04.29.08

More parenting stuff

Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 9:07 pm by Sarah

Note: turned a post into a column. One small update – I watched the 3rd part last night and it was interesting – the most interesting characters who started coming into the picture were the grandparents! Their experience and wry view of life was in stark contrast to the chirpy parents who still believed they had control over their lives. With the exception of the mother of 8. She was relaxed and lovely.

ANOTHER week; another television series about children. This time it’s 21st Century Child, Monday nights on RTE. I used to Hoover up information on parenting, loved programmes like Supernanny; now I can’t take it anymore.
Here’s their bottom line: if your children are hassling you, it’s your fault not theirs. For every child’s problem there’s a parenting solution, so you’ve only yourself to blame. Fine! I blame myself. My confidence has been so destroyed by the avalanche of advice that my boys have seized on my doubt and bully me from one end of the kitchen to the other.
The terrible tragedy is that on those rare occasions when I acquire resolve and implement the advice – it works. The problem arises when I either lack the necessary resolve, or struggle with conflicting advice. It’s a paradigm of competing needs – mine for peace and quiet; theirs for maximum attention. Telling them to buzz off just isn’t done anymore – it’s all about them now, and honestly, I’m weary. What about me?
I could just stop watching the TV shows, but it’s Monday night and there’s not much on. 21st Century Child, presented by child psychologist David Coleman, will track ten families with different backgrounds and approaches to parenting for the next six years. The families were picked with scrupulous attention to diversity. We’ve got Nigerian and Eastern European immigrants, a disabled mother, a single, teenage mother, suburban first-timers, and a midlands family with eight children. I noticed they hadn’t managed to persuade any affluent, SUV-driving, nanny-enabled families with their ostentatious fourth child to take part. That’s a real pity since, of all factors, money has the most significant influence on a child’s health and advancement.
As Coleman visited each family, I learned that I had instinctively indulged in what’s called attachment parenting. I breast fed on demand, had the babies in the bed, picked them up when they cried and stayed at home with them full time until they were two.
Now they are little emperors who expect Mammy to stay attached. But Mammy has detached. Mammy wants to go to the toilet by herself. She wants to listen to the radio and read the paper without being interrupted three times in every sentence. So Mammy tells them to go outside and stop bugging her. But the parenting experts say that Mammy should play co-operatively with her children. So Mammy feels bad and wonders if it would be easier to take a job full-time and hire a professional to rear her children since she is clearly so inadequate for the task. Mammy also can’t understand why she’d love another baby.
All that before we even hear from the Freudians, before we address the Oedipal nightmare being created at home. It’s 3am and the four-year-old potters into the bedroom, climbs over Daddy and curls up between us. Daddy isn’t going to stand for space invasion, so what does he do? Carry the child back to bed? No. He departs to the spare room. One day those kids are going to call it Daddy’s Room in front of the in-laws and we’ll all be terribly embarrassed.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that the eldest son displacing the father in the marital bed is going to cost someone a lot of money in therapy in 30 years’ time. But I’m too sleepy to be authoritative in the middle of the night. I roll over and go back to sleep, postponing the worry about the psycho-sexual consequences until the morning.
Apparently, it’s all about building their self-esteem. But I was reared before self-esteem was invented so what little I have is being destroyed by the constant reminders that I’m doing it all wrong. Why can’t someone make a programme that builds up the self-esteem of parents? How about a series that says once you feed them properly, put them to bed on time, keep them clean and tell them you love them, they’ll be grand? And sure there wasn’t much you could do about their personalities anyway. Here’s a classic scenario. Coleman previously said he doesn’t allow his children to watch “broadcast TV”. That left a sneaky get-out clause – they could be watching hours of DVDs – but I still panicked. He says TV makes children aggressive. True. Mine saw Power Rangers a couple of times and went berserk. I blocked the channel that shows it, but it’s too late. Now they’re obsessed. They run around shooting and killing each other while I shriek “Boys! Don’t be so rough!”
I used to intervene but then I tired of that and fretted that I was feminising them. You read a lot about that now: men’s natural instincts being repressed since the feminists took over. Maybe boys are supposed to run around playing with pretend guns. So there I am, watching these two boisterous bundles of energy, wondering if I’m a bad mother for allowing them to fight it out, or a bad mother if I intervene. What I really want to know is if one ends up in jail and the other gay, will someone say it was my fault? Is their destiny dependent on how I act at this moment, and all the other moments that make up a day, a week and a year with a child? It’s nerve wracking. It’s not all bad, of course. Mine are at the stage where escalators and tractors are a source of huge excitement. But though dealing with toddlers is difficult, other parents keep warning me about the terror of teenagers. One friend has found a solution: she’s sent her 13-year-old daughter to boarding school. “Otherwise we’ll fight every morning to get her out of bed, and every night to persuade her to go to bed. I’m not spending the next five years at that lark.” Sounds like a great idea to me.
But we’re not Victorians and we can’t pack ours off just yet. Anyway, once I get over the fabulous feeling of freedom when I go away for a few days without them, I miss them desperately.
The point is that it’s difficult enough to rear children without having an entire industry shouting at you, pointing out the dire consequences of getting it wrong. As far as I can see, there’s nothing wrong with the self-esteem of today’s children. They get buckets more attention than we did. It’s the parents who are gibbering wrecks. Why won’t someone make a TV series for us?

Permalink