Time for Parenting...

...because raising children is a full-time job

March 2005 Newsletter

From the Chair; A Bundle of Contradictions; The Role of Fathers in Attachment Theory; How FTMs can help their husbands to help them

A Bundle of Contradictions

Alexandra Nightingale

A fellow ftm was bemoaning to me recently the time we spend ferrying our children from one activity to another, contrasting this "child-centred" approach with our own upbringing, when we were expected more to fit in with the adult world. That phrase "child-centred", which one hears bandied about so much in all areas of family policy, set me wondering about an apparent paradox: children do not seem to be any happier for being put at the centre of everything. Why is that? And is it merely co-incidence that "child-centred" is a phrase that has come into use only with the current generation of working parents?

There is a bundle of contradictions at the heart of the Government's attempts to win the votes of "hard-working" families in the run-up to the general election. Ftms do not seem to count as "hard-working": far from there being any recognition in the tax system either of marriage, or of the financial and social situation of the single-earner family, recent figures suggest that families are better off financially after divorce. We are promised "quality" childcare, but not supported when, as mothers, we give the best childcare possible. We are told we should spend more time talking and singing with our young children; then told that "what parents want" is wraparound educare, with our children sent off to school from dawn 'til dusk. Far from being "child-centred", this is all dictated by a largely misconceived perception of the needs of parents. And we wonder why children don't know how to behave if they are not the centre of attention.

Don't get me wrong: I am not (most of the time!) a stern Victorian moralist advocating that children should be seen and not heard (despite the fact that, as I write this, my three-year-old is playing hide and seek in the cupboard under the stairs with a torch!). But I do think that, paradoxically, children seem to thrive on not being the centre of attention all the time. They are at their most creative and resourceful when they and their activities fit around adults who are available, kind, fun and interested, but not totally focused on them all the time. They need quantity time all the time, not quality time when it suits us.

Unfortunately, this is precisely the reverse of the educare environment where grown-ups hover around the children in a "child-centred" way, while the adult world goes on separately somewhere else. Children of ftms, by contrast, are quite happy to help Mum with organising coffee mornings and sticking labels on PTA letters - and then to have her to themselves when they get home. Not very "new" or "modern", but maybe so old-fashioned that it's positively radical.