4/3/02

How to tame a wild child

India Knight

The Sunday Times

How’s this for an absolutely ludicrous story about what happens if you lapse from politically correct parenting? Last September, as the Scottish executive was first considering plans to outlaw the smacking of children under three, a Frenchman holidaying in Edinburgh decided to take his family out for a curry. His son, aged eight, started screaming and throwing a tantrum in the restaurant, refusing to sit where he’d been told. Monsieur X, who cannot be named to protect his child’s identity, remonstrated with his son, and when that didn’t work, took the boy outside, smacked his bottom, and then took him back in.

Unfortunately for X, this was witnessed by a passing couple, who claimed what they’d seen was more of a beating-up than a smack, and called the police. In court last week, the couple claimed the child was “whimpering like an animal”.

The child in question told the court: “No part of my body was hurt or injured,” a statement borne out by doctors who examined him at the time. The witnesses, according to the defence, had been drinking all afternoon, before and after an international rugby match taking place that day.

However, Monsieur X, who’d already spent two nights in the cells, was found guilty of punching and kicking his son. He was “admonished”, and told by the sheriff that if he’d lived in Britain, she’d have ordered him to carry out community service.

Predictably, X, 33, is outraged. Outside the court, supported by officials from his home town of Ons-en-Bray, he said: “I feel completely humiliated. The trial was unfair and now I have this on my police record . . . Injustice, that is the only word.” The deputy mayor of Ons-en-Bray said: “This father was treated like a criminal, he had his fingerprints and DNA taken, and why? Because he smacked his son on the bum.”

Well, quite: this outcome is spectacularly outrageous. The newspaper Le Parisien reports that, at the child’s school, teachers — “tres choquant” — had discussed the case with their charges. They explained that “if children were disrespectful” they would be punished. “All the children,” Le Parisien reports, (as if it were the most obvious thing in the world), “agreed.”

Disrespect, leading to punishment: a self-evident fact of life for French children, and a novel concept for British ones. The salient point, and it is one dim middle-class Brits on holiday in Provence consistently fail to grasp, is that the reason French children (or Italian, or Spanish, or Asian, or anything at all, except British) sit so nicely and photogenically in restaurants, causing tourists to murmur about how these marvellous Mediterranean cultures are so much more child-friendly than ours, is because they know they’ll get a walloping great smack if they don’t.

It follows that the waiter who stares disapprovingly at organically reared little Freddie from Wandsworth lobbing bread rolls and smashing wine glasses (“We never tell him off, it’s so bad for children”), is not, as we like to think, a horrid Frog who hates the English, but is instead genuinely appalled, as well he might be.

What sort of precedent does this judgment set? I wouldn’t think of smacking a child under three: you don’t go around hitting babies. But an eight-year-old is a different proposition. Frankly, there are times, few and far between, mercifully, when a sharp tap on the leg is worth far more than the tiresome negotiations we are encouraged to adopt instead — such as grounding, the banning of favourite pastimes for a week, or long and absurd chats about “feelings”.

Ask any boy of eight whether he’d rather have his leg smacked or be banned from PlayStation for a week, and I guarantee you he’ll opt for the former.

Perhaps this is why a survey carried out by the Scottish Parent Teacher Council last month suggested most parents were against the ban: not because they are slap-happy maniacs who like nothing better than beating their toddlers like gongs, but because, as Judith Gillespie, the group’s development manager, said last week: “The police, once involved, have no option but to charge the person accused of smacking . . . (this could) open the way to people mischievously charging each other with having smacked children, and that’s a risky road to go down.”

Nevertheless, the Scottish executive is going ahead with its plan. In England the government has ruled out a ban, but the NSPCC continues to campaign for similar legislation south of the border.

When will people get it into their heads that a smack on the bottom is not child abuse? When will they understand that we’re not talking torture with sinister instruments such as belts, canes or straps. Do the people who advocate the chats about “feelings” actually have children themselves? Unless we accept the crazy (and now widely accepted) idea that there should be no punishment at all for anything, full stop, nothing will make me believe a quick tap on the leg is more inhumane than saying “You can’t go to your best friend’s party because you were bad”.

The French have got it right, and we — plagued with appallingly behaved children in restaurants, in shops, in streets, in our homes — couldn’t have got it more wrong.

Meanwhile, Monsieur X is branded a child abuser because he wouldn’t tolerate his child behaving badly in a restaurant. “This couldn’t happen in France,” said the mayor of Ons-en-Bray. “We have laws against violence towards children but they wouldn’t apply to a father punishing a naughty child in the time-honoured way.”