【英语生活】子女犯错会不会拖累商场老爸？

Last term the son of a senior businessman got caught helping himself to another child's iPod and was suspended from his fancy London school.

This story of petty larceny is of keen interest to about a dozen people. To the businessman - who doubtless gave the boy a rocket - to the boy, his mother, his headteacher, his victim and the classmates who will have enjoyed the shiver of excitement that comes when someone else gets into trouble. Otherwise no one cared.

I happened to hear about it last week and didn't care much either. Yet the story made me wonder what might have happened - let us just suppose - if it had not been a businessman's child but Barack Obama's sweet-looking elder daughter who had taken it into her head to pinch a classmate's iPod. Then rather a lot of people would have cared: in fact it might have cost her father the US election.

If you are a politician, especially an American one, your children are a danger to you. Their transgressions become your own, as Sarah Palin found last week when the world thrilled in horror to find that her schoolgirl daughter was five months' pregnant. Luckily for her mother, an engagement was swiftly drummed up and political disaster averted, but it was a close run thing.

There is an obvious lesson here: unless you are childless, going into politics is a bad idea. Even quite nice teenagers delight in having unprotected sex, getting drunk, taking drugs, becoming anorexic or bulimic, and if you have five children - as Ms Palin does - the chances of one of them inflicting collateral damage on you at some stage must be close to a certainty.

By contrast, if you are a business leader your children can screw up as much as they like without harming your career prospects at all. One could say this was unfair. Business leaders, like politicians, are meant to be examples to the people they lead. If they cannot even marshal a couple of schoolkids at home, why should one allow them to lead thousands of workers?

Three things are wrong with this line of thought. Keeping one's own teenagers constantly on track can be harder than keeping a company - or a nation - in line. The loving parents of misbehaving teenagers are often to be pitied as much as blamed. And if the children of politicians and CEOs go off the rails more than most, it is not the poor leadership of the parents that is to blame, but their jobs, which generate too much money and fame, and keep them in the office round the clock.

Shareholders seem to have their thinking on this pretty straight. They are not sentimental about character (as electorates increasingly are). And from their point of view, if something has got to give, it is better that the children are neglected than that things at the shop are allowed to slide.

Children of businesspeople need to go spectacularly off the rails for anyone to take any notice at all. Patty Hearst got herself kidnapped and joined the revolutionaries, but she was special. Paris Hilton is special too - for being the world's most overrated celebrity. She might go to prison for drink driving, but I doubt if room occupancy rates at any of the hotels founded by her family have registered the scandal.

Even when the disgraced child works at the same organisation as the parent the damage is minor. The son of Sandy Weill, ex-head of Citibank, left his powerful job at the bank abruptly a few years ago and checked into drug rehab instead. While there was a certain amount of crowing on the internet, the career of Weill Snr sailed triumphantly on. In his business biography the story gets barely a line.

In theory, damage could be done when the values espoused by the child are at loggerheads with those of the parent, but in practice no one minds much or for long. The Queen (who is the head of a family business of sorts) has as her leading brand value a stiff upper lip. This trait was not in evidence in the hideously emotional divorce of her eldest son. But did that hurt the queen? After a bit of a dip, she is now more popular than ever.

Likewise, Eddie Izzard, the famous transvestite comedian, is the son of a straight up and down accountant. The son's antics do not seem to have held back the father - Harold Izzard has just won an award for "outstanding service to the profession of internal auditing".

I can only think of one business person who has been brought down by the behaviour of his son: Martin Lukes. Earlier this year, the chief executive of a-b gl?b?l was found guilty of passing insider information to his stockbroker son and is now in prison, his reputation in tatters.

The only routine damage a troubled child can inflict on a parent's career is by being so troubling that they distract the parents from their work. Failing this, children are more likely to help than hinder. For a start, they are expensive. It costs so much to get them through school and university that parents need to work hard and go on working hard for an awfully long time.

Second, children provide a parallel world. When the office is unbearable, there are children to distract. And when the children behave in their averagely foul, unruly ways, the peace and civilisation of the office offers the most blissful refuge.

But the biggest service offered by children to their high-flying parents is to take them down a peg or two. Teenagers routinely tell their parents that they are a piece of scum. If the parent is a chief executive with a big ego, this is an invaluable service, as no one else would dare perform it.

