Fairness in the Marlow household

[carmine-rose.livejournal.com]

I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on the fair/unfair treatment of the Marlow young by their parents. I'm thinking specifically the treatment of Nicola by her parents/mother in Cricket Term. Is there anyway this could have been handled better? Should it actually have been Nicola who was going to have to leave? Should they have told her or dropped it on her in the summer holidays? Should they have removed all the girls, or perhaps just both twins?

For that matter, should Lawrie have been given the Prosser? (I know this wasn't her parents' decision, I'm just interested whether people think it was a good judgement call on the part of the staff.)

In a similar vein, what about the horse business in Peter's Room? Was it fair that their mother bought Ginty a horse for her birthday, and said no-one else was to ride it? Was it reasonable to buy herself one before ensuring the children all had equal access to a horse for hunting? In effect, she created a situation where one daughter was the only one in the family who was unable to go hunting (without hiring a horse), which seems harsh to me. But then, I'm from a small family where such unequality with gifts never happened - is this normal for a large family? Was Lawrie's reaction reasonable, or did other readers take it as just one more example of her throwing whiny tantrums?

These two occasions seemed to me to best illustrate Mrs. Marlow's failings as a mother (and also perhaps where the children got their selfishness) - I wondered if anyone else felt the same.

Can anyone else think of any other examples of this kind of thing? Or of fairer treatment?

Comments

[carmine-rose.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. She made the decision, not him. So how can we examine his rightness or wrongness?

I don't really get your point - is it that because he's not there, he should be held equally responsible for the debatable* parenting decisions she makes on her own, because she's forced to make them on her own, due to his absence?

and ajhalluk was asking whether you would think that someone questioning Commander Marlow's parenting was anti-man and anti-father, since you seem to think questioning Mrs Marlow's parenting choices is anti-woman and anti-mother - you haven't answered that yet

Judging his abilities, and strengths and weaknesses as an absentee father is something else entirely separate from assessing Mrs. Marlow's decision to give a horse to one child out of eight. For all we know, he might have been appalled by this, or he might have whole-heartedly agreed. We don't know, so in this case, we can't judge.

We can, however, debate his parenting skills and choices as a separate issue.

*debatable because well, we're having a debate about it.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

So how can we examine his rightness or wrongness?

We can say that Mrs Marlow is there, making the parenting decisions that need to be made - which we, with the benefit of omniscent observers, get to criticise. Mr Marlow is simply absent, making (as far as we can see) no parenting decisions at all. Parenting decisions have to be made - and we can (or we could, except that the cultural paradigm does not support this) examine the utter wrongness of Mr Marlow simply escaping any responsibility for making parenting decisions. Which lack of responsibility is... unexamined.

[carmine-rose.livejournal.com]

So examine it. What do you think of his absence and his escaping responsibility? And actually, there has been a thread (http://www.livejournal.com/community/trennels/792.html?nc=49) in fatherhhod, if you look back, but it seems to have concentrated more on Edwin's parenting decesions.

If we, as omniscent observers, shouldn't criticise her parenting decisions (and no parents are perfect), which you seem to be implying*, then perhaps this community should shut down. Or is it only certain things that are up for discussion?

* though I could of course be wrong about this!

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

If we, as omniscent observers, shouldn't criticise her parenting decisions (and no parents are perfect), which you seem to be implying

Heh.

You see that questions are not neutral?

[carmine-rose.livejournal.com]

Well, that's not actually a question. The lack of question marks give it away. You made a statement, I replied to my interpretation of it, while giving you ample opportunity to tell me if my inferral was incorrect. Something you don't seem to be willing to do.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Something you don't seem to be willing to do.

And you don't appear to be willing to discuss (or even acknowledge) the assumptions you were operating from in your original post.

As you've already acknowledged elsewhere, we're well into the meta: no point in going over what you're not prepared to discuss.