I don’t miss those myopic mummies

How I agree with Sarah Oliver’s column last week regarding ‘smothering myopic mummies’.

As a retired headteacher I lost count of the number of times I heard my Reception class teacher or her teaching assistant say to a mother, ‘Who is the grown-up in your house?’ This was normally when a child of four or five arrived inappropriately dressed – without a coat or toting a huge teddy (the rule was ‘pocket toys only’) – and the mum’s excuse was ‘Well, s/he wanted to wear it/bring it.’

As children get older, there’s a bit of a difference. I have a retired secondary-school colleague who used to get mothers on parents’ consultation evenings saying (usually about a teenage daughter) ‘Well, we’re more like best friends than mother and daughter’, as if this was a good thing.

Her response was always: ‘You are her mother, she has best friends of her own age.’

I am relieved to have retired – the safeguarding procedures are now so stringent, and changing so fast, that teachers cannot possibly keep up and keep themselves ‘safe’ from parents who lack respect for the profession and believe that their little darlings can never do anything wrong. Barbara Hough, St Eval, Cornwall