In the Times: A Doctor's Perspective

I often talk about what it's like for me, as a teacher, to have to deal with a bunch of 4- and 5-year-olds in the classroom. Here is another perspective: what it's like for doctors to have to handle them in the hospital setting. 

But the age-old parental job remains.

And that job is to start with a being who has no thought for the feelings of others, no code of behavior beyond its own needs and comforts — and, guided by love and duty, to do your best to transform that being into what your grandmother (or Socrates) might call a mensch. To use a term that has fallen out of favor, your assignment is to “civilize” the object of your affections.

My favorite child-rearing book is “Miss Manners’ Guide to Rearing Perfect Children,” by Judith Martin, who takes the view that manners are at the heart of the whole parental enterprise. I called her to ask why.

“Every infant is born adorable but selfish and the center of the universe,” she replied. It’s a parent’s job to teach that “there are other people, and other people have feelings.”

Notice the qualifier "parental" at the very top of that exerpt, as well as the possessive "parent's" in the last sentence.  In the beginning, all children are wild. Some are wilder than others. Kindergarten teachers, pediatricians, and I'm sure many other sectors in the work force would be a lot happier if all parents did their parental duty by taming their wild children. As they say, though, it takes a village...something something. Go ask Clinton (first name Hillary).