Why I hate being a parent

My eldest son was born almost ten years ago and one of the first books he was bought as a present was The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr.  If you haven't read it, you should.  It has a quality that I haven't found in that many young children's books.  Namely it is ever so evocative of a serene and gentle former time.  The story is simple.  A little girl and her mum are disturbed at tea time by a tiger who comes to their house for tea.  The tiger eats all the food in the house and drinks all the drink, including all the water from the taps.  When daddy comes home, they have nothing in the house to eat or drink and as a consequence, they have to go out for tea.  They go out and its dark and all the cars have their lights on and all the streetlamps are lit and they go into town to a cafe where they have a lovely tea.

Now maybe it's because I am a child of the seventies that I find this so evocative.  When I was a child, if we had nothing in the house to eat, then the only option would have been to go to a cafe.  There was no such thing as a fast food restaurant; there were no Pizza Huts or KFCs.  There was a fish and chip van that came to a car park near by every Friday but that was all.  We did have a cafe nearby that sold fried teas with cheap sausages, chips, beans and mugs of tea.  I have no memories of ever going to a cafe for tea but every time I read The Tiger Who Came to Tea, I felt that I had.  Something about the words and the illustrations gave me such vivid memories of a simpler time.  A time when food wasn't available any hour of the day or night.  When there were only three TV channels and they all shut down in the mid afternoon and at night.  There was no internet, phones only came attached to the wall, nobody had ever heard of blogging and there was no such thing as twenty-four hour news.  News bulletins were short and news stories were confined to the important issues of the day.

Now don't get me wrong, I love the modern age we live in.  I am a technogeek of quite limitless proportions.  From our first family computer (a Commodore PET 2001) in 1978, I was hooked and I have embraced every advance in home computing since.  I love my phone and the fact that I can text friends who live in the United States or New Zealand literally thrills and amazes me.  I will never be able to take these things for granted because I have strong memories of a time when none of these things were even conceivably possible.  I am also a news junkie.  I consume much of the twenty-four hour news culture with a vigour that approaches an addiction.  Radio Five Live is on wherever I am whenever possible.  My Browser homepage is BBC, I get a little buzz of excitement when a news story breaks and word spreads over the Twitterverse.  However, I must confess that I also find that much of what I see, read and hear drives me nuts.

It is surely an accepted fact that there isn't enough real news to actually fill twenty-four hours of news broadcasting.  It is a feature of the modern media age that our news providers are often forced to create the news.  They will foster and fan the flames of debate in an effort to generate discourse and fill air time.  They will latch onto the lives of people who are of no public importance to provide further fuel for discussion and disagreement.  The publication of minor government reports are sometimes flagged as significant events and scientific studies that would once have been confined to the pages of obscure journals only are brought to our public attention with the science removed and the conclusions distorted or altered in an effort to generate sometimes debate, sometimes concern and sometimes just panic.

Another feature of the 21st century media is the desire to classify and judge people.  People who appear in the spotlight are often very quickly judged for maybe the one thing that they've done that has earned them their moment of fame.  Sometimes perhaps, the judgement is justified but often it isn't.  I could provide many examples of this but I'm not going to because that isn't my point.  My point is what is coming next.

The temptation to judge and classify is a 21st century condition that has spread throughout society and to a greater or lesser extent, we are all guilty.  In an ideal world, we would all be comfortable in our own skin and be able to justify our positions to ourselves but that is simply not the case and as a result, many of us are left feeling judged and angry as a result.  I do not remember such things ever bothering me though, until I became a parent.

The moment one becomes a parent, one becomes a member of a club and from then on, everybody is going to pigeonhole you and judge you and here now (at last) are some examples.  It starts straight away.  Some mothers breastfeed and some don't.  Those who don't may be judged as neglectful or in some way a failure by those who do.  Those who do breastfeed and do so publically may be thought of as intrusive for doing so whilst they may see any attempt to stop them from breastfeeding in public as an infringement of their rights.  Ask yourself, have you ever looked at somebody else's child and thought 'What on earth are they wearing?'  I know I have and I know the same has been said of my children.  Adults who don't have children are also so often judgemental of those who do.  On one occasion when my middle son was just over a year old, we were in a local restaurant with him and although he was being fairly well behaved, he was occasionally being noisy (as one year olds often are.)  I remember receiving the most angry and venomously disapproving stare from a young woman who was at a nearby table trying to enjoy a romantic Sunday lunch with her boyfriend.  I may be wrong, but the expression I read said that she felt my child was ill controlled and I had no business bringing him out for lunch.

Of course, when children go to school, the potential for judgement and disapproval increases a hundredfold.  Non-parents (I've heard them do this) curse at the parents driving their children to school because they clog up the roads.  Some parents call others too pushy, whilst others are judged as neglectful.  Some do too much with their children and others do nowhere near enough. Some take too much interest in their children's education, always pestering the teacher with questions and suggestions whilst others are too laid back, taking no interest in their child's education at all and leaving everything including discipline to the school.  But the biggest thing, the issue of the moment, the thing that got me going in the first place and woke me from my blogging hibernation, the thing that has led to this stupidly long ramble that I'd be amazed anybody is still reading, the real thing, is diet.

'Only one in a hundred lunch boxes meet government nutritional standards' it was announced last week and this little report was latched onto by various arms of the media and for a day, it was the subject of debate on the radio, on television and online.  On at least three occasions during that day, I heard, saw or read the suggestion that a parent who makes their child an unhealthy lunch has no excuse for doing so and is, in short, neglectful.  In other words, (and a man on a Five Live phone in said exactly this) if you send your children to school with an unhealthy packed lunch then you are a bad parent.  That's it, case closed, judgement sealed.

Issues around parenthood seem to excite peoples' emotions and I guess it's only natural that they do.  As a parent, you have to be completely happy that the way you are bringing up your children is the right way and as a result, you have to have opinions about how other people bring up their children too, but the truth is, as with so much in life, nobody is absolutely right and nobody is absolutely wrong.  I don't have a problem with the fact that my children go to school with crisps in their lunchbox and that they have jam sandwiches every other day because I know they will eat what they are given and I know they will be full for the two hours and fifteen minutes between lunch time and home time.  I am also proud about what they eat at home but I'm not going to tell you what it is because I have no desire to start implying that my kids are better than your kids or that I have the perfect parenting blueprint and you don't.  My kids are healthy and active and they enrich my life and I hope that I enrich theirs.  That (and I really mean this) is all that I care about.

I love being a parent. The highlight of every day for the last nine years and three months has been the time I spend with them.  For me, being a parent works. It is, I feel, what I was meant to be but so often I am aware that others would pass opinion and judgement on what I do and this is such a sad way for society to be.  It is media fuelled but it is now a condition of us all.  I don't know, but I doubt if when Judith Kerr wrote The Tiger Who Came to Tea, parents were so bombarded with criticism as they are now.  Life isn't about judging others or about being judged yourself, life is about being happy with yourself and your own opinions and allowing others to be happy with theirs.

As Billy Connolly says: 'Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes.  After that who cares, because he's a mile away, and you've got his shoes!'