How to leave home
21st February 2009
It is 10.30 on Friday night and I find myself in a tight place. I am attempting to carry a large office desk down a flight of uncertain concrete steps between two of the least desirable student flats in Dunedin.
I negotiated the waist-high grass in the front yard, sidestepped the hedgehog (sleeping? terrified? dead?) but now find myself wedged between the concrete foundations of the building on my left and a rusting toilet wastepipe fixed loosely to the building on my right.
Small yelps of distress – not from the hedgehog – fill the dark Dunedin night. The desk slips sideways a little, the wastepipe creaks. “This is a helluva way to leave home,” I strain to Marjan.
When I embarked on the journey of fatherhood twenty odd years ago, I had no plan. Moving directly into survival mode I basically took it in 15 minute blocks and have tended to work that way ever since. The wisdom of this approach was borne out time and again as I observed better organised parents anticipate their children’s needs and fail.
Fifteen-minute-fatherhood is, by nature, a journey of surprises. One learns to expect the unexpected, to roll with the punches. Most fathers finding themselves in my position, caught between a rock and a wastepipe on a Friday night, would make a fuss. Actually, most fathers reading this will tell you they wouldn’t be so stupid as to get themselves into this position. They lie.
Did I make a fuss? I can honestly assert (because the other witnesses have no opportunity to reply) that not only did I not make a fuss, but I used the moment to reflect on the phenomenon of leaving home.
How did you leave home? I mean, how did you leave your parents home, the home of your childhood and youth? – assuming you have. Whatever your experience I bet it wasn’t as straightforward as you anticipated.
In my keen observation the modern world has made leaving home desperately complicated. Think about it. Traditionally, young people departed their parents’ home on their wedding day to set up their own home in which, if things went to plan, they would dwell in peace and fidelity for the remainder of their lives.
Young men had a couple of alternatives: they could run away to sea or be apprenticed to a bootmaker uncle in distant Dorpsville. Young women had to sit tight and wait for their father’s permission.
Then society invented tertiary education and condemned its youth to years of enforced poverty, of straining against the umbilical cord but not daring to break it for fear of cutting off essential support. A former boss had a terrific expression for this – ‘sucking on the back teat.’
My parents, with six children, discovered this the hard way. Us kids were always leaving home. One after another we moved out with fanfare, only to return when the university holidays rolled around or a relationship went belly up or a job moved off-shore. Even when we eventually set up our own homes we still retained a pied-a-terre at mum and dad’s: a few boxes of books in the spare bedroom, a rack of clothes in the sleepout.
My own kids are equally ambitious. So when Marjan, at 19, decides to go flatting in Dunedin I’m all for it. When she suggests we hire a trailer to move her stuff I’m right there. When the trailer needs to be a large one because she’s taking ALL her stuff, including the mattress off my bed, I apply maximum fifteen-minute-fatherhood and go with it.
But when I’m stuck down a flight of steps on a dark Dunedin night I know that leaving home is not as easy as Marjan thinks. And I know I will be here again, straining against the wastepipe. Marjan, and her desk, will return.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Think twice about boy racers
7th February 2009
Every parent and teacher knows, or should know, the futility of losing your temper with a child. We’ve all been tested. Even the sweetest child chooses at some point to goad us to our boundaries and then, often with astonishing calculation, take a deliberate step beyond. At that moment we have a choice: we can either calmly but firmly apply established consequences – or we can lose our rag.
There has been a fair bit of rag-losing this week around boy racers. After goading the establishment with an escalating war of words the attack by a group of boy racers on a police officer in Christchurch last Saturday was the deliberate step over the boundary. Our response will have delighted them. Just as the parent who loses his temper with a child discovers he has also lost trust, respect and control, the frenzied response to last weekend’s incident moves us further away from solving the boy racer problem.
Let me be clear, the attack on the police officer was abhorrent. There is an element within the boy racer fraternity that deliberately offends, but the appropriate response is to support the police to identify the offenders and, calmly and firmly, apply the force of law.
Whipping ourselves into a lather with threats of car crushing and other unspecified sanctions is like an enraged parent shouting, “watch what you’re doing sonny, or, or, or…you’ll be sorry!”
There are dimensions to the boy racer problem that we seem unwilling or unable to grasp. For one thing, labelling all young men (and women) who possess late-model, low-slung cars as ‘boy racers’ is as counter-productive as the ‘war on terror’ because it marginalises a range of mostly unoffending people to a point where they see little alternative to behaving badly. Just as the war on terror glamourised terrorism for some, lumping all car enthusiasts together as ‘boy racers’ gives them an identity, a common purpose and a desire to bait the law that they previously did not possess.
