To you it's a temper tantrum. To child psychiatrist Robert Shaw it's the start of a slide into perdition. And it's all the parents' fault, reports Joanna Moorhead.
Parents are getting it wrong. Not just a bit wrong, not just round-the-edges, straighten-things-up-a-bit-and-everything-will-be-OK wrong but horribly, monumentally wrong. We're screwing up our children's lives - and because of that we're screwing up our own lives and screwing up the future for everyone. We're refusing to heed the warning signals and ploughing ahead into a colossal, disastrous pile-up.
Robert Shaw, an American child psychiatrist whose book on bad parenting, The Epidemic, has taken the US by storm, has an uncomfortable message. Today's children are emotionally stunted individuals whose every whim has been indulged to create a generation that has lost the capacity to appreciate the feelings and needs of other people.
All around us, he says, are whining, nagging, complaining youngsters who are being brought up in the lap of economic luxury but without the moral input of parents, who are either unavailable or far too lax.
The result, according to Shaw, is an epidemic of joyless, selfish people moving through life without empathy or a sense of duty to others. It is a tragedy not just for individual families but, because of the scale of the problem, for society as a whole.
One of Shaw's boasts is that he does not need to illustrate his book with examples of bad parenting that he's come across in his medical practice. No, he says, the evidence is all around him - and us - so he plucks examples from the corner shop, the local restaurant and the park.
Take the three-year-old whose parents get home from work too exhausted to cook a meal, drag their kid with them to a restaurant and then ignore him when he throws his food on the floor and gets down and runs around other people's tables. Or the four-year-old whose father, when he goes to pick her up from a friend's house, is met with a torrent of tears and screams and ends up promising treats in a desperate attempt to take control and get his child out of the door. Or the 12-year-old who, when his mother asks him to do something, gives her a defiant look and does exactly the opposite.
Feeling a bit uncomfortable? I can't imagine I'm the only parent who will see in those examples a few echoes of her own family life. The problem, says Shaw, is fourfold. One, we are not bonding well enough with our children, either in their early months and years or on through their childhood. Two, we're letting them watch way too much television.
"There's nothing good about TV," he says from his home in California. "People say children get taught their letters by Sesame Street, but I say it's far better for parents to sit with them and cuddle them and look at a book with them: they learn far better that way." Three, we're failing to give them a proper moral grounding. Of course, says Shaw, it's difficult when they're more influenced by their peers and the media, but that's all the more reason why we need to be on the case. And four, they are not getting enough unscheduled time to just hang out, be themselves, switch off: we've become too competitive, overly obsessed about their accomplishments and their achievements, and we are cramming them from their earliest years.
The result is children who are influenced more by outside forces than by the people who should be their main influences: their parents. They are sullen, unfriendly, preoccupied. They demand constant attention. They are frequently rude and contemptuous. They are used to being placated with electronic toys and media which make them uncommunicative and shorten their attention span. In that horrible word they are a generation spoiled: spoiled not only for us, their parents, but for the world in general.
The irony for Shaw is that the parents who could be expected to be doing the best for their kids are in fact doing the worst. "What I'm talking about is primarily a problem in middle- and upper-class families. It's comfortable families, families whose children in the past would have been expected to do well, families where there are two working parents, where there's plenty of money but simply not enough parental time . . . that's where the problem lies. And you can see the results of it, in the US at least, in the fact that the level of achievement is levelling off between the poorer groups and the financially better-off: that's one measure of the fact that the difference in the quality of parenting between those groups is changing."
Shaw is happy to admit that the parents he is challenging are hindered by a host of difficulties that make up the backdrop to family life today: advertising, ubiquitous television, commonplace drug-use, consumerism and so on.
But the crux of his argument, it seems, rests in his assertion that family life has changed over the past generation from a set-up where one parent works outside the home to one where both parents are employed. This is crucial, because it has stolen, as Shaw would see it, parental time from the children.
The time that children would in the past have spent at home with a parent (most often a mother) they now spend with a carer - and Shaw is quite clear that, although childcare can be good, it can never be better.
The most disquieting thing Shaw has to say is that, in the midst of an age where women have been improving their economic and political outlook, they have allowed their role as mothers to be diminished.
Try as he might, the 76-year-old cannot cut the mustard as a fair-minded egalitarian when it comes to parenting. When Shaw talks about how we could change our family set-up to improve our parenting, he speaks too often of what a woman should be doing (thinking ahead, choosing a career that will fit well with parenting, taking career options that will work around the children and so on). Reminded that dads have a role too, he is quick to concede that fathers are vitally important too, before admitting that, in his heart of hearts, he believes mothers come wired to nurture and probably count the most.
What all of us need to do, says Shaw, is start listening to our common sense. "Be clear that, as a parent, you always know inside what the right thing to do is. With children there have to be some rules, and it's up to you to make them. You know, if you're honest with yourself, when the times are that you give in to your child and it doesn't feel the right thing to have done. Trust yourself; trust that feeling, and if it's not right do something about it. Spend time with your children, give yourself permission to train them in the things you think are important in life.
"It's an attitude, really: you're their parent, you're not their friend, you're their nurturer, their educator, and it's your responsibility to show them how to live. You're the one with the manual, you're the one setting the guidelines. Don't forget that no one makes money out of parents parenting: advertisers want parents to be disempowered, because when kids are screaming for cereals and sweets and toys and getting their own way the advertisers are making money."
Shaw has definite views on baby care (the "high-demand older baby", who requires constant stimulation and keeps her parents awake at night, seems to be where the rot sets in); potty training (by two and a half, please, and no pull-ups); and the amount of TV a child should be watching (none, he tells me, or at least no solo viewing before the age of five).
It's a tough message, but Shaw doesn't pretend for a minute that parenting can ever be an easy ride or the decisions made easy ones. He tells me how, when his own four children were growing up, he and his wife, Judith, made the difficult and costly decision to move away from a suburb they otherwise liked because the young people in it weren't the sort of influences they wanted for their kids: they were self-centred, they had too many possessions and they were too unruly. The Shaw family moved out; he still regrets, he says, the fact that they had to go.
He has his own regrets as a father. "It's inevitable that you will let your children down. No one brings up children without doing grievous things. . . . I've had appalling moments when I've been almost oblivious to my children and their needs. But children are resilient: you don't lose your child through one mistake."
He implies, but does not say, that it takes a lifetime of mistakes to lose your child - a child's lifetime. And that, if we are not going to lose contact with our own, it's time to start making changes.
The Epidemic: The Rot Of American Culture, Absentee And Permissive Parenting, And The Resultant Plague of Joyless, Selfish Children by Robert Shaw is published by HarperCollins on May 6th
- Guardian Service
