Single Sex: Singular Problem

I don't know how many countries, like the UK, require learners to take an exam when learning to drive but imagine how inadequately prepared you would be for driving on the roads if you had all theory and no practice.

Education in the abstract is nothing without education in application. Any decent parent knows that successful child rearing involves doing what works for your child not abiding come what may to the strictures of books and experts.

Any decent parent also knows that a proper education, a full education, involves a great deal more than book learning and exam results. Children becoming adults need to be prepared for their whole lives not just a set of exams: in the same way that a couple preparing for marriage need to be able to look, think and plan far beyond their wedding day.

I've been thinking about that a lot in the context of the calamitous publicity endured by my alma mater Eton over the last few weeks. Alma mater, ironically, meaning 'nourishing mother'. The opening lines of the Eton Leavers' song 'Vale' are: 'Time ever flowing, bids us be going, dear Mother Eton far from thee...' There is something intensely paradoxical about the wellspring of the patriarchy being imagined in maternal terms.

I've watched the opening part of Will Knowland's controversial video presentation and didn't feel any need or enthusiasm to watch it in full. I don't particularly want to comment on his dispute with the school save for observing that that his video, the school's response to it and the ensuing publicity have been like an arrow directly in Eton's Achilles Heel.

Notwithstanding any impression created by our current Prime Minister there are many things Eton excels at and well equips its pupils for. Living in a world of women is absolutely not one of them. Once was a time, and it was a long time, I'd suggest about 550 years of the school's history, this wasn't in any way a problem. But now, is it satisfactory or acceptable to send boys out into the world without the faintest real idea of what girls and women are beyond what they've gleaned from their sisters and their friends in the holidays?

This narrowness of experience, understanding and exposure, of course, does not just apply to the opposite sex. Racial, cultural, economic homogeneity all tend toward a narrowness of thinking and perception of the world. I've written before about privilege, its purpose and its perpetuation. A school like Eton is able through scholarships to diversify the source of its pupils to mitigate the worst aspects of being partitioned by privilege.

But when it comes to girls and women the best it can do is describe, discuss ideas and suggest reading. All abstract, all theoretical. When you choose your child's education are better A Level results worth the loss of formative time spent with living, breathing representatives of half the human race? Mr Knowland's eye-catching hobby, which he has displayed on his YouTube channel, is powerlifting; through it he will know that if you only train one part of the body you risk overdeveloping the part to the detriment of developing the whole.

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.

Sea School - Lessons from 'My Octopus Teacher'

 

I loved 'My Octopus Teacher' so much that saying anything more than that I urge you to watch it as soon as you can, ideally with your children, seems a waste of time and words. Nonetheless I will venture some thoughts as to why I think this documentary is so much more significant and important than your common or garden Attenborough.

This is a deeply personal programme but also one which is itself a lesson of universal application. Reduced to its barest bones it's: man goes swimming, man meets octopus, man loves octopus. Characterised in that way it sounds absolutely absurd, troubling even. But that isn't really it at all.

Its narrator/director/protagonist, Craig Foster, is not a famous man. Nor is there anything about this programme, or him in it, that suggests that he has any interest in the pursuit of fame. He is very softly spoken, totally untheatrical or breathlessly wondering in his commentary. And yet all of that serves only to make his commentary all the more remarkable.

The sea in which Foster swam every day is both bountiful but also fraught with danger. He does not spell out what was going on in his personal life when he started his endeavour but it seems plain that he was contending with some kind of crisis or trauma. In that sense swimming clearly became catharsis for him.

He explains early on that he did not want a wetsuit or diving gear. We are not in our natural element swimming underwater for prolonged periods but practice, focus and determination permit us to journey there. There are growing numbers of studies that cold water swimming is not just beneficial for our physical health but our mental wellbeing also. It is difficult to give too much prominence to mental demons when you are literally being buffeted by huge waves.

Something that we do require, if life is worth living, is a purpose. In this film Foster finds a purpose and yet it's a purpose so far removed from what the vast majority of us regard as being significant and essential. His purpose is to observe, record and chronicle this octopus' life.

