Children Blaming - The Last Taboo?

They split you up, your son and daughter, they may not mean to, but they do.

Philip Larkin is the patron saint of parent blamers and it doesn't require a Masters degree in psychology to attribute character defects and personality shortcomings to poor parenting.  However the reproach that dare not speak its name is children blaming.

Everybody knows about the fearful consequences of favouritism by parent towards child; there is no surer path to resentment and disunity.  Few talk about favouritism by child towards parent.  But the fact of the matter is three's a crowd and the cuckoo in the nest is your newborn.

You think I joke but my toddler son has a working vocabulary of about 50 words (with bus and train being by far the most emotionally significant); if he wants something he can manage 'mama bed', 'mama bath', 'mama shoe' but his most emphatic expression is reserved for when he catches me giving his mother a hug: 'No papa cuddles!'  It's like living with an infant Mother Superior.

Indeed the only time I can safely embrace my wife is when he is fast asleep or, ironically, when he is himself hugging her knees; then I can safely take her in my arms until he realises with a shout of indignation he's become the relish in a parent sandwich.

My wife obviously finds this hilarious but I can tell she thoroughly endorses his decision to clasp himself, literally, to the maternal bosom.  The painful truth is I have nothing to offer beside holding him upside down when he's having a meltdown (surprisingly effective but best not utilised on the Tube or in the G.P.'s waiting room).

It's very important, however, that you don't let your child render you redundant.  Remind your wife what you can give that a 2 year old never can, like paying the gas bill no more than a week late and making sure that the Ocado man gets all the plastic bags to take away.

We have a king size bed but the little prince has rendered the true monarch a serf in his own kingdom, father beseeching son for the right to occupy a narrow strip one foot wide.  So much so that I often think it would be easier if I just slept in his cot, or by the bins which he thinks is my deserved post in the household.

I have come to realise that the fundamental issue here is inequality of arms.  There is nothing for it I will have to have a daughter.

Parental Privilege

I've written recently about privilege in the sense of having unfair access to capital whether it be cultural, social or just good old money capital.  That kind of privilege is usually unearned but there is another kind of privilege which is paid for or otherwise achieved.  When I feel particularly careworn by the burden and responsibilities of child rearing I am quick to give myself a pinch and remember what an awesome privilege it is to be a parent.

It is modish at the moment for those that commentate on having children to exaggerate or otherwise focus  on the trials and tribulations attendant upon trying to keep a child alive and prepared for the living hellscape that is the world of the twenty teens.  Whether it is the expressive stick mother of Hurrah For Gin or the unvarnished truth of the Scummy Mummies you don't have to look far to find a parent to tell you how awful it all is.

I don't intend this as some kind of saccharine antidote by pretending that parenting is all teddy bears, blowing bubbles and nursery rhymes in gingham dresses.  Anyone who has ever met a child will know the truth.  However I do think that in a society where many long in private anguish for a baby that it is worth remembering from time to time what immense good fortune it is to have a child to parent.

Socrates observed that the unexamined life is not worth living and there is truly no greater examination in life than being a parent (and I've sat Oxford Finals).  And therein lies the real privilege of parenting.  As you reach out to mould this new life you find yourself considering the contours of your own and the forces and experiences that shaped them.

I've previously written that I don't believe you can ever fully experience gratitude for your own parents until you yourself have become one.  Equally I'm not sure you can fully explore what made you until you engage in the terrifying task of making someone else.  Day by day, year by year, as your child grows you are able to bear witness to the fruits of your investment in your child.  If you are a creative person you can point to your buildings, paintings, songs or sculptures to show your progress over time but even the genius of the Sistine Chapel or the St Matthew Passion remain products fixed in time, examples of arrested development.

A child takes what you give it and makes it its own, something more, ever changing.  It is common for parents to lament the passing of their child's babyhood; I think this reflects a wholly understandable human desire for simplicity, innocence and (frankly) control.  Childhood and the vexing chrysalis of adolescence are all anxious steps to the garden gate but beyond lies the wide world and all the pleasure and pain of watching your child making her way.

