Who are you calling a bad mother
Since giving birth to her daughter Sasha, Julia Llewellyn Smith has been shocked by just how bitchy parents can be to each other
When pregnant for the first time two years ago with my daughter Sasha I became a target for the usual fusillade of gloomy warnings. ?Your body will never be the same, say goodbye to sleep, your life will change forever.? The only original line I heard came from a friend who said: ?As soon as you become a parent you become incredibly judgmental. For the rest of your life you?ll be looking down on other people and they?ll be looking down on you.?
What could she mean, I puzzled. It didn?t take long to find out. From the earliest days of Sasha?s life I was having to explain to disapproving faces at the baby clinic that I?d had a caesarean section because she was a breech baby, not because I was too posh to push. From then on, I found myself continually defending my chosen style of child-rearing (slavish attachment to strict Gina Ford routines) to pursed-lip other mothers.
They thought I was a devil for muttering there was something to this controlled crying business. James, my boyfriend, and I thought they were drips for letting their children sleep and eat whenever they wanted. ?No wonder X is so slow at crawling,? we?d snort. ?Without regular naps, he?s always exhausted.? At the same time, lips curled when I revealed I was still breastfeeding at 13 months. ?It?s a very personal decision,? my so-called friends and I would agree, before they went home to bitch about what a hippie I was and I rolled my eyes at the fact their formula-fed infants were always getting colds.
Somehow I kidded myself that things would be different once the mad days of babyhood had passed, but now Sasha?s a toddler, it?s getting worse. Virtually every day James and I tut about parents who tolerate their children getting repeatedly out of bed (?Why don?t they just put a rope on the door??) or whose toddlers are still drinking from a bottle (?Don?t they know how bad it is for their teeth??).
Then, a few weeks ago, I was at a first birthday party in the nappy valley of Crouch End, north London. A chocolate cake appeared, I took a slice, and, to silence her yelps, gave a chunk to Sasha. She demanded another, then another. I realised silence had fallen. Looking around, I felt like Marie Antoinette at the guillotine. ?Does Sasha eat sugar?? one mother asked in much the same way you might inquire if I fed her arsenic. It reminded me of Gwyneth Paltrow?s remark that she would rather ?die than let her child eat Cup-a-Soup?.
All the way home, James and I carped about neurotic, middle-class parents. ?A glass of Coke and a KitKat never did us any harm,? we justified to ourselves, while meanwhile the houses of north London buzzed with horror at the aftermath of their visit from Wayne and Waynetta Slob.
Professor Frank Furedi, author of Paranoid Parenting, knows what I?m talking about. ?Our grandparents would never have criticised other parents, now we do it all the time, so much so it shocks me,? he says. ?Once bringing up a child used to be a matter of this choice as opposed to that, now we?ve become much more emotionally involved in the process it?s about saying, ?This is my identity?. When you see other parents doing it another way it criticises your very sense of self.
?I am very laid back about what my kid eats ? I don?t do any of this Jamie Oliver stuff ? but I told this to a parent who was vegetarian and she was utterly shocked. It wasn?t a question of what I fed my child, it was because I was calling into question her integrity as an individual and her whole moral outlook and to her that made me an evil person.?
Looking ahead, it can only get worse. The number of activities scheduled into your child?s day, the amount of pocket money allowed, what school she attends (put her down too early for your favoured institution and people will deride your pushiness, leave it too late and she?ll never get A-levels/a degree/a job/a life), taking her out of school early for holidays ? the comparisons will be endless.
If you?re like Fergie and snuggle up with your children in front of DVDs all day, then you might as well call in the NSPCC, if you?re like Madonna and ban television than you?re a humourless martinet. I?ll think parents who let their teenagers drink, smoke and have sex under their roof are irresponsible and lazy; they?ll think I am putting my head in the sand when it comes to the realities of adolescent life.
Naturally, the biggest issue is working mothers. As someone who works part-time from home, I am able to condemn both the stay-at-homes, whose horizons extend as far as the next school jumble sale, and the selfish full-timers who might as well not have had children for all they see them. Of course, both sides have an equal dig back at me ? the first lot were shocked when I found a nanny when Sasha was only 10 weeks old, the second think my work is just a silly hobby, that I try to squeeze between Gymboree classes.
The government hasn?t helped: state-funded parenting classes, magazines and helplines abound, along with endless initiatives such as home-school contracts to make us aware of our ? and everyone else?s ? inadequacies. Nor has the proliferation of celebrity child gurus.
Turn on the television and you will find the Baby Mind Reader on one channel berating parents for angering their child for not keeping the house tidy (?Yes, what a tip!? I cry hypocritically from my food-stained sofa), while on another Supernanny pushes the naughty step. Watching (and judging) parents who are even more clueless than me gives me a totally unwarranted, warm feeling of superiority.
?Those programmes are useless, they create a massively unpleasant atmosphere,? Furedi fulminates. ?They are gladiatorial, voyeuristic and almost pornographic when they feature really incompetent parents. They simply exist to make other parents feel good about their skills.?
Oh dear. I think Professor Furedi is judging me for watching these shows. But then again, I am a bit shocked he?s feeding his child junk. Okay, perhaps it doesn?t make him an evil person. But I do think a professor should know better.