Rant: Critical children

Critical children When your children are young, you take care of them as best you can, tending to their every need. But when they have grown up, how do they repay you?

By making fun of you. Once they wriggle free from your jurisdiction, you are nothing but a joke. Perhaps to them you never were anything else, and they were just saving up to taunt you later.

Fathers who once fondly assumed they were looked up to now find everything they do is wrong or ridiculous. If they try to stay ‘with it’, they are accused of dad dancing. Should they dare try to keep in shape, they are vilified as MAMILS, middle-aged men in Lycra. And woe betide the dad who swaps the boring family car for a sports car.

Even – perhaps especially – famous parents are cut down to size by their kids. In his recent memoir, TV documentary-maker Louis Theroux sniggers at his father’s weird American accent and the tank tops and flares he wore in the 1970s. Louis’s father is bestselling author Paul Theroux.

Dads may come in for the cruellest jibes, but mums are not immune. My two sons, Will and Tom ( The Oldie’s Town Mouse), explode into gales of derisory laughter at my delusion, as they see it, that, at the age of 75, I believe I can still attract a man. By rights – their rights, at least – I should be long past it.

As your ever-loving family collapse into helpless giggles at yet another of your real or imagined foibles, whatever happened to the concept of honouring thy father and thy mother? And what should be your reaction?

The only response is to laugh along with them and hope that, underneath all the incessant teasing and joshing, they are really quite fond of you. LIZ HODGKINSON