Sophie Heawood: I’ve read all the advice, but I still don’t know – am I raising a serial killer?
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Version 0 of 1. Oh, what a relief it is to go to your first parents’ evening and hear lovely things about your child and realise that you haven’t messed this whole project up completely. I sat there in the pre-school classroom of our local primary school, last week, my adult bum squashed into a child’s seat, waiting for the teachers to say something about my three-and-a-half-year-old’s hitherto unspotted psychopathic tendencies. A quiet propensity for vengeful murders in the sandpit, perhaps, or a certain killer way with a glockenspiel. But no, it was all good news, and waves and waves of relief washed over me. Because here’s the thing: until your child is embedded in the education system, there aren’t really any unbiased grownups around to give a verdict on the person you’re inventing. You and your mother think your child is wonderful, sure, but you and your mother also share the family belief that broken biscuits contain no calories and that time spent on the property websites of minor European principalities is never wasted, so you are not to be trusted. And it’s not that you want your child to be embedded in any system at all, but if you’ve read as many parenting books as I have (The French way! The Argentinian way! The continuum concept! Attachment parenting!), and then done the things that I have ended up doing, then you, too, would be quietly concerned you were raising a serial killer. Thanks to all those books and blogs about natural parenting being the only righteous way, I worried about having had a stressful pregnancy, a bad labour, emergency surgery and no milk supply. I worried so much about formula milk, in particular, that the baby lost weight while I refused to let a drop of it touch her desperate lips. So brainwashed had I been by “Breast is Best” that I would now like all British medics to add a caveat to that campaign: “But Starving Is Much, Much Worse”. I worried so much about choosing the right nursery, only to move house, then have to move again, and on to new waiting lists – now she’s ended up going to four different places before she’s even turned four. A catastrophe, according to the theory. Yet to look at her, she seems… Jubilant? Alive? When I see a friend with a newborn baby, and look into her tired eyes, I know that it is not the baby keeping her up late, but the internet keeping her up even later, as she pores over some comment on a messageboard by a stranger called mummysparkleprincesshorse, whose friend once read a study that said 65% of children whose parents did controlled crying ended up in borstal with most of their body’s surface area tattooed with images of Peter Andre and/or dolphins, and that this means you and your baby must both stay awake in the same room for the rest of your lives, or you’re doing it all wrong. And so I tell them about my friend Sarah, who has now invented a parenting philosophy of her own to trump all these other ones, and called it Wolf Blanketing. What exactly Wolf Blanketing consists of isn’t clear, but it doesn’t matter. Whenever anybody on the bus points at Sarah’s baby girl and asks why she isn’t wearing a nice pink ribbon to stop her looking like a boy, out comes the death stare. “We practise Wolf Blanketing,” she replies. If somebody wants to know why she hasn’t wiped the baby’s nose: “We practise Wolf Blanketing.” If a well-meaning friend asks why she is doing baby-led weaning (or why she isn’t), Wolf Blanketing is the reply. “Because the person who needs to be wrapped in a blanket,” she says, “to escape from all the parenting advice, isn’t the baby. It’s me.” |