I'm not one for counting my blessings and even if I was it wouldn't take me very long to count to one.

Privilege Part Two

Waitrose running out of hummus, your Uber rating taking a knock, that day's Pilates class being full are all classic first world problems.  But a quandary I wrestle with eclipses them all, namely wondering how much privilege I should seek to bestow on my child.  Admittedly this is not a question of Bill Gates telling his children they won't be inheriting his billions because he wants them to make their own way.  Although, interestingly, that has not stopped him from ensuring they have received the best possible education and a reassurance that, while they won't be billionaires, they will have a safety net that the average child could only dream of.

If you are not privileged you don't think twice about doing absolutely everything in your power to provide your child the maximum possible privilege, as much of a head start as you can muster for them.  In truth many privileged people don't think much about this either.  But the fact is that once you're fortunate enough to provide for your child's basic needs you have to make decisions about their more evolved needs.  Education is unquestionably chief among them.  The education you provide your child in your home is, universally, a matter for you as its parent whether you live in Hull or Honolulu.  Conferring privilege upon them in that regard is entirely contingent on how much time, energy and interest you take in cultivating their interests and developing them as a human being.

Some people are so financially disadvantaged that simply providing for their child's basic needs allows them no time for this domestic development.  Some people are so financially advantaged that they outsource what should be domestic development to outsiders and to institutions.  Either scenario is liable to produce a person lacking the benefit of a parent or parents who have been able or willing really to focus on that child and who that child might be.

Every single one of us is born with talents.  Some of those talents are highly marketable, a natural affinity for coding by way of example, some confer a negligible financial advantage, such as being really good at whistling.  Talent is innate but skills are learnt.  The privileged are remarkably adept at ensuring that their children become skilled in a marketable way irrespective of their talent.  Top jobs go to the privileged because the skills they require have been drummed into their occupants from a tender age.  If talent is not nurtured it will never blossom, like the seeds sown on stony ground in the parable, equally if sufficient skills are taught to the untalented they will bear a fruit of sorts like tomatoes forced in English greenhouses.

The privileged understand all of this implicitly.  It is why they spend so much money ensuring their children pass the right exams at the right schools to get into the right universities so they are at the front of the queue for the right jobs.  This is all done whether the talent is there or not.  The counterpoint to all this is that an unprivileged child may be blessed with all the necessary talent but, denied cultivation of the necessary skills, they will pass no exams, go to no university and not even know about the jobs.  Take a moment to imagine, for example, what the world would have lost if Shakespeare had never learnt how to write or Mozart how to read music.

Wanting the best for your child is not wrong.  Being able to give the best to your child is not wrong in the same way that it is not wrong to win the lottery.  However we don't need to look far to see lives ruined by huge payouts.  What you do with your privilege is what counts.  And privilege is not necessarily the same as wealth.  It has always been an odd feature of the British class system that it was possible to be privileged and yet not actually very well off.  Increasingly, however, money does now mean privilege and its lack denotes its absence.  While charity does begin at home when you concentrate privilege solely in your child you inflict a small concomitant harm on society.

The Criminal Bar is, unquestionably, a profession that requires talent but it also requires many skills.  For a majority of barristers gaining access to the Bar entailed some connection to privilege.  A huge resource of raw talent alone is unlikely to propel an aspirant through all the countless hoops that precede entry to the Inns of Court.  This is where those of us who have benefitted from privilege, thereby enjoying the privilege to practise, owe it to other people's children to provide a helping hand.

The Bar Council runs a mentoring service for students in Year 12 & Year 13.  There is no good reason not to volunteer for it.  The student I mentor is so brimful of enthusiasm and he knows that he will have to make the connections that for some of us were provided on a plate.  It costs me nothing but a small amount of time to be a resource and a guide.  The Kalisher Trust has for many years provided concrete financial help to embryonic criminal barristers but also undertakes outreach work teaching children how to construct an argument, conquering their fears of public speaking.  These are the sort of soft skills that the privately educated sometimes don't even realise were inculcated in them and therefore look askance when promising youngsters don't present with the polish of privilege.  Kalisher is always in need of funds so if you're cash rich and time poor why don't you support its work: https://www.thekalishertrust.org/donate (and yes that is me modelling a fetching pair of pink trousers).

