You have to trust your children

I was having one of the nightly showdowns with Louise, my nine-year-old daughter, over supper. Admittedly, what I put in front of her looked like shit (almost literally) – some recipe involving black olive paste and fettuccine – but it tasted pretty good. However, Louise, on the whole, doesn’t like to eat anything that isn’t fried, made of potato or doused in sugar. So, as she so often does, she refused.

I don’t like to enter into lengthy battles over food. I don’t want to compel her (albeit compulsion can produce short term results, ie she eats, albeit without pleasure, and sometimes with a little, possibly theatrical, retching).

I am, as in most things, somewhat dilatory. I make sure that she properly tries the food (which, in the case of the shit fettuccine, she did). Then, if she doesn’t like it, I don’t try to make her eat it.

Instead, I tell her she can eat some fruit if she likes, but she won’t get anything else until the next day. My hope has always been that she will get hungry and eat what she was offered. The drawback with this is that it pretty much never works, as Louise has an amazing resistance to hunger pangs.

Or perhaps it’s not that amazing. I have sometimes found caches of sweets hidden in her room, and discarded wrappers under her pillow. So I am fully aware of her wiles. Therefore, as a condition of allowing her to leave the table without finishing her food I made her promise that she had no secret stocks of sweeties, and even if she had, she would not eat any of them this particular evening. She looked me soulfully in the eyes and agreed that she wouldn’t.

The next day, a pile of sweet wrappers was discovered under her pillow. She did not deny the charge – she had, after all, filled up on sweets after the meal.

It dismayed me. Not because I thought she was going to get fat, or for any nutritional reasons but because I trusted her and she had betrayed that trust. When I explained my disappointment, she seemed genuinely remorseful. But then she has been remorseful before in similar situations, and it doesn’t seem to have changed her behaviour.

What, then, is one to do? I am a great believer in giving children your trust – whether it is staying out late clubbing (in later life) or paying back a loan you have made. For me, human relationships are severely diminished without trust because without it, you have to rely on constant surveillance and compulsion, and that leads to an even greater breakdown of confidence.

This is a tendency visible not only in family but also public life. Teachers are not trusted to teach, doctors are not trusted to treat.

Instead they are overseen by ever receding regulatory bodies, sometimes with regulatory bodies to oversee the regulatory bodies. Lack of trust is corrosive and trust is easily lost. Once it is lost, then you will conjure what you feared – if you trust no one, they will have little motivation to behave honourably as they are bound to resent not being given the benefit of the doubt in the first place.

I have always believed that you have to have faith in people – including children – even though you may be let down, perhaps time and again. This can elide into simple foolishness, weakness and naivety, I know. However, the hope is that by offering your trust, sooner or later, people – or most people – will learn to respond to it. Those who don’t can eventually find that it is lost for ever.

So, sweets or no sweets, I will give Louise yet another chance to prove that she is capable of honesty in the face of the evidence. Because the alternative is worse. Trust me.

@timlottwriter