Kids are neither whales nor dogs - why train them as if they are?

GIVE ME A BREAK:OCCASIONALLY my e-mail inbox delivers a surprise, such as the press release stating that if I want to raise my children right, I need to be a trainer of killer whales. If you can tame Shamu, who will swallow creatures whole, you can tame a child, writes KATE HOLMQUIST

A new book, Whale Done Parenting, shows how "advances in behavioural science and positive training concepts used at places like SeaWorld can be adapted to the sometimes frustrating challenges of parenting". The book follows the travails of a novice whale trainer who marvels at the complex behaviours that experienced trainers can coax out of killer whales, while she and her husband struggle to make their son obey even the simplest rules. She learns three essential lessons: set your child up for success, ignore failure and/or redirect bad behaviour, and reward success. She learns a philosophy that emphasises communication and praise rather than obedience and punishment.

I don’t know about you, but when I was sitting in the splash zone at SeaWorld I saw these trained whales as pathetic caged creatures willing to humiliate themselves for a treat of a smelly mackerel from a bucket. If I had followed these rules, I suppose I could have robotic children who kept the house tidy and had my dinner waiting when I got home from work, and would go on to support me in my dotage, but the notion that my children are here to make my life easier reminds me of the slum children of Mumbai, who rag-pick to feed their parents.

I feel the same way about watching children who have been trained from toddlerhood to perform tricks – such as 11-year-old contortionist Emily on Sky 1's Got to Dance, whose disciplined perfection is nauseating. Her dancing isn't creative and free. She is like a dancing bear, doing tricks to win approval.

Meanwhile, some US parents are using the philosophy of Cesar Millan, dog trainer to the stars on National Geographic's Dog Whisperer, to train their children. A mammal is a mammal, human or not, and children will react to positive reinforcement and a confident trainer just like dogs do, say advocates of training children like dogs.

This trend is incredibly sad. We have divorced ourselves from the creativity of childhood. We look for ways to train our children to conform to a world we ourselves may find limiting and even depressing. Having suppressed our own creativity in favour of playing by the rules, we expect our children to do the same and follow us on a career track measured by how much we earn and what sort of house we live in.

So many parents want children who will fit in quietly with their lifestyles, when childhood and adolescence are, by their very nature, chaotic periods of discovery, with swinging emotions and levels of creativity that may create a mess in the house but have value of their own. Children like structure, but they also need room to play, and being playful is difficult when your parents are so stressed out by work routines they’ve forgotten what playfulness is.

When parents are intent on having a clean, well-ordered house rather than a happy one, they tell their children to tidy up this, clean up that, to stop leaving toys lying around, to keep their fingerprints off the furniture. A child banished to a bedroom with a PlayStation in a clean house is preferable to a child making a mess of creating art on the dining room table.

For Leaving Cert students, who need to have their CAO forms filled in by early February, there’s a choice. Some parents are thinking: should my child pursue the passion for art that she has shown since about the age of one when she first held a crayon in her hand and realised that it would make a mark on paper as well as walls – or should we see our Leaving Cert children as dogs, telling them to focus on walking politely on a lead towards a career in business, medicine, science or nursing, even if it isn’t what they truly want?

If you see yourself as a trainer of whales, dogs or 11-year-old contortionists who will ultimately reward you with a perfect performance, you will push your child towards a high-earning career regardless. But if you see yourself as a parent who believes that the next generation may actually have the potential to change the rules in ways you have never considered, then you might just encourage your child towards an arts course that has no specific career path at the end. You might just believe that learning how to think is more important than being told what to think.

There are two kinds of parents at Leaving Cert stage: those who encourage their children to pursue their passions, and those who direct their children to a specific job because they fear having a child still living at home at the age of 30, who works in a call centre or a restaurant, or who emigrates to work in a call centre or restaurant overseas.

Medicine and accountancy can be passions, and if your child achieves the points to do those jobs and really wants them, that’s great. Yet there are many children who achieve high points and sign up for subjects such as medicine merely because they got the points. These children are afraid of being artists because, in our society, personal fulfilment has no economic value.

In The Unit, a novel by Swedish writer Ninni Holmqvist, artists aged 50-plus with no dependent children are put into utopian hospital facilities where they participate in medical experiments, donate their organs, and then die by choice, so convinced are they of their worthlessness. These childless artists are redundant, because when judged as economic units of production they don't measure up. Their ultimate worth is their organs. Their art is left in underground banks, never to be seen again.

In Holmqvist’s world, valuable people are those who do not challenge the status quo, and choose instead to conform and perform entrepreneurial tricks in banking, the bland media and multinational companies, while producing children who will follow their path.

Her book made me ask this question: do you want your child to play by the rules and have a predictable life of productivity and procreation, SeaWorld-style? Or do you want your child to swim free? And are you willing to admit how much free-swimming children scare you?