I remember balking the first time I heard the expression 'check your privilege'.  As time has gone by I have realised that anyone who has been the beneficiary of privilege needs to undergo their own truth and reconciliation exercise.  It's not enough merely to check privilege we need to fully survey and delineate it because unless we understand how we have been advantaged it's highly unlikely we will be motivated to advantage others.  

Ultimately it goes without saying that I want the best for my child but only so that he can give the best of himself.

This is the second part of a blag that I have published on both my legal blog  Counsel of Perfection and also my parenting blog  The Paternity Test because it touches on both my professional and personal interest.

Privilege Part One

The Bar Council is running a successful social media campaign at the moment titled #IAmTheBar. Barristers from across the country are recounting the adversity they overcame, the long roads they travelled, the deterrents they fended off to be called to the Bar.  The tales make for inspiring reading and hopefully the young and not so young seeing them are persuaded that not all barristers are people like, er, me.

A procession from Eton to Oxford to the Inns of Court misses only a stint in the Guards and a safe seat to avoid giving me the institutional royal flush.  I am the Bar people expect because I am the Bar as it always was.  In fact, as the Bar Council's campaign correctly demonstrates, today barristers are a much more diverse bunch than people and the media give the profession credit for (at least on the publicly funded side).  This is thanks to a short-lived purple patch when Legal Aid was rightly widely available and rightly properly funded.  As the tide has gone out faster than the sea at Weston-super-Mare many commentators have predicted a raising of the drawbridge and a return to the privileged Bar of old.

In one important respect they are wrong.  And they are wrong because of the way in which privilege operates.  This blog is not about the funding of legal aid, I have written about it until I am blue in the face, and the Secret Barrister continues to do so to much more public and beneficial effect than I ever have.

We hear a lot from the privileged.  One of the biggest benefits of privilege is that it gives you the biggest stage.  You don't have to fight to be heard and you assume, by your privilege, that when you speak people will listen.  One topic that the privileged rarely talk about, however, is privilege.  When they do it is often, absurdly, to insist that they don't have it; like a child covered in spots claiming not have chicken pox.  You will no doubt remember the extraordinary claim that Benedict Cumberbatch had been 'held back' by his Harrow education.

I obviously can't speak for Harrovians but the thing about having been to Eton is that you just can't, with a straight face, deny your privilege.  It's like a marquess claiming to be middle class.  That isn't to say that some don't try.  If you live on privilege island you will only meet privileged people and that is a very comfortable place to live, it's surprisingly easy to pretend that there isn't the rest of the world out there.  For the moment you acknowledge your privilege you have to acknowledge the absence of privilege and that provokes some uncomfortable realisations.  Like how you got a bloody great big head start in life.  Like how maybe it wasn't just hard work and brains that got you into Oxbridge.  Like how maybe you weren't the best man (or woman) for the job: just the most advantaged.

And on the subject of women you don't get to be privileged only by going to Eton.  You just have to be a man, or white, or heterosexual, or live in Western Europe, or have a roof over your head.  Every single one of us has some privilege over the next worse off person and there are many, many worse off people.  However, because the conveyor belt of social mobility is only supposed to go in one direction, many of the privileged don't want to know about, still less care for, those less fortunate than them.  You might be in the 1% but unless you're in the 0.1% you're still a worker, still struggling, keeping it real because you only have a Range Rover not a Lear jet.

Have a think about who does the complaining when tiny incremental changes are suggested to reduce the number of trampolines given to privately educated men trying to reach the top jobs.  Quotas for women are unfair, say the men who have enjoyed a 100% quota, quite literally for centuries.  I don't know why they're complaining because they seem to have forgotten the first rule of Privilege Club which is that, like the Hotel California, you can check out any time you like but you can never leave. Privilege is not like your house keys or your passport; it's not something you can lose.  Where it is like your passport (at least until next March) is it enables you to go anywhere and do anything without the hassle of getting a visa, of obtaining permission.

