Machiavelli’s The Prince is by far the most useful guide to parenting
King Lear was right: How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have an ungrateful child. For the past fortnight, I have been overseeing the construction of a tree house for my three-year-old son Ludo at the bottom of my garden, but he has yet to show any appreciation. The problem is, I have employed a young man called Edward to actually build it. The fact that I am the ‘project manager’, not to mention paying for the labour and the materials, cuts no ice with Ludo. As far as he is concerned, ‘Eddie’ deserves sole credit.
‘Where Eddie?’ he says the moment he comes back from nursery and then runs out into the garden. If I wander down to the construction site in the hope of spending some time with my son, he blocks my path and says, ‘No grown-ups.’
‘But what about Edward? He’s a grown-up.’
‘Eddie building tree house,’ he says, as if explaining something to an idiot.
My only consolation is that Ludo insists on ‘helping’ his new hero, i.e., picking up power tools and waving them around, accompanied by the appropriate sound effects. Poor Edward has to climb down from the branch he is perched on and gently pry them from Ludo’s fingers.
This whole episode has convinced me that there really is no point in doing anything nice for your children. Not only are they ungrateful, but they expect you to carry on doing nice things for them in perpetuity — an unwelcome burden for any parent. Either you meet their expectations, in which case you go bankrupt, or you dash them and they end up hating you. This is a point made by Machiavelli in The Prince.
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