On Bamboo Canes, Embarrassing Fathers, and the Serious Attempt to Raise Children Without Fear

In German, “Hosen runter!” — literally, “Pants down!” — is something you might say when it is time to stop making excuses, put everything on the table and reveal what is really going on.

In my childhood, however, the phrase could be meant considerably more literally.

Back then, physical violence was part of the accepted repertoire of child-rearing. Slaps across the face, hard smacks on the backside – some parents even had dedicated equipment for the purpose. My father owned a bamboo cane wrapped in masking tape. Most of the time, he did not even have to use it. Its mere presence was enough. The child knew what could be done with it.

Fear and violence were established methods for turning children into whatever adults thought they ought to be. They called it parenting. That sounded much friendlier and conveniently avoided awkward questions about who held the power.

If you were going to get a beating on your backside, you had to pull down your trousers. It protected the fabric and was simply part of the procedure.

At least the fabric was supposed to be protected.

Many years later, when I was a father myself, I occasionally threatened my children with taking my trousers off as well.

For entirely different educational reasons, though.

I do not believe in hitting children. Nor do I believe in making children live in fear of their parents. I know both from the child’s perspective, and yes, I did learn something from the experience.

Above all, that I wanted to do things differently.

That does not mean, however, that I consider children’s bedrooms lawless territories where the Geneva Convention on minimum standards of hygiene has been suspended.

Sometimes a room simply has to be cleaned. For aesthetic as well as hygienic reasons.

You can even explain why.

Food scraps eventually develop a life of their own, dirty dishes do not become clean through patient waiting, and every now and then it should at least be possible to determine that underneath all those clothes on the floor, there is in fact a floor.

Nevertheless, when confronted with

“You really ought to clean your room again.”

a pubescent human being may respond with the profoundly philosophical question:

“Why?”

There are answers to that.

“I saw this interior design on television recently.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. It was in black and white there, though.”

“What were you watching?”

“A documentary. Germany, 1945.”

“Not funny, Dad!”

“I think it’s funny. And pretty realistic, actually.”

“You’re embarrassing, Dad.”

“Can’t say I’ve noticed.”

At some point, as a father, you have to free yourself from the notion that being “embarrassing” is necessarily a bad thing.

Quite the opposite: embarrassment can be an extraordinarily effective educational tool. One of its particular advantages is that it is entirely non-violent, while the educator himself does not even have to suffer from it.

The crucial question is:

Who actually has the problem with the embarrassment?

I do not have to go to school the next morning. I do not have to listen to embarrassing remarks from classmates. I do not need their acceptance. They are perfectly free to consider me embarrassing.

Why not?

I really could not care less. I have nothing to prove there.

This changes the negotiating position considerably.

“You don’t want to clean up?”

“Nah. Can’t be bothered.”

“So you’d rather embarrass yourself later, when your friends are here, by having your embarrassing father clean your room in his underwear while they’re visiting?”

“Er …”

“Thought so. I’ll check again in half an hour.”

Usually, that is enough.

The little darlings can become astonishingly attentive and industrious when it comes to preventing the worst.

Should the ordinary threat ever lose its effectiveness, the level of embarrassment can theoretically be increased. Old, dirty or hole-ridden underwear possesses considerable educational value, even though its manufacturers have probably never mentioned this particular feature in their product descriptions.

I admit, I would have loved to make a suitable advertisement and show it to my children.

Educational material.

But even without it, a vivid imagination is not merely entertaining. It can also be remarkably useful when it comes to guiding and shaping the little ones.

In practice, I never had to go that far.

My father’s bamboo cane disappeared at some point – although, despite all the threats, no culprit was ever identified.

A regrettable case of unresolved property ownership.

My own children, by contrast, actively wanted me to be wearing underwear when I appeared in front of their friends. They may not always have been fully aware of this themselves, but a father does, after all, have a duty to provide information.

“Trust me – if I’m tidying up your stuff while your friends are here, you want me to be wearing something.”

“Erm …”

“I can tell you know what I mean.”

“Erm.”

That provided a solid basis for negotiation.

Perhaps this does not sound like particularly sophisticated educational theory. After all, the threat still produces the desired behaviour.

But there is one crucial difference between the bamboo cane of my childhood and the paternal threat of underwear.