I don't see privilege like an island I see it like a wall.  On the privileged side the sun is alway shining, there is always enough to eat, everybody knows everybody and absolutely nobody wants to be on the other side of the wall, many pretend there is no other side.  On the unprivileged side the weather is very changeable, sometimes there is food sometimes not, there are many strangers some of them hostile, most want very much to be on the other side of the wall and are abundantly aware of how extraordinarily difficult it is to scale.  Think The Wall in Game of Thrones and double it.

On the top of the wall there's an 'I'm Alright's Watch' keeping an eye on the masses but preserving privilege for the few.  From time to time they might dispense the occasional scholarship pour encourager les autres but like a bouncer at Studio 54, ensuring that only the right sort are let in.  Noblesse may sometimes oblige but never forget the divine ordination of the privileged child's favourite hymn: 

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them high and lowly, 

And ordered their estate.

As a privileged person working in criminal law I ascend to the top of my side of the wall (there's a lift) and see what life is like for the unprivileged.  At the end of the day I go home and when I'm being my better self I reflect on my good fortune and wonder at how I can pass some of that privilege on.  When I'm being my worst self I worry about how I'm going to adhere to the second rule of Privilege Club, which is how I'm going to pass some of that privilege on - to my child.

And that rule is why commentators on the social mix of the Bar are mistaken.  Privilege begets privilege or it is repudiated.  It bears its unfair fruit when one generation passes on the leg up to the next generation.  If legal aid won't pay the school fees (and it won't) the privileged won't touch publicly funded work with a bargepole.  It does rather beg the question where the barristers of the future will come from if the unprivileged can't afford to get over the wall and the privileged are scared they might fall off it.

Next week in Part Two - What to do with your privilege? (hint: pass it on).

I am publishing this on both my legal blog Counsel of Perfection and also my parenting blog The Paternity Test because it touches on both my professional and personal interest.

A time to be born

No, no, no, not now, not now, now, Now, NOW! - never.  They say surfing is all about timing and in a sense so too is child bearing, with one important distinction; if you have a kid you’re in for the ride ready or not.

The modern world has a lot to answer for and I truly believe one of its biggest mixed blessings is choice.  100 types of breakfast cereal to 1,000 men on Tinder.  How can you ever be satisfied with the choice you have made when there are countless alternative options mocking your maladroit selection.  How even are you supposed to make a decision at all.

Agency is anxiety when you lack confidence and sometimes what you’re really looking for is a set of instructions.  Nowhere is agency more illusory than when it comes to starting a family.  Making an intended baby requires two very important things that we have some agency over and one essential thing over which we have none.

We need to find somebody to have a baby with and we have to decide to have a baby.  We also need luck.  I had my child at 36.  That is 6 years later than I had always insouciantly assumed from youth that I would.   As my 30s have progressed I have noted a dismaying depletion in my physical energy.  The vigor I enjoyed at 30 will almost certainly be replaced with Viagra at 40.

I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have a child at 18 (definitely the first No).  Technically an adult but still full of the presumptuous certainty of adolescence.  I could have matched that child shot for shot on the tennis court, they would be in the midst of university, months away from flying the nest.  But what meagre nest could I have provided.  Would university even have been a possibility.

I also look at friends (men, for biology will enforce this inequality for some time to come) who have had children in their 50s and wonder how they scoop a screaming toddler from the floor when even rising from an armchair elicits a heavy sigh.

Musing on timing I suppose I am left with an equivocal thought.  If you can love your child, which ultimately is all it really needs, there will be times when no time will seem the right time but also any time can be the right time if you so choose.

Memories are Made of This

It is, all things considered, a complete mercy that nature does not allow you to remember your earliest moments in life.  I am sure it's not by chance that conscious memory seems to kick in at about the time you can make a good fist of dressing yourself, attend to your bodily functions and have a decent stab at fixing your first dry Martini.

