Li’l Bhaji is in major boundary-pushing mode today, being constantly and deliberately naughty with a grin and cheerfulness that is actually harder to bear than if he’d been sullen and wilful.
I have just rather tearfully confessed to an online friend that actually, I don’t like my three year old very much this morning and was glad to dump him off at nursery for a three hour respite. I have been a shouty, vindictive bitch-monster from hell and I’m not proud of it in the slightest.
So the article Parent Rage in today’s Times was very timely.
Campaigners for children’s rights certainly take that line. The NSPCC’s campaign against child abuse makes an explicit point that no loss of self-control by parents is tolerable. It’s not just smacking that now qualifies as abuse, but shouting, belittling, almost any kind of deviation from the unruffled air of benign and imperturbable calm urged on us by the parenting pages and the plethora of television parenting programmes[...]
[...]Back in 1947, long before Supernanny was thought of, the renowned paediatrician D.W. Winnicott wrote an amazing thing: “Let me give some reasons why a mother hates her baby,” he wrote. “The baby is ruthless, treats her as scum, an unpaid servant, a slave. . . He is suspicious, refuses her good food, and makes her doubt herself . . .” Oh my goodness. He just came right out with it. Let’s hear it again, shall we? Mothers (sometimes) hate their babies. We could continue this line of thought: sometimes they hate their toddlers, too. And their bigger children.
And their teenagers. Especially their teenagers. Sometimes we hate our children so much that we wish we’d never had them, or that we could run away from home and be ourselves again – have fun, get some sleep, have a conversation, or simply not just have to keep telling people what to do, nonstop, all day long.
It’s an excellent article, and I thoroughly recommend you read the lot.
My favourite bit though is the list at the end of suggestions on how to keep your children happy in the car. It describes the usual bunch of entertainment ideas then at the very end suggests:
- Install a cage partition, as for dogs.
Perhaps I should invest in a kennel?
7 responses so far ↓
1 Valb // 7th Jun 2007 at 11:28 pm
Pewari, having just endured two days of hell with my 9 year old, I can totally understand how you can love someone and yet hate them at the same time :-(
As an aside, your mention of a dogcage in the car reminded me of a story which I saw today – I’m not sure if it made the national news, but here it is, and it’s very hard to believe ANY mother could do this to her kids, no matter how much they wind you up:-
Mother fined for abandoning girls
A mother has been fined for abandoning her two young children alongside a busy dual carriageway on a winter afternoon.
The 44-year-old left her daughters, aged six and nine, on Northumberland’s A69 after an argument.
Police were called by concerned motorists who had spotted the children at the roadside in January.
The woman admitted two charges of abandoning or exposing a child to unnecessary suffering and was fined £2,000 by Hexham magistrates.
Apparently, it was 3 hours before she even went looking for them, which is pretty shocking, let alone the fact that she left them at the side of the road in the first place. The children are now living with their father.
2 ian // 8th Jun 2007 at 6:21 am
Do dog cages contain a sound barrier now that mutes high pitched whining?
3 Pewari // 8th Jun 2007 at 7:00 am
valb: yes, saw that news item, in fact it’s what the inspiration for the article I linked to was. However, I don’t think I wanted to hear that about 9 year olds!! Akra Jr has got to a lovely age of 6 and I was hoping that would last until at least 12 or so ;)
ian: unfortunately not. I feel that’s possibly a major design flaw…
4 dropdeaddusty // 8th Jun 2007 at 4:13 pm
My opinion is that kids are basically insane. After I had mine, I could no longer deny the doctrine of original sin…that no one is born basically good, lol!
5 ian // 8th Jun 2007 at 8:46 pm
You call it a design flaw, I call it a unique product marketing opportunity. Has anyone got the number for the patent office?
6 Pewari // 9th Jun 2007 at 4:01 pm
dropdeaddusty: lol, I can completely understand where you’re coming from with that.
ian: hmm… you make it, I just might well buy one…
7 Alley Katt // 11th Jun 2007 at 10:55 am
A friend of mine’s mother said that she felt like throwing her baby down the stairs (this was 34 years ago), my mother apparently gave me whisky to make me go to sleep, she threatened to throw me in the canal, and my daughter right now is trying to see how far I will go before I snap.
My problem at the moment is that I am suffering severely from depression, and I have just started new techniques that are helping where my kids are concerned, and to me, that is all that matters. When I start losing it – as I do so often at the moment – I stop, think and close my eyes. Surprisingly it works.
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