Читать книгу Beyond Fear - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 19

In 1621, Robert Cleaver and John Dod, in their book A Godly Form of Household Government, advised parents:

The young child which lieth in its cradle is both wayward and full of affections; and though his body be but small, yet he hath a reat [wrong-doing] heart, and is altogether inclined to evil… If this sparkle be suffered to increase, it will rage over and over and burn down the whole house. For we are changed and become good not by birth but by education… Therefore parents must be wary and circumspect… they must correct and sharply reprove their children for saying or doing ill.⁷

Cleaver and Dod were making explicit the model of the child which is still very prevalent in our society today. This is the model of the child being intrinsically bad. The Christian image of the child being born in sin is an example of this model. If children are seen as being intrinsically bad then their upbringing must be concerned with inhibiting, controlling and moulding the child. Many educational systems are based on this model, including the educational system, which sets a national curriculum and demands that every child must be educated totally in terms of this curriculum. However, there is another model of the child which we can use, that of the child being intrinsically good. This second model is implied in our word ‘education’, which has its root in ‘leading into the light’.⁸ Alas, most children become victims of an education based on the idea that children are basically bad and have to be inhibited, controlled and moulded. The belief that children are not actually people but objects to be used by adults is still very prevalent in most societies, including our own.

This idea is part of the tradition that the child’s point of view is of no importance, that the parents’ point of view must prevail, that the parents must teach the child everything of value and that the child must sacrifice himself for the parents. This is an essential part of our culture, for this is what the Bible teaches. As the psychoanalyst Alice Miller has described it:

It is always the Isaacs whose sacrifice God demands from the Abrahams, never the other way around. It is daughter Eve who is punished for not resisting temptation and not suppressing her curiosity out of obedience to God’s will. It is the pious and faithful son Job whom God the Father continues to mistrust until he has proved his faithfulness and subservience by undergoing unspeakable torments. It is Jesus who dies on the Cross to fulfil the words of the Father. The Psalmists never tire of extolling the importance of obedience as a condition of each and every human life. We have all grown up with this cultural heritage, but it could not have survived as long as it has if we had not been taught to accept without question the fact that a loving father has the need to torment his son, that the father cannot sense his son’s love and therefore, as in the story of Job, requires it.⁹

This tradition arose out of necessity. When life was ‘nasty, brutish and short’, a child was of little value. Adults, whose life expectancy might be no more than twenty or thirty years, were the tribe members who could maintain the tribe by having the skills to secure the food supply and by producing future generations of the tribe. A dependent child was a burden. The child had to be grateful for being allowed to exist - unsatisfactory babies were left to die - and had to prove his gratitude to his elders. As soon as the child was big enough to carry out some tasks, he or she had to begin working, and to work effectively the child had to learn the tribe’s rules of conduct. If the child and the tribe were to survive, then the children had to give up their desires to play and to be irresponsible, and had to learn to conform to the rules of the tribe. Physical survival of all, children and adults, depended on obedience. Even today, in most African societies the child, even when an adult, is forbidden to correct an elder, even if the elder’s ideas are leading to disaster.¹⁰

The lowly status of children and the necessity of children learning obedience in order to survive continues to this day where families live in poverty and near-starvation. Over the past two decades, in each of the famines in Africa, aid workers from the West saw their task as that of feeding the starving children, but for many of the tribal Africans this was not their first priority. For them, the adults should be fed before the children, and this is what they did, even if it meant that the children starved.

