AS A SMALL child, I can vividly remember being bored to tears in mass on Sundays and my dad whispering into my ear that if I wasn’t good, “the man would throw me out.” I didn’t know who the man was or what he looked like, but I knew ‘the man’ could be anywhere and was not opposed to asking young children who didn’t behave to leave places like Mass, restaurants or even a supermarket.

Today, we tend to look back on these kinds of well-used parenting hacks from the 80s with a sense of superiority (and probably a strange sense of fondness, too). But for the most part, parenting strategies like this worked, or at the very least, they bought addled parents some time before their toddlers went fully nuclear.

Today, threatening your small child with the notion that some mystery man or woman is going to cross the room and throw them out due to their bad behaviour might seem overly harsh, but the gas thing about ‘the man’ (or ‘the lady’ – either worked) was that it was a completely empty threat used by probably put-upon parents, who weren’t strict authoritarians at all.

Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

They were more than likely just at their wits’ end, like mine with my Mass-going shenanigans and wanted to avoid having to move with me into the dreaded ‘crying room’ (another 80s throwback for you), so they trotted ‘the man’ out as the final attempt to get me to behave.

I often wonder what my mum or dad would have done if I’d asked them any follow-up questions or challenged the idea of ‘the man?’ I never really called their bluff, although I’m fairly sure they pointed at some random man or woman in the distance on the occasions I probed any deeper, and it seemed to cement the idea even further, making me believe it was no bluff.

You’ve got to take your hat off to them for thinking on........

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