How to talk to your children about rules
Lay down the law at home — with the aid of old German tales
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Narrated by Gavanndra Hodge
Rules. without them society would be an anarchic mess. Which is what my home was like when I was growing up. My parents were Chelsea bohemians in the Seventies — ie drug addicts. I ate what I wanted, watched TV as much as I wanted and started smoking aged 12. My dad’s only rule was: don’t be boring. This was fun, glamorous, chaotic, sometimes scary. How I longed for my parents to delineate the edges of my existence with, say, a fixed bedtime. How I longed for some rules. As Janis Joplin sings: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
It is up to parents to create their children’s universe. We use rules to keep them safe (“Look before you cross the road”); to make sure the family unit runs smoothly (“Don’t do that to your sister’s eye!”); to teach them about the world beyond the one we make for them (“Say thank you to the nice lady”). Unlike my parents, I run quite a tight ship. It feels like this is useful for everyone: children, adults, even the pets. But children are natural rebels and laying down the law can be an exhausting business. There’s no statement more soul-grinding than: “Don’t do that No, don’t do that. I said don’t do that, DON’T DO THAT. I told you not to do that, of course it hurts.”
What can we say to children to help them understand that the rules are for their benefit too? That we are not being simply bossy and annoying. Rather than regaling them with tales from one’s own childhood (children find it hard to believe that their parents were ever young, making this a pointless exercise) I would suggest nightly readings from the excellent 19th-century collection of German cautionary tales Struwwelpeter (Shockheaded Peter) by Heinrich Hoffmann. These are gory enough to keep children interested and bizarre enough to stick in the memory. The stories include The Very Sad Tale with the Matches, in which a little girl refuses to stop playing with matches, accidentally sets herself alight, burns to death and is mourned only by her cats; and The Story of Soup-Kaspar, in which a hearty young boy decides he doesn’t want to eat his soup any more, wastes away and dies after five days. A soup tureen is placed atop his grave. That will make them eat their peas.
However, there are times when rules can and should be questioned. I’ve always thought it an interesting irony that we praise adults who know their own minds and who query the system – the entrepreneurs and the change-makers, the ones who refuse to accept the established narratives and thereby create something new and exciting, without whom we might still be sitting in caves rubbing sticks together for warmth — and yet we do not encourage this behaviour in children. When they ask why they must perform some arbitrary task or fit in with an arranged plan, they are most likely to hear: “Because I said so”, “Just do it”, or “I’m your mother, I make the rules” (I realise now that this might just be me).
So, for the second half of this conversation a prop might be useful: a ruler. I’m not talking a prime minister or a chief executive, just a plain old ruler in wood, metal or plastic. The Latin word for ruler is regula, which means the thing that helps us to draw a straight line, while “rule” comes from the Latin verb rego, meaning to keep straight, to guide, to control. And this gives a sense of the spectrum of meaning here. Rules can be comforting anti-chaos tools, they can be moral guidelines to maintain a functional society and the safety of its inhabitants, but they can also be oppressive, controlling, wrong. We must not forget that rules (like the ruler in our pencil case) are only as good as the human who devised them. It is important, when thinking about the regulations that bind our existence, to ask who made them and to what end. Malala Yousafzai was a child who questioned the rules set by her society, as was Greta Thunberg.
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Good rulers — good parents — are the ones who listen to these questions and might even be prepared to have their opinions shifted, to change the rules.
