A Misguided Nostalgia

Why are Gen X romanticising child neglect and corporal punishment via memes?

Gen X.

Hard as fucking nails we were.

Rocketing down vertical slides on to surfaces of PURE GRAVEL…...

Mind, gravel was harder than it is now though. OLD SCHOOL gravel it was …..granite gravel…….

Wore it in our gammy, gashed knees like grey jewels, we did…..

Roooaaaarrrr!

I jest, but I am partial to a bit of that, myself - nostalgia for good old fashioned 80’s danger.

As a kid, I rocked that ‘Witches Hat’ in Springfield Park like a pro surfer. Bending and balancing, my stomach muscles never had it so good.

I remember when Alexandra (the posh kid next door) tried to leapfrog over the oblong rocking horse, mistimed it and ended up with its metal ears lodged in a very unfortunate place. *winces*

All this said, I rally against the prolific ‘safety’ culture we see today and wrote about it here

A Wolf named ‘Safety’

Risk is what made my generation so good at making judgements. It allows us to assess situations and as Alexandra found out, learn the hard way.

BUT

What I find no value in, however, is the current vogue for using memes to celebrate a ‘golden age’ of corporal punishment and child neglect.

Whilst risk involves naturally occurring consequence, physical chastisement and neglect involve an adult deliberately creating a violent response or ignoring welfare altogether. Here’s an example of the sort of thing I mean.

It wasn’t cool then, it’s not cool now.

Of course, fans of this don’t come out and say ‘bring it back’ but these memes are all are in that spirit of ‘ah….those were the days’, you know?

The one that disturbs me most is of a toddler being encouraged to drink alcohol. You’ve probably seen it.

It prods me for a reason.

At infant school, there was a boy in my class and one morning in the early ‘80s, his little brother - about the same age as the kid in that meme, went downstairs after a family party. He innocently helped himself to the dregs left in all the glasses, was taken to hospital and died of alcohol poisoning.

Giving your toddler alcohol is abuse. End of. There is no justification. I see no good in revering it. It gave no one super powers.

Then, there are the memes like this one;

Where to start, where to fucking start……

Yay! Big up Daz’s dad, everyone. He had it sussed. Ledge!

The ‘good’ hiding crew, eh?

Maybe you’re one of them.

I too, got smacked as a child - many of us did.  Whilst I am not comparing the odd clout to a full-on weal inducing beating, I believe no type of ‘hiding’ to be a ‘good’ one and worthy of an encore.

The usual defence, is the oft said

“Well I turned out alright”

On the surface, maybe so, but is this because of or in spite of these acts?

If you think the former, then a play date with your inner child is long overdue. I suggest you and little six year old Johnny reconvene and reminisce. I can assure you if he was back in the room and we took a cortisol reading, it would illustrate massive stress.

Imagine if it was sexual abuse, being made light of.

“Oh! I remember the fella from the newsagent! A quick knuckle shuffle on a Sunday after me paper round never did me any harm……”

Of course it did. You just survived it. There’s a difference!

Sadly, both physical and sexual abuse still occur, but thankfully, sexual abuse hasn’t been trivialised in this way. Maybe because not only was it always unacceptable (in most circles) to do in public, but there are clearer boundaries. Unlike physical abuse, society didn’t tend to generally condone a bit of it here and there. There are fewer grey areas.

We are all to some extent, products of our time, and mercifully these days, most parents no longer hit their children.

But it should never be glorified as something we want to return to. The dark legacy of that era runs through us all.

I am a fan of Alice Miller and she has written extensively about the trauma children internalise from physical punishment. Her book ‘For Your Own Good’ is a great place to start if you want to explore the subject further.

If you find yourself posting those kind of memes, ask yourself why you seek to defend or make light of inflicting pain on children.

Could it be, that in your quivering, vulnerable little six year old heart, you don’t want to believe that your ultimate protector could have ever betrayed you in that way?

Most of our parents did what they thought best, just as we currently do for our kids and grandkids.

There are popular practices currently widespread, that I hope will one day be looked back upon with disbelief and horror by our descendants. Cry It Out/Controlled Crying, for example. For those who don’t know, it’s where parents deliberately choose to dismiss the cries of their baby in order to ‘train’ them.

In many respects, it feels as though emotional abuse has taken the baton as society’s preferred way to damage its offspring. Ignoring your child’s attempts to connect whilst you scroll on your phone is now the socially acceptable face of neglect.

All this, whilst paradoxically, ‘feelings’ have never had so much attention. Perhaps the posting of the memes I describe is a backlash against the ‘I’m offended’ culture we find ourselves immersed in. ‘Feelings’, after all are the new sex……

I don’t know about you but I’ve never felt more pressured to have them, talk about them and pay someone to……oh I don’t know…….whatever Feeling Whisperers counsellors and therapists do……

But regardless of our thoughts on the jiggery wokery currently afoot, there are some things that are better left in the past. For me, normalised physical violence and kids on the lash are two of them.

So please let’s stop talking about them fondly in the same breath as mix tapes and Crispy fucking Pancakes.

It didn’t make you tough then, and it just makes you sound like a nobhead now.