上学期，一位资深商界人士的儿子偷另一个孩子的iPod被抓住了，他所在的伦敦高级学校把他开除了。这个小盗窃罪的故事受到一些人的热切关注：那位商人——他肯定会大骂儿子一顿、那个男孩、孩子的妈妈、孩子的校长、受害者，以及那些看到其他人遇到麻烦会无比兴奋的同学。除此之外，没有人关心这件事。

上周我碰巧听到这个故事，但我对这个故事也不太关心。不过，这个故事让我想到，假设如果不是商人的儿子，而是巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)容貌甜美的大女儿突然想抢同学的iPod，结果会怎样呢？那就会有很多人关心这件事：实际上，这可能会让她爸爸输掉美国大选。

如果你是一位政界人士，尤其是美国政界人士，你的孩子对你来说是个危险。他们的过错就是你的过错，就像莎拉•佩林(Sarah Palin)前些日子发现的那样，当得知她还在上学的女儿已怀有5个月身孕时，全世界都震惊了。对于她的妈妈而言，幸运的是，一场订婚迅速被制造出来，从而避免了一场政治灾难，但过程真是惊险。

此中有一个显而易见的教训：除非没有子女，否则从政并不是一个好主意。即使是十分乖巧的少年也乐于沾染以下行为：没有防范措施的性行为、酗酒、吸毒、厌食或暴饮暴食。假如你有五个孩子——就如佩林一样——几乎肯定会有某个孩子在某个时候给你惹来麻烦。

相比之下，如果你是商界领袖，你的孩子无论怎么折腾，对你的职业前途都不会有丝毫妨碍。有人会说这不公平。与政治家一样，商界领袖也应该成为他们所领导的人的榜样。如果连家里的几个孩子都管不好，怎么带领数以千计的员工？

这种想法有三点错误。管好青春期的子女，让他们从不出轨，可能比管理好一家公司——甚至一个国家——还要困难。对于做错事的孩子的父母，人们往往同情多于指责。如果说政治家和CEO的子女比平常人更爱出乱子，那么不应该怪父母管教无方，而应该怪他们的工作。工作给他们带来金钱和荣誉，却也占用了他们的大部分时间。

股东们在这个问题上的想法似乎相当直率。他们不会感情用事（选民则日益如此）。在他们看来，如果必须放弃某样东西，忽略孩子总好于放任商店里的情况日益变糟。

商界人士的孩子只有在行为特别出格的时候才会引起人们的注意。帕蒂•赫斯特(Patty Hearst)被绑架后加入了暴力组织，但她是个特例。帕丽斯•希尔顿(Paris Hilton)也很特别——她是全世界最被高估的名人。她可能因酒后驾车而坐牢，但我怀疑，这件丑闻不会对她家族创建的酒店的入住率产生丝毫影响。

即使行为不光彩的子女与父母在同一家机构工作，损害也是微乎其微的。花旗银行(Citibank)前主席桑迪•威尔(Sandy Weill)的儿子原来在该行掌有实权，但几年前突然离开公司，进了戒毒所。此事虽然在网上引起非议，但老威尔的职业生涯仍然一帆风顺。他在传记中对此事也仅是一笔带过。

理论上，如果孩子的价值观与父母格格不入，就可能造成伤害。但实际上没有人会太在意或者长时间念念不忘。女王（各种家族企业的领导者）将坚韧克制视为自己的最高价值标准。这种标准并未体现在她长子引起世人反感的离婚事件中。但女王受到伤害了吗？在略微消沉之后，她反而比以往更受欢迎了。

同样，著名的反串喜剧演员埃迪•伊扎德(Eddie Izzard)是一位不苟言笑的会计师的儿子。儿子的滑稽动作似乎并未妨碍父亲——哈罗德•伊扎德(Harold Izzard)近期获得“内部审计卓越服务”奖项。

我只能想起一位商界人士是被儿子的行为拖垮的，那就是马丁•卢克斯(Martin Lukes)。今年早些时候，这位a-b gl?b?l的首席执行官因泄露内幕消息给从事股票经纪业务的儿子而获罪，并因此入狱，声名扫地。

爱惹麻烦的孩子给父母事业造成的唯一常见麻烦，是害得父母从工作中分心。若非如此，孩子更可能是带来帮助，而非妨碍。从一开始，养孩子就要花去很多钱。他们的学费如此昂贵，父母必须努力工作，而且在很长的时间内都得努力工作。

其次，孩子带来一个平行的世界。当办公室让人忍无可忍时，孩子可以让他们分心。当孩子举止讨厌，不受管束（他们常常如此）时，安宁、文明的办公室就是安乐窝。

但对于胸怀壮志的父母来说，孩子最大的作用是可以挫挫他们的锐气。少年人一贯会这么说他们的父母：没什么了不起。如果父母是自视甚高的CEO，这可算是无价的忠言，因为别人谁也不敢这么说。

译者/梁艳裳、岱嵩