The Look

I was walking into a shopping centre recently when I became aware of a group of 3 boys, aged about 10, hanging around the car park. One of them was on his knees beside the front offside tyre of a BMW. Now I'm no fan of BMW drivers, especially since they seem to be able to do anything with their cars except park them between white lines, but vandalism is vandalism whether it's being done to a Fiat 500 or a BMW. I went back a couple of steps and fixed the boy with The Look. He said: 'Whit?' I said: 'What are you doing?' He said: 'Nuffin.' I said: 'Fine - now go and do it somewhere else.' And off he slouched with his mates.

In the doctors' surgery today, there was boy of about four climbing the walls or at least the partition that separates the reception desk from the waiting room. His mother said: 'Come down from there, please, Oliver' a few times and then gave up. I tried to ignore it. It wasn't Oliver's fault: his doctor was running 35 minutes late and Oliver was like a wee Tasmanian Devil. It was pure boredom. When he started climbing on chairs and jumping off them, I gave up all pretence of not noticing and gave him The Look. He went and got a car out of the toy box. I wasn't planning to batter Oliver. I just
thought some adult was going to come and sit where Oliver's feet had been and I wasn't happy.

It's quite alarming to discover I still have The Look. After all, I haven't been in a classroom since 1990. But it is reassuring to notice that kids still know what The Look means. Most kids know when they're pushing their luck. Call it testing the grown-ups if you like. And they know when they've gone too far and will mostly back off when they get The Look. It's the ones who don't respond that we have to worry about as parents, teachers and communities.

The use of the word 'please' by parents worries me a lot. I don't remember adults using that word to me very often. Even the blessed Joyce Grenfell only said: 'George, don't do that.' Sure, there are plenty of times when you can slip in a please - eat your broccoli, please - but when a child is doing something that is unacceptable, inappropriate, wrong in fact, if the grown ups around them don't tell them to stop, who will?

I think what most bothers me is that in my opinion (and not so humble either) children should know who runs the show and it's not them. Grown ups make the rules and enforce them. Mostly the rules are reasonable.

Now that I've written this, I realise I probably come over as some sort of fascist. That's not my intention: I believe kids need rules and those can only come from adults. Setting rules and boundaries doesn't make a grown up a baddie. It makes them responsible. And we all are, parents, grandparents, members of the community.