capable, in England at least, of forming a criminal intent.
1, 2 add a few and suddenly the bad behaviour has a cause and that cause is you, or at least that is the assumption when children’s behaviour tips over the edge of criminality. In the early years of my day job as a barrister I spent a lot of time practising in the Youth Court. The Youth Court is one of the private/secret places in society. You’re not allowed in unless you’re a party to the case. The perfectly sensible rationale is that when children and the Criminal Justice System come into contact this should not be done in the glare of the public eye.
However if you subscribe to the maxim that it takes a village to raise a child you might say that it absolutely should take place in the public eye so that the local community can bear witness to what has gone wrong with the child and the families involved. And a child committing a criminal offence must, we assume, come from a family gone wrong.
Jihadi brides and unfathomable child killing has been much in the press recently and reading articles about the children involved leads one to wonder what was happening in their homes and upbringing that brought this about. But what if the answer is not drink, drugs, domestic violence and family strife. What if within those homes are loving and attentive parents asking themselves precisely the same questions but with an urgency we could never imagine?
In one of my first posts I wrote about how the really interesting milestones of childhood almost never get written about or remarked upon. One of those was noticing the first time your child is naughty. Not when they were infuriating or maddening through unreasoning impulse but the first time they deliberately did something that they knew was forbidden, simply to vex and annoy.
There is the first glimmer of a child's agency that leads one day to a junior barrister mitigating on behalf of a mother being prosecuted for failing to ensure that her 15 year old, the size of a man, is attending school as required by law. It is bizarre that practice in the Youth Court is largely undertaken by the youngest and most junior barristers because it is there that the causes of criminality are most immediate and the prospects of doing something about it are the highest.
When children commit crime through nurture it is incumbent upon all of us as members of society to take account and step in to lend assistance to ensure that child is protected. If children are committing crime through nature, something many deny exists with the idea of being ‘born bad’ treated as anathema, that needs to be established at the earliest possible juncture to ensure that other children are protected.
In the mean time I recommend an indifferent disregard to all anti-social behaviour by your toddler in the playground and if other parents complain remind them that the Good Book enjoins us to forgive them for they know not what they do.
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