Tim Parks - An Italian Education

In Donna & Mamma the letter goes on to say how, in response to every parental veto (‘and we can assure you we restrict these to the absolute minimum’), young Francesca goes crazy, shouts, bangs doors, even attacks her parents physically.

Somebody looks in from the street, sees there are too many people (four at the paediatrician’s means at least an hour’s wait), and goes out again.

‘The only thing that seems to work,’ continue the two desperate parents, ‘and please don’t be too shocked, is ricatti , blackmail. “Be a good girl, otherwise we won’t take you to the playground.” “Don’t shout, otherwise we won’t let you see a video.” “Do us a favour and we’ll do you one…”’

But this is a method these conscientious parents really don’t want to use. It is poco educativo — not very educational — in the sense of not bringing up the children as one should. How can one, they wonder, sink to blackmailing a three-year-old child? And they complain that the girl’s fractiousness is beginning to affect them. They are getting more and more irritable themselves, less and less willing to try ‘to understand her’. ‘Even though we adore Francesca,’ their missive finishes.

Jessica has just begun to attack the carpet with a pencil when the door to the surgery opens and the mother can grab her by the hand and take her in.

‘ Bella bambina ,’ says one of the other women appreciatively.

‘Very lively,’ I agree.

Then before I can stop her, the other woman, who I recognise as the cashier in the butcher’s, is giving Michele a caramella . His teeth will thus be filthy when the paediatrician looks in his throat.

I decide to study the expert’s answer to the case of little Francesca and notice that in more than a page and a half (for this is the ‘in-depth, case-of-the-week letter’) the word ‘spanking’ is mentioned only once, and noticeably it’s the more unpleasant word picchiare — to beat — that is used (i.e. something totally unconscionable), rather than the blander, less frightening botte (smackies).

‘Sometimes,’ the learned man says, ‘some parents get so frustrated with children like Francesca that they even hit them [his italics], and then of course they feel like “worms” for treating the child so badly and perhaps causing her a serious trauma…’

Nascimbeni no doubt would make his corna . For my own part, I can’t help thinking that while the trend away from formal discipline is clearly general across the Western world, no people is perhaps as perplexed as the Italians with the whole problem of how to make a child do what it does not want to do. Perhaps because Italian parents so rarely find any good reasons for not doing what they want to do.

‘You must,’ our expert in Donna & Mamma concludes, ‘firmly disapprove of any behaviour you think is unacceptable, even if this does not immediately give noticeable results. You must, however heart-rending it is, be willing to hear her cry…’

O la Madonna!

But ricatti , the paediatrician insists, are out. And particularly ricatti to do with food. The little girl must never be told that if she doesn’t eat something she won’t get something else. She must never be bribed…

How curious and unnatural all this is! And how comic in a society that seems to hang together above all on ricatti and a strict tit-for-tat system of favours done and returned. I accept an invitation to dinner only to be scolded by my wife because ‘Now we will have to invite them .’ My professor at the university offers me a weekday off, but then friends suggest I should not accept because ‘Then you will be obliged to do him a favour when he asks. And you don’t know what that favour is.’ My bank gives me a mortgage, but then is furious when I close my account to move it elsewhere. ‘You were ready to come to me when you needed a favour,’ the bank manager almost shouts, ‘and now you ditch me just like that. When I thought the British were so civilised!’ Michele is dispatched with a Christmas present for one of our neighbours, only to return with a ten-thousand-lire note in his hand. Disturbingly, they felt the need to discharge their debt once more.

But perhaps it is because society is so comprehensively established on ricatti that parents try to spare their little ones the experience, that Jessica, for example, isn’t threatened with the loss of some treat or other when she starts tearing posters down from the wall. My own feeling, though, is that parenthood would be impossible without blackmail. ‘You better behave,’ I tell Michele before we go into the paediatrician’s office, ‘otherwise you can forget any ice cream afterwards. Okay?’ But I tell him in English so that the mothers won’t have to hear anything so poco educativo .

The door has opened, and Jessica’s mother is being eased out. Jessica herself runs straight across the floor and grabs another mother’s shopping trolley. ‘ Che bambina vivace! ’ everybody says. What a lively little girl.

One of the excellent things about the Italian health system is its strict separation between your GP and your paediatrician. It represents the positive side of taking children seriously. Our paediatrician, a petite, peppy woman exactly my own age, is a pleasure to deal with. She has called Michele in for the check-up automatically carried out on three-year-olds.

‘What a buffalo!’ she says as he comes through the door. She has a boy the same age who is about half his size. She gets Michele to strip and weighs and measures him and looks at her chart on the wall. She shows me the relationship between the various parameters: age, height, weight. Michele is way over even the maximum; his figures are those of a five-year-old. I’m rather concerned. I don’t want the boy to be one of those poor giants who lumber around at school feeling embarrassed about how big they are. But the paediatrician reassures me. The charts we’re looking at were based on children in Rome in the early 1960s. The first such charts came out in the fifties and all the Italians were worried how small their offspring were, because the charts had been based on studies of Swedish children and then distributed internationally. So the Italians made up their own charts for their own much smaller children, only to catch up and perhaps even overtake the Swedes in just a couple of vitamin-crazed decades.

‘A supernourished age,’ the paediatrician says, shaking her head. But when we go over Michele’s diet, she can see nothing wrong: a big mug of warm milk and a piece of toast for breakfast; fruit mid morning; meat and vegetables at lunch, or mozzarella and boiled eggs and tomatoes; two or three whole peaches or a big bowl of cherries in the afternoon; pasta in ragout for dinner; an ice cream or two here and there along the way. It’s not excessive, she feels. They’re just big children. I stress Rita’s care in making sure the children get the right things, though I don’t add how appalled she is when we visit English friends who let their shrimpy offspring get away with a couple of bread soldiers with honey. The truth is that Italians go on spoon-feeding their children years after the English have stopped, just to make sure they have enough of everything. It’s almost the only issue over which they seem willing to stoop to physical coercion. Marta will tie Beppe in his chair so she can force him to get what is good for him, then let him run as wild as he likes. Outside, of course.

‘ Occhio alle merendine ,’ the paediatrician says. Watch out for the snacks.

‘ Magari ,’ the little boy says. I wish. ‘Daddy never lets me have them even when he promised, because I’m always naughty…’