I blame the parents

There are different opinions about psychological problems in adulthood.

You can trace them back to childhood and blame parental failings.

You can say that blaming your parents is a cop-out and you should just work through your hang-ups.

Or you can say that your parents did their best by the standards of the times and so you shouldn't blame them for their failings.

Personally I take the first approach. It's clear to me that my parents sent me to an entirely unsuitable boarding school that didn't equip me properly for adult life and left me emotionally and intellectually under-developed.

I don't think it's a cop-out to blame my parents if it's quite obvious they made a major error of judgment and there's no way they could pin it on anything else. That error is a reality and should be acknowledged.

I also think referring to the standards of the times doesn't absolve my parents. Whatever the standards of the times, they picked an unsuitable school and they should have noticed I wasn't happy, I wasn't thriving, and the quality of teaching wasn't good enough.

Of course if your parents are still alive, you don't want to upset them by telling them they were deficient parents. So you're likely to hide your criticism and pretend they did a great job. Which simply sweeps everything under the carpet.

Falling back on "the standards of the times" is dangerous, as it can excuse all sorts of negative behaviour - like domestic violence, homophobia and sacking pregnant women. Behaviour should be judged by today's standards and not the standards of 50 years ago, as if the following decades of cultural changes never happened.

Inherently evil?

Although I still believe that human beings are basically good-natured and kind, and only turn nasty if they've been badly mistreated in some way, there are still many who believe some people are intrinsically evil and nothing can be done to change that.

Yes, there are monsters from middle-class backgrounds, people who've apparently had loving and devoted parents, but their childhood might not have been as healthy as it seems. Their parents may have been so wrapped up in their work or otherwise self-absorbed that they never gave their children the attention they needed.

Like 16 year old William Cornick from Leeds, who murdered his teacher in 2014, and came from a respectable middle-class home. His mother was a human resources manager and his father was a council executive. All those who knew him were baffled that he could have done something so dreadful.

But if you look closely at the background of hardened criminals, you often find a history of ill-treatment. Many serial killers are abused - physically, psychologically, sexually - as children by a close family member.

Children can easily be damaged by their home life. Years of poverty and deprivation, squalid housing, or parents with drug or alcohol issues, can leave a child with a deep-rooted bitterness about the unfairness of life, and that can lead to them lashing out in unpredictable ways.

I just can't believe that some people are inherently evil. It seems like a very cynical and negative view that ignores the huge influence of childhood experience on impressionable young brains. I'm sure good-natured children can easily become vicious and destructive if they're exposed to uncaring parents for long enough.

But perhaps I have a slightly rose-tinted outlook that defies reality.

So much misery

Misery memoirs (recalling the writer's terrible childhood with all its cruelty and abuse) seem to be as popular as ever.

Britney Spears is the latest person to have recalled not only her childhood misery but her adult misery as well. How she was harassed, taunted and belittled by her husband, how her heavy-drinking father had legal control of her life for over 13 years, and so on.

I suppose some people would argue that there's no need to recount all this negativity at such length, that lots of people have been exposed to childhood misery of one type or another, who needs to be told about it yet again?

I disagree. The more we know about the appalling way some people have been treated as a child, the more incentive there is to ensure children grow up with caring and supportive parents who encourage them to make the most of their lives.

Mind you, that's assuming all those misery memoirs are truthful in the first place, and haven't been somewhat embellished and exaggerated to attract more readers.

The English barrister Constance Briscoe successfully defended herself against her mother Carmen's accusations that her "true story of a loveless childhood" was "a piece of fiction".

But Kathy O' Beirne's story of abuse in a Catholic institution, Don't Ever Tell, was denounced as unreliable by her family, while James Frey was discredited for his fictionalised autobiography A Million Little Pieces.

I'm surprised people feel the need to exaggerate their experiences, which are probably horrifyingly awful in the first place. I would say the more misery memoirs we read, the more we know the truth about the dreadful childhoods some people have endured.

Pic: Constance Briscoe

My whole life

At the age of 76, I've now known every stage of human existence, from childhood to old age, so I have a total life experience. I know what it's like to be a child, to be middle aged, and to be nearing the end of my life. No longer do I have a vast and unknown sweep of life ahead of me, but I've got the whole picture.

I know what it's like to be a child, fitting in with my parents' beliefs and prohibitions, largely innocent of adulthood and its horrors and liabilities, free to enjoy my childhood games and obsessions without having to think about bills or mortgages or roof repairs.

I've met the challenges of middle age, when you're constantly exhausted by the demands of full-time work, household maintenance, looking after elderly parents, and maybe raising several children. You're rushing from one task to another with little time to explore your own needs and desires.

And now I'm in the throes of old age, adjusting to all the minor dysfunctions of my ancient body, hoping I'll have enough money for however long I'm alive, hoping I won't develop dementia and become a useless vegetable (but also knowing the joys of retirement and not being in thrall to some vicious boss).

