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WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME? Natasha Joffe and Justine Roberts
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For our children
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Contents Introduction Golden Rules You don’t have to bake with your children Don’t fret about milestones Don’t buy a guinea pig for your child Ignore unsolicited parenting advice from old biddies on buses Don’t give up work for your children Cut all their hair off Let them eat cake Boycott World Book Day Don’t hit your kids Put away your mobile, turn off your laptop and don’t even think about a BlackBerry or an iPhone In the Beginning Have a baby, not a birth Lock visitors out after the birth Call your baby what you like Don’t buy a Moses basket Don’t heed the gurus You don’t have to ‘get your figure back’ six weeks after the birth Don’t feed your baby in lavatories You don’t have to go to baby groups It’s OK to do controlled crying Don’t let your toddler kick all the babies at playgroup
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7 10 15 21 26 33 38 42 47 59
67 71 75 86 90 99 102 105 108 113
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Dos and Don’ts Avoid loud (otherwise known as ‘performance’) parenting Do not be frightened of public tantrums If you prefer his brother, take it to your grave You are not too big to apologise/you are too big not to apologise Don’t overdo the praise/tell your children every scribble is a masterpiece You can’t choose their friends Don’t call it a twinkle Tell them they are beautiful (but that beautiful is the least of what they are): some thoughts on love, appearances and self-esteem Be proud of your geeky child because life isn’t, after all, an American high school movie Don’t get cross with your dreamy child, learn to manage him You’re the Boss You don’t have to have a naughty step but the odd star chart never killed anybody: modern disciplinary systems and what to do with them Manners matter: make them mind their ps and qs You don’t have to have family meals Let them fight amongst themselves Don’t shame your children up about fiddling but do make them do it in the bedroom Turn the computer games off Make them do chores and start them young Don’t worry about the imaginary friends Do not let your child dress like a ho: pink, princesses and other gender-specific stuff Be hypocritical about swearing Health and Safety Let them eat dirt Let them fall over You don’t have to bathe your children every day Keep your poxy or vomiting child at home You must not allow your children to be a safe house for parasites
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121 125 130 135 138 143 152 156 163 168
175 182 189 194 200 204 211 214 224 234
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Fun and Games You don’t have to play Sylvanian Families if you don’t want to Drink wine and hide: the art of ‘playdates’ Chase other people’s children away in public places Don’t hire a limousine for children’s parties Make them write thank you notes Don’t let your kids do martial arts Toddler life: if in doubt, go out
273 280 292 295 306 311 314
Nearest and Dearest Help your partner be competent to look after your mutual children Do argue in front of the children but do reconcile publicly Be kind to your in-laws Your childcarer is not your friend Do not covet thy neighbour’s grandparents Let grandparents who babysit do it their own way (within reason)
319 324 329 333 341 345
School Gates Choose the best school for your child, not the ‘best school’ (primary variety) Secondary school: don’t worry if it looks like a prison, they all do Get organised then feed and leave: starting school You are not six: don’t worry about other parents at the school gates ‘They don’t turn into pimps and hos because of sex ed’ Bribe and corrupt them to get them through exams
351 357 365 374 381 386
Postscript Index
393 397
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Introduction WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME?