Have we ever tried to find out who ‘boy racers’ are or what motivates them? Are they a constant group? Do they all deliberately break the law?
I suspect those who incite violence are often an older, criminal element who manipulate the energy and youthfulness of boy racers for their own ends.
The government’s response has been disappointing. Threats to increase penalties against boy racers overlook the fact that recently toughened laws are not working. Using the force of law to shut down boy racers on the streets needs police resources far beyond our means and would require mass court actions that will almost certainly fail for lack of evidence or for breaching civil liberties.
Just as in the anti-terrorist raids in Ruatoki, attempts to enforce impractical laws against boy racers will frustrate police, diminish trust in legal process and boost the mana of the alleged offenders.
A better approach is to tackle the supply side of the problem. If government restricts the ability of car dealers and finance companies to offer almost unlimited credit to young men off the street we will curb the proliferation of vehicles in their hands. If the only way I can buy my first car is to save the purchase price there’s a chance I will be more mature by the time I can afford it and I will value it enough not to risk having it confiscated.
Eventually we will have to accept that the long term solution to boy racers is to address the underlying causes, which are our cock-eyed societal values that produce young men with appallingly limited role models and aspirations.
Until we offer boys a better model than the alcohol-inspired, fuel-injected macho posturing that passes for masculinity in this country we will continue to have mayhem on our streets. As a community we must accept that their behaviour has been learned from us. As the collective parents of these young people we could do better.
7th February 2009
Every parent and teacher knows, or should know, the futility of losing your temper with a child. We’ve all been tested. Even the sweetest child chooses at some point to goad us to our boundaries and then, often with astonishing calculation, take a deliberate step beyond. At that moment we have a choice: we can either calmly but firmly apply established consequences – or we can lose our rag.
There has been a fair bit of rag-losing this week around boy racers. After goading the establishment with an escalating war of words the attack by a group of boy racers on a police officer in Christchurch last Saturday was the deliberate step over the boundary. Our response will have delighted them. Just as the parent who loses his temper with a child discovers he has also lost trust, respect and control, the frenzied response to last weekend’s incident moves us further away from solving the boy racer problem.
Let me be clear, the attack on the police officer was abhorrent. There is an element within the boy racer fraternity that deliberately offends, but the appropriate response is to support the police to identify the offenders and, calmly and firmly, apply the force of law.
Whipping ourselves into a lather with threats of car crushing and other unspecified sanctions is like an enraged parent shouting, “watch what you’re doing sonny, or, or, or…you’ll be sorry!”
There are dimensions to the boy racer problem that we seem unwilling or unable to grasp. For one thing, labelling all young men (and women) who possess late-model, low-slung cars as ‘boy racers’ is as counter-productive as the ‘war on terror’ because it marginalises a range of mostly unoffending people to a point where they see little alternative to behaving badly. Just as the war on terror glamourised terrorism for some, lumping all car enthusiasts together as ‘boy racers’ gives them an identity, a common purpose and a desire to bait the law that they previously did not possess.
Have we ever tried to find out who ‘boy racers’ are or what motivates them? Are they a constant group? Do they all deliberately break the law?
I suspect those who incite violence are often an older, criminal element who manipulate the energy and youthfulness of boy racers for their own ends.
The government’s response has been disappointing. Threats to increase penalties against boy racers overlook the fact that recently toughened laws are not working. Using the force of law to shut down boy racers on the streets needs police resources far beyond our means and would require mass court actions that will almost certainly fail for lack of evidence or for breaching civil liberties.
Just as in the anti-terrorist raids in Ruatoki, attempts to enforce impractical laws against boy racers will frustrate police, diminish trust in legal process and boost the mana of the alleged offenders.
A better approach is to tackle the supply side of the problem. If government restricts the ability of car dealers and finance companies to offer almost unlimited credit to young men off the street we will curb the proliferation of vehicles in their hands. If the only way I can buy my first car is to save the purchase price there’s a chance I will be more mature by the time I can afford it and I will value it enough not to risk having it confiscated.
Eventually we will have to accept that the long term solution to boy racers is to address the underlying causes, which are our cock-eyed societal values that produce young men with appallingly limited role models and aspirations.
Until we offer boys a better model than the alcohol-inspired, fuel-injected macho posturing that passes for masculinity in this country we will continue to have mayhem on our streets. As a community we must accept that their behaviour has been learned from us. As the collective parents of these young people we could do better.
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