There are some things that are impossible to predict: the winning lottery numbers; the likelihood of Dublin getting snow during any given weather warning; whether my children will bring home the same coats they left for school in that morning; and an article’s final word count if my editor is naive enough to say “Sure give it whatever you think it needs, Jen”.
And yet as certain as night becomes day, and that tomato ketchup is the work of the devil, you can bet your life that in temperatures of -3 in Dublin, as was seen earlier this month, Irish teenage boys will venture out in shorts.
It flies in the face of everything we obsessed about when they were babies. Is the room the right temperature? Do they have enough layers on? Do they have too many layers on? Does this tiny duffle coat, while exquisitely fashionable and matching with my own, provide an adequate level of insulation? Am I instilling good coat-wearing habits and etiquette from an early age?
No, it seems.
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And the same goes for long trousers. Because come rain, hail, shine, or weather warnings, bare legs will prevail.
In the teenage boy/parenting dynamic, there is only ever one party worrying. And it’s not the person likely to actually feel the discomfort of icy weather, gale force winds, or biblical downpours. Because I have no brothers, I can’t draw on previous family experience, but I am fairly certain that, growing up, I never saw any of the young fellas in my neighbourhood wandering around in shorts when it was Baltic out.
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So today’s Irish lads are a clearly different breed of hardiness. They laugh in the face of weather warnings and scoff at suggestions of ark building. They don’t feel the cold. Or if they do, they’re not letting on, in spite of what their mottled legs might attest to.
Perhaps it’s this newfangled approach to parenthood that’s led to this sense of disconnect. Where “because I said so” is no longer a sufficiently valid reason to wear long pants, and instead we hear our kids out and pick our battles. Where we roar instructions up the stairs like fishwives but don’t follow through with consequences when they ignore them, because we are too busy being better than our parents. We are of the gentle-parenting era and big feelings. Yes, so many big feelings. Most of them ours.
You see some people think they’re just parenting but the internet says otherwise. We’re either attachment parenting, helicopter parenting, tiger parenting, bulldozer parenting, pushy parenting, competitive parenting, authoritative parenting, authoritarian parenting, neglectful parenting, permissive parenting, running-yourself-ragged-from-pitchside-to-pitchside parenting, stay-at-home parenting, work-outside-the-home parenting, work-from-home parenting, or “winging it and hoping no one asks you in the Whatsapp group what the Irish homework is” parenting.
But no matter what type of parenting it is we’re doing, we’re getting it wrong, it seems. The kids aren’t resilient enough and are struggling in ways we never anticipated, we’re told. And all fingers are pointed at the parents who tried to do things differently.
So it was only a matter of time until someone invented a new type of parenting. And the internet, the knower of all things, says it has already happened. Move over gentle parenting – there’s a new sheriff in town.
FAFO – or “f*ck around and find out” – parenting sounds remarkably like the parenting of the 1980s and 1990s. You know: the type this generation of parents is trying not to replicate. Basically it’s the Isaac Newton of parenting. It’s the law of natural consequences, and the antithesis of gentle parenting.
Leave your Lego on the floor when you were told not to – now it lives in the bin. Decide not to do your geography homework – you can take it up with the teacher tomorrow. Didn’t bring a coat to school in the rain – get wet. (You’re not allowed to say “I told you so”, however, which is half the fun.)
But, of course, it’s all well and good until you remember that one size has never fit all. One child’s teachable moment is another child’s drowning moment, and I don’t need to FAFO to work that one out.
Personally I live in continued hope of general cop-on parenting coming into style.
“What are you writing about?” a shorts-wearing teen asks me, popping his head around the door, having arrived back from walking the dog on a miserable evening.
“Boys who wear shorts all year round,” I reply.
“It’s not that cold out,” he says, laughing.
Could this be an unintended FAFO that backfired?
Perish the thought, if not the legs from the cold.