When my first baby was about six weeks old, I panicked about the fact that we seemed to be oozing along formlessly in our life together. He was mostly feeding or sleeping in my lap, the feeding being almost constant and the sleeping occurring in frequent but very short bursts. Neither of us had any sense of night and day. I panicked in particular because I had just purchased a book that looked friendly but which seemed to be telling me I had already messed it all up, that my baby should be eating and sleeping in a certain way and in certain places, and the fact that he was not doing so was a very bad thing – it was hindering his development and my happiness. I am not even sure that the book actually said any of this or at least said it with anything like the firmness I thought it did. I make no claims at all for my intellectual faculties at that time. So I found myself, after six weeks of very little postnatal sleep bolted on to quite a lot of previous prenatal insomnia, doing a mad and awful thing. I put my baby in his cot at what the book seemed to say should be one of his naptimes and I went away and left him there whilst he screamed miserably and continuously, wide awake and understandably outraged. I think I went away for twenty minutes; I fear it may have been longer. I have erased the details. When I went back his face was glazed with tears and set in horizontal lines of woe like the Duchess’s baby in Alice in Wonderland. I held him tight and wept whilst he continued to sob convulsively. He was inconsolable; I could not console him. The book didn’t actually tell me to do what I did. I just lost it. I thought I was damaging him and myself by allowing us to carry on in the way we were (and funnily enough we weren’t unhappy that way – he was just a tiny baby and I was just a bit strange). I subsequently read another book about abandonment and stress hormones and psychological development and INTRODUCTION
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convinced myself that this one incident had psychologically scarred him. Forever. Neither of the books I read helped me to be a better parent or him to be a happier baby. I think many people, like me, found Mumsnet in the early days of our parenting in bewildered retreat from one book or another we had snatched from the shelves, too tired to read it properly, too tired to apply it, too tired to exercise our critical faculties about what it was telling us. Too tired not to feel like we were failing miserably at times. So we found a website. Where other folk told us it was OK to be exhausted, to feel at times like you had the wrong emotions for your baby, to fail to have a routine, to impose a routine if it was right for you and your baby, to make use of childcare (if you can afford it) and go back to work, to make mistakes, as long as you tried to do better next time: that they had made mistakes and life had carried on and their children were fine. And a couple of years down the line, when we couldn’t get a three-yearold out of nappies, we found some ideas for bribes, and a little later some reassurance about the baffling testosterone-fuelled rage of four-year-old boys. And when we had seven-year-olds who went upstairs to get their clothes on for school and were discovered twenty minutes later reading the Beano in their pants, there were other people’s stories to laugh at and their tips to try. Because, at each stage of your child’s development you tend to realize there is a whole lot of stuff you fretted about at the previous stage which you probably didn’t need to. ‘God, I did it all though. But it’s like having a wedding and then realising you should have just eloped or had your immediate family. Once you KNOW you KNOW.’
(codjane) But there are also boundaries to what works and what is OK, and sometimes we need a (virtual) village to help us find those boundaries. So this book is really a compendium of all the things we wish somebody had told us, the insights and experiences of all those virtual sisters, mothers and best friends (and the odd teenage boy with 2
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nothing better to do over half-term) who populate Mumsnet and who will tell you what to put in your party bags, how to help a child who has no friends, how to remove the smell of baby vomit from your work clothes (or indeed why you shouldn’t use the disabled loo, how to make a lemon drizzle cake and how to get poo stains off a leather pouffe . . .) any time of day or night. And the goal of this book is to make you into the person you would be if you had had two or three children to practise on before the ones you actually have. So that when you hear your toddler singing (from the back of the bike on which you are ferrying him to nursery), plaintively and to the tune of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’: ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, Mum. Mummy, Mummy don’t go to work . . .’, you can laugh a little rather than falling off your bike.i What we hope you will find most of all in this book is reassurance: a buoyancy aid to help you keep your head above water. This book is about finding your bearings, doing things in ways which make your life a little better and easier, forgiving yourself for being barely adequate at times but recognising when you are heading towards genuine awfulness and learning to put the brakes on. Because somewhere out there is some sane middle ground between the neurotic hyper-attentiveness which childbirth naturally engenders and actual neglect (or indeed faux neglect – ‘the parenting equivalent of pretending you haven’t done much revision.’ (Enid)). That is the ground this book is trying to stake out. And here is a more general something we would have liked someone to tell us during those long days of infancy and toddlerhood (aka ‘The wipe-wash-dress-wipe-clean cycle’), which seem endless then are suddenly over: ‘I don’t think anyone ever said looking after small children was incredibly fulfilling, not anyone I know anyway. But in the long term, with the long vision, I think you might see that having children was a good journey, and an interesting one and you learnt lots during it and it broke your heart a few times but then it made you proud and made you smile a whole lot too. That’s not so bad you know, for a life.
INTRODUCTION
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In the meantime, everyone should have something else that they do at the same time to keep sane. Preferably a job of some sort.’
(Favourthebrave)
i) This would be Justine, with her fourth child. 4
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GOLDEN RULES
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You don’t have to bake with your children the rule otherwise known as: don’t believe the lifestyle journalists ‘I remember when my mum knitted me a school cardigan. Christ, it was awful. Luckily she saw sense and bought me the polyester one that everyone else had. Knitting is just a thing, it’s not a way to be a good mum. It’s just wool.’
