By: Natural Dad

Louise
You ask if this tapped into something for me, and I realise that it did. It tapped into a great sadness and a sense of loss.
I see now that the power of these two emotions might have made my comments seem more vitriolic than I meant them to be and I regret that.
The sense of loss comes from a memory of my own childhood, when it seemed natural and desirable that the whole community be involved in looking after children and the emphasis was more on ‘our lives’ than ‘my life’, ‘our children’ more than ‘my children’. I believe that community (turning the ‘strangers’ you refer to quite a few times into neighbours) is the framework where the diversity we both cherish can best flourish; where we can best explore what it is that makes us different and what it is that makes us alike.
Obviously this community involvement required give and take and I remember my mother muttering about interfering busy-bodies. But she was strong enough to take the occasional chiding and in return she, and I (and my brothers, sisters, cousins and playmates) received love and support, practical advice, listening ears and watching eyes.
And yes, I regret and mourn the shift in emphasis from community to individual, from involvement, albeit occasionally grating or unwelcome, to ‘these things are not your concern’ and ‘my life is not your business’. I am interested in thinking about how we could rebuild that sense of community, how we can bring back some of what we have lost. It won’t be easy, but I think it is important. And, almost by definition, to increase community we will have to abandon a degree of individualism. We will have to say in reply to ‘my life is not your business’, ‘er, well, it kind of is you know’. Globally and locally we need to think more about what is good for us, rather than what is good for me.
This will have to start with dialogue, and as our conversation so far shows, tone matters. Perhaps much of it is a question of tone and degree. One person’s interference is maybe another’s involvement, one’s criticism another’s suggestion.
I hope in my personal life that I have followed your strictures scrupulously — my experience has shown me that rather like one of those absurd game shows life in general, and parenthood in particular, are minefields through which there is no safe path. We get stuff wrong, and other stuff right. We learn from the booby traps we set off ourselves, but also from the warnings of others of the pitfalls that might lay ahead.
In my own parenting I have been hugely helped by strangers, even though it may not have felt helpful at the time. My oldest child had a skin complaint when still a toddler. At the time we were living in a country where people routinely talk to you about your child (sometimes positively, sometimes ‘interfering’ — with a bit of patience you learn to filter). We got a lot of comments about the skin condition, and assured these ‘strangers’ that everything was alright, dismissing their concern in favour of our knowing better. Needless to say, the babe got iller and iller, but because we were too close, too new as parents and too much under the state of beaten-up tiredness you describe to really know what was going on. Fortunately we heeded one final piece of advice and our child was mended at the last minute. Thank you strangers, you were right, we were wrong. However what you were saying might have felt like criticism or judgement at the time, I now realise… We listen, we learn.
So, like you, I do my best not to criticise (certainly never randomly), and I try just as hard to encourage and support, but thanks for the reminder that being nice doesn’t hurt — one can never have too many reminders of that.
I hope that having clearly come across as negative I have managed to repair some of the damage, and I’m sure that there is much common ground between us. But, I am confused by this section of your reply:
“There are certainly children being neglected in many senses of the word. But these families are the ones people walk on by and don’t intervene towards. These are the parents people choose not to see, choose not to challenge, and fail to support. And the families we then sit at home and judge when they are seen on the news, never giving a thought to how we could support those families in similar situations nearby.”
This seems to suggest that there are two types of family, the ones doing nothing really wrong who are the frequent recipients of criticism about missing gloves and poor sleeping positions, and the ones committing serious neglect or worse who everyone ignores. How do you, how should I, tell the difference?
You say these are the parents people choose not to see, to challenge and fail to support but you don’t seem to draw the conclusion that seeing, challenging and supporting other parents may have prevented them from going down the same path.
You say we sit at home and judge and never give a thought to how we could support families in similar situations (I’d like to count myself out of that ‘we’ if I may, I don’t judge, though I do sometimes weep, and I give a lot of thought to how we could prevent this cruel part of our history from endlessly repeating itself).
This is a terribly, horrifically important point. My child has a bruise and you don’t mention it — children get bruised all the time as they grow to fall in love with the physical world around them. My child has two bruises — nothing odd about that, she’s a lively little one isn’t she, always getting into trouble. My child has three bruises…
I won’t labour the point; I’m sure you get my drift.
Perhaps you can tell the difference between the innocent — who resent the irksome meddling of strangers — and the guilty or the desperate who are ignored. I am not so fortunate, and would rather ruffle a few feathers than allow monstrosities to happen.
I say, that it is precisely by involving ourselves in other peoples lives (in as benevolent and non-judgemental a way as possible, natch) that we can all start to provide the nudges, hints, and if necessary stronger actions that could help people drifting into such desperate places. It is precisely by recreating the social norm of involvement that we will all come to relax a little about it and our children will learn how to deal with the input of others.
You say that my earlier comment highlights how we, as a nation, like to criticise. I don’t know if we share a nation (I’m a bit wobbly on my own national identity) but would like to think that one day we could share enough of a view of the nation we’d like to make it happen.
Right, enough of me, I’ll take Cate’s advice and zip it! (thanks Cate) Either concise but bellicose or verbose but softer — you’d have thought that after 60 years I’d have been able to find the middle ground.