@ Daphne: what you suggested about child upbringing does not clash with what Sedqa social workers lecture.

[Daphne – Bingo! And I never went to a Sedqa course, a Cana course, or tal-Muzew. Now I wonder where I learned all that…..let’s have a guess.]

But there are more questions by parents which are not that easy to answer. Should parents resort to physical punishment?

[Daphne – No, for God’s sake, isn’t that obvious?]

Should they treat their teenage children as friends?

[Daphne – No, absolutely not. Parents are parents and friends are friends. You need your parents to be your parents because your friends are people you choose for yourself. The role of parent and the role of friend are different. The LAST thing children and teenagers want is their parents trying to be their friends. I knew mothers who were proud of the fact that their teenage sons (and daughters) told them everything – or so they thought. I wanted to tell them that if their son was telling them everything, then his psychological development wasn’t normal, he was emotionally retarded, or he had no life. As we grow, weare supposed to have secrets from our parents. It’s a matter of privacy. We tell our friends things we shouldn’t be telling our parents, and that’s one reason parents can’t ever be friends, and shouldn’t try to be. Imagine the full-on creepiness of a parent telling you their inner-most thoughts and giving you details of who they fancy – revolting.]

Should we leat our kids learn from their own mistakes?

[Daphne – Yes, but only if they insist.]

How can we teach our children to be assertive?

[Daphne – That’s easy. Give them a backbone and don’t send them to places like tal-Muzew where they get slapped down.]

Parents who think they are not good as Daphne should think seriously about going for a Parental Skills course.
http://www.sedqa.gov.mt/primaryprevention_parentalskillsprogramme.asp

[Daphne – I strongly advise against it. The trouble with a lot of parents is that they’ve somehow – unbelievably – forgotten what it’s like to be on the other side. The clue to parenting is damned simple: put yourself in your kid’s shoes. I would never have gone to a parenting skills course if for no other reason than that I can imagine how I, as a child, would have reacted to my parents going to one. They’d say X and I would yell back “Oh, is that something they taught you at Parenting Skills, by any chance?” Come on, you can’t be serious. If your children are any age above 10 and they know you’re going to Parenting Skills lessons, you’ve bloody well had it before you’ve even begun. It’s just so false. Do you think children with the merest bit of intelligence can’t tell when you’re unsure of yourself and following lessons somebody else has just taught you? The only lesson worth knowing: remember what it was like, and behave accordingly.]

Lidl is the same all over the world. In the UK and Ireland these seasonal offers are known to be sold-out within the first hour.

Exactly! It was Angelik.

So according to Daphne we don’t need Sedqa, and social workers, Alfred Adler’s theories should be thrown out of the window because Daphne says so.

[Daphne – You’re confusing two entirely different things. Sedqa and social workers are there to help people with problems. They are not there to teach entirely normal people in normal families how to live. My point was that we have developed a dependency culture to the point where we think we need help, lessons and guidance to do even the most basic things, like relating to a spouse and bringing up a child. We need somebody to hold our hand all the way. The result is not better spouses or better parents, but weaker and more inept ones who give up the minute they can no longer lean on any one or receive reassurance that what they are doing is fine. Alfred Adler lived between 1870 and 1937, for goodness’ sake.]

Daphne, if you never attended Sedqa’s parental skills course how can you say it’s all BS?

[Daphne – Because these are things that you can’t teach, just as you can’t teach somebody to be a good husband or wife. No amount of Cana courses have ever made a good marriage – indeed, marital breakdown is escalating even though the courses are compulsory for those who marry in church. And despite the welter of parenting books and parenting courses, children have never been so unhappy even though they have never been more safe and comfortable in the history of humanity. They are bossed, bullied and every minute of their day is controlled by constantly hovering, domineering adults with some agenda and a plan. It is the whole person that makes a good parent or a good spouse, and the whole person is created from birth and cannot be made instantly and overnight in a crash course. Children can tell if their parents are deploying learned lessons and so can spouses. It comes across as false because it is false.]

Some people love their children but spoil them with the way they bring them up.

[Daphne – I have strong views on what constitutes spoiling, and I rather suspect that they are accurate ones. Spoiling does not mean giving children whatever they want. It is perfectly possible to give children whatever they want and still end up without spoiled children. Spoiling comes from imparting a shallow and materialistic attitude and more importantly, from allowing children to believe that the sun shines out of their butt and that they are allowed to be ill mannered and insufferable because they are children. Maltese children are grotesquely ill-mannered and poorly behaved. Their table manners are hideous, they are allowed to run around in restaurants, they talk back, they can’t converse, they whine and shriek – ghastly. Everywhere I go on this island I see one of two types of parent: the ones who beg and plead with their children to obey, and the ones who threaten them with violence. Can this behaviour be unlearned through a parenting skills course? I don’t think so. You’d have to change the whole of the parents’ psychology. It’s not a simple matter of telling them: never plead with your children or speak violently to them.]

Yes, there are those people who tell others what to do but fail miserably when they come to practise what they preach. I know of many doctors who smoke. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take heed of their recommendations against smoking.

[Daphne – Do as I say and not as I do? It never worked for anyone, parents least of all.]

As far as I know, tal-Muzew never organised parental skills courses. Sedqa and Cana do and their courses have been beneficial to many Maltese families. I and many others recommend them.

