That’s okay, I’ll take it anyway

I’ve started doing something when I go shopping. It started with a box of cereal. Actually, it started with the information that we are producing enough food to feed every single human being on earth, but we waste almost half of it. With this rattling about in the back of my mind, I reached for a box of cereal in Lidl a few weeks ago. And stopped, mid-reach. There was a box at the top, but I was about to wiggle another out from the collection, because this box at the top was damaged. It struck me then that other than the cosmetic aspect, there was nothing really wrong with this product. The cereal inside was sealed in plastic, and the box itself was still sealed. All that was different between this box and the rest, was that someone somewhere along the line had put a bit too much pressure on the top, maybe someone had leaned against the stack of boxes or something, and the top of the box got a bit squashed.

If I didn’t choose this box of cereal, most likely every shopper following me would do the same. Sooner or later a shelf-packer would come to tidy the cereal aisle, see the damaged box and remove it. It would probably get thrown away.

I redirected my reaching hand, and loaded the damaged box into my trolley. I brought it home, the kids opened it sometime, they opened the plastic bag inside, ate the cereal, and all lived. Subsequently, I’ve bought a bottle of laundry soap with a slightly sticky lid, a pack of toilet paper with the plastic wrapping slightly torn on one corner, and a cucumber that had a small bad spot. The cashier pointed that last one out to me (I hadn’t noticed), and I said it was all right, I’d take it, we’d eat it before it spread and the damage was so minute I could just cut it out when I chopped the salad. It was a bit of a job to convince her to let me take this inferior product. She was totally prepared to go get me another one. Was I sure?

I was sure. I still am.

Ouch!

Here’s something we should all keep in mind: what you say online, even in “private”, is public. Anyone can do a screen capture of even the most secure conversations, and even if you have only a handful of followers/friends on a social media site, they must always be considered public platforms. What you say on the internet is also, unfortunately, very permanent, if it draws any attention. Perhaps a careless comment or status update can be quickly deleted and gratefully forgotten, but once it’s out of our hands, there is no way to get it back. It’s like Pandora’s box.

This lesson was learned in the most painful way possible by a young lady in the UK this week. She posted this tweet:

Predictably, it was pounced on very quickly, and brought to the attention of police. Emma realised she’d messed up, and deleted her twitter account, but it was too late. In addition to the admission of a crime (hit and run), and the exposure of ignorance (there is no such thing as road tax in the UK, apparently; roads are maintained from general taxes and the motor tax you pay is related to carbon emissions), earlier tweets were spotted and grabbed before she could do damage control. Among other traffic violations she photographed, such as tailgating (never mind the obvious one, taking pictures while you’re driving!), there was this nugget:

This is all very interesting, but here’s the point: her undeniably stupid actions are going to be more costly than just the present embarrassment, legal ramifications and the possibility that she’ll lose her job. If you Google her name right now, there are thousands of results for this incident. This is never going to go away.

I worry about this reality of online life. Some of the most amazing people in the world have made big, big mistakes in the past. Many of them become amazing through having learned from terrible missteps. How many potentially amazing people will be dragged down into the ground for the rest of their lives because things we were able to live down in the past now follow us, unfading, unforgotten, forever? There is no more forgive and forget. The only survivors are those slick enough to spin their mistakes, to glitter up the turd so it looks like gold, and those are people who often have no conscience. Those who are weighed, burdened by their missteps, haunted by the effect of their mistakes on others’ lives, are the ones we need more of in society, yet they are the ones more likely to shy away from trying again in a harsh, unforgiving world.

What are we creating?

What a shame

In the course of this week, I became aware of the case of Dorje Gurung, a Nepali teacher who was employed by Qatar Academy. Here, a group of twelve-year-olds were acting in a disgraceful manner. They made fun of his appearance and calling him Jackie Chan. According to available accounts, one of them went so far as to stick his finger up the teacher’s nose. Their shameful conduct doesn’t seem to be disputed. He attempted to address their behaviour, asking them how they’d feel if they were stereotyped and all called terrorists.

They’d not like that at all, apparently. These twelve-year-old children accused their teacher of disrespecting the name of Allah. He was fired from his job, and subsequently arrested and imprisoned. The word spread far and wide, with thousands of people protesting the situation across the world. The story has a happy ending, thankfully: Dorje has arrived home safe and sound. 

What are the results of this whole mess? In the first place, Qatar Academy is now, in the minds of thousands, that place where little kids are taught it’s okay to bully people, and where they’re encouraged to show no respect to their elders by being rewarded for atrocious behaviour. If you have Qatar Academy on your CV, bear in mind that is what many potential employers will think of first.

In the second place, these children, if the accounts are true, may have brought dishonour to the name of Allah. We show respect not only through our words, but through our actions. If they used his name as a tool to hurt someone else, made a false accusation, it shows disregard, not respect, for something they claim to consider holy.

