the times | Wednesday December 2 2020 1GM 29
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What my mother taught me about parenting
Since her death last week, I’ve been reflecting on how she brought me up and how it could help our polarised society
unnecessarily. We should instead be
trying to think of the funniest and
most uplifting moments of 2020 to
tell the next generation, while
learning from the considerable
mistakes made during the pandemic.
Yet anger and hatred are
increasingly prevalent among adults.
Recent books like The Anger
Advantage, I Hate Men, The Power of
Not Caring, Not Nice and Stop People
Pleasing are all about honing
confrontational skills. Being in a
tribe now means pitting yourself
against, and distinguishing yourself
from, another tribe rather than
bonding over an oral history and
joint endeavour.Instead, we need to become less
polarised and more considerate,
exploring similarities rather than
highlighting difference. Interviewing
the footballer Marcus Rashford last
weekend, it was clear to me that his
mother taught him to be kind and to
empathise with others, refusing food
herself so her children didn’t go
hungry. That’s why it is easier for
him to want to give back to those in
need now rather than feeling
resentful about having been on free
school meals himself.
She may be a natural Inuit mother
but we can all try. Self-control isn’t
always a bad word; learning to keep
calm and show humour in adversity
is one of the greatest talents.had to shout to convey her message.
This gave us an oral family history
that bound us together and we still
use today when we ring each other
to relate the latest irritation or
embarrassment. Even organising her
funeral in lockdown has become a
comedy rather than a tragedy. It was
no coincidence that she became a
dyslexia teacher and set up a
publishing company for reluctant
readers. She wanted to share thepower of story-telling.
If you live in proximity to others,
as the Inuit understood and as many
of us have discovered this year,
screaming at each other is not the
answer when the people you live
with may be anxious or depressed.
Patience (my mother’s name but not
her greatest attribute) really is a
virtue. Children learn through
imitation. Parents have had to
become more civil during lockdown,
which takes huge self-restraint when
so many of us are exhausted. But it
works and is worth practising until it
becomes a habit. Now I have four
teenagers myself, I can see that
hurling abuse escalates any dramaWe need to become
more considerate and
explore our similarities
than sarcasm to prompt better
behaviour.
This is what my mother did all her
life. Everything became a story. She
juggled four children with work and
the help of an occasional homesick
au pair, but both my parents
managed by treating us all as equals
and turning traumatic events into
valuable lessons or entertaining
anecdotes. Humiliating or harrowing
moments became family legends.
Fishing up a decomposing body in
the Thames — a thriller. A flasher in
a mac and pink pyjamas on the way
home from school — a farce. Missing
trains — a skill. Being asked to mime
in the school choir — a triumph.Even when I somehow managed to
get my younger sister run over by a
car, my mum checked it was only a
broken leg before telling the
neighbours how exciting it had been
for us both to go in an ambulance for
the first time.
She was sometimes spectacular in
her exaggerations but she taught us
as we regularly moved cities and
schools how to distance ourselves
from social catastrophes and laugh at
our mistakes. She was proud of my
daughter for going to school a week
early dressed as Roald Dahl’s Mrs
Twit for World Book Day and used
the same techniques with her own
pupils, amusing us with tales from
the classroom. It meant she neverT
here have been tiger
mothers, helicopter
mothers, snowplough
mothers and free-range
mothers. My mother died
last week and I was trying to
describe her to a friend. “A former
headmistress” made her sound tooaustere, “a publisher” too distant.
Then I read about the Inuits and
realised my mother could easily have
raised us in an igloo. She had very
similar parenting techniques to
families in northwestern Canada that
would work remarkably well now in
a time of pandemic and culture war.
In the 1960s Jean Briggs, an
anthropologist, went to live in
winters of minus 40 degrees
Fahrenheit and summers of
perpetual light with an Inuit family
above the Arctic Circle. Living off
stewed fish and raw caribou, she
soon noticed the adults had an
astonishing ability to control their
anger. If a child knocked boiling
water on the ice floor they just said“too bad”, and if a teenager crashed a
boat they helped to mend it together.
There was no sulking, blame or
aggression; everyone was measured,
considered and thoughtful.
In the book based on her
experience, Never in Anger, Briggs
describes her realisation that
learning to temper emotions was a
technique that had been passed
down the generations. When small
children lashed out, their mothers
would encourage them to hit them
and then tenderly explain how it felt.
Yelling back, a mother explained,
taught children to escalate their rage
rather than respect each other.
Inuit parents never raised theirvoice or sent their offspring out into
the wilderness on the naughty step.
That would be considered
demeaning and infantile for all.
Instead communities taught their
children using narration. Every time
there was a confrontation they asked
them to mime it out, discuss it
courteously or turn it into a mini
saga. They recounted fairytales to
explain consequences, myths to warn
of danger, and used humour ratherNow I have teenagers, I
see that hurling abuse
escalates any drama
Alice
Thomson
@alicettimes