If the early generations of the human race had not followed the rule that children should be sacrificed in order to secure the continuation of the tribe, many of us would not be here today, benefiting from a lifestyle which does not demand that a child dies because there is insufficient food or that a child has to begin working as soon as its little hands can carry a burden or its little legs can toddle. In the West we no longer send five-year-olds into the factory to tend the machines, or seven-year-olds down the mine to pull the coal trucks, but we still demand that the parents’ interests are paramount. An example of this can be seen in the Family Court in NSW, Australia. The journalist Adele Horin wrote:

A few years ago the Family Court published research on separated fathers that vividly exposed the pain and sadness many felt… But lawmakers got it into their mind a few years ago that all fathers (the neutral term is non-resident parent) had a right, and a duty, to be involved in their children’s lives, post separation - although they framed it in terms of the child’s rights. And so the Family Law Act was reformed in 1995 to shift the emphasis towards a ‘right of contact’ and ‘shared parental responsibilities’. A major study, released this week, shows how naïve the hopes that legal changes could turn bad fathers and husbands into co-operative, involved parents post-divorce, or end the war between men and women who can’t agree on the children.

The three-year study, based on interviews with judges, solicitors, parents, counsellors and written judgements, is sobering reading. It shows that the reforms have created an environment where the concern for fathers’ rights has increasingly taken precedence over concern with children’s rights.

It shows also the futility of trying to impose shared parenting patterns - which require a great deal of communication and co-operation - on bitterly divided couples who are slogging it out in court; and it shows the dangers of giving men who are violent greater leverage over their ex-wives and children…

What the Family Court increasingly deals with - its core business - are cases where violence, abuse and harassment are alleged. And thanks to the legal reforms, more children are being forced to spend time with fathers who turn out to be as dangerous as their ex-wives allege. Contact with fathers is not always good for children.¹¹

As ever, children must sacrifice themselves for their parents. Pedagogical texts from the Bible to the present day extol this tradition, while it is implicit in the arguments supporting the physical punishment of children.

I was once invited to talk to a meeting of the National Childbirth Trust about depression. My experience of National Childbirth Trust people was that they were well educated, concerned, aware and critical women and men. In the part of my talk where I was outlining the links between childhood experiences and adult depression I was suddenly interrupted by a young woman, nursing a small baby, who was sitting near me.

She said, ‘Can I ask you a question? It’s going back to something you said. I didn’t want to stop you in full flow.’

I detected a note of hostility.

‘It’s what you said about not beating children. Don’t you think children need to be hit. How else will they learn?’

She went on, passionately, to describe how she disciplined her two elder children. (I assumed, hopefully, that she was not talking about the baby as well.) She had a wooden spoon called ‘Mr Henry’ with which she hit them whenever they misbehaved. ‘You can’t reason with young children,’ she said, and then she described to us how Mr Henry accompanied them wherever they went. If the children misbehaved in public she would take them to some place where they could not be seen and there Mr Henry would do his work. ‘I wouldn’t hit them in front of other people. That would embarrass them. Usually I don’t have to hit them. They know that if they are naughty Mr Henry will come out.’

I asked her whether she had been beaten as a child.

She said, ‘I was very unruly as a child, especially when my mother’s marriage was breaking up. I wasn’t beaten, just hit. I caused my mother a great deal of trouble.’

Some of the people in the room shared my sadness as she gave her detailed account of the punishments her small children received, but others supported her, claiming that all children were too wild and unruly to be brought up without some form of corporal punishment. One woman, who had earlier identified herself as someone who suffered greatly with depression, assured us that all the children who misbehaved themselves in the school where she taught came from homes where corporal punishment was never used.

The amount of physical violence used against children is greatly underestimated. I found that many of my clients regarded hitting their children as both normal and necessary. If I commented upon this, they usually said that they hit their children only when their children needed it and that they did not hit them as much as they themselves had been hit by their parents. I hoped that this was indeed so, for some of the troubled people I saw had been brutally treated by their parents. Nevertheless, I suspect that Alice Miller was right when she wrote, ‘Parents who beat their children very often see the image of their parents in the infant they are beating.’¹² Many people find that one very effective way of getting rid of your own pain is to inflict pain on others. If it were not so, where would dictators find the people to man their concentration camps, death squads and torture chambers?

