IT'S A DAD'S LIFESpending time with the kids, plague-ridden and all, is a blessing
PARENTING, LIKE anything, has its highs and lows. In an ideal world you would behave in a consistently uniform way to your kids. You would discipline them with regularity and praise them appropriately where merited. They would know where they stood with you based on your at all times unwavering and appropriate responses to certain behaviours.
This ideal world, I think it's called Germany, would also see you allocating a specific amount of time each day to play with your children, more time to furthering their educational development and yet more to preparing nutritious meals. By these obvious standards alone, I am a rubbish parent, and I bet you're pretty wojus too.
I have never experienced a parenting high from regimentally adhering to a plan and achieving a goal with the little beasts. I have found myself in an emotional slump after realising my behaviour has been inconsistent and unclear, resulting in their responses being angry and frustrated, but that slump is never offset by a bump when I follow Supernanny's guidelines.
I can see how all the guidance offered by experts will work when applied to practical dilemmas (and Mr Coleman on this page is extremely good at what he does), but any real connection or moments of intense empathy I've experienced with the kids have come about through simply being comfortable and relaxed with them.
I say this after spending more than a week sweating through a flu in their company. A week where none of us slept for more than a couple of hours at a time, where we choked and spluttered and hawked up industrial-strength phlegm, where we all suffered bouts of conjunctivitis that were probably divinely inspired to keep our eyes stitched shut so that we would not be blinded by the decay we wallowed in.
It was one rough week, but one I came out of feeling rather pleased at having got to spend so much time just hanging out with them.
Work went out the window, school and crèche weren't options, we were on lockdown in Smellville. At any given moment, one of us was passed out or close to comatose, and another may have been struggling not to leak bodily, but we had no option but to put up with each other. And we did, and while it wasn't quite fun, it had its moments.
Time is the killer. For all the advice we get about making our behaviour appropriately mature to reinforce positive messages to our children, it seems more and more obvious to me that our irregular messages stem from lacking the time to just be with them. Some of my mates are fantastic cooks and think nothing of getting the nippers involved in cake-baking and lasagne-making. I can't do that, so I rarely try.
I can't play an instrument so we don't do much musical things either. I can't make things with cardboard and pipe cleaners and my personal idea of hell is trudging around the countryside stunned at the beauty of nature. Those things are encouraged by the maternal grandparents and they're good at them; I make an insipid imitator on the days I attempt to get involved.
My forte is killing time. I can waste a day by just staring it down. When I'm busy, I get frustrated, not that I don't have time to do other things but because I don't have time to just sit and do nothing.
In recent years, I have discovered that sitting and doing nothing can be further enhanced by getting my daughters involved. They seem to have natural aptitudes for the same things I do; lifetimes of idleness beckon.
In these idle moments, I have given much consideration to this need for nothingness. It may seem to a go-getting outsider that time spent on your backside with a steaming mug of tea for company is time wasted. I strenuously disagree. The ability to kick back is a lost, or at least fading art.
It strikes me that its demise stems from the assumed belief that kids should be occupied at all times. This may be a by-product of a nation of busy parents suffering from Crèche Guilt Syndrome who insist that their window of opportunity at weekends be filled with stimulating bonding events, an insistence usually doomed to failure by its forced nature.
As a kid I learned to fill time, chiefly because I had so much of it. My parents weren't concerned that I had something to do every minute of the day, though often I did. Being bored wasn't something to fear, it was something to relish, it meant down time. It meant no schoolwork, no sport, no worries.
Now it takes a dose of the plague to force us all to sit together and stop moving. I couldn't have asked for better company in my recuperation.