Children, like dogs, need to be trained. After this promising start, Cassandra Jardine sets out to offer parents some practical advice on how to teach children ‘good habits from an early age’. Heaven knows such advice is needed, not least because, as Jardine remarks, ‘Many is the time when the children of delightful parents have left me speechless with irritation as they behave boorishly around our house.’
I had hoped, after reading her opening remarks, that Jardine was going to come down like a ton of bricks on modern parents and belabour us for spoiling our children rotten. She has it in her, I believe, to produce a reactionary masterpiece, which could be given at Christmas by long-suffering older members of the family to every sentimental, over-indulgent parent in the land. In other words, I longed for Jardine to give her seal of approval to my own almost entirely ineffectual style of parenting (dread word), which consists of bellowing like a demented sergeant-major at my three children (girl aged seven, boy aged three, girl aged one) when I see in them any lapse from the standards which I consider indispensable to civilised life.
Jardine is unfortunately too kind, too tactful and too unsure of her own authority to have written such a book as yet, but I trust that when she is older and her own five children are grown up she will have another stab at it. Almost all the necessary wisdom is here. She has come to realise that it is far kinder to children to establish a routine: as Jardine remarks, she discovered, on starting to make rules about when to go to bed, that her children’s ‘natural instincts were those of camp commandants’.
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