Skill shortage

I'm shocked that so many children now arrive at school lacking some of the basic skills they should already have acquired. Such as:

• How to have a conversation
• How to play with toys
• How to focus on a task for more than two minutes
• How to hold a pen or pencil
• How to throw or kick a ball
• How to use a paperback
• How to follow a story
• How to interact with other children

These failings are attributed to the Covid lockdowns, when children were stuck in the home; children glued to screens rather than engaging in physical activity or exploring the outside world; and parents who think children will develop these skills naturally and don't need parental instruction.

Teachers are having to teach these basic skills on top of their already heavy workload. They could do without it.

When I started school aged five I certainly had all the necessary basic skills, as did my classmates, and there was no question of our needing special instruction. The idea would have struck us as ludicrous.

Unfortunately, unless screen use suddenly declines, it looks as if this shameful situation can only get worse rather than better.

Nosey parkers

As a non-parent, I'm grateful I've escaped all those unwanted criticisms that parents are confronted with. As if it isn't hard enough dealing with an unruly, angry child, unhelpful comments from others just add insult to injury.

In an American poll*, nearly two thirds of mothers said they felt they had been criticised for their parenting decisions, from their own family as much as from total strangers.

Discipline, sleep and diet were the topics that usually brought criticism, but anything was grist to the mill. I guess those who are long-time parents often feel entitled to criticise the supposed failings of new parents.

I don't criticise other people's behaviour, unless they're behaving especially badly. I don't even criticise people's table manners, something that gets a lot of people stewing.

And as a non-parent who has little idea of what parenting involves (apart from watching my own parents), and certainly not the day-after-day stress of living with volatile, self-centred, truculent youngsters, I wouldn't dare challenge a parent on his or her parenting skills.

So much of the criticism is a matter of opinion anyway. "Your children are being too noisy". "You should give him a good smack". "You're being too indulgent". "She's manipulating you". Mind your own business and shut the f--- up.

Looking back on my own childhood, I can see now that I must have been an absolute pain in the neck at times. I disagreed with my father on most things and I could be stubborn as a mule. Luckily he was a middle-class father who would think twice about clobbering me, however maddening I was being.

I have every sympathy for hard-pressed parents. However much you love your kids, there are times when they're simply utterly exhausting.

*A poll of 475 mothers of children under five by the C.S.Mott Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan

A blind eye

I have to admit that when I notice someone doing something reprehens-ible - something criminal or cruel or anti-social - I'm always in a quandary. Should I turn a blind eye or should I take action? Many's the time when for one reason or another I've turned a blind eye.

I'm sure I'm not the only one. How many of us are prepared to take it further if we risk violence, abuse or some other kind of retaliation? I suspect most people would hesitate before diving in.

When I was working at a London bookshop once, one of the staff quite casually walked out with two bulging carrier bags of stolen books. Nobody said a word. None of the other staff, including me, were prepared to intervene. Why, I couldn't say. I guess we were all waiting for someone else to make the first move.

Another time Jenny and I were in a supermarket when the manager stopped an elderly man who was walking out with some stolen cheese and physically knocked him to the floor. On this occasion we took action. We were so disgusted by this inhuman response that we abandoned a trolley full of shopping and took our custom elsewhere.

When I see a mother shouting and screaming at her truculent child, I'm tempted to defend the child and tell her to calm down. I don't though because I tell myself that (a) it's none of my business and (b) what right do I have as a non-parent to criticise her behaviour? But that allows her to keep shouting and screaming.

There are more trivial misdeeds - dog shit left on the pavement, parked cars blocking cycle lanes, people dropping litter. But I can't object to everything, I'd soon be known as the mad bossyboots at number 90. So I keep quiet and let them get away with it.

My mother was bolder, a shameless busybody. She was always embarrassing me by ticking people off for their bad behaviour.

I'd end up ticking her off for ticking people off.

Reality or innocence?

The whole subject of safeguarding children is a real hot potato. To what extent do you protect them from the horrors of the outside world and to what extent do you keep them happy and secure in a little childhood cocoon?

There are no clear answers. Every parent has their own guidelines as to how much cocooning or how much real-life exposure is appropriate or healthy. When real-life nowadays is often so squalid and monstrous, it's a serious dilemma.

Certainly in my own childhood I was very much cocooned. My parents tended to keep me away from newspapers, news reports and gruesome local happenings and encouraged me to stay immersed in my own private world of model trains, comics, glove puppets and my sister's dolls house.

When I started work as a local newspaper journalist, it came as a big shock to discover the realities of everyday life that I had been so ignorant of - poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, grim working conditions and all the rest.

But what should parents do? On the one hand, they want their kids to enjoy a carefree innocent childhood for as long as possible, and not risk their being traumatised by everyday atrocities they aren't ready to deal with.