(Ozziegirly) Unless you live up a tree in the rain forest, it is probably impossible to avoid Jamie Oliver and his kids. Or many another celebrity plus offspring pictured in their lovely homes. Baking and doing craft activities. Or just looking radiant and fluffy in soft sunshine and cashmere cardigans. And it’s not just celebrities – we have too much access to all sorts of other people’s prettified versions of their own parenting, too many books and blogs and tweets. (Although you have to wonder about some of the blogging mummies – when do they find the time and how bored must they be to write those blogs? Why do they never post about their bad days? But let them blog – we all have to get through the day somehow.) It sometimes seems that what all of these people and Sunday supplements and catalogues are selling is the one truly good and wholesome way to bring up children, a way that probably involves picking berries and visiting baby farm animals and messing about in streams. And a great deal of contentment. And not very many reconstituted meat products in a breadcrumb coating or cartoons. Or screaming. So those of us who regularly fall by the wayside with packaged entertainments and packaged foods and don’t holiday in our own reclaimed crabshacks full of the children’s oil paintings and converted crabpots, or GOLDEN RULES
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whatever it is you catch crabs in, sometimes feel like we are not managing to be particularly good parents. That we do not spend enough time with our children and that the things we do with them are crap. But actually, the stuff your kids will remember fondly (apart from the many, preferably illicit, things they did with other children) is the stuff you both loved, the stuff you both enjoyed, not the stuff you endured because you thought it was what you were supposed to do to be a good parent. OK, some stuff along the way you do just have to endure – no adult person wants to play with Thomas the Tank Engine or talk about Dora the Explorer. Almost no adult person wants to hear about the different kinds of battle droid or watch High School Musical 3. But you might all enjoy walking or swimming or riding bikes. As they get bigger, you might all want to make stop-motion animations. Or pretend you are on MasterChef. Or eat pizza in front of X Factor. Or you might all love to bake and paint china. We are many and various and so are our children; no one’s relationship with their children can really be much of a model for anyone else’s. And, whatever activities you get up to, some days there will be shafts of great happiness, unexpected exchanges of kindness. And other days they will tell you they hate you, that you are the most unfair mummy in the whole world. And you will bore them and they will bore you. Because the truth about parenting is that it is not some perfectible edifice you are building in which you will keep your babies safe from the outside world until they are strong and clever enough to emerge. It is an unpredictable, often worrying, occasionally revelatory relationship with one or more other people, who are themselves changing all the time. And sometimes it is just hard graft for all the parties involved. If you can let go, if you can realise that no childhood is nirvana, but is at best a sometimes random jumble of good and bad and boring, then you and your children will probably find some unexpected adventures in unlikely places. And cupcakes won’t be some ghastly symbol of an unachievable lifestyle. But a kind of small cake which you might bake some time. Or you might buy some Mr Kiplings instead.
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What, no cupcakes? Mumsnetters’ happy childhoods ‘I think the important thing is to think back to your childhood – what do you remember? I found out recently that for quite a few years my dad worked a six-and-a-half day week doing overtime to meet the mortgage when interest rates were high. This means my sister and I must hardly have seen him. I have absolutely no memory of that. What I do remember is looking down the road to see him come home for lunch sometimes. That and that awful yellow haddock my parents fed me, Princess Di’s wedding, a holiday in Sussex, lilac blossom and the buddleia covered in butterflies, coming downstairs on Christmas morning and seeing my new dollhouse, the day the neighbours went waterskiing leaving a casserole in the oven and the oven caught fire . . . nothing, nothing to do with how much my parents worked or spent time with us. I hope and trust it’s the same for my kids. I’ve no reason to think otherwise.’
(NorthernLurker) ‘I remember candle making and “science experiments” with my mum, and fingerpainting when younger, and having friends around to play in the garden, and every year we’d pick all the blackcurrants and try and make blackcurrant jam but my mum was hopeless at it and it would always end up being blackcurrant syrup, and I remember having a chest freezer where the yummy puddings were stored (like premade chocolate eclairs) but she would never remember to take them out in time so if we had one as a treat it would always still be half frozen which didn’t stop it being delicious. And sometimes there’d be parties at our house (we always had lodgers to help pay the mortgage) and I was allowed to stay up a bit and try the (cheap) camembert on baguettes. She detested cooking, so we lived on fish fingers and Findus pancakes and bad stew, but sometimes on weekends she’d make flapjacks or eggy bread, and every Halloween she’d try and make treacle toffee and sometimes get it right. The thing is, my mother was a single parent working horrendous hours, and we grew up in a cheap horrible neighbourhood, with a titchy back garden mostly concrete, and I had to share a bedroom with my brother until I was ten because we needed lodgers. But I don’t remember that, I just know it now. My memories of my childhood are idyllic, because my mum loved us so.’
