Today let us begin with the bottom line. The message, that is.
The very fact of the excessive preoccupation with parenthood and questions of child-rearing — in words and pictures, in print and online — is damaging the quality of our parenting and making it less effective, and perhaps less happy.
Second message: placing the child principally at the centre of the family's beam of attention, and shifting the adult to the edge of the circle, is bad for children.
That is not exactly a new message, it must be admitted. But old messages need repeating, because we forget. As a parent, your rate of forgetting simple truths advances meteorically as domestic life rolls on.
It is an intrusive heretical thought, no doubt, and even somewhat paradoxical. Good parenting is not connected to children?
Stay with me for a minute. Let us write on the board what we know.
Good parenting does not require any prior training, unlike preparation for a professional role. Being an air traffic controller requires a process of learning and qualification, otherwise you will not succeed. On the other hand, millions of couples were hurled into the situation of children without books or advisers, for generations, and a good many of them produced functioning and happy offspring.
The intention is not to say that preparation is harmful, but to recall that it is in no way essential to reaching the hoped-for result.
Second point. Raising children is a multi-disciplinary and non-exclusive task. A parent raising a child finds himself engaged in a variety of tasks differing in content and complexity — feeding, establishing rules of discipline, choosing clothing, emotional support, cleanliness and hygiene, setting an educational and cultural routine.
Logically, it is impossible for him to be brilliant at every one of them.
And here is the practical consequence, which is the point of the whole piece.
A parent who has been persuaded that each of those domains requires expertise, optimisation and continuous attention will be permanently anxious and permanently inadequate — because the standard is unmeetable by construction.
Whereas a parent occupied with their own life, their work, their relationship and their interests, who is adequate at most of those tasks and good at some, produces children who are demonstrably fine — and who additionally get to observe an adult with a life, which is itself the most useful thing they will see all decade.