Is ‘Soft Love’ harming our children?

Animals and humans are products of millions of years of evolution. It is not just our bodies that have evolved the instincts that protect us and guide us in a dangerous environment have too. In the past the cost of getting it wrong was that both parents and children came to an untimely end.

The dangers we and our children face today are different but our instincts are still there. How much do we value these instincts?

Maybe because of modern society we’ve lost the ability to trust our instincts. Animals have a built-in instinctive routine for training their children. It is a balance of caring and moving them towards self-sufficiency.

Victorians believed children were wild, uncivilised, barbarian savages that needed to be severely disciplined to keep them under control. ‘Spare the rod and Spoil the child’ was the motto of the time. Maybe we have swung too far in the other direction.

While children are not born savages, they can become so if their parents allow it to happen. You don’t need to be brutal to discipline your children.

Learn from the ‘tough love’ of animals

Parents who feel they have to keep a comfortable home with three meals a day for their near adult children should remember the eagles.

Baby eaglets are born onto a layer of down from the mother’s breast which she places in the base of the eagle’s nest. However, once the offspring reach a certain age, the parents will remove the down so it is no longer as comfortable to lie in the nest.

A bit later the parents will take the eaglets to the edge of a cliff and nudge them towards it. If they don’t take the hint, they will push the eaglets off the edge.

That same parent will plunge down to catch the eaglet if it doesn’t manage to fly.

Advice from grandparents

As part of evolution we learned to talk. Grandmothers passed down knowledge and experience of child rearing by ‘word-of- mouth’ to mothers. However, with our more mobile society, that advice is frequently not available.

Today we need to pool what knowledge and experience there is and to take much greater responsibility for our role as parents and trainers of future citizens of our society.

The tragedy of our time is to see evidence of so many ’feral’ children. Not all ‘feral’ children come from poor or deprived backgrounds. What they have been deprived of is ‘tough love’ by soft or negligent parents. If we don’t toughen up, we can look to an increasingly savage society!

One of the things we need to do is realise when ‘soft-love’ is not benefiting our children. However, no one thinks it is easy, especially if children have had experience of being left to run their lives as they thought fit to suit themselves.

Take our Bringing up Children programme to find out how to give ‘tough love' in a loving caring way which results in happy and responsible children.