(tortoiseonthehalfshell )
GOLDEN RULES
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Don’t fret about milestones ‘It’s not a modern thing to be worried about development of speech etc. . . . As a child, Einstein seldom spoke. When he did, he spoke very slowly – indeed, he tried out entire sentences in his head (or muttered them under his breath) until he got them right before he spoke aloud. According to accounts, Einstein did this until he was nine years old. Einstein’s parents were fearful that he was retarded. One interesting anecdote, told by Otto Neugebauer, a historian of science, goes like this: As Einstein was a late talker, his parents were worried. At last, at the supper table one night, he broke his silence to say, “The soup is too hot.” Greatly relieved, his parents asked why he had never said a word before. Albert replied, “Because up to now everything was in order.”’
( jenwyn)
The Cloud of Parental Anxiety Our initial impulse is just to say ‘get over yourself ’ in relation to milestones (milestones are things your child is supposed to do around a certain age: rolling over, smiling, talking, reaching developmental stages right through to puberty and beyond). But ‘get over yourself ’ is the parenting advice no one can ever take, except retrospectively, because really some degree of hyper-attentiveness is part of the human parenting condition. Parental insouciance only works for species like seahorses which wander around in a soup of offspring and can afford to have a few wander off. For those of us with any tendency to worry, hyper-attentiveness means living with the Cloud of Parental Anxiety. The Cloud of Parental Anxiety is by no means always obscuring the sun and sometimes you will hardly notice it at all, but it is always floating somewhere, just casting its shadow over a different part of the landscape. So if I reassure myself about my 10
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non-walking twenty-month-old by starting a discussion on a parenting website in which a hundred respondents tell me that their children didn’t walk until that age or later, the Cloud of Parental Anxiety will drift slowly away from the swamp of late walking before stopping at the little hillock which is that bump my baby has always had on the back of her head. And the Cloud, which was really quite pale and wispy and cirrus for a while, will darken and thicken as I google the bump. And it will swell with rain and sizzle with lightning bolts as I discover obscure conditions which the bump could be but almost certainly isn’t . . . So we do need to attend to milestones, to an extent, without becoming hysterical about them. They are there for a reason and they have a role to play in alerting us to problems our children might (but statistically probably do not) have. ‘Our son did have language delay and spotting that he was lagging behind on the development charts meant we picked it up early and got the involvement from a speech and language therapist which he needed. It might well have been nothing, but in our case it was not. Now he is 6, you’d never know he’d had a problem. He never stops talking.’
(Mumasaur) Some thoughts about milestones: • Places where new parents congregate tend to be hotspots of anxiety over milestones. There is sometimes little else to talk about on slow news days, which are many of the days of infancy. Parenthood turns you into a kind of scientist who specialises in your own baby. You watch him so much of the time. And there can be so little to observe. So you are driven to compare what he is doing (or not doing) with what other babies are doing. Consider hanging around with people with older or no children to distract you from ruminating about why your baby isn’t rolling yet. Although these people may avoid meeting your eye. 'It’s BORING. Find some different mates that talk about shoes or plants or the economy or Corrie. ANYTHING.’
(MalloryTowers)
GOLDEN RULES
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• Don’t constantly be reading books about child development, and be especially wary of those which give very narrow ranges for particular skills. • Remember that there are many areas of development where the range of ‘normal’ is vast – walking is one. • Many milestones are meaningless – some children never crawl, for example. • Once basic skills have been acquired, there is a lot to be said for enjoying the achievements of today and not looking ahead to the ones which may or may not occur in the future. ‘The whole planet might get eaten by a Giant Goat before he ever makes it to managing director, but a complicated jigsaw done upside down today is still Good Stuff and something to be enjoyed.’
