Playground parable - what we can learn from child's play

 

I was sitting in a playground with my firstborn last summer looking about me and had a strange dissociative moment when I looked at the children playing and their parents supervising and thought about how weird it would be when one day that would be my life; completely oblivious, in just that moment, that this WAS my life.

Just as grief has its well publicised staged pathway culminating in acceptance perhaps the same is true for parenting and that one has to work through denial, anger, bargaining and the rest before finally accepting that yes you are a parent.

But maybe it was just that playgrounds were such an unfamiliar environment. There are literally signs in them forbidding unaccompanied adults. Since then I have spent a lot more time in playgrounds, other than during the first lockdown when they were locked up like Hebrides playgrounds on the Sabbath.

It's a pity that the childless are so unwelcome because I have formulated what I think is a brilliant business plan. Playground child rental. Those considering breeding can rent children of various ages by the hour or two while the parents can put their feet up nearby with a coffee. That way parents in waiting can try before they buy while the troops get some much needed R&R away from the trenches: two income streams one product.

While that is obviously wishful thinking it does nonetheless seem to me a shame that only parents get to enjoy one of the real privileges of the playground which is watching children play. It is quite remarkable how unabashed children are at joining in with play. It is also a real lesson to those of us that have forgotten childhood how important unstructured play is.

If you think about your adult life it is quite likely that it contains no unstructured play at all. Everything is organised and yet everybody knows that the first rule of organised fun is that it's NOT fun. Last weekend I was back in the playground (there's certainly nothing else to do and mercifully they're still open). The 4 year old immediately fell in with some older boys, I reckon about 7 or 8 years old. May not seem much of an age gap but it's like me striking up a friendship with a random 80 year old on the bus.

I was momentarily worried that they would spurn him on account of being so little but instead enfolded him immediately in their not at all gender normative game of running around with sticks pretending they were guns. There were no rules, there was no point to it but in 25 minutes he had more fun than I've had all year.

So I suppose the moral of the story is: make more friends, make more fun.

When 1 + 1 is 1/2 - Lonely Parenting

 

I was inspired to write this post by Nell Frizzell's observation about loneliness in mothering. I say in mothering advisedly because, despite it being the 21st century, I know that this is, still, a feeling that assails mothers infinitely more than it does fathers. That isn't to say that it is unknown to fathers and it certainly isn't to me.

A quick disclaimer. I'm half of a two parent, two income family and it would be a grotesque misrepresentation to suggest anything but that my wife bears, by far, the lioness' share of the parenting. To borrow one of the catchphrases of 2020 I must 'do better'. I know that there are many mothers, and some fathers, doing all this on their own without financial or familial support. They have my boundless admiration.

All of that out of the way Nell's observation rings as true as a bell tolling the end of your freedom. Very few explain to expectant parents that when they add one to their family they subtract the world. Obviously in one sense that is melodramatic nonsense but when you are listening to screaming, whining, pleading, badgering all day it is very easy to feel that you have ceased to exist as a participating member of the human race.

I've written before about how early years parenting requires a profoundly healthy relationship with your emotional self and ready access to your inner child. Babies needs may be basic but they are relentless. No intellectual nourishment arises from feeding, burping, changing and napping all day every day, week after week, month on month. The price you pay for growing your child is diminishing your self and place in the world. If you have striven hard and tirelessly to find that place its loss can feel like a bereavement but mourning it wins no well wishers or sympathy.

When you parent a small child technically you're in company but in reality you're encumbered. Adult conversations are snatched, unsatisfying, invariably about the cares and cost of childcare. A sense of being untethered quickly sets in.

Much of this is a result of how we parent now. We are atomised and isolated; parenting as a group activity is vanishingly uncommon. I remember how ineffectual parent and baby (alright mother and baby, let's get real) classes seemed to be at mitigating this feeling of being alone. Paying for an hour's company felt like paying for a friend.

Those lucky enough to live near supportive and support giving relatives enjoy a benefit almost unimaginable to those sentenced to months of unremitting childcare. Maybe I'm being naive or missing something but the solution to all this isolation and loneliness seems obvious to me.

Childcare in Britain is madly expensive and usually comes at the cost of parents' return to work. What we really need are comfortable creches where parents could spend the day in company with other parents and their children. Where parents could take a nap with the reassurance of knowing their child is being watched by another parent. 

Alternatively we can persist with the broken model of staying at home and going quietly mad.