Taking the madness out of parenting
By Emma Pomfret, Belfast Telegraph, and Kate Kelland, Reuters
Belfast - Once it was considered good enough if your child reached 21 without too many major catastrophes, but modern parenting is a whole new ball game.
The plethora of parenting experts and glossy magazines filled with photos of immaculately groomed celebrity 'Yummy Mummies' means that raising kids can turn into a competitive business.
But rather than going round the bend trying to compete with the Jones' and their multi-talented offspring, the best antidote is to simply accept that 'perfect parents' are about as likely to exist as Father Christmas, according to Annie Ashworth and Meg Sanders, authors of new book The Madness Of Modern Families.
| 'Humour was the only way to go with this' |
"We're all trying to prove ourselves, for all kinds of reasons, through our children, and I think we need to stand back and think hang on a minute, it doesn't have to be this difficult.
"Parenting is tough and it would be much nicer if we all just admitted how hard it was instead of trying to impress everybody all the time."
Of course, there is a natural tendency when you become a parent to think that your child is the most precious thing the world has ever seen, but these days competitive parenting is out of control, Sanders, who has 12-year-old twins, says.
"The way society is now plays to all our worst faults and failings - the problem is that we all live in a culture of constant self-improvement and both mothers and fathers are often guilty of extending this to include their children," she explains.
| 'It doesn't have to be this difficult' |
"It's also all linked in with material possessions, in so much as your lifestyle demonstrates what and who you are," agrees Sanders. "You have to put it all out there like a shop front window - you've got to have the car, the clothes, the body, the house and the perfectly behaved kids. This just isn't attainable for a normal human being, unless you have an army of stylists, your own personal cameraman and lighting expert and someone following you around with an airbrush 24/7!"
Rather understandably, when it comes to offering 'helpful' parenting tips, both Ashworth and Sanders recoil in horror. "Don't ask us! Just follow your instinct and remember that just because somebody says they're an expert doesn't mean they know what they're talking about!"
The book tells of parents who play foreign radio stations in childrens' bedrooms so they can learn languages in their sleep, mothers who buy supermarket cakes and "distress" them to make them look home-baked and fathers who forge their children's homework and include "authentic" errors to make it look real.
"I've spent nights sort of rubbing out her times table and rewriting them and trying to recreate her handwriting, and getting the five round the wrong way and stuff," one father confesses. "And you think: What am I doing, what am I doing?"
British parents are not alone. In the United States, some middle class parents have long been prepared to do whatever it takes to give their children an edge that can lead to better marks, better colleges and a better future.
The authors paint light-hearted, but worryingly recognisable, sketches of certain modern parent types.
There's Helicopter Mummy, who hovers constantly by her child's side, never allowing it out of her sight, and Touchline Dad, who bellows "get stuck in" at his reluctant mini-rugby playing son and whose wife sits by the swimming pool timing the child's backstroke laps on the stopwatch on her mobile phone.
Eco Mummy feeds her children - all of whom were born on her kitchen floor at home - on "biodynamic felafel and organic mushroom pate", while Craft Mummy will "carefully hand you a collage of leaves and grasses that is not quite dry" when you go to pick up your children up from a playdate.
Sanders says Britain's parents are living in a state of almost permanent anxiety and guilt that they might do the wrong thing - fuelled by a constant stream of criticism and advice.
She points to a recent campaign in British newspapers which lamented the "loss of childhood" and criticised parents for being too pushy. A month later, research in the United States suggested children who are coached with extra music, languages or sports perform better and have healthier relationships with their parents than their less driven peers.
On top of that, there is constant media coverage of how children are becoming obese because their parents are too lax and let them do nothing but watch television, play computer games and eat junk food all day.
"As parents we are bombarded with information - and a lot of it is contradictory - so we no longer know what to think," Sanders said.
"Parents are coming in for a lot of blame at the moment, and that's just making us more and more neurotic."
In some cases, neurotic is an understatement.
"We had a call recently from a mother who wanted her child to have hours of Italian classes," a tutor says in the book.
"She had heard that if a child is exposed to a language early, it is easier for them to be fluent. The child turned out to be one and a half."
But sport, it seems, brings out the worst in pushy parents.
A swimming trainer tells how the parents of one young girl took her to two 6am training sessions and five after-school sessions a week. When she broke her arm, she still had to train, holding her injured limb out of the water as she swam.
A tennis coach adds: "We had one girl who played pretty well until she suddenly stopped coming. I saw her a few weeks later and asked her what had happened. 'Mummy doesn't want me to play any more,' she said, 'because I'm not winning.'"
Sanders is eager not to criticise modern parents - after all, she says, much of this madness was born of constant criticism - but she hopes that by gently poking fun at them the book might persuade them to calm down.
"The spirit of the book is 'fessing up to all the daftness and absurdity that we find ourselves getting sucked into," she says.
"It's quite a serious topic, and it's very close to peoples' hearts - because if people feel they are being criticised for letting their children down, the reaction is visceral. That's why we felt that humour was the only way to go with this."
But if even this exposure of their most ridiculous behaviour does not persuade pushy parents to back off, there is always the prospect of mutiny in the ranks.
The book tells of one little boy who told his mother it was "a violation of his human rights to make him go to orchestra on a Saturday morning".
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