Many men see it as their prerogative to beat their wives and children whenever they wish to do so. Sometimes women thrash their children, but often it is the woman who stands helplessly by while her husband takes his temper out on the children. In such families the children often regard their mother as a saint, a woman who suffered at her husband’s hands for her children’s sakes. However, it is a truism in psychotherapy that it is not possible to have one good and one bad parent. If the good parent does not protect you from the bad parent, then you have two bad parents.

Parents often justify the violence they do to their children on the incompatible grounds that a) it is necessary in order to make the children good, and b) children do not remember what is done to them. If children do not remember what was done to them for being bad, how can they remember to be good?

As the law stands in the UK, Australia and the USA adults are protected from assault but children are not protected from assault by their parents and, in the majority of schools in Australia and the USA, by their teachers. Children Are Unbeatable, an alliance of organizations and individuals committed to changing the law so that children are protected, has fought long and hard for this to be achieved. The UK Children’s Commissioners, themselves appointed by the government, issued a statement on 22 January 2006, where they said in part

Children are the only people in the UK who can still be hit without consequence. The current and previous governments have made welcome progress by prohibiting all corporal punishment of children in schools, other institutions and forms of alternative care. In relation to parental corporal punishment, in England, Wales and Scotland the ancient common law defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’ has been limited, but not removed completely; and in Northern Ireland the government has indicated that it plans to bring the law into line with that in England and Wales.

Children have the same right as adults to respect for their human dignity and physical integrity and to equal protection under the law, in the home and everywhere else. There is no room for compromise, for attempting to define ‘acceptable’ smacking. This has been confirmed by United Nations and Council of Europe human rights monitoring mechanisms, and by the Westminster Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights.

The UK has been told repeatedly since 1995 that to comply with its human rights obligations, the reasonable punishment defence must be removed completely in all four countries of the UK.¹³

The strongest opposition to any change in the law comes from some of the Christian churches whose members believe in following the Old Testament injunction, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’. Adults who beat children protect themselves with a set of self-serving lies, typically, ‘This hurts me more than it hurts you’, ‘It’s for your own good’, and ‘I don’t beat my children, I just give them a tap’.

Yet this is not how young children experience a ‘tap’. In a study conducted by the National Children’s Bureau and Save the Children seventy-six five- to seven-year-olds were asked their definition of a smack. ‘The message from children is that a smack is a hit: on 43 occasions children described a smack as a hit, a hard hit, or a very hard hit.’ When a child described a smack as a hard hit her questioner asked, ‘Can it be a soft hit?’ The child replied firmly, ‘No’. A seven-year-old girl observed, ‘A smack is parents trying to hit you, but instead of calling it a hit they call it a smack.’ When asked why children usually get smacked a five-year-old girl said, ‘When I’m very naughty my mum smacks me’. Her questioner asked, ‘What is being very naughty?’ The little girl replied, ‘When you hit people a lot.’ Apparently her questioner refrained from asking whether her mother was being naughty when she hit her but no doubt the little girl had considered this question.

When asked what it felt like to be smacked, the children were clear that it was very unpleasant. A six-year-old boy said, ‘It feels like someone’s punched you or kicked you.’ A seven-year-old girl said, ‘It hurts and it’s painful inside - it’s like breaking your bones.’ Another seven-year-old girl said, ‘You feel like you don’t like your parents anymore.’ When asked how children feel after they have been smacked, only one child said that he learnt from his mistake.¹⁴