We all know someone who claims, completely fraudulently, to remember being in the cradle or the face of the surgeon greeting them following the emergency caesarian.  More common are those that have a load of improbably precocious memories all of them triggered by baby photos.  My earliest memory is of being carried precariously on my father's shoulders as he descended the stairs in our first house.  This was also my first experience of motion sickness and the outcome was definitely not one for the family album.

It's no bad thing the regular bouts of screaming that punctuate even the happiest babyhood exist in memory limbo.  The downside is that while you will never forget your baby's gurgling joy they will never know it.  As a new parent you are marked very deeply in a wholly conscious way by your child's earliest experiences.  They by contrast soak up all those experiences like a sponge.  The outward appearance of them does not betray what they have absorbed and it is only when they are wrung out that you see what has been poured into them.

I have written before about baby milestones and how tedious all the conventional ones are of measurement, movement and utterance.  There is one milestone that no parent can ever know, still less record, and that is their child's first memory.  If I was a scientist I would devote my life's research to discovering what it is that triggers a child's ability to remember, for the first time, a particular moment in time.

Of course because we can't predict it we are forced constantly to be on our best behaviour.  You might be a model of parenting kindliness for 99 days from you child's 3rd birthday and on the 100th your exhausted patience slips and for the rest of your child's life their earliest recollection is of a sharp rebuke.

Memory is a mystery and a constant reminder of how much there is still to know about what makes us what we are.

To understand all is to forgive all - Being a better child

One of the first things you realise when you become a parent is how much you have to think about parenting. Unless you are a supremely indifferent parent, in every sense, you will worry, ruminate and dwell upon every single thing, little or large, from breathing to sleeping from schooling to breeding.

I thought very much about this recently when I saw Debra Granik’s ‘Leave No Trace’, a magnificent meditation on escaping from society.  This is not a film review but this work, about someone who can’t or won’t just settle down, is so sensitively handled.  Father and daughter live off grid in Oregon despite official interference could have been a bungled succession of clichés.  But like all the best directors Granik shows she does not tell.  And what she shows is the forest not as a forbidding place full of menace but of restoration and healing.  It is, of course, also a place to hide.

At the heart of the film is a father’s relationship with his daughter.  Neither mute nor weighed down with words theirs is a bond formed of teamwork living life as basically as the West will allow.  The father, a combat veteran, leaves one wondering not how combat prompts some to give up on other people but why it doesn’t cause everyone to do so.

The most moving part of the film comes right at the end and is what has triggered this short post.  Go to any bookshop and there are shelves of books promising skills and expertise in parenting.  The book has never been written however, so far as I am aware, about how to be a child.  Few people, if any, worry about whether they could be better at childing.

It’s true, if you are a decent human being, that you might worry about whether your parent is well or lonely. But that thing that constantly preoccupies parents, namely whether their child is being formed right is not often thought about by children.

Your parents were shaped before you were born; by good things and bad and in the same way that the world after us is unimaginable it is extremely difficult to see the forces that acted upon our parents.

Where Leave No Trace packs its greatest punch is in showing a daughter seeing her father’s wounds, acknowledging them and, with great maturity, firmly refusing to accept them as her own.  There is always a reason our parents are the way they are and if we don’t want to be the same way we must find that reason.  It is sometimes said that good parenting is about careful listening.  I would suggest that good childing is about careful watching.

Wheat from the chaff - What childhood is made of

Sometimes when you are rooting around in the attic, basement or garage you chance upon a shoebox containing the treasures of your childhood.  Mine, I am embarrassed to admit, contains a Gameboy.  This was given to me by my grandmother in 1989 for my 9th birthday.  She succeeded where my parents had spectacularly failed the previous year by giving me a Tomy Tutor Play Computer which was, as far as I was rightly concerned, a toy for toddlers.  This relic of my boyhood confirms it will be an act of utter hypocrisy should I ever reproach my son for excessive screen time as I reflect how much time I wasted on Tetris, Super Mario Land and Speedball 2.

