From the sydney morning heraldHow to find the cherub in every bratApril 28, 2005
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Email to a friend Printer formatContemporary parents are dazed and confused, and their children are suffering, writes Miranda Devine.
It is clear from the extraordinary success of Channel Nine's Monday-night program Supernanny that Australian parents are suffering a crisis of confidence in their child-rearing skills.
And judging by a study released this week by the Australian Childhood Foundation, insecure mums and dads are crying out for guidance on how to control the brats who rule their lives. The study revealed that 38 per cent of parents surveyed say parenting does not come naturally and 63 per cent are "concerned about their level of confidence as parents".
Perhaps the trend of permissive parenting, launched by Dr Benjamin Spock in the 1950s and '60s as a reaction against the authoritarian child-rearing practices of the past, has gone too far, leaving a generation of laxly parented parents clueless about how to manage their own children and desperate for advice.
If you take the pathetic American families on Supernanny as an example, it seems modern parents are afraid to set any kind of rules for their children for fear of damaging their self-esteem and losing their love. So you have situations in which a 10-year-old flips the finger to his mother and tells her to "f--- off" , a four-year-old spits in his mother's face, children refuse to go to bed, eat their dinner or stop screaming and swearing at their parents, as happens every week on Supernanny, and the parents do nothing more than say, "That wasn't very nice".
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"Oh honey," says one mother when she finds her wild three-year-old son wandering around outside with a pair of lethal-looking secateurs.
In steps British "supernanny" Jo Frost, 34, whose seemingly magical ability to control the brats in these desperate families is really just old-fashioned discipline and common sense. She makes judgements about right and wrong. She uses such politically incorrect words as "naughty" and "discipline" and "tames" and "authority". Bad behaviour she deems "unasseptable", a mispronunciation that has become her trademark.
Her methods have been criticised by child psychologists who regard them as anti-child, brutalising, unnatural, psychologically destructive and eroding the dignity and autonomy of children. The Sydney University anthropologist of human development Stephen Juan has gone so far as to describe Frost as a "devil Mary Poppins". But then, you would expect the experts to disapprove. After all, they have replaced the mothers, grandmothers and neighbours of old as dispensers of child-rearing advice, and their theories are the reason a generation of parents don't trust their instincts.
But as most real-world parents will attest, children crave boundaries. The transformations worked by Frost in each show after a "healthy dose of discipline" are all the more remarkable when you see how happy and calm the children are after their autonomy and dignity have supposedly been stripped from them. Angry, out-of-control brats become adorable, smiling cherubs.
The Orm family's "trio of wild boys", Chandler, 8, Caden, 6, and Declan, 3, for instance, started out in a recent episode as aggressive, rude, angry and disrespectful. Chandler treated his mother with contempt, talking back and hissing at her under his breath. Her response was to plead, "Chandler, honey, don't yell at me, sweetheart", which made him more contemptuous.
"Please, please, please," she begged her children, watching helplessly as they smashed their toys and ran wild though the house.
"These children are ruling the roost," Frost tells the TV audience. "They do nothing but constantly snack through the day." Frost pointed out to the mother that all that snacking made the kids hyperactive and said that was why they wouldn't eat dinner. "Mum has to assert herself," Frost tells us. "She doesn't hold authority with her children … They don't look at her with any respect."
To the tearful mother she says: "You feel guilty if you have to discipline your children. You [fear] you won't be close if you put your foot down."
The poor exhausted mother cries: "I want to be supermum."
Another mother with a plumber husband who is rarely at home, a two-year-old who won't go to sleep at night and a tantrum-throwing six-year-old who thinks his parents are a joke is near breakdown. "I haven't a clue," she weeps. "It's a horrible feeling because I love my boys so much and I don't want to screw it up."
The nanny sets a routine for each family, with a timetable mapped out from morning to night. She sets up an area called a "naughty mat" or a "naughty room" where children are sent for time out if they misbehave, and she trains parents to nip bad behaviour calmly and firmly in the bud. Lo and behold, the children respond by controlling themselves. The two-year-old learns that screaming and getting out of bed will not be rewarded with cuddles on the couch at midnight. The six-year-old treats his parents with new respect.
It's a lesson the parents in this week's Australian Childhood Foundation survey may want to heed. Asked what strategies they used to teach children the difference between right and wrong, 98 per cent or more think it is about making children feel loved, spending time with them and setting a good example; 82 per cent favour rewarding good behaviour and 78 per cent reason with their children. All are admirable qualities, but pointless unless backed by firm discipline, something just half the parents employed.
Only 53 per cent of parents surveyed used Supernanny's favourite "time out" strategy, 46 per cent created a diversion if the child was misbehaving, 38 per cent grounded the child and just 4 per cent used a smack.
But the self-confessed insecurity of parents and their hunger for guidance indicate that several decades of permissive parenting aren't working. The chaos in schools as hapless teachers try to discipline children whose parents can't control them, and the pressure on doctors to prescribe drugs to regulate these children's wild behaviour, are symptoms of the problem.
Supernanny may not have all the answers, but at least parents are beginning to ask the question
