The scene in Little Dinosaurs was an ugly one. The scene in Little Dinosaurs, to be fair, is always a pretty ugly one: it’s a “soft-play” centre—a well-padded indoor-adventure playground cum climbing frame through which north London’s most energetic under-sixes bound and romp and shriek while their dispirited parents sip milky coffees and listen out for the siren-wail of minor injury.
Ordinarily, such shouting as there is is directed at members of the pre-school community. But on this occasion, it was mother-to-mother, and the vehemence of the altercation was enough to blow spume off the top of my cappuccino. Mother A had witnessed Mother B’s four-year-old socking her two-year-old on the jaw at the top of the slide; and Mother B had, unfortunately, witnessed Mother A telling the four-year-old exactly what would happen if he did it again.
“How dare you shout at my son?”
“He hit my boy!”
“It’s not your place to tell him off!”
“If you can’t control his behaviour someone’s going to have to!”
“Whatever!”
“WhatEVER!”
And so on. There was not, in this exchange, even the slightest hint of compromise or conciliation. Mother B was absolutely outraged that Mother A had presumed to discipline (or, as she clearly thought, bully) her kid; and Mother A took the view that if someone else’s pet thug is going to punch your child you are entitled to issue a mild corrective. Obviously there’s a world of moral greyscale when it comes to the nature of said corrective, and its appropriate level of mildness. But the row seemed to dramatise one of the cruxes of modern parenting.
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Isaiah Berlin’s useful popularisation of the difference between positive and negative freedoms is relevant. As it’s sometimes expressed, your right to swing your arm ends where it meets my chin. In this case it is subject to an extra layer of complication: your child’s right to swing his arm ends where it meets my child’s chin. The problem is, the moral agency of the child is subcontracted to his parent: it’s your responsibility to keep your child from hitting my child. But if you fail to discharge that duty, does your child’s negative liberty (freedom from being told off by other grown-ups) trump my positive liberty to do what I deem necessary to safeguard my own child’s negative liberty (freedom from being socked on jaw while queuing for dinosaur-shaped slide)?
I was feeling not unlike Thomas Aquinas as I conducted this miniature inquiry into morals at my Formica table in front of my unquiet cappuccino. And like Aquinas, who placed a high value on contemplation, I conducted my inquiry inwardly because I did not much fancy wearing Mother B’s hot chocolate as a hat.
But it’s a peculiarly modern, late-capitalistic inquiry into morals to be having. In many other ages and societies, I think I’m safe in saying, the issue wouldn’t arise because the penumbra of parental responsibility would be wider: any adults on hand would, within reason, be presumed to have some responsibility for keeping the kids in line. Mother B would see Mother A scolding her child and—with a wince of apology—would pile in and give her own child an even bigger talking-to. “It takes a village to raise a child,” as the phrase popularised by Hillary Clinton has it.
But two things have changed. We have a cult of the child, in which the positive liberty of the kid to do what it damn wants is now more highly valued, as is its negative liberty to do so without hindrance from any adult other than its own parent.
And we have the atomisation of the idea of communal or public space. There is no village: “there are individual men and women and there are families,” as Margaret Thatcher had it. These aren’t our children: they are, like private possessions, my children. They are extensions of the self. Other adults are no longer presumed allies and proxies of the parents; rather, they are potential abusers. Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap hit that nerve exactly.
The row in this case ended, to the relief of myself and my cappuccino, in a stand-off rather than a slap-off. Mother A sailed off in high dudgeon. Mother B remained at the table, rehearsing her indignation. “She says she’s ‘got her eye on him’? Stupid cow. Like, she can see everywhere?”
Ah, the Panopticon! It’s all going on in Little Dinosaurs.
