Countless words have been devoted to the psychological torments of parents — to questions, feelings of guilt and pain — until we forgot one basic thing about our parenthood. It is a position of power.
Hold the hysterical laughter for a moment. When you become a mother or a father, you produce a successor who is totally dependent on you, who may submit entirely to your authority, an employee to whom you are a young boss, exceeding him in skills, knowledge, life experience and physical capacity.
If that situation occurred in any standard commercial company, you would simply assume that the subordinate is supposed to do what you tell him. The senior person does not of course have to bark his instructions at high volume. He may even adopt a pleasant and amiable tone, so long as it is clear to all participants that instructions flow in one direction.
And yet, when we arrive at the field of parenthood, that working assumption is cast into doubt and sometimes discarded at the edge of the pitch as a useless implement.
The child should obey me? What is he, my soldier? I want him to want to do it. I want to appeal to his reason — and I have heard such sentences even about an eight-month-old.
Many parents recoil from being in the position of the one who is obeyed. The obvious question is why.
Modern society regularly undermines the base of legitimacy on which the parent stands. It presents him repeatedly with new objects of anxiety and countless channels through which he may be doing it wrong. Every text, every developmental toy, every expert contributes another small deposit to the sediment of doubt.
And a person who is not certain of their own competence cannot comfortably occupy a position of authority. Which is the actual mechanism here — the reluctance is not usually a considered philosophical position about children's autonomy. It is a symptom of a parent who has been persuaded that they are probably getting it wrong, and who therefore cannot bring themselves to insist on anything.
The cost falls on the child. A small person genuinely needs somebody in the room who is prepared to be in charge — not harshly, not loudly, but unambiguously — because the alternative is a child who has to work out for himself what the limits are, by testing, continuously, which is exhausting and frightening for him.
Obedience is not the goal of parenting and it is not a virtue. But the willingness to be obeyed is a service you owe them, and it is one of the few that cannot be delegated.