In the third place, Qatar Academy has been compromised in their ability to deliver academic excellence. Who knows what talented teachers will now give this school a wide berth, knowing they will be at the mercy of children, with the weapon of Allah’s name a threat that can be used against them anytime. 

I certainly wouldn’t want to teach there, and if kids like that are free to behave in this way to teachers, what suffering is being inflicted on fellow pupils? Caring parents would surely think twice before enrolling, too. 

All that is a crying shame. The only winner in this situation is Dorje Gurung, who has shown integrity and strength of character which confirms testimonies from colleagues and acquaintances throughout this ordeal. It’s behind him now, and any school would be lucky to have him next. Let’s hope for everyone’s sake that this incident can fade into distant memory, but that perhaps Qatar Academy will not forget the lessons from it, and perhaps reconsider their policies.

How to raise children

I often receive compliments for my kids. They’re kind, polite, articulate, and just all around fantastic. Somewhere, somehow, I accidentally did something very right. Or maybe their dad did (more likely). Whatever the case, as my youngest enters his last few months of primary school, I find myself looking back, and wondering what I could possibly have done to deserve such amazing children. What will I tell them, while it’s still relatively fresh in my memory, if they ask my advice on raising children of their own? I would tell them:

1. Don’t have children unless you fully understand that you must be prepared to meet their needs, and also truly understand what those needs are.

Babies’ needs are, in order of importance:

a. Physical closeness to the mother.
b. Breastfeeding.
c. Physical comforts such as shelter, a warm bed, regular baths etc.

Toddlers’ needs are, in order of importance:

a. Physical closeness to both parents for several hours every day.
b. The presence of an adult who loves them at all times.
c. Physical comforts such as shelter, a warm bed, regular baths etc.
d. Messy play – earth, rocks, plants, grass, mud, sand, water. Forget the plastic stuff, give the child a bowl of dirt. I’m in two minds whether this shouldn’t perhaps have been (c) on the list.

From the age of about six or seven, the child needs, in order of importance:

a. Free access to at least one parent whenever this is desired. It becomes tricky at this time, because while the child must always know their parents adore them, they must not feel stifled or feel guilty if they want to be alone. Yet sometimes it must be up to the parent to sense when it’s been too long since they connected, and initiate together time.
b. Enough healthy food to not be distracted by hunger.
c. Freedom to explore, and natural space to do so (grassy field, park, big garden, as much exposure to other natural environments such as forest or mountain, these obviously with proper guidance).
d. Physical comforts such as shelter, a warm bed, regular baths etc.

2. Unless you are a single parent, you are not a single parent. Your other half is going to parent in ways you disagree with. It will happen. When it does:

a. Do not confront him/her in front of the children. You create serious insecurity and anxiety in your kids if you do this.
b. In private, discuss why you disagree with his/her approach and why, but remember that you are not the boss. You are not the alpha parent. Once you’ve shared your view on the matter, you can’t dictate what they decide.

3. The human brain grows its most in the first two years, then still grows at a tremendous rate until about seven, but that first two is vital. This growth is deeply impacted by how you relate to the child, and what environment you create for them. In this time, you are laying down the foundations for who and what this person is going to be for the rest of their lives. Your parenting decisions will still influence the world through this person when they’re eighty years old. It will influence the people they form love relationships with, it will influence their children, it will influence their grandchildren. Don’t screw it up, and never underestimate the vital, crucial, far-reaching effect every book read, every hug, every warm cuddle, every moment you invest, will have.

4. When you’ve finished hyperventilating at the realisation of the immense responsibility resting on your shoulders, CHILL OUT. Because as contradictory as it may sound, once you have truly internalised that realisation, the job is three quarters done. You will naturally act in the best way possible from now on, meaning your occasional screwups are not going to ruin your child forever.

5. Like your child. Like hanging out with them. Realise that it’s not okay to feel your kid is not someone you just love being with, and that if you don’t like being with them, you need to sit back and work out what you need to do to change that.

6. Read the parenting gurus’ wisdom and advice, then just for the love of gods forget it. There are few things as tragic as a parent relating to their children in a forced or unnatural way. Yes, sometimes you need help or advice, sometimes you’re stumped and may have to train yourself to act differently. This should always be seen for the problem it is, with new behaviour internalised as quickly as possible to return to a natural, unforced interaction between two people.