The knowledge that they are being harmed by the person who should be looking after them creates a conflict that children have to resolve in some way. Some children bravely face the truth that they have parents who are not the perfect parents they would wish for, but others choose to lie to themselves and to deny their own pain and fear. They tell themselves that they are bad and deserve to be punished, and they deny that the physical punishment actually hurts. The first choice destroys the child’s belief that she (and it is often a she) is valuable and acceptable, while the second destroys the child’s capacity for empathy. Boys who are repeatedly beaten tell themselves that they feel nothing, and they are rewarded for this lie by being admired by their peers for being tough. Seeing yourself as being wicked and deserving punishment, and destroying your capacity for empathy, has many bad outcomes. The research carried out by Murray Straus at the Family Research Laboratory, University of New Hampshire, showed that, regardless of race, socio-economic status, the gender of the child and the quality of the support given to the child by the mother, the tendency to antisocial behaviour increases after corporal punishment. Straus also found links between corporal punishment in childhood and adult violence, masochistic sex, depression and alcohol abuse.¹⁵

A study which revealed how children who are physically abused lose their capacity for empathy took the form of a survey of 11,600 adults in the USA, and found that 74 per cent of those who had been punched, kicked or choked by their parents did not consider this type of behaviour abusive.¹⁶ In Britain at least one child dies every week from injuries inflicted by an adult, usually a parent or step-parent. Yet in Sweden, where all forms of corporal punishment have been illegal for twenty years, only four children have died at the hands of an adult over that time and, of these four, only one died at the hands of a parent. A study published in 1999 on the effects of the ban on smacking in Sweden showed that the number of reports of assaults on children increased, with the result that any child at risk of serious injury was identified early, thus preventing anything like the tragic cases found all too often in Britain where, even though healthcare workers and neighbours often knew that a child was being savagely beaten, no one acted to prevent the child’s brutal murder. In Britain young people’s drug use and alcohol intake have increased over the past twenty years, while in Sweden these have decreased.¹⁷

In Britain surveys show that many more people want to ban fox-hunting than want to ban parents smacking their children. It is often said that the British prefer animals to children, but harsh, uncaring attitudes to children are found in every society. Those who want to retain the right of parents to inflict physical punishments argue that a ban would turn the parents into criminals. The Swedish government introduced many measures concerned with improving the skills of the parents and with providing good professional support.

Physical punishment gives parents no cause to think about their actions. A slap can be inflicted instantly. Over recent years psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry have provided parents with another method of controlling their children which requires no thought on the part of the parents except to remember when to administer a pill.

Kirsty, a social worker, told me how she had gone to visit her younger brother Tim, his wife Cora and their three-year-old son Peter. Peter was being his usual rumbustious self, rushing around, climbing on chairs and tables, enjoying rough games with his father, noisily arguing with his aunt over a jigsaw. The only time he was quiet was when he sat, transfixed, in front of the television watching his favourite programme, Bob the Builder.

As Kirsty watched her strong, healthy, active nephew, she remembered Tim at that age, behaving just like Peter, and wearing their parents out with his antics. She remembered too how surprised she had been when her grandmother had talked about Kirsty’s father being the same at that age. Kirsty knew her father only as a very staid accountant, just like Tim had become. Over dinner, when Peter had finally gone to bed, Kirsty wanted to reminisce about the generations of boys in her family who had been such lively three-year-olds, but she was forestalled by Cora saying, ‘There’s something we want to ask you,’ and Tim enquiring, ‘Do you think Peter’s got ADHD?’

ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, is currently a fashionable syndrome. Physical illnesses do not have fashions, only epidemics when some virus or bacillus is on the loose, or when some deleterious environmental conditions prevail. Physical illnesses have some identifiable physical basis, but mental disorders do not. Some psychiatrists claim that a brain dysfunction underlies ADHD, but no such dysfunction has been found.

In the early 1960s, before ADHD was invented, I was working in Sydney, Australia, as an educational psychologist with special responsibility for children with emotional problems. Part of my work was to advise teachers about pupils whose behaviour was causing them concern. The kind of children who were most frequently referred to me were seven- or eight-year-old boys who would not or could not settle into the classroom routine. When I examined these boys and their family background I found that they fell into two groups.

