CUTTING EDGE: Fruit of loins not always export grade

It's our job as parents to believe our kids are slightly perfect.WHEN YOU hear a parent claim, with certainty, that their child would never do drugs/binge-drink/drink-drive you may well imagine that they would, and quite probably do. Few angels are out there.
It's our job as parents to believe our kids are slightly perfect, and their job, if they know what's good for them, to protect us from the reality of what they get up to. Parentkind cannot bear very much reality. It's kinder to leave us with a few illusions intact.
I feel for Labour leader Phil Goff, then, whose 25-year-old daughter was caught with ecstasy tabs in her bra. Still, it's taken six months for the matter to come to light, and it happened in Australia, which makes it only half real.
There but for fortune goes any one of us, so pervasive is the drug culture even among the nicest of kids with the most caring parents. Goff himself, in his days of long flowing locks, had been around people who smoked and inhaled, like many did in those innocent times. But I was bemused by his startling assertion - given the undisputed facts - that, " ... my daughter has never taken drugs, never taken drugs. I'm not challenging this [court document], she was discharged, she was not convicted. I'm not being naïve as a father. I know she has not taken drugs apart from the legal drug of alcohol."
And so on, for he is a loyal father, and also legally trained.
My hunch is that he is indeed naïve as a parent, as are all of us. It's a survival thing. And that's why I'd expect that the parents of the 14-year-old Auckland boy, reportedly near death from drunkenness on a school trip last month, had no idea what he was up to.
The boy was part of a group who took bottles of vodka mixed with liqueur, straight vodka, and vodka premixers to school on June 1. They drank this nauseous muck before school started, teachers were alerted, the boy's denial was believed, and so he ended up convulsing and spewing on a bus headed for the zoo, and being taken away by ambulance.
It would not surprise me if his parents swore oaths on all they held holy (car, family photos, dog) that their boy had never before touched strong liquor, still less if they believed this to be true. With a third of our young people known to be binge-drinking, this would have to be the case. Surely so many parents can't be so stupid or incompetent that they fail to see - or smell - the evidence, and all those many parents couldn't condone it. Kids are heartbreakers: one other story of the past week is evidence of that. I wonder how the parents of the Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Ngati Kahungunu ki Heretaunga are feeling right now about their children's classroom antics.
The school is in Flaxmere, where many families struggle financially, and a strong gang presence exists. These Maori parents won't have chosen a language immersion school lightly: they'll have wanted their kids to be active in their culture, in which the survival of the language is pivotal. But a court case in which one of their teachers was found guilty of assault last week showed just what some of their kids had done with their expectations.
Trevor Apihai faced 15 charges of assaulting pupils who admitted they'd brazenly provoked him. He was found guilty on four counts - of hitting a child with a pencil case, pulling a child from her chair, holding on to a child's wrist, and pulling a child by the wrist - and while we deplore the use of force at all in the classroom, it's hard not to feel some sympathy for him. For that matter, many older people will have seen worse behaviour from teachers for less cause in the days of legal corporal punishment.
Former pupils of Apihai admitted they swore and yelled at him, were defiant, and made a game of deliberately upsetting him - and he plainly couldn't cope. The school, as a result, now has a teacher aide in every classroom to support its teachers. Hopefully some are parents, able to see just how kids can undermine their own futures in spite of everyone's good intentions.