Nic: I’m not a lazy mum
AROCHDALE mum has hit back at critics who say she is ‘lazy’ for letting her children do what they want.
Nic Bescoby was on Good Morning Britain to speak about how she has scrapped traditional parenting for a more ‘gentle’ approach when she received some backlash from viewers.
The mum-of-three allows her kids to choose how to structure their own days and lets them stay up late so that they don’t feel ‘anxious’ going to bed.
Nic, who is mum to George, eight, Ellie, seven who both appeared on the ITV programme with her and Aimee, six, spoke to hosts Ben Shephard and Kate Garraway about her unconventional approach, insisting it is not laziness.
Nic said: “It’s a lot of work, laziness is completely the wrong. I mean, I work from home, I am doing a uni course at the moment so there are a lot of elements in there.
“It’s constantly answering questions, researching the questions that they ask because half the time I don’t know the answer to the questions they ask.
“So we have to go and find the answer which is teaching them another key skill to find answers to questions.”
When Kate Garraway asked whether Nic ever resorts to telling her children to go to bed, she brushed that off as the ‘lazy option.’
“The lazier option would be saying ‘you have to do what I say’ because that is easier for me,” she said. “Where as actually we would sit and discuss why and it does take a lot of work to go through that. Sometimes I do say, we have to do this right now because I need to do it. It’s give and take, it’s not just allowing them to do what they want. That takes a lot of work.”
She continued: “As they were toddlers of course it’s really difficult to teach a toddler this. It took us a lot of effort to instil those values in them. Today anyone who has met my children has said how wonderful they are, how polite they are, and how much they have respected the rules of the studio which is a completely different set of rules to what we’d have at home.”
When Ben asked whether the structure of society is instilled in children at school, Nic defended her decision to educate at home.
“That’s the society they’re in now,” she said. “If we look at the society we’re going into, there has to be massive changes to the world we’re living in if you look at environmental factors, the way the world is changing, the technology we’re producing, we need out of the box thinkers.”
Viewers were torn on Nic’s parenting methods.
One warned: “This was the way my parents raised me and it messed me up for a long time. By the time I was an adult it was incredibly hard for me to cope with bosses being bossy. I hated being told what to do. I went from job after job.”
Another criticised: “kids are in for shock when they grow up and get told what to do. Just pure laziness on the mums part.”
A third said: “The job of a parent is to raise kids to become independent functioning adults. Wait till they grow up and have to follow society’s rules.”
But Nic also gained some support from viewers.
“To be fair I agree with some of the things said as I worked in nurseries and pre schools and children learn faster doing the things they enjoy like playing,” said one.
“If you force a child to do something that’s not their choice they aren’t interested and you are hitting a brick wall.”
Another praised: “Mum Nic seems such a lovely Mum, I feel she’s winning this morning.”
» GMB airs weekdays from 6am on ITV.