Expert advice should come down to this:

You have two tasks, two measures for every action, every lesson, every rule and decision in your household:

GOLDEN RULE FOR DETERMINING IF A CHILD’S BEHAVIOUR IS OKAY:
If a friend or spouse/partner did this, would you think it’s okay? If they speak to you in a certain way, or with a certain tone of voice, or with a certain attitude, would it be okay? Excusing or tolerating socially unacceptable behaviour from a child because they are a child is a big mistake. Children play differently, yes, they do some things differently while they acquire the skill to do it in an adult way. There is a difference between doing things childishly and doing things boorishly. For instance, a child eats with their hands as they learn how to eat with a spoon, a fork, a knife and fork. There are different standards there. However, throwing food at another person is not okay no matter how old you are.

GOLDEN RULE FOR DETERMINING IF YOUR BEHAVIOUR TOWARDS YOUR CHILD IS OKAY:
If someone did that to you, would you be okay with it? Would you really? You can reprimand a child, enforce consequences, take some serious action against seriously wrong behaviour, all without ever attacking the basic dignity of the child.

You see, social relationships are equal to air and water for our wellbeing, so I would rather err on the side of caution and nip behaviour in the bud which would make other people think my kids are boors. It’s the biggest favour you can do them, as long as you bear in mind that you must do so without being a boor yourself.

7. Consequences of unacceptable behaviour must be relative, quick, controlled, and offer a chance of redemption. Rewards must be much the same. The younger the child, the more immediate the reward for acceptable behaviour. There is nothing that breeds despair as effectively as a goal you feel you can never reach. Rather start too easy and make it a bit more difficult next time, than crush the child’s spirit with a target they simply can’t hit.

The most frequent consequence of unacceptable behaviour is negative effect on a relationship. Think big picture – what will happen if you behave like this as an adult? – and simplify. If you scream at others, they don’t want to be with you. If you’re rude, you don’t get what you want. If you hurt others, you will be isolated – that is what society does when you murder or assault others, and we learn that when we bite our sister and and are removed from the company for a while (but be careful not to copy society’s mistakes and use isolation in such a way that it increases rather than decreases bad behaviour). The more polite and pleasant you are, the more inclined people are to act in your best interests. These are big thoughts, but they must be learned when you’re small, and it’s your job as parent to translate big ideas into simple lessons.

8. Here’s one of the most vital lessons you can teach your child: how trust works. If you show responsibility, you earn trust. It’s easy to lose and very hard to regain.

Lying is a breach of trust. You don’t teach your children not to lie by trying to guess when they are lying. You trust them until they are proven to have lied, then withdraw that trust and let them experience for themselves how hard it is to win it back. Once you bear the rule in mind that redemption must always be possible, never an unattainable goal. Trust is not, however, just about lying, keeping secrets, or taking responsibility. It’s about being responsible with another person’s emotions. If you scream at me, if you hit me, in addition to the other ways in which that’s a problem, you will have lost my trust.

9. Be human. If you make a mistake, admit it and apologise. Don’t think you need to be this perfect, unquestionable authority. That is the quickest way to problems that you can ever imagine. Firstly, you close the doors to communication between you. If you’re perfect, how dare your child ever speak up if you behave in a hurtful way? Secondly, you set your child up for a massive shock when they find out you’re fallible. You will also have breached their trust, because to claim through direct or indirect communication that you are perfect, is to lie.

The flip side of this coin is that you must remember your child is a human, too. They are emerging adults. Relate to them in that way, and a lot of stuff just comes naturally. Apologise if you lose your cool and scream at them or smack them, and share how deeply upset you are that you have let yourself down with your behaviour. However, make it clear that while we are always responsible for our own behaviour, we can never get away from the fact that we are also responsible for the way others behave. If you screamed, what contributed to your loss of control? Kids can’t just do what they like and then condemn you if you turn out not to be a robot, and react the way human beings react when they are frustrated. Tell them why you ended up feeling the way you felt, and try to get an agreement both from you and from them about things to do differently to avoid a repeat of the situation. Of course you simplify this the younger they are. “I’m sorry I shouted. It’s not okay for me to do that. It’s also not okay for you to kick me. Not at all. I’m going to try hard not to shout again, will you help me by never kicking me again?”

10. Here is the foundation of the parent/child relationship: a child is a guest in your house. They are a welcomed, celebrated guest, they are an asset to your household, they are a guest who has rights and whose needs are paramount, but they are, when all is said and done, a guest. When you keep that in mind, you honour their existence as a person in their own right, and you understand and guard your rights as the person to whom this household belongs. You guard their needs and safety, but you understand there are limits to your right to interfere. When you do need to meddle, you do so respectfully, realising it’s not the ideal and getting the job done quickly.

Your children are people you are building a lifelong friendship with. It’s your job to teach them how to be a good friend, and primarily, you do that by being a good friend. You give to them joyfully and willingly, and hope to receive the same in return one day. If you work from that foundation, everything else becomes logical. If you want to dig even deeper, it all rests on being a human with all your faults and all your wonderfulness on honest display, ever striving to be a good thing in the lives of those around you.

