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