A child was afraid of the bamboo cane – afraid of pain and humiliation.

Not so much of my underwear.

At most, they were afraid of what other people might think. And even more of what those people might say afterwards.

My children were allowed to think I was stupid. They were allowed to roll their eyes, complain, and conclude that of all the fathers available in the world, they had somehow ended up with the most embarrassing one.

If it served the purpose: fine by me.

But they also knew:

This man is not going to hurt me.

That was always important.

Because I had experienced what parenting could look like – and I knew what I never wanted to do to my own children.

My mother sometimes used to say:

“My hand slipped.”

It is a remarkable expression.

The hand almost becomes an independently acting organism. It simply slips. These things happen. The adult stands by, somewhat distressed, and can only hope that his or her extremities will behave more responsibly in future.

I readily believe that my mother was overwhelmed.

My father drove coaches and was away a great deal. My mother lived with a physical disability. And looming over everything were my grandparents and their ideas about how people were supposed to behave.

“Under Adolf, this was done this way,” and “under Adolf, that was done that way.”

Adolf had been dead for a long time.

As an argument, however, he continued to enjoy remarkable vitality.

How deeply these ideas intruded even into matters that should have remained between mother and child became apparent very early in my childhood.

My mother had allowed me to call her by her nickname.

Then my grandparents intervened.

That was no respectful way to address one’s mother.

The remarkable thing is this: my mother herself had decided how her own child was allowed to address her. Supposedly in defence of respect for her, her own decision was overruled.

Respect, apparently, was something that occasionally had to be enforced against the wishes of the person being respected.

My grandparents could also ring the doorbell furiously early on a Sunday morning and demand that everybody finally get up and raise the shutters.

Why?

“What will people say?”

People.

A powerful institution with no address, no board of directors and no constitution. Nobody had elected them, nobody knew exactly who belonged to them, yet somehow they still got to decide what time you raised your shutters on a Sunday.

Presumably, they also maintained an extensive network of regional offices responsible for monitoring the proper operation of German households.

Equally unforgettable were my grandfather’s tirades whenever he had once again gone through the rubbish to make sure that only things which, in his opinion, belonged in the rubbish had been thrown away.

Or the compulsory application of chemical fertiliser that put an end to my parents’ attempt to grow vegetables organically.

After all, one could hardly risk grown adults making their own decisions on their own property.

Where would that lead?

Whether it was the bamboo cane, the hand that “slipped”, or grandparents overruling other people’s decisions in the name of respect, it ultimately came down to the same thing:

Power that required no justification because it considered itself justification enough.

Perhaps that is where my aversion to rules that cannot be explained comes from.

I do not believe parents have to debate every rule with their children. If a child is about to run into a busy road, you do not convene a family conference. Nor do I have much interest in debating whether rotting food should be allowed to remain in a child’s bedroom for several weeks.

But I should be able to explain why a rule exists.

And violence is not an adequate explanation.

“Because I’m your father.”

explains nothing.

It merely explains who currently holds the power.

And power is not an argument.

Of course, none of this meant that I knew how good parenting actually worked.

I had a cycling proficiency certificate. I had a driving licence. I had a forklift licence.

I did not have a fatherhood licence.

With a forklift, I had to prove that I could operate the thing before anyone let me loose around people and high storage racks.

With your first child, life simply hands you an entire human being and says, in effect:

“Here you go. Formative years. Best of luck.”

No instruction manual was included.

Nor, as far as I am aware, was there a returns policy in case of dissatisfaction.

My most important training had been my own childhood. And what that had mainly taught me was how I did not want to raise my children and what they should never have to fear from me.

That is a start, at least.

But it is a long way from being a theory of parenting.

Was everything I believed was right actually right?

Probably not.

We had many conversations. We found ways forward. Sometimes, when the right words were missing, other means helped – homemade “newspapers”, for example, in which we simply recorded our world and our experiences instead of constantly having to talk about them.

We took wrong turns, made decisions and later revised some of them.

Parenthood has the minor disadvantage that you have to make a great many decisions before the results of the longitudinal study become available.

And the test subjects are remarkably poorly standardised.

Sometimes what a child needs is not a father who sets a boundary, but one who realises that something else is happening.