The Gameboy was, without doubt, my number one possession.  But there is a reason why it lies in the attic caked in dust.  The possessions of childhood are just that.  Their worth and value do not endure into adulthood.  What does endure and what you carry with you forever are your memories and experiences.  My fondest memories are not of playing computer games but instead assembling my costume with my father for the annual fête champêtre at Claremont Landscape Gardens just outside London.

It is hard to describe what a magical experience this was, like the best fancy dress party you've ever been to, with music, dancing, fireworks, exploring and everyone dressed to the nines.  An 18th century recreation in an 18th century place that made Alice in Wonderland real just for one night.  Childhood is golden when imagination meets adventure; preferably watching an orange sky purpling over  a darkening lake as dragonflies hover lazily around.  Anyway that was the best part of my childhood - Yours, no doubt, was completely different. 

One of the more abstract tasks of a parent is reflecting upon your own childhood and selecting what was of value and rejecting what was worthless in a bid to pass on only the good to your offspring.  This is an imperfect exercise and so the daughter of a domineering father endeavours never to tell her son what to do and in the process fails even gently to guide him in the right direction.  The son of a feckless and spendthrift mother keeps his daughter at her books and never makes any provision for even a little bit of fun.  The pendulum swings from generation to generation.  Or you watch in horror as the shortcomings that you vowed would never characterise your parenting bubble up to the surface despite your best efforts.

I have no idea what my son's passions will be but I hope very much and will do all I can to ensure that one of them is reading.  My mother got me reading often and early and our favourite book by far was Eric Linklater's Pirates in the Deep Green Sea written in 1949.  Driving to court today I was reminded of happy  hours curled in her arms plunging once again to Davy Jones' Locker.  The thing that triggered this recollection was Howard Shore's score for Lord of the Rings playing on the radio.  I only came to Tolkien in my twenties.  So excited was I at the thought of sharing this epic with my son some day soon I actually had a lump in my throat as I crawled along the M6.

I'm no expert but I do know that whatever is good for children books are best.

Your body - Your choice

This is a parenting blog, specifically a fathering blog, therefore one topic that doesn't really fall within its purview is not parenting, especially not parenting by women.  I'm prepared to shoot off on most topics but you won't catch me criticising mothers on here; still less women who don't want to be mothers.  Biological reality means that whatever perfection of equality is one day achieved equality of physical experience will never happen.  Men can't bear and birth babies.  They can stand by in awe and fascination or boredom and indifference, either way they can't do it.  And that reality, for me, underscores an important precept: of that which you know nothing of that you should say nothing.

But it is clear to me that is not a principle universally accepted, for countless men, since time immemorial have seen fit to tell women just what they can and can't do with their bodies.  I have often wondered, in idle moments, what the world's abortion laws would be and would have been if legislating men everywhere had said: 'You know what, I'm going to sit this one out, let the women decide'.  Instead it's 2018 and still this basic fight for  female autonomy is having to be fought.  The reason is simple, for the men that fight against freedom and choice there is no price to pay - not with their bodies, not with their lives, not with their money.

Perhaps we should make a deal.  If you're a bloke that wants to rail and campaign against abortion you can but you gotta pay to play.  First you have to carry a sack of potatoes tied around your waist for 9 months.  Then you can have a knife taken to your genitals and toss a coin, if it's heads you can be cut open to your navel.  Every third feller can take home lifelong incontinence.  Go home and give back half your salary every month for the next few years, forget about that promotion.  Allow a small animal to take a scouring pad to your nipples.  You get the idea.

It's said you should never judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes.  Well how about you never judge a woman until you've walked a mile in her postpartum maxi pads.

Boy Oh Boy! - On Wholesome Masculinity

It is vanishingly rare these days that you see in print the word masculinity without its cancerous prefix: 'toxic'.  From the President to the Presidents' Club everywhere you look there are men cleaving to cliche as if their lives depended on it.  And maybe, in a sense, they do.  Neanderthal and knuckle dragging isn't much of an identity but if it's the only one you've ever known perhaps it seems better than none at all.  When flair and imagination are the first qualities to be beaten out of a boy running the playground gauntlet is it any wonder that the world teems with man boys who just can't, for the life of them, see things any other way.

