are often a little shy. They want to help their parents. They use their brakes when

cycling down a hill. Because they don't pose many immediate problems, we tend to assume

all is well with good children. They aren't the target for particular concern. That goes

to the kids who are graffiting the underpass. People imagine the good children are fine,

because they do everything that's expected of them. And that, of course, is precisely

the problem. The secret sorrows – and future difficulties – of the good boy or girl begin

with their inner need for excessive compliance. The good child isn't good because by a quirk

of nature they simply have no inclination to be anything else. They are good because

they have no other option. Their goodness is a necessity rather than a choice. Many

good children are good out of love of a depressed harassed parent who makes it clear they just

couldn't cope with any more complications or difficulties. Or maybe they are very good

to soothe a violently angry parent who could become catastrophically frightening at any

sign of less than perfect conduct.

But this sort of repression of more challenging emotions, though it produces short-term pleasant obedience,

stores up a huge amount of difficulty in later life. Practiced educators and parents should

spot signs of exaggerated politeness – and treat it as the grave danger it really is. The good

child becomes a keeper of too many secrets and an appalling communicator of unpopular

but important things. They say lovely words, they are experts in satisfying the expectations

of their audiences, but their real thoughts and feelings stay buried and then generate

psychosomatic symptoms, twitches, sudden outbursts and sulphurous bitterness. The sickness of

the good child is that they have no experience of other people being able to tolerate their

badness. They have missed out a vital privilege accorded to the healthy child; that of being

able to display envious, greedy, ego-maniacal sides and yet be tolerated and loved nevertheless.

The good person typically has particular problems around sex. As a child, they may have been

praised for being pure and innocent. As they become an adult however, like all of us, they

discover the ecstasies of sex, which can be beautifully perverse and excitingly disgusting.

But this may be radically at odds with the picture of what they believe they are allowed

to be like. They may in response disavow their desires, go cold and detached from their bodies

or perhaps give in to their longings only in a disproportionate way that is destructive

to other bits of their lives and leaves them disgusted and frightened. At work, the good

adult has problems too. As a child, they follow the rules. Never make trouble and take care

not to annoy anyone. But following the rules won't get you very far in adult life. Almost

everything that's interesting, worth doing or important will meet with a degree of opposition.

A brilliant idea will always disappoint certain people – and yet very much be worth holding

on to. The good child is condemned to career mediocrity and sterile people-pleasing. Being

properly mature involves a frank, unfrightened relationship with one's own darksides, complexity

and ambition. It involves accepting that not everything that makes us happy will please

others or be honored as especially "nice" by society – but that it can be important

to explore and hold on to it nevertheless. The desire to be good is one of the loveliest

things in the world, but in order to have a genuinely good life, we may sometimes need

to be, by the standards of the good child, fruitfully and bravely bad.

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