Of the facts and the circumstances surrounding the finding of 18-months old twins a week dead, apparently of malnutrition, in Brisbane, I have no idea, but will be slow to rush to judgment. The immediate reaction - a sense of atrocity and shock and of the heavens crying out for vengeance - is tempered with the knowledge that such cases are invariably pathetic, and that we usually will find those responsible as much to be pitied and helped as punished.
But the talk such a case inevitably inspires - whether of the "how could they" variety or of the hell now confronting every living survivor, guilty or not - reminds me yet again how much modern society has separated the having and bringing up of children from ordinary routines of life. In just the same way we have virtually separated death from life - in the sense that 90 per cent of us have never seen a dead body, and 90 per of us will die in a hospital - we have, for many people, removed much of the naturalness of children, particularly babies.
One of the many reasons why I am fond of and proud of my daughters is that they are good with and natural with children, including babies. They should be, because they have grown up with children of different ages, and have always been surrounded with the paraphernalia of households with babies nappies, vomiting, crying as much as the joys of a response, of their learning and recognising, of taking steps and so on. For the younger daughters, without yet younger daughters to practise on, it is nieces and nephews, or a wider cousinage.
All know fairly reliably the difference between types of baby crying, the nature and rough regularity of the scores of different baby needs, and have a common sense approach to the scads of emergencies, such as the dropping of a baby's dummy, a rash on the bum, or a fall. They don't panic. My youngest is more frightened of spiders than a screaming child.
They have even ceased to be much embarrassed by my own propensity to pick up the children of perfect strangers, regarding it as just me being dotty again.
Feeling comfortable with children comes naturally to me, I suppose, because I grew up surrounded by a large family and clan. With siblings, plus 99 direct first cousins, it was hard to feel too intimidated by a dirty nappy or a screeching brat.
And that's in spite of the fact that we were, apparently, far more sexist then in terms of the division of labour in bringing up children or managing a household. My mother insists that my father never once changed a nappy. On the other hand, we were all, as children, hunted from the house itself soon after dawn, and spent almost all of the day outside, as often as not under the vague supervision of my father, including acting as his sheep dogs, porters and station hands.
The modern family tends to be rather more separated from the naturalness of life's cycles. For starters, families are generally much smaller, in cousinage too, and this, by itself, tends to demarcate generations so that the baby cycle occurs only every few decades.
That cycle is getting longer. When I was born, the median age of a mother at first birth was about 22, which is to say that for about half the mothers, the age was between 18 and 22. Now the median age at marriage is about 30, and of a woman having a first child is about the same. Many women are having their first child in their late 30s.
These mothers are usually healthier, wealthier and more resourced to look after their children (or, increasingly, the one child they will have) but they are, in many respects, far less prepared for, or informed about, the way that it will completely change their life. The change, generally, will be quite abrupt, with sleepless nights, ceaseless demands and, unexpected absolute disruption of established old routines.
No book can have prepared them for this. No TV sitcom either. Nor, generally, the somewhat despairing talk of those of their best friends who almost dropped off the radar when they had their little darling, or old wives' tales of pain and agony of birth.
What's even more daunting, a good deal of the time, is that many modern parents really have very little instinct for the thing, or confidence in what to do. Sometimes their conscientiousness will be a positive enemy. My most condescending and pitying look, for example, is for the household full of sterilising equipment, with anxious mothers (and fathers) rushing to disinfect everything dropped by the child. We old hands know that a bit of dirt can be positively beneficial for the immune system.
So competent, so often, in everything they have done so far, the "alien'' makes them feel hopeless and helpless. At wits end when the brat remorselessly keeps them from desperately needed sleep, they may also feel terrible for feeling like throwing it against the wall. It's quite a natural feeling, though actually doing it is not.
Normally, when people talk patronisingly of incompetent mothers, we are thinking of a teenage girl, or hopeless drug addict without the knowledge or physical or spiritual resources to nurture and bring a child into the world, often unwittingly cruel or objectively neglectful even as she is trying her best and loves her infant to death. These need our help too, but there is often a crisis in knowledge, in wherewithal and in support as great among reasonably well-resourced people for whom the experience, often deeply wanted, has proven as tumultuous as breaking both legs. However much we must think of the baby, and its welfare, first, we must be slow to judge how different people cope.
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