It’ll be fun to look at this in ten years’ time, and see how perhaps my views might have changed. However, these are the foundations of the approach I have taken.

Best Mother’s Day card ever

My daughter gave me my mother’s day card today. It is so special that I’ve scanned it here. This is what the card looks like on the outside:

I thought it was maybe a little bit soppy, but hey, it’s for mother’s day and it’s from my girl, I love anything she gives me.

Scroll down to see what it looked like when I opened it:

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Let it be known that I have THE BEST DAUGHTER EVER IN THE ENTIRE WORLD. She specially went to look for the soppiest, most sentimental card she could find, then the most excellent Eilis helped her find and print out the perfect Grumpy Cat – she knows I adore Grumpy Cat – and pasted it on the inside of the card.

I love my kids so much.

 

Your footpath, my pavement

One thing that has interested me since moving to Ireland, is how different English is spoken. I’m not referring to accent, but rather to different understanding of some words. Part of that was also related to wider exposure to various English speakers around the world over the internet.

Once, in a critique of a work in progress, a fellow writer was puzzled by my use of the word lounge. To her Canadian ears, that meant a place where people could go to have a few drinks together and socialise. To me, a lounge is a room in your house where you sit down to relax and watch TV or have a conversation with guests. Ah, but that, she said, would be a sitting room. Unless you’re in parts of Britain, I later found out, when it would be a drawing room.

To a South African, a robot is something commonly seen on busy roads, which has three different coloured lights which regulate traffic at crossings. To most of the rest of the world, that would be a traffic light, while a robot is a mechanical creation which performs tasks usually done by humans.

A more tricky one is footpath. To Irish people, a footpath is this:
To me, a footpath is this:

An African footpath is a path made by the passage of many feet. It’s about as wide as a human, and most often takes the form of a narrow line of exposed, compacted earth through grass veldt. That thing above this picture is called a pavement.

Take it a step further, and you get the Afrikaans sypaadjie, literally side path, to describe the pedestrian walkway beside a road.

It always used to bother me to use the word pavement, though. It implies a covered surface, and where I grew up, most “pavements” weren’t paved, instead boasted lawn that had to be mown in summer.

Talk about “Tom-ah-to, tom-ay-to”.

Doubly disabled

Years ago, someone we were acquainted with had a child with a tragic disability. The child was physically affected, walked with a visibly strange gait, and wasn’t expected to live long. Though we weren’t friends, I spoke to one of the parents on occasion, and knew them well enough to know they were good people, dealing as best they could with a difficult and no doubt heartbreaking situation.

One of the things that worried me was that they felt so sorry for their child that they treated her differently. As in, they turned a blind eye to behaviour most parents would never tolerate in their children, because the poor baby was disabled. She already had it so tough, the parents couldn’t bring themselves to discipline her, even in gentle ways.

We moved away and lost touch, but recently I spoke to someone on Skype whom I hadn’t seen in a while, who has never met the parents, but knows of the child. The girl has grown well into her teens, and has passed her predicted life expectancy. Sadly, her condition has deteriorated to the point where she is now in a wheelchair. This my friend knows because her daughter met the wheelchair-bound girl when they started at the same high school. Here is the bit that stuck in my head since we spoke: kids tried to be friends with the disabled girl from the start, but apparently this child is so unpleasant that after a while, everyone has stopped trying. A year and a bit since starting high school, this disabled girl is only ‘friends’ with people involved in her care, who are paid to be in her company.

Now, I cannot imagine what it must be like to live with a slowly collapsing body. It must be one of the most horrible strains imaginable. No doubt it can sometimes leave you frustrated and acting out. However, having seen for myself how softly-softly the parents were with discipline (in terms of behaviour, treating others with kindness, learning empathy and not allowing rudeness and nasiness towards others) when this young lady was a child, and listening to what my friend related of her daughter’s experience with this child, it sounds plausible that this is not just an occasional thing, but a default state.

Our need for social contact is as important as food and shelter. Deprive a human being of interaction with others, and over weeks, they will become physically and mentally sick. Continue this for a long time, and some will die altogether, others’ minds become so damaged that arguably, they have in fact also died, though the physical processes in their bodies may continue.

In light of this knowledge, how tragic is it that this child, born with a terrible condition, has an additional, acquired disability. She has not learned the skills necessary to establish and maintain relationships with others. Instead, her every whim was always induldged, she was never taught to respect others, to even consider that other people also have needs, to consider how she, even with her disability, can contribute to others’ happiness (an almost vital ingredient to being happy is to know you make the world a better place). She is rude, hurtful, and selfish.

Not a single peer feels any desire to willingly be friends with this girl. If that were true of a young woman who was totally normal in every other way, it would be enough to break your heart. How sad that an already short, challenged life should be so impaired.