The Side-Eye on…all our kids

Our children have enjoyed six months of quality time at home with their parents and it has been so wonderful to see their little quirks and personalities achieve full expression in this time. Little Dylan has really bonded with Mum over the daily pleasure, even forced pain of banana-bread making. Molly can name every beetle and creepy crawly in the garden and has made an adorable, if slightly sinister, display of her finds.

We’ve all really really got to know our kids, you know? And after endless, endless hours in each other’s company, back-to-school was a huge wrench. But oh, how we love our kids, and their adorable quirks, which are universally adorable and in no way annoying, odd, rude or downright mental.

Even before lockdown, we were all capable of extreme self-delusion about our kids. Of course, that’s the secret of the human race; to wilfully conflate mediocrity with signs of genius, or bad-tempered littleshitbagitis with wonderful free-spiritedness. Fortunately, the splitting of your perineum during childbirth comes with a free pair of rose-tinted glasses, which you would be wise to keep on for the next eighteen to fifty years.

Remember back when there were kids in school who were not hidden geniuses? ‘She’s never read a book in his life, he has no head for maths’, their mammy would cheerfully say through a deep cloud of 1980’s cigarette smoke. Today, there’s no such thing as a child who is less than Mensa-level IQ. Instead of shrugging our collective shoulders at the realisation that as in life, most kids flounder about happily in the middle of the bell curve and yet manage to get on perfectly well in their education and later their lives and careers, we talk knowledgeably about diverse processing speeds and learning styles.

And while there’s much that’s good about the leaps forward in recognising educational diversity, some of the ‘isms and ‘ologies have become a convenient whitewash for the happy bulge of children who are average in some areas and stronger in others.

In the playground, it’s the same story. One child’s thuggishly booting other kids off ‘the big swing’ has been rebranded as ‘strong sense of fairness’ or ‘highly developed sense of justice.’ Three-year-olds run around shouting menacingly that ‘fairing is sharing.’

Once upon a time, do you recall you used to go to your friend’s house for dinner and eat whatever you were given? No, me neither; we didn’t have ‘playdates’ then and if you did end up playing at your friend’s house when it was time for them to eat, it was perfectly normal to sit there staring with fascination at their Donegal Catch, peas and chips without expecting to be offered any. Should you begrudgingly offered half a chip with their wrong-tasting ketchup, you would have slurped it down eagerly and never dreamt of refusing.

Today, it’s practically the default to assume that any visiting child will be a fussy eater (sorry – has ‘a really sensitive palate’) and will demand plain pasta/ a vegan substitute meal / no green bits and absolutely no cheese or tomatoes. I realise I sound like everyone’s mother, but the vogue for snacking doesn’t help either. I grew up walking to the park and back with nary a bag of rice cakes and juice box to sustain me and it never did me any harm, etc. It also helped me not to become ‘very big-boned’ in modern parlance. The ‘plus-size’ child who has no medical reason to be, is commonplace now, which is no good thing.

As we prepare, with a sigh and a stocking up of loo rolls to once again curtail our normal lives, let’s remember that we best serve our kids by bringing them up to be happy, healthy, curious and humble. Whether that’s within our own four walls or within the wider world, we should find the parenting sweet spot that sits between embracing the good and amplifying the bad. In short, if only all of yours could be more like my own perfect offspring, we’d all be happier. Did someone say that it was HIS turn for a go on that swing?

Jennifer Coyle, September 2020.