A DAD'S LIFE:A fluid parenting philosophy is required to make it work, writes ADAM BROPHY
‘YOU STILL writing that column?” asks my buddy. He lives in Scotland so I forgive him and tell him that I am indeed still writing that column. Then I whisper down the phone that I’m worried, worried all the column is doing is highlighting my slow mental degradation. “Last week,” I tell him, “it was about letting kids run free. The week before I was banging on about the need for manners.”
“So what you’re telling me is you haven’t learned anything from being a parent,” he says.
Again, I am a little bit tempted to take the hump but realise ongoing parental ignorance is preferable to my initial concern about sanity. He may have a neat Glasgow apartment, with rows of clean hardbacks, architectural posters adorning walls and not a hard plastic toy in sight, but on this parenting subject he has just planted a hammer on a nail head.
I realise a fluid parenting philosophy is required to make day-to-day living bearable, but sometimes the extremes of swing are shocking. I can move from Victorian schoolroom principles to “live free and run naked” hippy ideals in one single utterance depending on the eyebrow arch of whoever’s listening.
Scoff if you will at my delinquency, but it seems this inconsistency is required in at least talking parenting, if not in its administration. Because talking parenting is one of the most delicate acts grown-ups engage in. Nowhere else are our sensitivity levels quite so tuned to criticism. I may believe in a convenience diet of nothing but McDonald’s in the morning followed by Abrakebabra after midday (I don’t, though, have a fondness for doner kebabs, sober even), but when I enter another family’s household will chow down on soya and extol its virtues, even as my children gasp in horror at the contents of their bowls.
This is not hypocrisy. This is survival. How I raise my kids is as right or as wrong as how anyone else manages theirs, and the reality, as far as my experience has shown it, is that diametrically opposed attitudes to food, health, culture and discipline do not necessarily produce diametrically opposed children. Whatever attitudes you inflict on your kids will, of course, have some bearing. But that bearing will pale in comparison to the effect the time you spend with them will have.
Whatever belief system you are trying to impart will have little chance to take hold if the kids don’t spend enough time with you to see that system in action. And if you do make the effort to spend that time with them, what they are most likely to take from the exchange is your belief that spending time with your kids is important. This, hopefully, will override any dogma we feel the need to impart at a given moment.
All parents have had an experience of the “we don’t do that” moment. It happens when a minimum of two families mingle and a proposal is mooted. It might be a meal suggestion, an activity, or a punishment (most likely) for the combined children’s inevitable raucous behaviour. The suggestion (stir-fried hamster, skydiving or a month in a Vietnamese prison) is met with a stony: “We don’t do that.”
This implies a number of things. It informs other parents that this couple have cracked the nut, they have it sussed, they are following the path to enlightenment and will not be budged. It asserts that alternative parenting approaches to their own are weak and half-assed. It insists that there is no room for doubt or flexibility in the rearing of the modern child. And everyone knows doubt is the cornerstone of the confused careering family.
If anything, parenting needs support. Whatever policies we adopt, there seems to be only one consistent truism: that we all have the wellbeing of our children at heart. We start from there and begin our deviations. Often we will double back on once firmly held policies and rewrite our own personal rule books in the ongoing quest to do our best by our kids and get a night’s kip if possible.
Consistency, the parenting books will tell you, is key, and they’re right. Consistently being there, consistently responding to the never-ending requests for help, guidance, instruction and, most of all, money. After that, it’s all about the flexibility because if there’s only one thing I’ve learned through this parenting lark it’s that there are very few things “we don’t do”.
abrophy@irishtimes.com