About to conclude a column for So it go I am aborting it to write, instead, on a sudden impulse, about Helen Bartlett, a mother in Point Fortin,Trinidad, who is big in the news this week over a video of her beating her 12-year-old wayward daughter. First of all, the beating of a child is a particular blot on any parent’s behaviour, and it is to be condemned, as this mother is to be condemned, but having said that I also have to say that, as we say in the Caribbean, we should see with this woman; she was wrong in her behaviour, but as we condemn the act one has to also take into consideration the circumstances surrounding it.
The reality for Helen Bartlett, and many more like her, in the region and the world, is that the forces that come to bear on parents these days in bringing up a child in the straight and narrow are complicated and powerful beyond belief. I helped bring up two children from my first wife,