Contrary to what some may say empathy is not a uniquely female quality nor compassion confined to girls.  But since forever (it sometimes seems) boys and men have won no reward for feeling another's pain.  Put yourself in the shoes of the man behind the bayonet and you'll feel steel in your guts before you can say love you brother.

If we are lucky what we are witnessing in America and elsewhere is no good manhood in its death throes; a last ghastly efflorescence of everything we don't wish in our sons.  Everything I don't wish for my son.  Or perhaps it is we that are in mortal peril: about to burst into the air and sparkling sunlight will we be dragged back to the depths by the Kraken's squirming tentacles?

My fear is that the more we fixate on the bad man the more we fix the idea of man bad.  There are magnificent men out there like the surgeon David Nott, heroically putting himself in harm's way time and time again to help the most harmed people in the world, thoughtful and funny men like Grayson Perry whose Descent of Man and Robert Webb's How Not to be a Boy brilliantly encapsulate how we've gone wrong and how we might go right, graceful and sexy men like Carlos Acosta, the peerless Cuban dancer and let's not overlook Sir David Attenborough, the world's favourite naturalist.  It is incumbent upon all of us to celebrate and promote these passionate men not the empty vessels of moribund manhood.

I am certain that there is no difference between being a good man and being a good person but there is a joy in being a boy that needs nurturing so that the man can rejoice at the boy within not the boy fear exposure by the man without.

#MeToo has been a long time coming for women in its collective expression of solidarity and refusal to tolerate the tired tropes of the past.  The time is ripe for men to have a #WeToo moment in celebration of all that is marvellous about manhood and a renunciation of the unearned privileges of patriarchy.

The man whole isn't just about fists and feet but heart and soul too.

Bath Time is the Best Time

Every parent knows that an inescapable feature of having a child is the unsolicited advice. Everyone from a cabbie to a countess is just itching to tell you what to expect.  The absolute worst types are those that gleefully enumerate all the terrible parts of being a parent; deriving a vicarious shuddering thrill from watching your foreboding and anxiety bloom like damp in a Brighton B&B.

I am not here to give advice unsolicited or otherwise I am here to tell you something wonderful - bath time is the best time.  Why is that wonderful? Because you don't need a book to tell you how to do it; you don't need an expert to come into your home at £100 per hour; you don't need to go anywhere for it; you don't even need any special equipment, you just need a bath.  And if you don't have a bath, well then you have my pity because no bath no laugh.

When we bought our flat we got rid of absolutely everything except one thing: the bath.  Familial propriety prevents me from making public an image of family bath time but I have no such compunction where my best man Christoffer van Tulleken is concerned, not least of all because this fabulous photo has been filched from his Instagram account.  And who can blame the man, anyone who has luxuriated in a tub of such titanic proportions wouldn't want just to tell the world but to show it as well.

Priests say that the family that prays together stays together.  Well I can tell you that the family that soaks together jokes together.  However maddening you have found the day or each other or the day because of each other all cares are washed away in a gurgle of delight.

So taken have I been with my bath's life enhancing properties that I have been offering it around to local friends; although it must be acknowledged that the suggestion that they come round and have a bath has been prone to misinterpretation.  Still I am unrepentant in expounding its virtues at least, that is, until the water bill arrives.

Parenting without guilt - Why trying your best is the best

If you're thinking of buying the books: don't.  If you have: throw them away.  Any expecting or new parent knows exactly to which books I refer.  Your baby is not a weekend away in Paris requiring a guidebook or a new Golf complete with user manual.  Your baby is your child and the best way to learn parenting is by being a parent, not slavishly following rules set down by someone who has never met you or your baby or even, in some cases, had a baby of their own.