The first and largest group was those boys whom school did not suit. Many such children have good performance abilities - that is, they have good hand-eye co-ordination, they can think in spatial terms, and can analyse and construct patterns but their verbal skills - either through inborn limitations or early education - have not developed to the same degree as their performance skills. However, schools use and value verbal skills much more than performance skills, and thus many boys come to feel alienated from the educational process. Consequently, if they are bored in class, they seek to entertain themselves, and if they feel rejected and undervalued they seek to protect and to assert themselves by getting attention through being naughty. If you cannot be famous you might as well be notorious.

To a casual observer this first group of boys was no different from the second group, who were also inattentive, restless and inclined to get into mischief. However, these boys were not bored and seeking attention. They were frightened, and their fear made them unable to concentrate and to keep still. The family background of these boys was one which created the child’s fears. Some of these families were deeply unhappy. The mother may have been depressed and threatening suicide, or the father may have been a brutal tyrant. Some were migrants and the parents were still suffering the effects of their experiences in the Second World War. Often the adults were unable to adapt to a strange country. One young lad told me how at home his grandmother would punish him if he spoke English, yet he now thought in English and wanted to be accepted as an ordinary Australian boy.

It was not a happy time for any of these boys, but in one way they were lucky. They could not be diagnosed as having ADHD and be medicated with Ritalin.¹⁸

Ritalin and Equasym are the brand names of two drugs based on the generic drug methylphenidate hydrochloride, used in the treatment of ADHD. Both have been approved by the UK National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), which advises that the drugs should not be given to children under six and should be used only as part of a comprehensive treatment programme. In the USA several million children have been prescribed these drugs, including large numbers of children under six, even toddlers. Ritalin is so well known in the USA that my word-processing program includes it in its dictionary. In the USA and Australia it is known as ‘kiddie cocaine’. A survey of child psychiatrists and paediatricians across Australia showed that 80 per cent have prescribed stimulant drugs like Ritalin for children. In 1999 this type of drug was prescribed for 5,819 children under six, of whom 67 were aged two and 715 aged three.¹⁹ In the UK the number of children prescribed these drugs is now in the thousands and is doubling each year. The literature supplied by the pharmaceutical companies which make the drugs speaks of ‘psycho-stimulant therapy’ but does not explain why children who are hyperactive are given a drug that is known for its capacity to stimulate adults.

Drugs that are prescribed for babies and children both in medicine and psychiatry are not tested on babies and children. Drugs are tested only on adults. All doctors can do is extrapolate from the recommended adult dose. Babies and children have died from some such extrapolations.²⁰ Recently the National Institute of Mental Health in the USA set up the Research Units on Pediatric Pharmacology (RUPP). The first report issued by one of these was that from the Johns Hopkins Medical Children’s Center, where a large, randomised double-blind study showed that the drug fluvoxamine was an effective treatment for anxiety in children. This drug is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), which causes the neurotransmitter serotonin to accumulate in the synapses in the brain. Supplies of the drug were provided by Solvay Pharmaceuticals, who also gave research support (i.e., money) to the RUPP centres. The trial ran for only eight weeks, which does not make it a measure of the long-term effects of such a drug on the developing brains of children.²¹

Methylphenidate hydrochloride is a core member of the group of drugs called amphetamines, whose street name is ‘speed’. It is not understood why amphetamines cause adults to feel energetic and excited while the same drug slows children down. Obviously the drug works differently on a developing brain than it does on a mature brain. What has been known for some decades now is that amphetamines are addictive. Indeed, amphetamines are so addictive, toxic and dangerous that adults cannot take them legally without prescription anywhere in the world.

Pharmaceutical companies dislike the word ‘addictive’. In the prescribing information given by Medeva for their drug Equasym it says, ‘Chronic use can lead to tolerance and dependence with abnormal behaviour.’ ‘Chronic use’ is not defined. It could be six years or six months. Such companies do not like to reveal the adverse effects of any of their drugs and try to meet the legal requirements for disclosure while saying as little as possible. Adverse effects are minimized by calling them ‘side effects’ and by listing as few of them as possible. Medeva list for Equasym ‘nervousness, insomnia, decreased appetite, headache, drowsiness, dizziness, dyskinesia, abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, dry mouth, tachycardia, palpitations, arrhythmias, changes in blood pressure and heart rate, rash, pruritis, urticaria, fever, arthralgia, scalp hair loss’.