Suffice to say bearing witness to the ingenuity, versatility and playfulness of this octopus' existence makes the prospect of a plateful of calamari seem almost a desecration. One thing this programme does not do is solemnly intone about man's devastating destruction of the seas. Instead it revels in their richness and lets the viewer draw their own conclusions about the true price we pay for plundering and polluting earth's natural habitats.

For me the most affecting part of the show is when Foster is joined by his young son and he comments proudly on how strong a swimmer he has become. This is, after all, a blog about fathering, and I seize upon models of fathers communing with their sons. Shared activity, shared values and shared joy.

Watch it now.

Trailer - https://youtu.be/3s0LTDhqe5A

The Golden Treasury

 

There was a moment today when my wife was rolling on the floor laughing with our 3 year old and the baby joined in giggling from his high chair. He wasn't being played with or obviously included but he knew there was fun and he was part of it. I wanted to nail that moment down, or preserve it in aspic or press it between the pages of an album. But before I knew it the moment had gone, the baby resumed smearing yoghurt all over his face and the 3 year old his demands for the iPad.

'Sharenting' and baby spam is a demonstration of parental desire to share joy in children with the outside world. Some parents give in to an impulse to record every second of their children's lives in a bid to arrest the passage of time. Obviously, audio, video and photographic records of family times are important but they are vastly less important than what they are seeking to capture, which is time itself.

'Treasure every moment' and 'It goes so fast' are both trite pieces of parental advice but they're no less true for that. The word treasure carries for me a particularly powerful symbolism. Our shared joy in the kitchen was just a moment but it was a moment of genuine family communion. All taking pleasure in the same thing at the same time.

That moment is like an ounce of gold and although the moment passes the value of it never does. In fact that ounce of gold, whether you realise it or not, is securely deposited in the individual and collective memories of the whole family. And as the days, months and years pass every such moment is added to the balance creating a golden treasury. That treasury will end up holding more value in the family's heart than any bank account or investment portfolio ever could.

When sadness, tragedy, illness, grief and bereavement come, and come most surely will, then is the time to draw on those reserves. In fortunate families those reserves will be full and sustaining, in others they will be scant and unconsoling. You can not pay money into that treasury and you can not employ others to pay into it for you.

Real presence in the lives of small children comes at a real cost, of sleep, of patience, of intellectual stimulation but it is also the time for gathering those ounces of gold and, like a prospector panning for gold above San Francisco, it's not gifted to you it has to be worked for. But the conditions are ripe. Your children when they are small don't just want you in their lives they need you in their lives.

A time will come when children want distance and independence. Gathering gold then is difficult and, like any investment, will accumulate much less interest for being made late in the day. A day of fun in a small child's life seems an eternity because their life is so short, a day of fun in the life of a 20 year old is but one of thousands of days.

'Do the work' has been something of a catchphrase this year and it is one that could not be more aptly applied to bringing up children, that is how you become rich in reminiscence.

Pockets of Loveliness

 

I don't remember all my school assemblies. Occasionally, however, the headmaster would use the opportunity to take the school to task for bad behaviour that had been reported to him. His evocative expression for this was 'pockets of ghastliness'. That expression came to mind when my 3 year old recently started assembling a rock collection.

Many of the rocks he collects are far too big for my pockets let alone his but they presage a period of boyhood that I think is little observed or commented upon. It is sometimes said that if you want to know a woman make an inventory of her handbag, hence the fascination with what the Queen carries in hers. But if you want to know the soul of a small boy turn out his pockets.

These pockets of loveliness can often contain the unloveliest things but they contain the things of value to the boy and that makes them valuable. It is often difficult for me to understand why my son discerns value in one rock rather than another but if he catches me decanting them from the car he takes tremendous umbrage.

In some unseen and unexplained way these stones have captured his imagination and it is wondrous how small children have an instinctive and comfortable relationship with their imagination. Most children will take a screen over self-motivated play but if you take the screen away from them they have an immediate and easy access to their imagination in a way that should be the envy of most adults.

