Now is Naughty New - On Children & Discipline

You may, as a prospective parent, have had the wisdom and foresight to sit down with your prospective co-parent fully to discuss your attitudes to parenting.  There must out there be a mother and a father whose views on every conceivable aspect of bringing up baby dovetail in perfect harmony.  I abhor those people as I do perfection in anything.  After all to err is human.

There is, without question, one part of parenting more likely to sow discord and dissent than any other and that is discipline.  The first year of your baby's life will bring many (many (many)) trials and tribulations.  One tiny consolation is that discipline will almost certainly not be on the agenda unless your name is on a social services agenda somewhere.  Even the most addled and sleep deprived parent of a newborn knows that you can't chastise a baby.

But a moment will come and for the first and only time in your child's hopefully long life it will be a wondrous moment because 'now is naughty new'.  Baby milestones as marked in public are fiendishly dull: who cares when a baby sits up, what's so interesting about 'dada', he slept through the night - big deal! Nobody marks, still less celebrates, baby's first hypocrisy, earliest effort at deception or any of the manifold failings that really constitute what is to be human.  

It is perhaps not by chance that it is in the 13th month of my child's life that I have witnessed an incipient bent for rule breaking.  Of course he has no conception of rules or that they are made for breaking but recently when he provoked a scolding from his mother for 'too much teeth' when getting his daily dose of the good stuff I caught him in a grin that said he knew.   It was a grin I knew too as I have worn it countless times in my life when getting a well deserved telling off and the conspiratorial glint in his eye told that he knew on what side of the discipline fence 'dada' is on.

Absurdly there was a time in my life when I thought that as paterfamilias I would be responsible for discipline along with failing to put up shelves, failing to change tyres on the car and failing in any way to be the man my wife thought she had married.  Then I remembered that my wife is German and that I am not in charge of anything.

Something you don't really understand about disciplining a child until you have to do it is what a performative process it is.  In most countries in Europe the age of criminal responsibility for children is 14, for us it's 10 to satisfy the especially English urge to start blaming others as soon as we possibly can.  In no country is it 3 or even 2 and yet pointlessly in playgrounds across the land parents patiently explain to their child why grabbing is wrong and sharing is right.  The children haven't got a clue, it is a waste of everybody's time and breath.  But of course it's not being done for the child's benefit it is all a pantomime for the other child's parent that you know the difference between right and wrong.  It would be much simpler just to say that to the other parent and let the kids get on with it until they're old enough to reason (which in the case of some children is around the age of 40).

Anyway I am looking forward to many years of breeding sedition, sowing subversion and fomenting rebellion and I will leave the unter Strafe stellen to my wife.

Don't Worry Be Pappy - Fathering & The Fear

If you're an anxious person you should think twice before having a baby.  If you're not an anxious person you should also think twice before having a baby.  There is a universal omertà that prevents parents from sharing the truest tribulations of having a child.  Secrets that make freemasonry seem an orgy of oversharing.  The biggest secret is the fear.  The fear that starts with your baby's first breath and is just as strong with your last.

Checking that a baby is still breathing seems a mad thing until you have a baby when doing anything else seems a madness of irresponsibility.  Eventually (most) parents are able to reintroduce some basic functions into their lives like eating and sleeping, getting dressed even.  But an instinctive anxiety has been woken that will never be laid to rest.

That is why if you're already anxious you need to realise that there are levels and intensity of anxiety that even at your most overwrought you could scarcely conceive of.  If you're not anxious you need to  realise that you are about to introduce into your life a gnawing insatiable concern, a stone will be cast into your millpond and it will never cease rippling.  Or you will fall into the tiny minority of parents for whom having a child creates no care or concern at all, but there is no relief to be had there, for these are the bad parents incapable or unwilling to acknowledge nature's law that the self must surrender to the child.

As the father of a 13 month old I have enough foresight to realise that I am only beginning to get acquainted with the dimensions of base camp and that the ascent in earnest still lies ahead.  But like any mountaineer surveying a lofty peak I am not blind to the climb that lies in front of me.   There will be crevasses unseen and rockfalls unexpected but the goal and the general sense of the route lies clear before me.  And every step of the way will be the fear.  But parenting, unlike mountaineering, provides a multiplicity of subsidiary fears to lend novelty and variety to the experience.  

I have made a table:

Age	Fear C	Fear B	Fear A
Life BC (Before Child)	Homelessness/Unemployment/ Loneliness	Death of spouse/sibling /parent	Death of oneself
0-6 weeks	Will the baby ever latch on	Death	Death
6 weeks –3 months	Will the baby ever sleep	Will I ever sleep again	Death
3-4 months	Will I ever wear clothes again	Will I ever leave the house again	Death
4-6 months	Will I remember how to talk to adults	This is forever isn’t it	Death
6-9 months	Will the baby ever sit up	I had a sex life once	Death
9-12 months	Can’t wait to go back to work	Dreading going back to work	Death
12-15 months	Childcare	Childcare	Death
15-18 months	Will the child ever learn to walk	Who thought flying long haul was a good idea	Death
18-24 months	Will the child ever learn to talk	Will I ever not be picking up toys	Death
2-3 years	The nursery costs how much	Will I ever not smell of puke	Death
3-4 years	Is it too soon to have another	Is it too late to have another	Death
4-5 years	What do you mean we live 50 yards outside the catchment area	Is it too late to start going to church	Death
5-6 years	Will the child ever learn to ride a bike	Will the child ever learn to write	Death
6-7 years	Can’t believe the child still believes in Father Christmas	How do we stop the child finding out	Death
7-8 years	Why hasn’t my child been invited	I can’t believe we forgot to bring a present	Death
8-9 years	Why is the child being bullied	Why is the child bullying	Death
9-10 years	Being top of the class isn’t everything	Should we get a tutor	Death
10-11 years	Learning a musical instrument is very important	The recorder is Satan’s stick	Death
11-12 years	Big school	Puberty	Death
12-13	Puberty	Puberty	Death
13-14	I hope the child isn’t sexting	I hope the child isn’t smoking	Death
14-15	I hope the child isn’t smoking weed	I can’t believe I thought babies were difficult	Death
15-16	Please don’t get pregnant	Please don’t get your girlfriend pregnant	Death
16-17	GCSEs	GCSEs	Death
17-18	Will the child ever pass the driving test	Car insurance costs how much	Death
18-19	A-Levels	A-Levels	Death
19-20	A gap year was a terrible idea	Child is really missing out without a gap year	Death
20-21	As long as they get a 2:1	A 2:2 isn’t the end of the world	Death
20s	Will the child ever get a job	Will the child ever move out	Death
30s	Will the child ever get married	Please get pregnant	Death
40s	Please don’t get divorced	Please don’t get made redundant	Death
50s	Please don’t buy a Ferrari	She’s completely unsuitable, why didn’t the child learn first time	Death
60s	Please don’t put me in a nursing home	No, really don’t	Death