Peter Breggin, the American psychiatrist who has devoted his life to researching the deleterious effects of the drugs used in psychiatry, pointed out that the list of behaviours given as symptoms of ADHD in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) focuses on behaviours which interfere with an orderly, quiet, controlled classroom. ‘The first criterion under hyperactivity is “often fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in seat”. The first criterion given under impulsivity is “often blurts out answers before questions have been completed” and the second is “often has difficulty in waiting turn”. None of the ADHD criteria is relevant to how the child feels. Mental and emotional symptoms, such as anxiety or depression, are not included.’ In his book Talking Back to Ritalin²² Peter Breggin ‘catalogued dozens of “causes” for ADHD-like behaviour. Most commonly it is the expression of the normal child who is bored, frustrated, angry, or emotionally injured, undisciplined, lonely, too far behind in class, too far ahead of the class, or otherwise in need of special attention that is not being provided. More rarely, the child may be suffering from a genuine physical disorder, such as a head injury or thyroid disorder, that requires special medical attention rather than stimulant medication.’²³

In his book Naughty Boys consultant child psychiatrist Sami Timimi told how he would ask his colleagues ‘to explain to me what diagnoses like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), conduct disorder and Asperger’s syndrome were, what was going on physically in these children, and how they “knew” which child had a conduct disorder caused by family problems as opposed to ADHD caused by an immature frontal lobe (in other words a physical problem in the development of the brain). They couldn’t explain this to me and didn’t know how to differentiate physical from emotional or other environmental causes. The best they could come up with was “it must be so”. Shockingly, I realized that the whole profession is built on subjective opinion masquerading as fact.’²⁴ Writing about the psychiatric conferences supported by the drug companies, he said, ‘All too often I leave these mainstream events feeling like I had attended a cult convention, not a scientific conference, so bad has the lack of democratic debate or interest in non-drug-industry-driven perspectives become.’²⁵ Sami Timimi was born in Iraq and came to England when he was fourteen. He could see very clearly how different his upbringing was from that of his English fellow students. Later, as a child psychiatrist, he could relate this understanding to the problem of ADHD, which is a problem only in countries which have a western culture. Outside these places it is unknown. Of course in these places there are some naughty boys, but haven’t there always been? What is it that happens to boys particularly in western societies that does not happen to boys elsewhere?

Sami Timimi pointed out that, ‘Early in the twenty-first century we in the West are living in the bizarre paradox of Western governments spending billions every year to fight a war on drugs with the right hand whilst the left hand hands out millions of prescriptions for cocaine-like stimulants to its children.’²⁶ Peter Breggin explained the long-term significance of these ‘therapeutic’ effects in an article which he called ‘The New Generation Gap: Today’s Kids Suffer Legal Drug Abuse’. He wrote:

We are the first adults to handle the generation gap through the wholesale drugging of our children. We may be guaranteeing that future generations will be relatively devoid of people who think critically, raise painful questions, generate productive conflicts, or lead us to new spiritual and political insights. Growing up on psychiatric drugs, millions of children are developing little sense of their own personal responsibility. Instead of discovering their own capacity to improve their lives and transform the world for the better, they are being taught they are brain-defective - and require lifetime treatment with psychiatric drugs.²⁷

