How firm should we be with the children in our care? It’s a question I’ve been thinking about since a dear friend told me about the shock she got after spending a day at her daughter’s apartment, watching her granddaughters while their parents were at work.
Instead of thanking her when she got home, her daughter reprimanded her and said, “You were a little hard on them this afternoon!”
My friend was surprised. It was true that she had spoken out firmly to the little girls when they behaved. She may even have raised her voice (although I hasten to say she adores them and would rather die than damage a hair on their head).
But how on earth did her daughter know what had happened that afternoon?
It turned out that, unbeknownst to my friend, the apartment was fitted with hidden cameras, allowing the girls’ parents to keep an eye on the children and their babysitter while they were away.
So many grandparents these days – including Ms. U – give up much of their lives to unpaid childcare without complaint.
I was shocked when I heard it. Leave aside the question of whether we adults have the right to be strict with young people when they misbehave. I’ll come back to that later.
If I had been my friend, I would have been furious. Indeed, I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had flatly refused to babysit ever again after learning that the girls’ parents had been spying on her.
But like so many other grandparents today – including Mrs. U – she continues to give up much of her life for unpaid childcare, without complaint. All I can say is that she is a saint.
I tend to agree with the comment about the story, which appeared in the South China Morning Post: “It is frightening that the child has to live under such a level of supervision from such a young age.”
I thought of my old friend this week when I read about a mother in China who uses her webcam for a completely different purpose. Instead of using it to make sure no one gets mad at her nine-year-old son, she streams him live on the internet while he does his homework to discourage him from slacking off.
Her system not only forces her son to stop fidgeting and focus on his studies, says Ms. Zhang from southwestern Sichuan province, but also frees her up to continue with housework and care for her other child, who is three is to take care of.
In one day alone, she says, more than 900 people watched him do his homework on her Douyin account — or rather, they just watched his hands as he worked, since children’s faces are not allowed on the platform.
I’m not sure I approve of this approach either. I tend to agree with the comment about the story, which appeared in the South China Morning Post: “It is frightening that the child has to live under such a level of supervision from such a young age.”
I certainly wouldn’t have wanted 900 strangers looking at our four sons and urging them to work harder while they did their homework growing up.
But then I must admit that I have always been the wimp in our marriage, far too lenient with our sons and far too quick to overlook their vices – perhaps because I have so many of my own.
When it came to dragging the boys out of bed in the morning to go to school, pushing them to do their homework, or enforcing bedtimes, it was always Mrs. U who cracked the metaphorical whip. If it had been left up to me, they would have stayed in bed most of the day and not done any schoolwork.
As it stands, all four are now gainfully employed, with very respectable degrees from Russell Group universities. Meanwhile, my wife has to make do with disapproving of me for spoiling the dog.
To be fair to Ms. Zhang, it must also be said that the strict line she takes with her son seems to be yielding impressive results. According to her own testimony, he has managed to complete a week’s worth of work in one session since she began subjecting him to public scrutiny via her webcam.
We don’t have to take her word for it that her strategy works. “I tried this today too,” said one parent. ‘My child completed the homework that normally takes three hours in half an hour and I no longer have to supervise him during the holidays.’
Whether it would work in decadent Britain is another matter. I suspect that if parents were to stream their children live here on the Internet, it would quickly attract all kinds of unsavory characters, more interested in grooming than encouraging hard work.
It was either that or the kids’ classmates would laugh along.
On one point, however, I think the disciplinarians have the right idea: the balance of power between adults and children in modern Britain has tipped far too far in the latter’s favor.
This is especially evident in our schools, where wet-thinking politicians and the Education Blob have deprived harassed teachers of almost any effective sanction against disruptive students who hold back all their classmates.
I write with some feeling, as two of our sons are teachers and struggle to make a difference in the lives of children in inner-city state schools, where disruptive influences abound.
One of them tells me that the ultimate punishment he can receive is to call the parents of a troublemaker. But he is terribly reluctant to do this because he almost always gets one of two reactions, both of which he hates.
Sometimes a parent becomes furious with the offending child, who comes to school the next day with a black eye. Or that, otherwise Mom and Dad won’t care how their little thug behaves at school and tells our poor son, “That’s your problem, isn’t it, buddy?” What does it have to do with me?’
Meanwhile, children know they can make their teachers’ lives hell by making all kinds of accusations against them, from sexual impropriety to racism, transphobia or religious discrimination.
Take a Muslim student’s claim that her school – dubbed the ‘strictest in Britain’ – discriminates against her Islamic faith by banning ritual prayers.
I won’t comment on the ins and outs of the case other than to point out that Katharine Birbalsingh, headmistress of Michaela Community School in Brent, insists she introduced the ban for the good of everyone at the school.
A sudden urge to pray had become a source of division among her multicultural students and racist harassment from teachers, she said, while Muslim girls were subjected to unnecessary peer pressure.
No, I’m just saying that I find it quite incredible that the student’s challenge to her principal’s ruling has gone all the way to the Supreme Court, while the school has had to engage an QC to argue her case.
In my day, the child would have been ordered to remain silent and do as she was told, and that would have been the end of the matter. But students are now the masters – and don’t they know it!
Otherwise, I’ll just say that, as an old softie, I’m a little squeamish about some of Mrs. Birbalsingh’s strict disciplinary teaching methods, and the elaborate rules she imposes on the students, such as maintaining total silence in the hallways.
But even her harshest critics would undoubtedly agree that she achieves astonishingly good results. Her school topped the country’s rankings last year for ‘Progress 8’, which measures how much secondary school pupils have improved since leaving primary school.
But let me end with a warning to my sons and daughters-in-law: if you are tempted to install hidden cameras around your house to check that Mrs. U is not being too strict with the grandchildren, you better find a new nanny, doubly fast.