On the other hand, they don't want their kids to grow up naive and unworldly, unaware of just how brutal and barbaric and wretched some people's lives may be, and how we all need to do our bit to create a fairer world.

These days of course it's virtually impossible to keep your child cocooned. Very early on they'll discover social media and the extremes of real life will be thrust at them in every appalling shape and form. To keep them cocooned you'd have to live on a desert island or in a mountain cave.

Parenting has never been such a complicated business.

A big fat blank

It strikes me that I have little idea what my parents thought about the whole business of parenting. They said virtually nothing about it and I never asked them. Was it a positive experience or a negative one? Did they enjoy it or did they hate it? I honestly couldn't tell you.

I had little chance to tackle my father on the subject as we were totally estranged for the last twenty years of his life. I had plenty of opportunities to question my mum, who outlived my father by thirty years, but I never did. The subject simply never came up, maybe because we were both afraid of what dark secrets would come tumbling out. And also because my mum was just extremely secretive.

My guess is that they enjoyed bringing up my sister, who was always obedient and well-behaved and cheerfully conventional, while they found me more of a handful because  I played up and answered back and had wayward views on just about everything.

But it's all guesswork because they never confided their real feelings about parenting. For all I know, in the secrecy of their bedroom they complained non-stop about the heavy demands of child-rearing and how inadequate and ignorant they felt. They may even at the worst moments have wondered why they had children at all. Who knows? It's just one big fat blank.

Some of the questions I have:
1) Were they glad they had children, or not?
2) What were the best aspects of parenting, and the worst?
3) Were there times when they were totally at their wits' end?
4) Were there times when they just wanted to get rid of us?
5) Did they feel they weren't really up to the job?
6) Did they feel other parents were much better at it?
7) What was the biggest mistake they made?
8) What would they have done differently?

I'd love to know the answers.

Optimists wanted

It strikes me that you have to be very optimistic to be a parent. If you weren't optimistic you'd never take the plunge. You'd be too terrified of the dire twists of fate that might overtake your children. So you have to believe:

• That they'll grow up to be be healthy, happy and secure
• That they won't be caught up in World War Three
• That they'll always love you and won't turn against you
• That they won't become alcoholics, drug addicts or rapists
• That they won't fall off a cliff while taking a selfie
• That they'll find rewarding and satisfying jobs
• That they won't end up in prison
• That they'll be kind and generous to other people
• That they won't be as thick as two planks
• That they won't want to climb the North Face of the Eiger
• That they won't be right-wing extremists
• That they won't drive like maniacs

You also need to be a low-anxiety person. If you're the anxious type, you'll be worrying about your kids every minute of the day, wondering if they're safe, or behaving sensibly, or eating properly, or resisting that strange blue tablet their friend's just offered them. You'll be a permanent nervous wreck waiting for tragedy to strike.

Both my parents were pessimistic and anxiety-prone, which not only meant stressful parenting, but turned me into an equally anxious child. I'm sure they expected parenting to be a painful ordeal. And so inevitably that's what it was. While my sister was well-behaved, my constant teenage rebelliousness tested them to the limits. But I survived to tell the tale. And so does my mum - at 95 and counting.

Broken heart

Parents who refuse to accept their children for what they are, who want their children to have certain beliefs or interests, or worse still want them to be a carbon copy of themselves, are a menace. It's a shame they can't be prevented from having children in the first place, such is the distress and misery they cause.

Seventeen year old Leelah Alcorn of Kings Mill, Ohio, was a tragic victim of such parental dogmatism. Born a boy but having told her devoutly Christian parents she wanted to be a girl, they forced her to undergo conversion therapy to cure her transgender feelings.

Last Sunday she walked in front of a truck on Highway I-71 and was crushed to death. She left a suicide note saying her parents had broken her heart and made her hate herself.

This is hardly a unique case. So many parents won't accept their children's personal identity and try to push them in some direction they're not comfortable with, which simply screws them up. They find their children's independence deeply alarming and hard to adapt to.

Fathers want their sons to join the family business. They want them to be tough, unemotional high-fliers. Or they want them to be sporty outdoor types. Mothers want their daughters to go into traditional female jobs, or to be pretty and submissive, or to have lots of children. Religious parents want their children to share their beliefs. Socialist parents are terrified their children will become gung-ho capitalists.

There are children who are pushed to become champion swimmers or concert pianists or mathematical geniuses, but who eventually crack up under the strain and give it all up to become civil servants or baristas.

My own parents sent me to a school completely unsuited to my personality - emphasising sport and religion and regarding anything artistic or cultural as unimportant. Clearly I was unhappy but I wasn't allowed to switch to a more suitable school. The emotional fall-out still lingers.