In particular, it's great being able to look back at my entire life, knowing exactly what happened to me and what I did with whatever opportunities arose. I know my life has been a success and not some string of disasters and miscalculations. When I was living on my own in the 1970s, I was rather pessimistic about the future, and had no idea things would work out so well.

The once unknown future has revealed itself.

On a postcard

I was saying earlier I know little about my mum's thoughts and feelings, not only regarding my early childhood but many other things. She was very secretive about whatever was going through her mind.

The same goes for my sister. We've never been close and we've never kept in touch on a regular basis, so there are lots of things I still don't know about her. Such as:

• Would she say she had a happy childhood?
• Did she like one parent more than the other?
• Were her schooldays happy?
• What does she feel about having a terminal and severely disabling illness?
• What did she feel about having to give up her work?
• What are her likes and dislikes?

So what do I actually know about her? I assume she enjoyed her schooldays and had a happy childhood. She got on with our father much better than I did. She started a nursing course but didn't complete it. She had several jobs at the BBC (she almost became a radio newsreader), then had various jobs at a hospital, a doctors' surgery and an infants school.

After marrying, she had a daughter in 1982 and then in 2005 was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. The reason she has survived so long is that her lungs and heart are still healthy despite her general physical decline.

Oh, and another thing - she has a photographic memory. So if aged five I broke her favourite doll, she'll remember it vividly.

So what I know about my sister could be written quite comfortably on a postcard. Considering I've known her for 73 years, that's remarkable. But I guess I'll just have to be satisfied with the bare outlines!

Childhood blanks

It suddenly came to me that I know next to nothing about my early childhood. My mum was very silent about a lot of things (like the second world war and her personal ailments) and my infancy was one of them.

There are so many unanswered questions that only now occur to me. For instance:

• Did she conceive easily?
• Was her pregnancy easy or difficult?
• Did she have a miscarriage?
• How long was she in labour?
• Was it an easy birth or were there complications?
• Did she have a a caesarean?
• Was I an easy or difficult baby?
• Did she adjust easily to being a parent?
• Did my father give her enough help?

I have some of the answers but mostly I'm in the dark. I assume she got pregnant easily because I was born very soon after the war (March 1947). As far as I know it was an easy birth and she didn't need a caesarean. And presumably I was an easy, well-behaved baby but maybe she just preferred not to remember what a pain in the arse I was. But I didn't speak until my sister appeared in April 1949 (it must have been the excitement of getting a sister).

So in general my early childhood is a bit of a mystery. All I really know for certain is that my mum got pregnant, gave birth to me and changed a lot of nappies (and they were the old-style cloth nappies, long before disposable nappies came on the scene).

Unanswered questions - the story of my life.

Reluctant adult

A lot of children want desperately to be adults. They find childhood totally frustrating - always being told what to do, prevented from doing things, treated like idiots, not understanding what the grown-ups are talking about.

They passionately want to be adults so they can do what they want, make their own decisions, understand life a bit better, not be constantly watched.

Not me. I can't remember ever yearning to be an adult or chafing under all the parental restrictions. I think I wanted to be a child forever, always looked after and never having any adult worries.

Even though my childhood was far from ideal, with a bad-tempered father and a dreadful boarding school,  I must have concluded that all things considered perpetual childhood would be the ideal state.

Maybe it was because so many of the adults I came across seemed to have numerous worries and burdens and didn't seem very contented with their lot in life. My parents themselves had been on the verge of divorce at one point and other adults had to cope with huge mortgages, nasty bosses, serious illnesses and endless bills. I could stay a child and avoid all those frightening problems.

I didn't see adulthood as a land of opportunity, more as a land of increasing encumbrances and obstacles. The drawbacks seemed to greatly outweigh the benefits. How often did I hear an adult saying how much they enjoyed being an adult? Not often enough for my liking.

Of course now I've been an adult for so long I can better appreciate the benefits and make light of the encumbrances. But I guess there's still a small part of me that thinks childhood was really rather idyllic and why couldn't I have been a self-indulgent, irresponsible teenager a little longer?

Call my bluff

At the age of 74 I still don't feel like an adult, only an overgrown child. There are so many things I can barely cope with, and only with a lot of effort.    There are so many things I stealthily keep away from, quite sure I'd instantly mess them up.

I may have all the physical trappings of adulthood. I've had three mortgages, I own a house, I've owned several cars, I was the executor of my mum's will, I've had paid jobs on and off for 53 years, I've travelled all over the world.

Yet I still don't feel like an adult. When people treat me like an adult and expect me to behave like an adult, I'm straight into impostor syndrome. I do my best to live up to what's required, but it's mostly a feverish pretence, a frantic pursuit of this ever-elusive quality known as adulthood.

