The Slap

Recently I have become obsessed with a book called The Slap, which has been dramatised into a TV show. This story has made me think a lot because I do have quite a few overly liberal friends who, I feel, don’t give their children firm boundaries. And if you have ever been to a gathering with children like these, and watched them wind your own children up, you will understand what this novel is all about.

In the book, a boy who has been behaving badly at a family barbeque is suddenly slapped in the face by an adult – and not one of his parents. Now, no-one I know would ever condone hitting another person’s child, but the cleverness of the book is that you find yourself sympathising with the adult who did just that – because somehow this child is symbolic of all those irritating parents who think it’s fine for their child to hurt yours and never feels their child has done anything wrong.

But then you discover that the adult who hit the child is a deeply unpleasant person who beats his wife. So you realise there were two monsters involved in this story: a big one and a little one. I am fascinated by this because I do believe that hitting children is wrong; and yet I’ve been in situations where parents expect you to “understand” when their child is behaving like a brat.

I have never been able to get the gist of that middle-class thing where one never tells off someone else’s child, no matter how much you privately feel their behaviour is bad. I’ve sat in school assemblies, where someone’s toddler has been allowed to bumble around as children bravely struggle to speak their part in a play; his mother merely smiling and saying “ahh”; while I sit there seething and thinking to myself: “I wish that someone would just grab that child!”

The Slap explores that last taboo: no it is never okay to hit a child; but we as parents need to find new ways to establish boundaries for our children.  And maybe, sometimes, it’s okay to tell a parent that their child’s behaviour is really out of order.