A father who thinks about what he is doing and finds creative solutions where the traditional ones fail.

At some point, one of my children came to me and said, more or less:

“I don’t think I can manage this on my own.”

It was about the bedroom.

This time, the usual argument about cleaning up was over before it had even begun. The sheer quantity of deposit bottles underneath the bed had reached dimensions at which rubbish bags and a vehicle parked outside had become necessary infrastructure.

The domestic disorder had left the realm of parenting and begun to present logistical challenges.

So I helped.

No nasty remarks. No gloating victory celebration.

When someone has already realised that they are standing in front of a mountain and asks for help, there is no need to build a second mountain of reproaches beside it.

We organised the work and cleaned the room together.

When we were finished, however, I explained that this was going to happen exactly once, because I was not currently looking for a new hobby. I also expressed the cautious hope that the room would never again reach such a pitiful state.

It did not.

Instead, the same child came to me shortly afterwards with a plan.

Now that the room was tidy anyway, perhaps this would be a good opportunity to rearrange the furniture and repaint the walls.

I was asked to help with the planning and show how to paint a wall.

Of course I helped.

The child wanted lilac walls.

I would not have painted the walls lilac.

But in moments like these, there is a certain danger of suddenly hearing your own parents coming out of your mouth.

So: lilac.

Their room. Their taste. Their decision.

No debate, no counterproposal.

There are things a father simply has to endure.

Lilac is one of the more harmless ones.

And perhaps that mattered far more than the colour.

A room that Dad had wanted cleaned became a room the child wanted to shape for themselves. Once you have planned the furniture, masked the edges and painted the walls, you look at your own space differently.

Tidiness was no longer merely a demand imposed from outside.

The child now had a reason of their own to keep the room that way.

Perhaps successful parenting ultimately consists of making parenting increasingly unnecessary.

Not because the child eventually learns to obey perfectly.

That would merely be the old model in nicer packaging: the bamboo cane may be gone, but the desire for an obedient child remains.

Rather, because

“Dad says I have to clean my room.”

eventually becomes

“I want it to look nice in here.”

Control can become responsibility.

And Dad can keep his trousers on.

That was a long time ago.

Today, my children are 33 and 35 years old.

I cannot tell them what to do anymore. I cannot stop their pocket money, set their bedtimes, and – thankfully – the design of their rooms is none of my business either.

Eventually, all the things that give parents power over their children during childhood fall away.

What remains is the relationship.

And perhaps that is where a fairly merciless form of quality control begins.

Because adult children no longer have to visit.

They do not have to tell you things.

They do not have to laugh.

And they certainly do not have to find their father funny.

You might almost say that after thirty years, the trial period comes to an end and you suddenly discover that the test subjects have long since developed lives of their own and are under no obligation whatsoever to continue keeping the principal investigator company.

When I look at my children today and talk to them, I find that quite a lot of what we tried along the way was apparently pretty right.

We can talk seriously.

We can disagree.

And we can still be utterly ridiculous together.

Perhaps that, of all things, is a sign of trust.

Being silly means voluntarily lowering your guard. You make a ridiculous joke, say something completely absurd, and know:

The other person will not turn it into a weapon.

You do not lose face.

Nothing terrible happens.

On one such occasion, my son came up with a sentence that is now written on the inside of my bathroom door:

“Home is where the Bauch don’t have to be eingezogen.”

Or, for anyone fortunate enough not to speak Denglish: Home is where you don’t have to suck in your belly.

I could hardly put it better.

Home is not just a building.

Home can also be a relationship in which you do not constantly have to hold yourself in. Where you are allowed to be serious and silly, strong and uncertain, sensible and completely ridiculous.

“I like doing stupid shit with you more than with anyone else,”

I once told my son.

That, too, was a declaration of love.

One that suited us.

Back then, I did not know whether I would handle every situation well or get every difficult conversation right. I did not know whether every decision I made was the right one. I only knew some of the things my children should never have to fear from me.

We had to figure out the rest together.

We talked, found our way, and took a few wrong turns as well.

Today, my children no longer need a father to raise them.

But apparently, they still like having a father they can talk and laugh with.

Perhaps that is not such a bad final grade for someone who never had a fatherhood licence.

And when we are being silly together these days, I can even keep my trousers on.

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