Children need to be nurtured, not moulded.

Pic: Leelah Alcorn

Good mothers

Journalist Bronwen Clune moans that from the day she produced the first of her four children everyone expected her to be a "good mother" and assessed her every action against this impossible ideal. Any careless lapse was instantly jumped on.

But can this really be true? Surely in this day and age everyone - including non-parents like myself - knows that parents are not perfect, children are not perfect, and obviously you have to make allowances for normal, fumbling human behaviour.

Not so, says Bronwen. She's expected to make gourmet school lunches, supply everyone's favourite breakfast cereals, be a maths wizard and always have matching socks on hand. She's meant to be forever smiling and free of foibles and oddities.

I don't believe people are so censorious. Doesn't every other parent know full well how hard it is to bring up children? How demanding and awkward they are, how exhausting and infuriating, how unpredictable and startling. Do parents who know all too well the non-stop craziness of parenting and their own constant inability to measure up really expect other parents to reach some exalted standard they couldn't possibly reach themselves? Are they truly such mean hypocrites?

Even those of us who've never had children and may know little of the day-to-day turmoil and weariness of looking after them can surely imagine what it's like and sympathise with those mums and dads who're temporarily losing it or collapsing in a defeated heap while their offspring happily misbehave?

Who are all these people who expect Bronwen to be so saintly? If they're friends and relatives, then shouldn't she either keep well away from them or tell them to go screw themselves? If they're complete strangers, why take any notice of them at all? Or are these elevated standards ones she's actually setting herself, some kind of internal perfectionist streak?

This "good mother" hang-up seems especially odd for someone who's had four children. Hasn't she realised by now that there's no perfect way to bring up a child and you just have to take things as they come and do the best you can? Isn't the best response to other people's sniffy disdain a gale of raucous laughter and another glass of pinot noir?

Gone missing

I was astonished to read that up to 200,000 children go missing in the UK every year. Can you imagine all the grief, guilt, anger and bewilderment parents and carers go through as they realise their child has gone and face the agonies of trying to find them and wondering if they might be seriously injured or even dead?

Some children just get lost accidentally for a few hours. But it's terrible how many children deliberately disappear, possibly for years, because of overwhelming personal problems or family tensions they simply can't sort out. They feel their parents don't understand their difficulties, or aren't giving them enough help, or are actively hostile to them.

They're being bullied, they're secretly gay, they're taking drugs, they're failing at school, they've been abused, they're depressed. Whatever the reason, they feel their home life is making things worse rather than better, and walking away from it actually seems the sensible choice.

How sad that parents who presumably love their children are unable to give them the support they need, because they're too busy to listen or they trivialise the problem (or they are the problem) or they simply don't know what to do.

And how distressing it must be when children go missing for years or even decades, with no clue as to where they might be and whether they're alive and well. There's not even a letter or phone call to reassure their parents they're just living their own life and haven't come to a grisly end.

The continuing despair of Kate and Gerry McCann over their long-lost daughter is only the most dramatic example of how a child's disappearance traumatises the parents and family. But there are plenty of other families in similar despair.

Even learning your child is dead must be easier to deal with than the endless uncertainty over their fate, simply not knowing anything, imagining one horrible scenario after another, day after day. It could very well drive you crazy.

Parents always fear their children's disappearance. But if it actually happens, it must be so much worse than anything they've imagined.

Little monsters

It's a common belief that some children are born nasty and vicious and they'll never change. I don't accept that, I'm convinced any child will be just great as long as they're brought up properly.

What produces monsters is parents who don't love their children and don't know how to bring out their innate goodness and sensitivity. If they're aided and abetted by teachers who write off children's potential and assume they'll never achieve much, then naturally those children will be messed up.

Look at any child who's developed a mean streak and become "impossible" and I'm sure you'll find these negative factors at the root of it. There are many many parents out there who really have little idea of the right way to bring up a child.

Of course parents will say "Ah, but you don't have children. You don't know what they can be like. Some children are trouble from the word go and there's nothing you can do about it. You can bust a gut trying to sort them out and you'll get nowhere. Some kids are simply beyond the pale."

But there are plenty of people working with children who say that's not the case. They maintain adamantly that difficult children can be turned around if you just treat them the right way, if you understand why they've become so wayward.

I'm sure we can all think of mature, responsible adults who at one time were complete tearaways. It's not a predestined path, young hoodlums don't have to be hoodlums for the rest of their life.

Camila Batmanghelidjh of Kids' Company for one has helped hundreds of children to shake off their dysfunctional past and become the positive individuals they were meant to be. People used to call her a crazy idealist but not any longer. They've seen the practical results of her work and they know she's wiser than all the defeatists and cynics. For her, writing people off is just not an option.

