Jayne Dowle: Children must learn a lesson about right and wrong... and who really rules the world

That’s a great message to give to your five-year-old isn’t it? If you want something, just throw a tantrum and it’s yours for the taking. And if throwing a tantrum doesn’t work, then perhaps you could throw a punch at your mother.

If you think I’m joking, take a look at the disturbing new book from Dr Aric Sigman, an expert in childhood behaviour. He points to the rise in “little emperors” – children who are becoming increasingly violent towards their parents if they don’t get their own way.

I have seen these little emperors in action. They march across all barriers, class, social and geographical. Indeed, you only have to go to a children’s party or a school sports day to witness the kind of behaviour that makes Violet Elizabeth Bott look well-adjusted.

And, as Sigman has found, more often than not, it is mothers, not fathers, who are bearing the brunt of violent children. He has found cases of children hitting, kicking and even trying to push their mother down the stairs. And what is even more worrying is that this behaviour is starting younger and younger – nursery age, in fact.

With uncanny timing, these findings came out on the very same day as Government research which suggests that violent behaviour in schools has doubled in a year.

Every day in England and Wales, almost 1,000 children, some as young as five, are excluded from the classroom for displaying threatening or abusive behaviour.

I’m no psychologist, but it doesn’t take much to work out a connection between the two. If a child behaves like a “little emperor” at home, what happens when that child goes to school? And, what happens if he ends up in a class full of little emperors, each one fighting to be top dog?

It’s no wonder that teachers are locked in a battle against such endemic behavioural problems. “I know my rights”, is the answer to any attempt at discipline. And too many parents – and it’s almost always the mother discipline falls to, whether by accident or design – find themselves powerless in the face of the onslaught. What can you do with a child like that?

I am not trying to create moral panic. I know that for every little emperor, there is a little kid who loves his mum and wouldn’t dream of hurting or upsetting her.

I just worry, as a mother, about all those mothers out there being bullied by their own children. It must be awful enough now, knowing that your own child lashes out at you in anger, but what kind of foundation is this for the future? When children turn so easily against their own mothers, breaking that most natural of bonds, are we surprised that families are becoming so fractured?

I worry, when one of mine throws a wobbly, whether I am unwittingly creating my own little emperors. Do we modern parents subconsciously do something – or not do something – which makes our children believe they have not only rights, but the divine right to rule?

I try my best, but I know that my son and daughter do not “behave” as well as my sister and I did when we were aged eight and five. But that was more than 30 years ago, and our parents’ generation was caught between the semi-Edwardian strictures of their own upbringing and the permissive age we lived in.

It wasn’t perfect, no childhood is, but I know for sure that we had no concept whatsoever of “rights”. We accepted, albeit begrudgingly, that we were the junior partners and we had to bow to authority. It didn’t stop us answering back, but most of the time, we did a quick sum of consequences in our heads, and buckled under. Now, both at home and in school, the issue of the rights of children is to be found at the heart of all these problems of violence and anger and frustration.

It’s a tricky balancing act, isn’t it? We can teach please, thank you, and may I leave the table, but we can’t turn the clock back. Children learn the concept of rights and respect as soon as they go to school. We modern parents have to respect these rights, just as we would expect our own rights to be respected. But we also have to find a way of bringing up children without allowing the balance of power to tip entirely in their favour.

I don’t have the definitive answer. I am just a parent, after all. But what is clear to me is that we are in danger of giving children so many rights, they will totally lose sight of the biggest right of all – what is wrong and what is right. If we want to stop the onward march of the little emperors, we have to take back control, and remind our children who rules the world. And whatever they might think, it’s not them.