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.

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.