When I was a child my family gave me to understand that there was something intrinsically wrong with me as a person because I had a chronic lung disease, bronchiectasis. This so undermined my self-confidence that it is only in recent years that I have been able to talk to people, other than the doctors I consulted, about the effects this disease had on my life. How much worse it must be to be told that you have a defective brain, that the way you behave is unacceptable, that you are incapable of controlling your behaviour, and that only by depending on a drug will you be in any way acceptable to your family and to society. A number of studies looking at what children on Ritalin thought of the drug confirmed this. One child said, ‘I think it is a kind of sickness, because it, it kind of takes over, I know it takes over my body… it’s like you don’t have that much control… I kind of feel weird, because you need a pill to control yourself.’²⁸

The child psychiatrist Sandra Scott, writing in New Scientist, said, ‘Contrary to what some parents presume, drugs do not treat bad behaviour directly. Using drugs to treat conduct disorder exposes the child to unnecessary side effects and makes it harder to apply more effective methods such as cognitive behavioural therapy - getting the child to understand why he behaves in the way he does - or therapy involving the child’s family.’²⁹ The ‘comprehensive treatment programme’ recommended by NICE includes both cognitive behavioural therapy and family therapy.

Another consultant psychiatrist, Felicity, told me how, while she did prescribe Ritalin, she was well aware that many of the mothers of children diagnosed with ADHD had little idea how to use praise in getting a child to behave well. These women relied solely on criticism and punishment, often physical punishment. The multi-disciplinary team of which Felicity was a member used group methods to help the mothers learn how to praise their children. One sticking point was often the mother’s inability to see that praise which is followed immediately by criticism is in effect not praise at all. There is no point in saying to a child, ‘You behaved really well then,’ if this is immediately followed by, ‘Why didn’t you behave like that yesterday?’

However, using praise effectively to encourage a child to behave well is not simple. Over the past century much of the research carried out by psychologists has been devoted to proving the obvious, but then the obvious is only what people are prepared to see. For many people what was obvious was that children will learn to behave correctly if all their errors are punished. This ‘obvious’ fact psychologists have shown not to be true. We all learn best when our correct behaviour, or even just-approaching-correct behaviour, is rewarded and our errors ignored. This has been shown to be the case not just with our own species but with a wide range of other species.

The idea that rewards, not punishments, should have primacy was gradually, though not completely, taken up by teachers and education specialists. However, knowing what response to reward can be tricky. What nearly right answers should be rewarded? Is 6 + 4 = 11 less wrong than 6 + 4 = 13, and thus deserving some modest praise?

The question of what behaviour to reward is even more difficult when it comes to more general achievements and social relationships. A continuing problem for those of us who try to help people change and thus lead happier lives is that a good but relatively complex idea, if taken up enthusiastically but uncritically by people seeking fame and fortune, becomes oversimplified and is applied lavishly without any careful thought. The Freudian psychoanalytic idea that sexual repression can lead in complex ways to neurotic misery, when taken up enthusiastically and uncritically by advocates of free love, became the source of fame and wealth for a few and the source of great misery for many, with an immense increase in the number of people suffering from sexually transmitted diseases. Similarly the idea that children should be praised for right responses was linked to the idea that adults should treat children with respect, and together they were turned into one oversimplified notion called ‘self-esteem’. A person was deemed to have, or not to have, self-esteem, in the same way that a person might have, or not have, a car. Or a person was deemed to have high or low self-esteem, in the same way that a car might have a nearly full or nearly empty petrol tank. What followed was competition between therapists in a scramble to win fame and fortune out of ‘self-esteem’ and its spin-offs, like ‘the inner child’. In the USA, where self-confidence is usually ranked as the highest virtue (being sure that God is actively engaged in supervising your welfare is a mark of supreme self-confidence), parents began praising their children as enthusiastically and uncritically as they used to beat them.

Fashions have their day. Now some psychologists in the USA are saying that too much praise lowers children’s motivation and can turn them into ‘praise junkies’. Nikki Sheehan, writing in the parents section of the Guardian, said:

Dr Ron Taffel, author of Nurturing Good Children Now, described watching children sledding in Central Park. ‘Their parents were screaming, “Great job! Phenomenal sledding! That’s the best I’ve ever seen,’ “said Taffel in the New York Times. As he points out, the children were being praised for obeying the laws of gravity. ‘It cheapens the praise, and children may become dependent.’

