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Saturday 17 May 2008

Status Anxiety

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. ‘Liberality, when used so that you may be held liberal, harms you,’ he writes. ‘If one wants to maintain a name for liberality among men, it is necessary not to leave out any kind of lavish display, so that a prince who has done this will always consume all his resources in such deeds.’

As a guide to parenting, The Prince is far more useful than any of the standard texts by well-meaning child psychologists. If you substitute the words ‘household’ for ‘principality’, it offers all sorts of useful tips on keeping the little buggers in line. It is, after all, a step-by-step instruction manual on how to win and maintain power, which is what good parenting is all about.

As a father, one of your principal duties is to instil in your children a respect for authority. This is not merely to make your own life easier; it is for their benefit, too. According to Freud, it is only by acquiring the habit of repressing their rogue impulses in deference to paternal authority that children eventually develop a moral framework. It is the voice of the father saying ‘no’ that becomes internalised and metamorphoses into the conscience — or what Freud called the ‘super-ego’. Even those who do not subscribe to Freud’s theories acknowledge that fathers have a crucial role to play when it comes to producing well-adjusted, law-abiding citizens. It is a truism among criminologists that the reason a disproportionately high number of muggers, burglars, robbers and the like are black is because of the prevalence of absentee fathers in the West Indian community, one of legacies of slavery.

Ludo is currently going through what Freud would call the ‘Oedipal phase’. I suspect this is behind his current infatuation with ‘Eddie’. It is nothing to do with Edward’s skills as a builder, great though they are. Rather, he is just a convenient stick to beat me with. As far as Ludo is concerned, I am his rival when it comes to his mother’s affections and he will do everything in his power to emasculate me.

Sometimes he expresses this less obliquely. For instance, at 6.45 a.m. every morning he climbs into the marital bed and kicks me repeatedly until I am forced to get up. He then enjoys a blissful ten minutes lying beside Caroline, convinced that he has vanquished his rival. I daresay I should put a stop to this practice in the interests of fostering his superego, but I know that Ludo will make an almighty fuss. Still, as Machiavelli says, it is better to be feared than loved. Next time he tries it, I am going to banish him to his tree house.

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.

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