Bedtime for Frances

I wore my contact lenses today and was horrified by the filth of the house when I see it unencumbered by my crappy glasses. I really need to call those people about laser surgery, if only to find out that I'm not a candidate and stop wondering about it. I also really need to hoover the stairs.

(Now accepting bets on which will happen first.)

There's a story called Bedtime for Frances, which is an endearing little number (if a tad tedious, but I think that's part of the plan) about a badger who doesn't want to go to sleep. She comes out to her parents as the night goes on with various demands and worries, eventually waking her father to tell him the curtains are moving in the wind. (I particularly like the bit where she comes downstairs to find her parents having tea and cake in front of the TV. As if that would happen.) He is, understandably, not happy to be woken, and tells her that he has to get up in the morning and go to work, because that's his job, and that moving the curtains is the wind's job, and that going to sleep is Frances's job, and that if she doesn't go back to bed, she will get a spanking.

Every time I read it, we do fine until that part, where I cringe slightly and move swiftly onwards. Usually I'm reading it to Mabel, who doesn't comment, but one day recently Monkey was listening in too. "What's a spanking?" he asked, inevitably.

Such a funny moment. Surely at the age of almost five, even obedient, sheltered I knew what a spanking was, and had even been given one or two. Isn't it strange, and nice, and sad, that my son had to ask - and that I had to tell him? It sounded so peculiar and primitive, even as I chose my words, to explain that some parents would hit their children to try to get them to behave. (I didn't say "hit" because that sounds far too violent. I demonstrated by slapping his hand gently and telling him a spanking would be like that only harder, so that it hurt.) He was a little bemused, but took it on board.

I'm not saying there have never been moments when I wanted to thwap him one on the side of the head, or that I'll always manage to restrain myself in the future. I'm certainly guilty of yanking an arm too hard on occasion, and not being terribly sorry if something got bumped on the way. But if a cardinal rule in the house, and the school, and the child's society as a whole is "Do not hit," then hitting them to enforce that or any other dictat is surely illogical. (Jim.) And will compromise our credibility as the ones doing the enforcing.

The next day I was reading The Tale of Tom Kitten to Mabel. When Mrs Tabitha Twitchet finds her kittens in the garden with their fine clothes nowhere to be seen and company about to arrive, she pulls them off the wall and smacks them. "'Spanks,' you mean," said Monkey, knowingly.

How soon they learn. One more balloon of childhood innocence rudely popped by beloved children's authors.