Lilian Katz, from the University of Illinois, claims that saying, ‘good painting’ will keep children at task while you are watching, but, once adult attention is withdrawn, many lose interest in the task. She believes that demotivation may occur as the child’s focus moves from enjoyment of the task in hand to the search for more praise: the more we reward, the more likely the child is to lose intrinsic interest in whatever they were doing to get the reward…

Research in the classroom by Mary Bud Rowe, at the University of Florida, found that students who were praised lavishly were more hesitant in their responses, less likely to persist with difficult tasks and did not share their ideas with fellow students. Creativity may also be affected as they take fewer risks with their work.

One explanation for the loss of confidence and motivation is that over-praised children feel under pressure to keep it up. ‘What kids need is unconditional support,’ avers Alfie Kohn, author of Hooked on Praise. ‘That’s not just different from praise - it’s the opposite of praise. “Good job!” is conditional. It means we’re offering attention and acknowledgement and approval for jumping through our hoops.’ Kohn suggests instead that a simple, evaluation-free description of what the child is doing tells them that you have noticed, and lets them take pride in their actions.³⁰

Unconditional support means that the parent is on the child’s side even when the child get things wrong. Occasionally the parent does praise, but, in deciding when to do this, the parent discriminates between what the child is well capable of doing and what requires some special, new effort by the child. Just as a parent needs to separate the act from the actor in correcting the child (‘That was a bad thing you did’, instead of ‘You are a bad child’) so the parent needs to separate the act from the actor in praising the child. ‘That was a clever thing you did’ allows the child to conceive of cleverness as a choice of how to behave, say, cleverly or stupidly, whereas ‘You are a clever child’ could lead the child to make one of three unhelpful assumptions. The child could overestimate his innate ability and thus come to feel that he need not try to make an effort in anything he does; he could doubt that he is as clever as his parent says he is because he doubts the veracity of his parent’s praise, and so come to feel that he is an impostor who will one day be found out; he could worry that he might not always be able to demonstrate his cleverness as his parent expects, and so come to feel that he will often disappoint his parent.

Life is never as simple as an examination with mutually exclusive right and wrong answers. Most of the things we do are both right and wrong. Everything we do has good and bad consequences. Parents need to think carefully about what they should praise in a child’s behaviour and when and where they should offer praise.

What an adult chooses to praise in a child’s behaviour reveals as much about the adult as it does about the child. Here is a fictional incident which has the hallmarks of being taken from real life. Anna is the protagonist in Sarah Harris’s novel Closure, which is about a group of middle-class thirty-year-olds in London in the 1990s. Roo is Anna’s long-time friend.

Anna agreed to drive over to Roo’s house, although she was not in the mood for Roo’s five-year-old daughter, Daisy, who, last week, had laughed at Anna’s shoes.

‘They’re ridiculous,’ she had said, as if trying out a new word for size. ‘Mummy says you dress like you’re a teenager and if you leave it much longer you won’t have any children.’ She had paused, as if to allow Anna to reflect on her words, before saying, with horrified indignation, ‘Why is your hair all straggly?’

Roo had praised Daisy for the proper use of the word ‘straggly’.³¹

Closure is not a deep psychological novel but Sarah Harris does show how her heroine Anna is still struggling with the questions of who she is and to what degree she should value and accept herself. A five-year-old child could threaten her with annihilation. She had tried to deny her fear by indulging herself in foolish, romantic fantasies about a man, a radio agony uncle, whom her commonsense should have told her was a poseur.

Sexual activity and sexual fantasies are an extremely popular defence against the fear of annihilation, but they are a defence which wounds us because in childhood our experiences relating to our sexuality gave us much that we had to deny.