Buy This Book!

You would not learn to drive by reading a manual written by someone who has never driven and yet, remarkably, you can buy parenting books written by the childfree/childless. I have written before about my general disregard and distrust of parenting by the book/s but that was because the right book had not yet been written. Calling your book 'The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read' certainly suggests no lack of confidence on the author's part but the truth is we all long for advice from those quietly confident in its soundness.

That is not to suggest for one second that Philippa Perry, its author, claims absolute knowledge about the best way to parent. She does however take real pains to set out why some of the conclusions she draws are well founded by her researches and, most particularly, by her own experiences of parenting. She is quick to illustrate reflections upon her own childhood experiences in consciously shaping her own intentions for parenthood.

A remarkable number of people seem not to question their own childhood experiences or weigh up what was successful or less successful about their parents' parenting. True it is that there are a lucky few whose early years were characterised by clear boundaries within which needs both basic and complex were attended to and there was the fullest possible realisation of physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual development but was that genuinely your experience? Even if it was it's impossible that came about by pure chance.

A lot of parenting books insist upon a clear right way/wrong way duality with wholly implausible case histories where the author's edicts are followed to a T and overnight a howling banshee becomes a model of docility. There is often a distinct absence of kindness and gentleness in the imparting of advice and that is where Perry excels. In her words it's never too late to repair the ruptures. And ruptures there will always be despite and sometimes because of our best intentions.

Another thing that Perry gives a lot of thought to is the vocabulary of parenting. She decries the description of children as naughty or bad but instead, rightly, suggests a focus on the causes of the behaviour being exhibited. Characterising, as she does, 'bad' behaviour as inconvenient may seem euphemistic or mealy-mouthed but the reality is that the worst toddler meltdowns are the worst because they happen in the most inconvenient ways at the most inconvenient times.

The hardest truth of parenting to absorb and process is its inconvenience but resistance to this truth does perhaps more harm to children than anything else. At the start of parenting it comes as a shock that you have to sublimate your desires (convenience) to meet your child's needs every single time. A baby's cries are a very effective way of ensuring that the immediacy of that requirement should not be overlooked. Although a baby can be 'trained' to an emotional awareness that decibels don't work. That uncomfortably is what 'sleep training' depends upon. Deliberately rendering impotent your child's only means of communication might be convenient but it's also very uncomfortable.

Children have needs. They are never needy. If children's needs are neglected that neglect often manifests in adulthood as neediness. When a parent prioritises their convenience over their child's needs they simply defer a debt that will have to be paid at a most inconvenient time in a most inconvenient way. The good news is that it is never too late to settle the account.

Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!

I am bad at maths. Numbers are no problem but letters send me loopy. Even well into adolescence I would be reduced to tears at my incompetence at something that came effortlessly to my peers. Everybody can identify with that consuming anguish that engulfs the body when you just don't get it, even when the teacher patiently explains for the thousandth time. So it is with baby pacification, gummy smiles give way to howling hysteria the instant the baby passes from my wife's arms to mine (and the baby doesn't enjoy it either).

Walk him around. Sing him a song. Don't hold him like that. Don't bounce him on your knee. Even an idiot could follow those simple instructions. Plainly I have yet to graduate idiot school. There is a vicious circle. When the mother does all the mothering what right minded baby wants an ersatz paternal substitute. But if the dad doesn't do the primary care giving he will never be baby's first choice. And if the baby is benefiting from breast is best that top spot on the podium is as inaccessible as Mount Olympus.

Another Saturday another long read in the Guardian about patriarchy's enduring stranglehold and why there is nothing natural about male supremacy in the world. A concomitant conclusion is that there is nothing pre-ordained about maternal primacy in the home. And yet. 3 years into being a dad and still basically as clueless  as when I started; I have a strange hankering to meet and learn from single dads. And I don't mean ones that have outsourced to a nanny or their mother but the ones that are genuinely doing it on their own.

I don't know any fathers who are parenting without the benefit of female assistance/input/instruction and I assume they are few and far between. They are certainly not a common cultural trope. Likewise, how often do you read mothers writing about how their partners take the lead and the load when it comes to child rearing and domestic labour? Almost never.

There was a cartoon that did the rounds a couple of years back about unequal bearing of emotional labour by women and the effort involved in giving instruction to useless men. I could scarcely get to the end so excoriatingly close to the bone did it cut. I didn't want to be that guy, I don't want to be that guy and yet, so often, I am that guy.

It's a cliche but parenting is about teamwork and communication. But an important codicil to this excellent advice is that all teams have a captain. Someone has to be in charge. And captaincy carries its burdens but also its privileges. When two parents equally decline to take responsibility there is not a happy outcome for the children. However the same is also true when both parents vie for the task of laying down the ground rules. Perhaps the secret is familial government by tribunes but I've rarely seen that in action.

My wife recently laid the charge of hypocrisy against me to which my plea is unequivocally guilty. If you want to see a dad stepping up to the plate and putting in his shift don't read a blog by a man about parenting; any proper dad has no time for navel gazing like that. And just as fine words butter no parsnips they wipe no bottoms, noses or work surfaces either.

I know that I am hardly alone in wanting to be a better parent and a better father but sometimes I feel as Nancy Astor must have when she first took her seat in a place built by men for men. I have been to enough mother and baby activities to know that other than the occasional token bloke they are for mothers and babies. On a recent extraordinary outing to Water Babies with my toddler it was only dads that turned up. The swimming teacher could not overcome her cognitive dissonance and kept on addressing us as 'Mums'.

I am crying out for writing by dads for dads. Until then I prostrate myself before my wife as yet again the co-pilot has put the parenting plane into a nosedive.