they will deny it desperately when pressed). When I worked in daycare
centres, early in my career, the comparatively neglected children would come
to me desperately, in their fumbling, half-formed manner, with no sense of
proper distance and no attentive playfulness. They would flop, nearby—or
directly on my lap, no matter what I was doing—driven inexorably by the
powerful desire for adult attention, the necessary catalyst for further
development. It was very difficult not to react with annoyance, even disgust,
to such children and their too-prolonged infantilism—difficult not to literally
push them aside—even though I felt very badly for them, and understood
their predicament well. I believe that response, harsh and terrible though it
may be, was an almost universally-experienced internal warning signal
indicating the comparative danger of establishing a relationship with a poorly
socialized child: the likelihood of immediate and inappropriate dependence
(which should have been the responsibility of the parent) and the tremendous
demand of time and resources that accepting such dependence would
necessitate. Confronted with such a situation, potentially friendly peers and
interested adults are much more likely to turn their attention to interacting
with other children whose cost/benefit ratio, to speak bluntly, would be much
lower.
Parent or Friend
The neglect and mistreatment that is part and parcel of poorly structured or
even entirely absent disciplinary approaches can be deliberate—motivated by
explicit, conscious (if misguided) parental motives. But more often than not,
modern parents are simply paralyzed by the fear that they will no longer be
liked or even loved by their children if they chastise them for any reason.
They want their children’s friendship above all, and are willing to sacrifice
respect to get it. This is not good. A child will have many friends, but only
two parents—if that—and parents are more, not less, than friends. Friends
have very limited authority to correct. Every parent therefore needs to learn
to tolerate the momentary anger or even hatred directed towards them by their
children, after necessary corrective action has been taken, as the capacity of
children to perceive or care about long-term consequences is very limited.
Parents are the arbiters of society. They teach children how to behave so that