Richard Glover enjoys post‑ABC life and reflects on parenting advice

“But it translates across, of course, beyond comedy. It’s this weird thing with writing. Tolstoy has a great eye for human behaviour. This ink, mechanically placed on a page, can cause you to well up with emotion for someone you don’t know and don’t even like that much, a Russian aristocrat from a different time, yet here you are, choking up with emotion. Wonderful.”

The impulse to begin How to Ruin a Child came from Glover’s own upbringing which, in his words, “wasn’t great”.

Even in later life, there was a coldness and distance that at times felt almost comical. In the book he describes the scene when he brought his sons to visit his mother and her fear of children’s germs was so extreme that the boys sat back-to-back on a small plastic pouffe in the middle of a sheet spread on the ground to prevent the spread of their imagined contagion.

Glover had assumed that his parent’s attitudes were uniquely strange, and they do appear odd in the book, but his research showed that a lot of what happened was not just commonplace but officially sanctioned and promoted by governments.

“You read it and think, ‘Well where do these crazy ideas come from?’ And the answer is – from the government’s own booklets,” he says.

“They vary a little bit, but they do say that toilet training should start, some of them say, at two days of age. The more liberal ones say three weeks, and it should be completed in the first year. You wouldn’t want to be doing the laundry in that household.

“The uniform idea was you mustn’t praise them, you mustn’t spoil them. This was the official advice to thousands of mothers in NSW, Victoria and elsewhere every year.”

A common thread from Federation right through to the 1970s was that authorities from hospital staff to the government itself recommended distance and coolness between mums and their babies.

In 1974, the Gough Whitlam government commissioned a grandly titled Royal Commission on Human Relationships in an effort to understand and modernise family planning, parenting and the roles of women.

As well as medical experts, thousands of members of the general public shared their experiences, and Glover combed through all of them as he researched the book.

“Some of it made me angry,” he says. “There were a lot of times doing the research when I became quite choked up. I get angry at [experts], and at their certainty. Just the image of the baby in the room crying, and the mother crying on the other side of the door because it’s five to six and she’s been told she can’t go in and feed the baby until 6pm.”

Standard parenting advice remained remarkably harsh by contemporary Australian standards until about 1980, when the dams broke and the opposite extremes began to spill through in advice given to parents.

Suddenly, it was perfectly OK for young children to sleep in the parental bed, feed on demand and be showered with attention and affection.

“That goes along for a while, and then you do get this backlash in the late ’90s,” Glover continues. “And it’s a strange backlash because on the one hand you get people on the left who think this intensive parenting is turning women into slaves, and then people on the right, who have influence from evangelical Christianity, who think this parenting is permissive and is breaking the relationship they want children to have with Godly good behaviour.

“And that’s where we are now, right in the middle of a culture war.”

So what are young parents to do when everyone’s telling them that they’re doing it wrong?

“Once you see all this mad parenting advice from the past, you realise all these parenting ideas on the internet now have already been tried before, usually in about 1920, and found wanting,” he says.

“I think one of the conclusions of the book is that parenting is always difficult, and this idea that you can make it easier by being a disciplinarian just don’t work. They’ve all been tried. You don’t smack your way to peace.

“All these experts are so certain of themselves, and the language is so extreme and the outcomes are so dire.

“Yet most parenting happens somewhere in the middle, and the outcomes are usually a great human being. So parents can take great comfort in that.

“Most parents understand what children want. They want a system of reliable rules in which they feel comfortable, and they want a lot of love.”

Just ask Batboy and Space Cadet.

How to Ruin a Child by Richard Glover is out on September 29.