BEING a parent is the toughest job in the world, that's the official line.
My official line is that parents make work for themselves.
To an outsider, parenting seems to be a competitive sport. Children no longer go to bed. The have Bedtime. Bedtime is hallowed, sacrosanct. It takes hours of dedicated labour.
You can't telephone parents during Bedtime, you can't be anywhere near their homes. To disrupt Bedtime is to mark yourself out as some kind of hell troll bent on destroying the sanctity of the family.
What happened to just cleaning your teeth and going to bed? That is not enough.
Not enough is the marker of the modern parent. Having spent tens of thousands of pounds manipulating their children into the "right" schools it is then not enough for the kids to come home from a hard day learning and play in the street or attend Brownies/Scouts on a Friday.
They must have ski-ing lessons, piano and singing, swimming, horse-riding, football, dancing, gymnastics, karate and camera club. And that's just Mondays.
A birthday party in your living room with ice cream and tinned mixed fruit, some homebaking and pass the parcel is not enough. The average cost of a modern child's party is £309. For this, you take your child to a swimming party where they get the whole pool to themselves, replete with giant inflatibles. It's not really a swimming party so much as a theme park in water.
Or you can hire a bowling alley, a climbing wall, a ski slope or a petting zoo. Party bags are a minimum £15-a-head.
The news that the parents of a five-year-old schoolboy in Wales have been invoiced for failing to attend a school friend's birthday party is no surprise. Derek Nash and Tanya Walsh failed to take their son, Alex, to a classmate's shindig and were threatened with legal action if they don't cough up £15.95. I'm only amazed the bill wasn't higher.
Fish fingers and chips are not enough for the modern parent's modern child. Food must be organic, vegetable-based and raw. Speaking again of children's parties, a friend was at a children's party recently where one of the many activities on offer was a table allowing kids to ice their own biscuits.
Or, it would have been, but little Arabella is banned from processed sugar and artificial colourings. Instead, the party-goers were allowed to decorate rice cakes with honey and chia seeds. They were cool with it, however. They didn't know any different.
I like children, I really do. But I'd hate to be a Parent.
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