(cory) • Constantly comparing one child with another is a mug’s game. ‘Two things I have noticed since having children is firstly that pretty much all children have something they can do amazingly well. My goddaughter could do jigsaw puzzles at about eighteen months, both the right way up and upside down (i.e. with no picture showing). That was it – in every other respect she was entirely “normal”, but if you judged her on that alone you would think she was astonishing. My son and daughter have both been very early talkers – much earlier than their peers, clear diction, full sentences etc. But that’s all, and in fact in my son’s case, all his friends at four now speak exactly the same way and you certainly don’t look at him and think he is freakishly advanced, in the same way that I don’t expect people say about me “Wow, doesn’t Anchovy speak well – so clear, and in sentences”.’
(Anchovy) • Anecdotally, many parents report that children who do things late often do them very quickly. They have just been figuring out exactly what to do in their own heads before having a go. Perhaps it is a pride thing. • Remember your child is the product of your own dubious genetic material and is compelled to express it. One of the great pleasures of having a child is seeing similarities and being struck by how he or she differs from his or her parents. 12
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‘My son was very funny about clapping. Can’t remember the age, but everyone else’s baby could already clap. He watched very closely while I clapped. Then he rubbed his hands together, while smacking his lips to make the sound. We figure that with both parents being people who cannot run/jump/throw a ball or do anything that requires physical coordination, that is just the way he is.’
( fisil ) • There is a crude tendency to associate early development of particular skills with intelligence. So a lot of clever mothers peer doubtfully at their largely inert infants and wonder where their DNA went. ‘Sleeping through the night, potty training, walking, these are NOTHING to do with intelligence, are they?? I can litter train a rabbit in a day. Dogs have really good motor skills. Hamsters sleep a lot. Not relevant.’
(harpsiheraldangelssing) • And let’s be frank – some of the anxious watching and comparing is not just about reassuring yourself that your child is ‘normal’ but about nourishing your guilty hope that she is somehow spectacular. This is probably why people love those Einstein stories about how he didn’t do anything at all as a child and then suddenly discovered the theory of relativity. It’s the ‘if we only have “normal” children what did we do “wrong” ’ or ‘I’m clever so why isn’t my kid clever, too?’ kind of thing. Then we wonder if others are exaggerating about their children’s talents. ‘I’m bummed my kids aren’t gifted; but I’m also grateful they don’t have any major problems, either (other than being burdened with me as a mother, but that’s another going back to wondering what I’m doing “wrong”, again).’
(zebratwizzler) There are of course some developmental delays which are worth checking out. If a child seems to be delayed in many areas or is particularly slow at one thing, take your concern to your GP rather than looking it up on GOLDEN RULES
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the internet. Chances are everything is fine but if a child does have special needs, early intervention is likely to be a good thing. ‘Also it often depends on whether the milestone is just late or whether it is disordered as well. My two-and-a-half-year-old has very unclear speech – and I’ve lost count of the number of people who have told me about late speakers. The thing is though that his speech isn’t delayed, it is disordered – he is trying to put it together incorrectly – speech sound development should follow a fairly set pattern, he’s all over the place – and that is often more of a problem than a delay and usually doesn’t get better by itself (and can indicate other problems).’
( Jimjams)
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WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME? Created in 2000 by two mothers, JUSTINE ROBERTS and CARRIE LONGTON, Mumsnet is widely regarded as the UK’s leading online parenting community. It has 2.5 million monthly visitors, and its members are loyal, active and passionate about the site. Fans of Mumsnet include India Knight, Sarah Brown, Dr Tanya Brown and Prime Minister David Cameron.
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Also available from Mumsnet Pregnancy: The Mumsnet Guide Babies: The Mumsnet Guide Toddlers: The Mumsnet Guide
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First published in Great Britain 2011 as The Mumsnet Rules This paperback edition published 2012 Copyright © 2011 by Mumsnet Limited The moral right of the authors has been asserted The extract from ‘Babel’ is copyright © Louis MacNeice, from Collected Poems, 2007, Faber & Faber. Reprinted with kind permission of David Higham Associates. The extract from ‘Afternoons’ is taken from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin © The Estate of Philip Larkin. Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4088 2226 5 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed in Great Britain by Clays Limited, St Ives plc
www.bloomsbury.com/mumsnet
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