It's interesting how we talk about imaginations being captured as if they have to be confined like birds in an aviary or tamed like a savage beast. In fact children need to be encouraged to allow their imaginations to roam wild and free, safe in the knowledge that they will never be mocked or punished for where their imagination takes them.

My son's favourite stone, with which he insists on sleeping, is in fact a piece of slate which bizarrely he calls 'My father's journal'. I have no idea why he calls it this but suffice it to say I am fairly certain he is not a reader of this blog. I don't believe that my son is an embryonic geologist and I don't doubt that in time the rocks and pebbles will give way to marbles, foreign coins, small toys, and feathers. When they do I fully intend to chronicle these ephemeral evocations of who he really is.

Incelent Boys

 

Princess Diana's death is generally regarded to have gone hand in hand with the demise of the British stiff upper lip. Other traditionally British characteristics have come under sustained attack since then. A glance at social media, or any 'below the line' comment on an online tabloid article, would suggest that the fabled British politeness is on its last legs. But one thing remains unchanged and that is British embarrassment about sex education.

It is just possible that the excellent Netflix series quite literally called 'Sex Education' indicates that the latest generation of adolescents, Generation Z, will grow up without the merest hint of pink suffusing their cheeks when they broach the birds and the bees with their children.

But there does seem something genuinely steadfast in the determination of British parents not to talk about sex with their children. Indeed one of the cliches of parenting is supposed to be an absolute dread about having 'the talk' or, even worse ,being caught unprepared by an innocent enquiry from junior.

It may be that I too will succumb to this Victorian squeamishness when the time comes but somehow I think not. If my 3 year old were to ask me now I'd tell him. There are other things I genuinely struggle to foresee explaining. Our fiddling while the world burned is going to be Count 1 on his generation's indictment. Trying to explain why people that Trump detested voted for him is a real conundrum. But sex, really?

The last decade has shown us that not only MUST we be ready for this conversation but we must be ready for it much, much sooner than our parents and their parents could ever have imagined possible. Adolescence, forget about it, a child of 8 or even younger is going to be seeing things online that would make any of us shudder.

Every parent's worst fear is something dreadful befalling their child but the second worst fear should always be that they might inflict something dreadful on another child. Something that I fear is my sons growing up to be Incels. For anyone unfamiliar with the growing ranks of involuntary celibates they are young and not so young men coalescing around misogyny as a movement and philosophy.

These men spout bile about women online asserting that their 'right' to sex has been stolen away from them and promulgating absurd conspiracies about 'feminazis'. It is safe to assume that few if any of them are involved in loving and mutually respectful relationships with women. Indeed when you read their rantings the overwhelming inference is that they are not involved in any sort of relationship with women.

One of the features of the vast proliferation of online pornography that gets commented on quite often is how terrible its effect is on men's sexual expectations and behaviour in the bedroom. What doesn't seem to attract so much comment is whether it's contributing to men not even getting into the bedroom in the first place.

A major anxiety of many parents of 15 year old boys is whether they might get a girl pregnant, or at least that used to be an anxiety. There is research suggesting that the age of first time sex is rapidly increasing. Now the concern might well be that 25 year old sons have never even had a relationship.

Navigating early sexual encounters is as likely to be bruising as brilliant and embarrassing as ecstatic. But in times past they were navigated because there was no alternative. Porn removes all the messiness of real human connection but it also removes all the joy of it too.

The noisy hatred of the Incels towards women is of course just a projection of their fears. They fear women because they are other and they have become other because far too many of these young men have had their sexual awakening in front of a screen instead of with a real, live human being. Nothing to be afraid of and certainly nothing to be despised.

Porn may well have its place but that place should never be primary school. But primary school is not too soon to be learning about sex and about consent, on the topic of which no boy should be taught to aim for mere consent when heartfelt longing is available. Ultimately though I believe its the parents' responsibility to make children comfortable with the idea of and ultimately the practice of sex.