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our children, ourselves

My son is 9 years old and in Year 5, and so I am heading into a time when many parents like very much to start crapping themselves about the 11+.

For boys the process is particularly strange, as while many schools start at 11, some start at 13. It’s not actually that complicated but it’s an excuse for parents to lose their minds with panic, spend four hundred thousand pounds they don’t have on tutors, stop speaking to each other, and spreadsheet themselves into oblivion.

I have already been through this with Kitty, who is 11. So I have had a lot of conversations with friends and acquaintances about children who are at this stage, and continue to. This is fine by me. I’m not one of those people who objects to talking about schools and house prices, it’s fine. It’s great! It’s fascinating.

And what I have found most interesting throughout these conversations is just how much freaking baggage parents heap on to their children. My god the baggage! The schools they aggressively rule out (“Over my DEAD BODY” etc.), the assumptions they make about their children, the arguments they roll out to you, justifying whatever school they’re sending kiddo to on what feels like an entirely arbitrary basis - but is almost certainly rooted somewhere in their own school experience, which is now some tens of years out of date.

(You can’t ever tell with schools, though, is my conclusion. You can do all the research you like but in the end it’s a roll of a dice, a leap of faith. Who knows?)

But in terms of heaping assumptions and expectations onto our children, I am sure I do this, too. I must do! For example, my sister has a theory that women with sons dress them up and style their hair to ape boys that they fancied when they were younger, which does actually make quite a lot of sense when you think about it. I don’t have much of a chance of this with Sam as he is in sports kit pretty much 24/7. But very occasionally when I get to dress him up, I do so as James Hurley from Twin Peaks, in check shirts and cord jackets and a nice crew cut.

I have been denied the dress-up dolly thing with Kitty because she is so instinctively and stubbornly her own person. She does not care what I, or anyone else think about her. She has no clear ideas about what she does want to wear, only what she will not wear. And she will not wear what I would like her to, or do with her hair the dreams that I have for it. And she is stubborn enough to go out in public wearing utterly maniac clothing on purpose, rather than the thing I want her to wear.

She will not go shopping.

A sad but instructive day in my life was when I took her to Zara Kids when she was perhaps nine and said, excitedly, “You can have whatever you want,” (this would have been my actual dream when I was that age), only for her to turn and say “I’d like a snack.” So, I have had to invent a clothing persona for her, intuited from her internet leisure pastimes, favourite books and music choices. I am getting quite into it: it’s like doing a crossword, but made out of clothes.

This is all harmless. They’ve got to wear something, after all. Where it becomes complicated is when you are pushing things, ideas, constructs, onto your children and you don’t even realise you’re doing it.

And some children, (not Kitty), are complicit in this. They are pleasers, they are jellyfish, just drifting with the changing tides. They do want to be told what to do, to make you happy. “Yes,” they’ll say, “I want to do that,” because they don’t know - haven’t got a clue, how can they? They’re ten years old. And they know if they say “No” you will say “Why?” and they won’t have an answer. Because they are ten. And then when they are thirty they will turn around and say, “I never said I wanted to be a radiologist,” and you say, “Ah but you didn’t say that you didn’t…”

You are looking at your watch, now, and yawning. “Get to the point,” you are thinking. Well, it’s only really that this is a thing that we all do, and it’s pretty much unavoidable. The only course of action is to be aware that you’re doing it.

How about you? Are you able to stop yourself from endlessly attempting to correct your childhood trauma through your parenting choices? Please leave a comment in the handy box below.