Gender unknown

How do you stop people treating your child in a gender-related way? Easy - you refuse to tell them whether the child is a boy or a girl.

This is what a Swedish couple have been doing for two years. Their offspring, referred to only as Pop, sometimes wears trousers and sometimes dresses, and his/her hairstyle is regularly changed to avoid gender assumptions.

They deflect all inquiries about gender and studiously present him/her in a neutral, category-free manner. Pink may not mean what you think, ditto blue. All conclusions are pure guesswork.

"We want Pop to grow up freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset" says Pop's mother. "It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead."

It's a fascinating experiment, trying to subvert the well-established tendency for children to be genderised, and to absorb the expected gender role, from the moment they're born.

But there are so many questions begging to be asked:

1) How do the parents avoid using a gender?
2) How do they avoid accidental giveaway remarks?
3) When will they reveal Pop's gender?
4) Is Pop happy about keeping his/her gender secret?
5) How do the parents stop him/her blurting it out?
6) Will Pop become gendered as soon as it's revealed?

Needless to say, some people have already accused the couple of child abuse for suppressing Pop's identity. But isn't it also a form of child abuse to force a child into a gender role they might not be comfortable with?

So? Nasty little boy or sweet little girl? Watch this space.

On not having children (2)

An Irish-born reader from Toronto has pointed me to the Ann Landers survey/straw poll from the 1970s which found that the vast majority of those who had had children regretted the experience and would not have children if they had to live their life again.

Ann Landers, a famous agony aunt with a syndicated advice column in North American newspapers for 45 years, published a letter from someone wondering whether to have a child or not. She was deluged with 10,000 responses of which 70 per cent said "Don't do it."

They were very sad and emotional letters, giving all sorts of reasons for their conclusion, in particular: people who didn't want to bring kids into such a messed-up world; parents who said their children had ruined their marriage; people whose children virtually ignored them once they left home; and parents of teenagers in serious problems with things like crime, drugs and joyriding. They went into parenting with high hopes but sooner or later got disenchanted.

Many of them said their relationships were great until the babies came along and everything went downhill from there. One woman wrote: "I was a successful, attractive, career woman before I had these kids. Now I’m an exhausted, shrieking, nervous wreck—too tired for sex, conversation or anything else.”

How come nobody had realised how disenchanted so many parents were? Because it was virtually taboo (and often still is) to voice negative feelings about your kids. Ann Landers pointed out that while it is just fine to moan about your wife or husband, or your mother-in-law, parents are still expected to praise their children and say that child-rearing is a blessing.

For more details of the poll, go to Happily Childfree

PS (October 20): Emilia has pointed me to a properly designed survey which actually got a very different result from the Ann Landers straw poll. That found only 9% of parents regretted their decision to have children, quite contrary to the Landers conclusion. In that case, glad to hear so many parents are actually happy with their lot!

On not having children

When I meet someone new, sooner or later they ask me if I have children, and I say no. If they're bold, they might also ask me if I ever wanted children, and I say no again.

I'm always relieved how tolerant people are about my complete lack of desire to reproduce, given their own enthusiasm for children and their evident joy in having them. I always expect to get a little spiel about how wonderful and life-enhancing they are, and what I'm missing by not having any, but not so. Maybe it's because I'm old enough to be beyond it, or old enough to have come to a mature decision, or old enough to have deep regrets they might trigger off.

But the point is that I've never found the idea of having children at all appealing (and fortunately neither has Jenny). I'm sure it's very fulfilling watching your very own offspring gradually developing from drooling, perplexed babies to mature, intelligent adults (hopefully), but I've always felt that my existing life is complete enough as it is and doesn't need children to enrich it. I certainly never fancied children for what I see as entirely selfish reasons like wanting someone to look after you in your dotage (and suppose your child dies before you anyway?).

Looking at other people's babies, I've never had that heart-wrenching pang you're meant to get, and that deep longing for one of your own. To me it was just a baby doing what babies usually do - looking ecstatic or wrecking something. Perhaps I'm just too selfish and too fastidious to put up with all the mess and disorder of little people doing their own thing, getting under my feet, and generally disrupting my own plans and pleasures.

I also wonder whether my parenting abilities would have been up to the job, particularly when I'm in a cafe or a shop and see children behaving like wild animals and their flustered, wrung-out parents not only failing miserably to control them but apparently unconcerned by their behaviour. I was always somewhat daunted by the responsibility that parenting involved, the need to ensure every single day that your child was progressing steadily towards sensible adulthood and not drifting into some dysfunctional cul de sac of drug addiction or gang warfare. Would I end up one of those bitterly disappointed and guilt-ridden souls, wondering where I had gone wrong and disowning my own progeny? And it happens more often than we care to admit....