Baby Come Baby Go

"Treasure every minute"

What parent of a newborn has not had that said to them by a veteran parent (definition - anyone with a child one day older than your own).  And what newborn parent has not muttered to themselves 'Are you kidding! What am I supposed to treasure? The shit, the screaming, the sleeplessness, the sorry mess that was once my home?'  And always it's coupled with the insane warning:

"It goes so fast"

And you think it really, really doesn't.  No time passes more slowly than new baby time, not waiting for Father Christmas to come down the chimney time, not waiting for your boyfriend of 2 years to propose time, not waiting for a part-suspended District Line train when you're late for work time.

But it is true and you will not find out it is true until it is almost too late.  When your baby turns 1 you will notice by degrees, day by day, they cast off their baby form and become a child: limbs lengthen, cheeks recede and random gibberish coalesces into words.

Milestones that were so long wished for suddenly start flashing past like a glorious panorama from a train window that you can scarcely register before you're hurtled down the track.  For the first time in your life you understand how some women can become addicted to having babies in a Sisyphean quest to preserve a state of total dependency.

Babies exist in a state of pure emotion and the expression of their feelings is unmediated by any experience, any learning and any intellectual process.  Their anguish is expressed without restraint but so, wonderfully, is their happiness and the purity of a baby's laughter is the best curative the world can offer to the cynic and the careworn.

If you are not in touch with your emotions or find open display of emotion discomforting the early months of parenting may prove to be a trying experience but you will never receive a better schooling that a life lived in our heads alone is a life only partly lived.  There is in all of us an inner child that is often silenced or banished into long forgotten exile but it is astonishing to notice how swiftly a baby's gurgles can coax that child from the shadows and into the sun where it belongs.

As I watch wistfully the last grains of sand slip from my baby's hourglass I'm treasuring every minute because it goes so fast.

Only boring people are bored

“I’m bored” – what child now ever has the opportunity to utter words so familiar to the youth of its forebears?  My father was so fed up of hearing me and my sister whine this from the back of the car that he repeatedly although unsuccessfully instituted a 50p fine for every mention of the word.  Only the boring are bored is an admonition that comes back to me from that time.  In truth car journeys in our family were an uncomfortable melange of tedious hours of I Spy and instant frantic demands for navigation as my father would veer off at a congested junction thrusting an extraordinary tome into my hands which claimed to teleport you from junction to junction but instead triggered a terrifying episode of real life Whacky Races.

The point is car journeys were boring as the only entertainment consisted of teasing my sister and asking every 5 minutes if we were nearly there yet.  Now screens in the back shut up the children and the screen in the front tells them exactly how nearly there yet they are.  The annihilation of boredom by screen is by now a well worn trope.  I had my first vivid experience of it when at the age of 25 I did my first evening of baby sitting.  An angelic boy of two was put in my care for an evening and I had preposterously envisaged a jolly couple of hours reading Peter Pan to him.  Instead the moment the door clicked shut behind his parents he started to howl relentlessly in entirely well founded objection to the incompetent interloper.  I tried everything in my power (which in truth back then wasn’t much) before in desperation pressing play on the VHS.  It was as if Thomas the Tank Engine had reincarnated as an opium pipe: instant blissful silence. 

Now that I am a parent the thing that really surprises me about my childhood is that however incessant were my complaints of boredom not once do I recall my parents rebuking me for being boring myself.  This may just be a symptom of heroic self-restraint, it may be basic good manners or it may be a reflection of the 24/7 childcare that I [they] enjoyed.  For the fact of the matter is children are often pretty boring.

Worst of all children are actively boring.  They do not engender the passive boredom of a rainy Sunday afternoon in a house devoid of screen based diversion; the nothing to do boredom of our childhood but now consigned forever to history.  Instead theirs is the tedium of the task that must be tackled.  Contrary to popular wisdom nappy changing is a doddle compared to the more hellish aspects of parenting a small child.  It has a defined beginning and an end.  Compare this to the assured misery of getting a tired baby to sleep.  And in contrast to a boring job or task at work which you couldn’t care less about this boredom is suffused with the guilty feeling that you’re doing it wrong, that you’re failing in some fundamental way.

I want to scotch any suggestion that this is a whinge.  The joys attendant on caring for a child, especially your own, more than compensate for the teeth grinding longeurs.  But I do have a concern that the tolerance for boredom of the parents of the future is being so diminished by screen based entertainment that there could yet be a real crisis in parenting 20 years hence.  Perhaps it is time to bring back boredom?