[Daphne – And I recommend no courses at all, because the only things that parents need to know are these: from an early age, make sure your children have perfect manners, respect for others, and know how to dress and converse so that can go anywhere and will always be pleasant company, open their minds, don’t hector them, don’t bully them about studying, and above all, leave them alone and let them breathe. Between the ages of 13 and 18, keep an eagle-eye on them, don’t suffocate them with curfews because, as you told your own parents, you won’t be doing anything at 4am that you can’t do at 1am, and don’t visit your own dreams and ambitions on them because they are not an extension of you. And of course, it’s always best if you carry on living with their other parent because children of all ages have serious trouble coping with the idea of their parent shacking up with somebody who is not their parent, however brave a face they might put on, and one way or another it’s going to come out, sooner or later. This is the bit of advice that parents like least – but tough, it’s a fact.]

Here’s some sound advice. Stop viewing the world in terms of the more recent past and observe current political developments through research from primary sources. Meanwhile, cross-reference your findings to the remote past and try to fathom the future.

As to thinking “of the EU as fascism”, that is totally incorrect. I am fully aware of the positive aspects – which, I remind you were achieved by the nation states not by the EU – now try to release yourself from that box. And don’t forget: I know how Europhiles feel because up till around 1990 I was one myself.

[Daphne – Then what happened? Let me guess: you saw an apparition and heard voices showing you the light.]

Mario I recommend a course in parenting skills which Sedqa and Cana organise for parents like you.
Me and my better half attended these courses some thirteen years ago and I can tell you that we put a lot of what we learned to practice with good results.
Parents tend to bring up their children the way they were brought up. Which is not always good.
These parenting courses are based on the teachings of Alfred Adler and are organised by qualified professionals on the subject.
Basically it’s a lot of common sense which nowadays is not that common and obvious.
To drive a car one must go for driving lessons , and pass a driving test.
Aren’t your children more important than a car? Invest some time for your children’s upbringing now and they will reap the benefits as they grow up.

[Daphne – Well, if I say that a Cana course on parenting is useless and that tal-Muzew is actually detrimental to a child’s mind, John Schembri comes out and recommends both. Parenting courses are useless for all but people who were brought up in barns, John, because real life throws up situations that the guide-books and the Cana courses don’t teach you about. In my experience (and it’s extensive), the worst sort of parents fall into two categories: the supremely selfish and incompetent (drunks, the emotionally retarded, the shallow and materialistic) and the supremely ‘competent’ (Cana counsellors, marriage counsellors, prayer-group members). The damage caused by the latter is not always immediately evident. Their children may lead obedient, repressed lives until they reach their late 30s and then break out. When I was growing up, I knew the children of two Cana counsellors who were forever on the Rediffusion telling other people how to bring up their children – while their own children lived on the streets, let themselves in after school, and then graduated to all sorts of sleaze and trouble. Children are not cars and you don’t learn how to drive them. If you have to be taught how to love and look after your own children, then God help you. One of the worst parents on record was Benjamin Spock.]

THANKS DAPHNE.

I beg to differ, John. Experience has shown that education and regulation do not work in Malta. It is laws and more importantly the enforcement of laws that works. Look at the smoking ban in bars and clubs. I have not been to any bar or club in the last two years where people were not openly breaking the regulation … the reason is that this law is not enforced and the chances of being caught are minimal. On the other hand you rarely see anybody driving and not wearing a seatbelt nowadays and the reason is simple, the chances of getting caught are considerable and the penalty relatively steep.

Whenever I travel to Nordic countries and use the trams I am amazed at how there are rarely any spot checks, therefore the chances of being caught not paying are low, yet everyone pays. I cannot help wonder what would happen if the same thing were tried in Malta.

Mario Debono says the obvious: “Daphne, you may be right. Or wrong. What if there was enough of a Muslim majority in a country like, say France, that would elect enough deputies to change the law?”

Daphne replies: “The point is that you can’t change the law, Mario. Wasn’t that one of the reasons we voted Yes – to ensure that our rights would no longer be tampered with or trampled upon?”

Are you serious, Daphne, or just plain ignorant? You are just like ‘Homo Sovieticus’ singing proletarian songs of glory, or the millions who thought the Third Reich was God’s gift to Germany. You may see through many frivolities, Daphne, but your own naïveté flies past you. The EU is your Achilles heals, because, as you yourself remarked, you are ‘a focussed person’ and EU citizenship was all you wanted. Couple that with your presumptuousness and you get a good dose of banality. I could call you a globalist – but you wouldn’t know its true meaning and globalists generally do.

[Daphne – Hohum, Kevin. The trouble with you is that you and your wife think of the EU as fascism, when actually it is the opposite. I find it amusing that people who grew up on an island under the Catholic boot should be so fearful of living under the boot of another religion. Living under the boot of any religion is bad, and what increased secularisation in Europe has done is erode all that, fortunately. If people want to live as Muslims or Catholics, it’s up to them. I trust you respect freedom of religion. The point at issue is forcing others to live by the rules of a religion they do not espouse, or even forcing them to live by the rules of their ‘religion’ when those rules are in head-on conflict with human rights or the laws of the land (forced marriage, honour killings…). Generally, these are not even religious laws, but social codes that predated religion. The tension in Europe is not between one religion and another but between all religions and secular laws.]