People expect me to make intelligent, informed decisions on a whole range of subjects, when I'm all too aware that actually on most subjects I have a hazy, anecdotal knowledge at best. I rack my brain for relevant wisdom, find the cupboard is bare and cobble together some supposedly authoritative opinion that might get me convincingly through the next five minutes.

I'm looking around desperately for a real adult, someone who actually has adult-like capabilities and can rescue me from this scary demand for responsibility and guidance. I want to be like the newsreaders who just pass on the stream of information fed into their earpieces.

I might look like a mature adult, but it's all an illusion. In reality I'm still a confused child hoping I'm doing and saying the right thing but always suspecting I'm totally goofing up. Sooner or later someone's going to call my bluff.

PS: A post on Facebook - "My personality is basically a mix between a needy five year old child who can't control her emotions, a teenage rebel who makes poor life decisions, and an eighty year old woman who's tired and needs a nap."

A helping hand

It's terrible getting old, people say. You've got aches and pains every-where, people don't respect you any more, you're baffled by all the new ways of doing things, you know death's just round the corner.

Well, actually life can be terrible at any age. As a child, you're always told what to do by other people, there are so many things you don't understand, you want things you can't buy, you're put in clothes you loathe, you're forced to spend time with distant uncles and aunts who mean nothing to you.

When you're middle-aged, you're loaded with ongoing responsibilities like bringing up children, looking after elderly parents, paying off a mortgage, building up a retirement fund, scrambling up the career ladder, coping with tyrannical bosses, maybe saddled with a huge overdraft.

Any age can be ghastly. But the real difference between one age and another is how much help and support you get.

Children have the support of their parents and relatives and siblings and teachers. They're surrounded by other people who want them to have happy and fulfilling lives.

The middle-aged are usually supported by a family network that helps with child-minding, ferrying children to school, giving parenting advice, providing loans and dealing with emergencies.

If they're lucky, older people will also have a family and friends to keep an eye on them, but they may not be so fortunate. Deaths may have wiped out their family and many of their friends and they may end up quite isolated and unable to get the support they need. They may struggle to keep their spirits up and get through their daily lives.

It's not old age that's the problem. It's whether you have a helping hand when you need it. Or preferably a whole bunch of helping hands.

Marked for life

It seems to be conventional wisdom among therapists that your experience of childhood will have enduring repercussions throughout your adult life. The way you were brought up leaves its mark in many ways.

But not everyone agrees that childhood is that significant in your character development. Some would say that's just an excuse for poor adult behaviour, and that it's entirely up to you what you make of your adulthood.

I strongly believe that your adult behaviour is greatly influenced by your childhood experience, and that it's very hard to throw off that experience. The attitudes and assumptions you're exposed to as a child become deeply embedded and can affect your whole personality.

It seems obvious to me that my woefully inadequate childhood led directly to me being a rather clueless adult. My parents and my boarding school between them left me with poor social skills, low self-confidence, repressed emotions and dismal self-awareness. I've spent my life trying to overcome those failings, but with limited success.

The sceptics would tell me my childhood is past history and has no influence whatever on my adult life. Instead of harping on about my childhood, I should just forget about it, focus on the present and grab life's opportunities.

Well, I have indeed grabbed life's opportunities, but I'm still conscious that other people are often better-performing adults than myself, quite confident about all sorts of things that still make me nervous and hesitant.

Or so it seems. It may be that their apparent confidence and social poise is only skin-deep, and underneath they're equally nervous. They're just good at hiding their trepidation. Or hiding their blunders.

In the final analysis, I've made the most of my life and had lots of fun on the way. That's good enough for me.

Goodbye to innocence

Are children today having a more fraught and difficult childhood than the children of previous decades? Is childhood innocence becoming a thing of the past, with today's children exposed earlier and earlier to adult realities?

Yes, says the charity Action For Children. They spoke to 5,000 children, parents and grandchildren and found a wide consensus that modern childhoods were getting worse amid increasing social pressures.

Youngsters were under pressure to achieve at school, fit in with their peers and cope with wider anxieties such as Brexit, poverty and the climate crisis.

Two-thirds of parents and grandparents felt childhood was getting worse, and a third of children agreed. All said bullying - both online and offline - was the main problem, followed by pressure to fit in socially, now more intense because of social media.

A very sad state of affairs. My own childhood seems like unalloyed bliss compared to what children face today.

Yes, I had a bad-tempered father and I was bullied at school, but now that all seems quite trivial when set beside present-day anxieties.

I glided through my school years with little awareness of the outside world and its problems. I wasn't too worried about passing exams, as I wasn't planning to go to university. I went on wonderful family holidays. I felt very little pressure to fit in with anyone else. At home we all enjoyed the popular radio sitcoms and comedy shows of the time. I spent hours whizzing round the neighbourhood on my scooter. I played in the street with no fear of child-molesters or knife-carriers or drug-dealers.

