The smack of firm government
Piers Paul Read
A GOOD ENOUGH PARENT: THE GUIDE TO BRINGING UP YOUR CHILD by Bruno Bettelheim Thames & Hudson, £12.95 Bruno Bettelheim, together with Erik H. Erikson, is rightly counted among the greatest child psychologists to have arisen since child psychology was invented. To the sceptical layman his greatest virtue is that his feet never leave the ground. On the whole he avoids jargon; the subcon- scious he refers to is one we can all accept; there are no grotesque presumptions of a Freudian, Jungian or Kleinian kind.
Like all professionals offering advice on the raising of children, he is faced with an immediate dilemma. If he is too forthright in laying down rules then he runs the risk of undermining the confidence of parents in their own instincts; yet if he fails to point out the common errors he has noticed in the course of his professional life, then children will continue to suffer from gen- eration to generation.
This book is a compromise. It is pre- sented by the publishers as The Guide to Bringing Up Your Child'; but Dr Bettel- heim himself is more cautious, saying that he only wants to
encourage parents to do their own thinking about some aspects of child rearing in the hope that these examples will help them to find good solutions to whatever problems they may encounter in raising their child.
Nurturing is an art, not a science, but no one should aspire to genius. Being good enough is good enough: hence the title of the book.
Without trying to systematise Dr Bet- telheim's thinking, since he never attempts to do this himself, it is possible to present some of his insights in an ordered form. His most important and fundamental point is that parents should beware of using their children for their own psychic purposes — projecting on to them their own values and ambitions, perhaps urging them to succeed where they failed in fields quite unsuited to the child's particular talents. They should also respect children's priorities: playing for them is quite as important as working for their parents. A child, he insists, must always be regarded as an autonomous personality, and the parents' most impor-
tant task and obligation is to create in their child the inner conditions for his psycholo- gical and emotional well-being — and this not for the moment but for all his future'.
Parents should never underestimate the role they play in developing this sense of well-being. 'It is sad', writes Bettelheim, `when parents fail to realise how terribly important they are to their children'; first in helping 'an infant to develop a healthy and positive attitude towards his body: to make him feel good about what it can do, and at the same time conveying, to him how much they love and value it, so that the child will do the same'; and later in presenting a consistent system of values which they adhere to themselves.
He thinks it particularly important that parents should be honest and authentic with their children — even at an early age. A child can sense, for example, when 'you need your sleep' means 'we want you out of the way': it is better, says Bettelheim, to explain to the child that Mummy and Daddy want supper on their own. They should also practise what they preach: children will see through their parents' posturing, and sniff out their inconsisten- cies, becoming confused by contradictory signals from, say, the lecherous and greedy Christian or the Labour voter who sends his children to private schools (my exam- ples, not his).
What makes things difficult for the parent is that the damage he does to his child's sense of security and self-esteem is invariably unconscious: thus Dr Bettel- heim's message to parents is, in essence, `know thyself', and get to know thyself by empathising with your own children, re- membering how you felt at that stage in life. This leads to a somewhat indulgent attitude towards discipline. He is against punishment because any punishment, however justified in our eyes and even those of our child, interferes with our main goals, namely that our child should love us, accept our values, and want to live what we consider a moral life.
Instead of smacking a child, or even rebuking him, he would have us tell him that we are sure that if he had known he was in the wrong he would not have done it. This increases 'his self-respect and his love for us, and all this entails'.
Not only does this advice conjure up horribly cloying conversations between pa- rents and their naughty children, it also seems to presume that there is no such thing as original sin — that children are never naughty, knowing that they are naughty, perhaps to test their parents' confidence in the rules they have made. Moreover since Bettelheim rarely makes clear the age of the child to which his advice pertains, it is difficult to judge upon the practicality of his advice. One might accept that 'during the period of adolescent
turmoil, it is best when parents can accept their adolescent's odd, antagonistic or otherwise unpleasant behaviour without approving it'; but when one finds, for example, a six-year-old daughter in a towering rage, flogging her eight-year-old brother with a skipping rope, it seems absurd to consider, as Bettelheim suggests, `the safeguards we are entitled to before we can be judged by society' (legal repre- sentation, trial by jury, etc). A quick smack seems the best solution.
One should bear in mind, perhaps, that while Dr Bettelheim was born and trained in Vienna, and was formed by European institutions (including Dachau and Buchenwald), his clinical experience has been largely in the United States. For this reason we can forgive him the odd horrible phrase like `meaningful as part of a rela- tionship' and the cautious, almost apologe- tic, way in which he urges parents to put their children's interests before their own. It is, after all, partly the spread of psychoanalytic concepts of individual fulfil- ment (`individuation') among analysis- orientated Americans, which has led to an egocentric attitude towards breeding. It would have been deemed evil, for exam- ple, in less enlightened times for educated women deliberately to conceive a child outside marriage. Now it is almost fashion- able. In the same way divorce was ab- horred because it destroyed what was necessary for the successful nurturing of the child. The importance of Dr Bet- telheim's book is that it reteaches us many truths about raising a family which were common sense before.
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