Terry Prone: Santa’s old-fashioned parenting tricks for the naughty and the nice

Originally published in the Irish Examiner.

Look. Santa’s been around for a while. A spring chicken he isn’t. Plus — as us collaborators know only too well — he has bad habits. It’s not the drugs or the drink. It’s the snacks.

You know the way we use the word ‘treats’ to excuse scoffing salted caramel anything? Covers a multitude, that word ‘treats’, with its implication of rarity and its paired implication of somehow having been earned by earlier privation or meritorious effort.

The world may not owe you a living, or fame, or fortune, but we still feel entitled to treats and extrapolate from that to the conviction that we must all reward/bribe Santa by setting out a saucer of cookies and a glass of milk. It’s a reprehensible form of cause and effect.

Parents spend the year conscientiously refusing ever to link food with their children’s occasional good behaviour. Back in the day, this wasn’t a problem because, once you had the bonding thing nailed, parenting was down to training your kids like dogs: “Homework done? Who’s a good boy, then?”

Then enlightenment struck and the instructions to well-behaved offspring to sit and gratefully snaffle a KitKat morphed into as shameful exemplar of your parental inadequacies so vile that you knew, if you stood for election, even a crime gang leader would do better than you.

Santa, of course, bypasses all this child development woke stuff. He still operates the canine training model: “Been a good girl? Here’s a whole stocking full of reward for you (insert ear-scratch here)!”

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