Permissive parenting -- some recollections

I grew up in the age of Dr Spock, a widely respected American pediatrician who preached permissive parenting.  He saw permissivenessas being as much a moral issue as a practical one.  His influence was particularly strong in the '60s, which was a time to question all values, so the Biblical advice -- "He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes" (Proverbs 13:24) -- was regarded widely as impossibly obsolete.

And for Spock and other reasons I was a beneficiary of permissive  thinking. I have no recollection of my parents ever saying No to me in fact. Dr Spock later changed his mind and decided that some parental guidelines were needed but it was all too late for  generations of kids. But permissiveness suited me.  I had a very untroubled childhood.

I was sent to Presbyterian Sunday school from about age 7 -- which I greatly enjoyed --  so I accepted the rather Puritanical wisdom that was preached to me there. And those were pretty safe guidelines. I am pretty sure I am a born Puritan, in fact. I was teetotal until I was about 28. But I like my gin these days. I was 17 in 1960 but the unhealthy substances that people poured into themselves in that era had no appeal for me. I have never even smoked tobacco, in fact.

Let me give two examples of the permissiveness of my parents:

My youngest sister at age 3 was the most gorgeous little blonde-haired tot you can imagine.  And she was plenty verbal by that stage. If my parents told her to do something she did not want to do, she would reply in a loud voice:  "I don't wanna".  No-one ever seemed to have an answer to that!  So she went her own way.  She is now a happily married lady with 3 adult daughters.  I think she was born with Puritan instincts too. On some occasions in her youth, she had 3 jobs at once.

Then there is my brother.  He had a very simple trick.  If ever he wanted to do something from which he might be deflected, he would say "I gotto do this" -- where "this" was very variable.  My parents would then let him do whatever he had "got" to do.

My son had an easy time too. I am an instinctive libertarian so he got no aggravation from me, to put it in a rather Cockney way. I would even defend his wishes to his mother!  His mother was basically a "No nonsense" lady with her first three kids.  Her eldest son thought -- and still thinks -- that his mother was a bit of a tyrant.  He had a way of expressing that view on one occasion that I had better not record, in fact.  She was of course a perfectly loving mother and has four high-functioning adult children these days.  And they all love their mother!

But his mother could see so much of me in my son that she was pretty permissive with him when he wanted to wander off in a direction she would normally question.  He was for instance allowed to spend a lot of time playing computer games.  But a boy who has a father who was a computer programmer would do that, wouldn't he?  He is now a well-paid IT professional with good friends of long standing so he didn't come to any harm either.  What he wanted to do was right for him. That he has spent just about all his life in front of a computer screen could be a health problem but he knows that and does dieting and exercise regularly.  He is in really good shape, in fact.

So I think a lot depends on the kid.  Permissiveness won't always work but it should always be the first approach.