Of course you will want advice, guidance and reassurance but that is what your parents, friends and relations are for.  They do know you and they know, or will be getting to know, your baby.  They are there for imparting wisdom, sharing experience and pooling information not for the imposition of a one size fits all regime.

This is no Brexitish denunciation of experts but an assurance that there is not and never will be any greater expert on your child than you its parent.  My particular bugbear with these books is that their ostensible purpose is improving the lot of new parents when in reality they do nothing but engender absolutely toxic feelings of guilt when, unsurprisingly, your child 'fails' to respond exactly as described in the 7 day plan that you must follow or catastrophe will ensue.  I say parents but in truth this does seem to be a downside of parenting that seems to assail mothers much more than fathers.  After all nobody and nothing will ever persuade me I am a bad mother.

I am no expert but I know that routine is good, however I also know that I get grumpy if I don't eat when hungry and don't sleep when tired.  If I move to a new house, school or job it takes time to work out a routine.  A baby is starting a new life so don't be surprised or dismayed if finding a workable routine is a matter of trial and error.

That is parenting in a nutshell: a lifetime or trial and error.  And if you are trying you must never, ever feel guilty.  You will get things wrong and your child will know you get things wrong and through that they will learn what it is to be human.  Getting things wrong does not include failing to give your toddler an exclusive diet of organic, home pureed vegetables.  Getting things wrong means exposing your children to experiences that they should be protected from and denying them experiences that will enrich them.  The complexity of parenting is that sometimes those can be one and the same experience.

But even then it is of supreme importance that you should parent without guilt.  Guilt wracks without benefit.  There is a place for guilt and that is when harm has been deliberately caused.  If your friends make you feel guilty when you are doing your best they are not your friends.  If the 'wisdom' of books makes you feel guilty when you are doing your best they are not wise.

Soft Play & Soft Suggestion

At the weekend I made my first visit to a place called Little Dinos which is a soft play area in North London that caters for children from 1 to about 7.  Soft play, to the uninitiated, is an absurd misnomer because though the surfaces are soft the speed with which the children deliberately or accidentally collide with each other is anything but.

Like all of these innovations this isn't about the children but about providing a safe space for frazzled parents who must leave their homes this instant before doing themselves, or worse, their child an injury.  What immediately struck me is that there were many, many more fathers than at any of the other baby friendly activities I had previously attended.  I noted that they all, like me, were sporting the de rigueur 'dad bod' that is without question the most dismayingly inescapable part of becoming a father.  I alone, however, was wearing chinos and cufflinks with my shirt rather than what seemed to be standard issue jeans and grey/black tee.  This was not a manifestation of fogeyism on my part but an ill timed attempt to placate my wife and satisfy her desire that I spend slightly less time wearing t-shirt and pants.

The thing about soft play is that creates the illusion of letting your guard down.  Because your child can't brain itself without a herculean effort at self harm you think you can take your neurotic anxiety down a few notches.  In reality, however, you have to watch like a hawk to ensure your child doesn't fall prey to the depredations of the miniature berserkers that beset the place.

This caused me to mull in a slightly disconnected way on the biggest lie about parents which is that they are in some angelic way any less selfish than the rest of us.  Ask any childless woman politician how pervasive this lie is and you'll get an earful.  True it is that having a child forces you to see beyond the end of your nose but that expanded vision stops abruptly at the start of your child's.

What would make soft play a genuinely interesting and instructive experience for parents is if, upon arrival, you were given responsibility for another parent's child and they yours.  It is only when you attend to the needs of another child and you have a chance to really scrutinise their personality that you can gain a prism through which to view your own.  What is more the default belief of many parents is that nobody on earth can really be trusted with the care of their child, this is nonsense and in times past children benefitted enormously from being passed hand to hand.  Variety is the spice of life and familiarity breeds contempt.

Of course our nearest and dearest will always take priority and charity does begin at home but a great good is done when we embrace our responsibilities to those that live beyond our four walls. Obviously my soft play suggestion is a pipe dream but what is a real possibility is offering our friends time off by taking their children under our wings, nothing could be more calculated to cement the bonds of friendship.