I truly was in a sealed childhood bubble that was seldom disturbed by the grim reality of things like the Suez Crisis, the cold war or nuclear threats, or by mental health issues like eating disorders, self-harm or body loathing. My cosy little world of pleasure and novelty was rarely punctured.

Childhood today seems more like a battleground.

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.

Not so golden

I'm not a nostalgic person. I don't yearn for some long-gone period of my life that seemed more enjoyable and idyllic than the one I'm in now.

Whatever chunk of my life I look back on, I'm very aware that it had its boring, miserable and frustrating bits as well as the rewarding bits.

I certainly don't pine for the "Swinging Sixties" as some people do. Yes, it was a time of creative ferment and the loosening of stuffy conventions, but it also saw a lot of men exploiting women in the name of "sexual liberation" and a lot of people wrecking themselves with relentless drug consumption.

I don't pine for some supposed golden age of daily life before we were swamped by the trivial and venomous outpourings of social media. It wasn't much fun trudging to the public phone box in the pouring rain, or trudging to the library to check on some disputed fact. Thank heaven for mobiles and Google.

Neither do I have nostalgia for some blissful, happy-go-lucky childhood. As you all know, my childhood was a tale of bullying and emotional violence along with the magical seaside holidays and Sunday picnics. No way would I want to go through all that again.

I think the nearest I get to nostalgia is looking back fondly to the Harold Wilson era when the welfare state and public services were cherished, money and profit weren't the be-all and end-all, there was more respect for the old and vulnerable, and the young had a much easier start in life. But even that era had its downside - homophobia was still rife, sexual norms were still very straitlaced, society was still very authoritarian in many ways.

Nostalgia's not my thing. I must have left my rose-tinted spectacles on the bus.

Boys only

My schooling was entirely single-sex, including five years at boarding school where my contact with girls was non-existent. Whether this was a good thing or a bad thing I've never quite decided.

It meant I was able to focus on my studies without the distraction of miniskirted females checking me out in the corridors and classrooms. It meant there was no feverish competition with the other boys to impress the girls.

But it also meant I had little experience of the opposite sex and how they differed from boys. It meant there was no encouragement to be emotionally sensitive or to be aware of things that boys traditionally reject as effeminate.

So was I deprived or didn't it really matter? Did I grow up unable to communicate properly with women, unable to understand them, permanently burdened with an arrogant, thick-skinned masculinity?

I must say when I started my first job on a local newspaper, I was very bemused by all the women, who were like some exotic species I'd never met before. It took me quite a while to get used to them and work out how they expected me to behave. It also took me a while to get up the self-confidence to acquire my first girlfriend.

Later I moved to London and was engulfed by the tsunami that was the Women's Liberation Movement. I was confronted in every direction by 57 varieties of feminist thinking and demands, and in a few months I learnt more about women than I'd discovered in my first 18 years. Relationships with women suddenly became much more straightforward and comprehensible and from then on I was always acutely aware of the female perspective in every situation.

So no, I don't think my single-sex schooling did me any lasting harm. I guess what really counts is not whether a school is mixed-sex but how intensely you're exposed to the opposite sex and their take on life once you've left school. And how willing you are to embrace it and benefit from it.
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Ah yes, where was I? Jenny and I were on holiday in Dumfriesshire in Scotland. Not quite as scenic or cultural as we were expecting, but we had fun exploring a part of Scotland we'd never seen before.

The child within

The older I get, the more I realise just how much of my character is directly linked to the way I was treated as a child. And I'm sure that's the same for most people.

I can see more and more clearly that both my weaknesses and my strengths reflect how my parents and teachers behaved towards me.

My nervousness about socialising goes right back to my diffident father, who seldom had visitors or visited other people. My lack of self-confidence stems from his regular disapproval of what I did and thought.

On the other hand, my wild sense of humour also comes from my father, who adored crazy comedy programmes like The Goon Show and Hancock's Half Hour. And my verbal skills owe much to my father's adeptness with words.

School bullying and a brilliant English teacher also contributed to the strange mix of self-doubt and articulacy.

However much I've tried in later life to correct the weaknesses and become more capable, I haven't got very far. Patterns laid down in childhood are remarkably durable and aren't easily changed once they've taken root.

All I can do is allow for my failings and try to ensure other people aren't upset or frustrated by them. And at the same time enjoy my strengths to the full, savouring the talents I do have and making the most of them.

I don't blame my parents or teachers for my faults. They were probably doing the best they could, limited by their own deficiencies and their own upbringings.

If I didn't have these particular faults, I would no doubt have other ones. None of us is perfect, and in any case so-called faults can sometimes be as interesting and endearing as the effortless virtues.

But that chain of cause and effect, of the early years determining the later years, seems more and more visible and far-reaching.

"Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man" said the Jesuit, Francis Xavier.