article_snippet.sent: The job of parents is to make parents children do the things parents do not want to do, the country’s most senior family law judge said yesterday.
article_snippet.sent: That is what parenting is all about.
article_snippet.sent: There are many things which they ought to do that children may not want to do or even refuse to do: going to the dentist, going to visit some “boring” elderly relative, going to school, doing homework or sitting an examination, the list is endless.
article_snippet.sent: The parents’ job, exercising all the list parental skills, techniques and stratagems
article_snippet.sent: But parental responsibility does not shrivel away, merely because the child is 14 or even 16,’ the child said, ‘nor does the parental obligation to take all reasonable steps to ensure that a child of that age does what it ought to be doing, and does not do what it ought not to be doing.
article_snippet.sent: What one can reasonably demand, not merely as a matter of law but also and much more fundamentally as a matter of natural parental obligation, is that the parent, by argument, persuasion, cajolement, blandishments, inducements, sanctions – for example, “grounding” or the confiscation of mobile phones, computers or other electronic equipment – or threats falling short of brute force, or by a combination of them, does them level best to ensure compliance.
article_snippet.sent: That is what one would expect of a parent whose rebellious teenage child is foolishly refusing to do GCSEs or A-levels or “dropping out” into a life of drug-fuelled crime.
article_snippet.sent: ‘Why should we expect any less of a parent whose rebellious teenage child is refusing to see whose rebellious teenage child father?
article_snippet.sent: Unless the parents can, as the parents must, even at this late stage, sort things out, the future for all of the parents is bleak.
article_snippet.sent: The mother needs to ponder these questions and think hard about what the answers might be.