BABY BOOMERS AND GEN X’S were really naughty and needed a lot of whacking. A 1960s study of New Zealand mothers showed that 23% smacked their children on a daily basis. A slightly less energetic 40% spanked weekly, and only a slack 1% of the 150 mothers of four-year-olds never whacked their kids. One mother said smacking was “as necessary for child rearing as the midmorning cup of tea is for sanity”; other quotes from the survey are; “I never hit a child except in anger”, “It clears the air” and “He may not act any better, but I certainly feel better.”
My, we must have been bad children.
Somehow, I survived having two very negligent parents because (unless my memory has corroded) I cannot recall a single hiding. I certainly remember getting whacked at school for various crimes, but I deserved it. I recall particularly painful whacks for using my pencil to make holes in Plasticene and removing the cover from my exercise book – two sins I am deeply ashamed of.
One primary school teacher – one of my favourites, actually – used the strap almost as punctuation: instead of wasting breath using words to correct us, a quick crack on the hand communicated eloquently.
This was 1960s normal, but my home life was abnormal. When I compared notes with my friends, my parents were strange. One friend regularly got belted with the electric jug cord, and another lived close enough for me to actually hear the whacks and wailing. But somehow, I seemed unable to provoke my parents to hit me, though I did try: I set fire to our orchard’s packing shed, stole their cigarettes and was generally beastly. However, my folks were somehow out of step with contemporary parenting, and I remained unstruck.
My parents were not placid saints. Dad would get riled if you talked during the news or – the worst crime in our home – if you took the creamy top milk from the bottle. That was reserved for Dad’s porridge. But his bark was his bite. More typically, he just looked at you from under seriously woolly eyebrows in a way that pulled me into line far more efficiently than any teacher’s strap.
Mum obviously knew the script other parents were following and would threaten me with the wooden spoon or the back of the hairbrush, but unless those blows were so hard they caused amnesia, she never followed through.
Maybe my parents were negligent. They would have no idea where I was between breakfast and tea-time. I might be messing around on the railway lines, exploring the bush by the creek or smoking those cigarettes I pinched. But, again, that was very typical of the era. Obviously, it was more dangerous, but with bigger families back then, you had spares.
Why were my parents so mild? Maybe because they were old – Dad was nearly 50 when I was born. Maybe they were just worn out by my four appalling older siblings. And here’s the thing – they were physically disciplined or beaten, as one brother put it. My brothers and sister – all much older than me and, sadly, all dead now – had a Dad who returned from World War Two with wounds in his body and serious turmoil in his mind.
They told me of a very different father – a hard, angry man – so unlike the gracious, kind old Dad I had. Maybe Mum had always been Mum, but somehow, I got a Dad with a refurbished set of attitudes.
Some time in the 16 years separating my oldest brother from me, Dad changed, and I benefitted. I think it must have been a conscious choice to be different, to lay aside cranky anger, to be gentle. My memories are of him encouraging me, engaging, conversing, being funny and very, very kind.
And one thing sticks in my memory very vividly – he would kiss me, and I don’t think that was very typical for men of his time. Prickly kisses.
His change of parenting style was one of my key inspirations in the decades I spent as a family worker and parent educator. Pat Cowan changed. People can change – that’s a wonderful truth. RIP Dad. I miss those prickly kisses.
AFTER DECADES STUDYING FAMILY LIFE, JOHN NOW FOCUSSES ON THE ‘PRIME-TIME’ ISSUES OF LATER MIDDLE AGE. CHECK HIM OUT ON JOHNCOWAN.CO.NZ – ESPECIALLY IF YOU NEED SOME WRITING, EVENT SPEAKING, VIDEOS MADE, OR SOMEONE TO HAVE A COFFEE WITH.
