Opinion

Children continue to believe a parent's place is in the wrong

<span style="color: rgb(38, 34, 35); font-family: utopia-std, Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, Times, serif; ">If only every parent would instil the confidence in every child that they&rsquo;re unique, valuable individuals with talents worth developing, opinions worth expressing and critical faculties worth cultivating; with dignity worth keeping and a responsibility to the society they live in&nbsp;</span>
If only every parent would instil the confidence in every child that they’re unique, valuable individuals with talents worth developi If only every parent would instil the confidence in every child that they’re unique, valuable individuals with talents worth developing, opinions worth expressing and critical faculties worth cultivating; with dignity worth keeping and a responsibility to the society they live in 

SCANNING the local papers here in the north west I note page after page of school prizegiving pictures and am struck by how very good-looking teenagers are these days – the girls slim, self-assured and sophisticated, the boys regular-featured, confident-looking and well groomed, with barely an acne pustule evident between them.

The ‘ugly duckling’ stage seems to have bypassed this young generation. They’re mostly swans – handsome and clever.

Somewhere in the roofspace there’s a box of old, black-and-white photographs. There I am with my contemporaries, the girls shapeless with puppy-fat, bad hair, spots and no illusions about ourselves; the boys raw-boned, jug-eared, with big hands protruding awkwardly from too-short blazer sleeves.

We existed in the mute envy of the smooth complexioned and academically gifted. Interesting then, to read that a recent wide-ranging academic study of adolescent girls has found a third of them are unhappy with their looks and one in seven discontented with their lives.

What does it say about modern society that we allow anxiety and depression to inflict themselves on our impressionable young? There’s something deeply disturbing about children from seven upwards worrying about their body image.

Mind you, had the study been carried out in my day, the results might not have been much different.

Though in retrospect we suffered the selfsame agonies of inadequacy, self-doubt and hopelessness, we bore them in stoical silence.

Personal vanity was a sin and ‘self worth’ an idea whose time had not yet come. Having big notions about oneself was severely discouraged.

The tumultuous hormonal surge that triggered our teenage moods, general bolshieness and rebellion baffled our parents who, (seemingly,) had themselves made the transition from adolescence to adulthood seamlessly and without pain.

They had no idea how to deal with us belligerent, answering-back children of a new liberal age where moral certainties were beginning to be dismantled. How could we have confided in them?

Instead, we spent long hours despairing of ourselves in the mirror, our only panaceas ‘fabulous pink Camay’ toilet soap and TCP.

I recall bleaching my freckles with neat lemon juice and removing the top layer of facial skin. To no avail – I still have freckles.

Brought up to be modest, respectful of authority and too compliant for our own good, only in retrospect do we realise how singularly ill-equipped we were for a society increasingly brazen, anarchic and egotistical. Innocent and ignorant, we shouldn’t have been let out alone.

Sex education was nil – apart from slim pamphlets at the back of the chapel on ‘Keeping Company’. One in particular I remember was ‘The Young Lady Says “No!”’ by a Dominican friar.

It was not a time when mothers and daughters were best friends and shared confidences. Lord love us, we were sent out into the world dangerously naïve and uninformed, apart from oblique warnings about the inflammatory effects of low necklines and high hems on the male of the species.

‘Keeping yourself pure’ was the sine qua non and, policed by fear and shame, we did. Reputation was all. To lose it, social death.

Bless our parents, who, in their time and by their lights, did the best they could for us, (for which we were never sufficiently grateful,) but they were risk averse, preaching the merits of steadiness and security rather than following a dream.

They were deeply suspicious of anything that didn’t bring in a regular income, even if our lives turned out to be as self-limiting as their own. Self-belief is all very well, was their thinking, but what if it’s unfounded? It didn’t do much for our confidence…

And so it goes on, generation after generation, each dealing with a fresh set of adolescent problems, resentments and alienations.

If only every parent would instil the confidence in every child that they’re unique, valuable individuals with talents worth developing, opinions worth expressing and critical faculties worth cultivating; with dignity worth keeping and a responsibility to the society they live in.

They won’t listen of course. Until they become parents themselves, they’ll continue to believe a parent’s place is in the wrong.