The 's' word!

About 25 minutes ago while making a juice for my gorgeous little girl (it is baking hot here in Watford) I heard the words that I hear far too often and which disgust me to put it mildly. Through our lounge windows which open on to the road to a kids' school a mother said to her little girl, "Well you're stupid..."

Parents, any of you, and my word even more so if you're believing parents, may I just make something overtly obvious to you: In the above equation there is only one person exposing their blatant stupidity and that is the parent.
To call a child stupid as part of the 'parenting package' exposes incivility, lack of grace, lack of wisdom, immaturity, impatience, and a form of barbaric nastiness.

It brings to my mind a marvelous little section of a superb book by C.S. Lewis called The Four Loves where I think Lewis expresses a similar incredulity at parenting of such a nature. Let him speak to us...

"We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents. Who has not been the embarrassed guest at family meals where the father or mother treated their grown-up offspring with an incivility which, offered to any other young people, would simply have terminated the acquaintance? Dogmatic assertions on matters which the children understand and their elders don't, ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions, ridicule of things the young take seriously sometimes of their religion insulting references to their friends, all provide an easy answer to the question "Why are they always out? Why do they like every house better than their home?" Who does not prefer civility to barbarism?"

Let's love our little ones, and be so aware that 'Sticks and stones may break my bones but words... break my heart."

Simon