ASK MEGSY

Our Agony Aunt Meg Mason dishes out somewhat questionable style and decorating advice for the holidays

Meg Mason takes on the parents and the in-laws

We’ve always spent January at my parents’ beach house, but now we have twin toddlers, it seems like a deathtrap. Although I’ve asked them to baby-proof it, they insist I’m being a helicopter parent and there was no such thing as baby-proofing when my brother and I were growing up. What can we do, apart from not go? Carolyn, Dulwich Hill, NSW

Ah yes, the long, hot, pre-safety summers of our collective youth, spent jumping off the carport onto a rusty-springed trampoline, angling the tin slide into the above-ground pool so we could slide down headfirst (achieving maximum speed via a squirt of Morning Fresh) and dashing through the sprinkler at the day’s end to cool the sunburn caused by the SPF4 we haphazardly applied before spending six straight hours in the sea. They were halcyon days for us, but even more so for our parents, whose chief concession to safety was sending us down to the sand dunes to play unsupervised so they could splash kerosene on the barbecue to hurry up the snags.

And while, to this day, that generation insists their hands-off style of child-rearing did us no harm, in actual fact their memory of driving us into town (unrestrained in the front seat and letting us change the gears) to get our front teeth reinstalled and foreheads stitched shut has been erased by time, if it wasn’t erased immediately by the three calming shandies they stopped in for on the way home (with us left to wait outside the RSL in the tray of the ute). For better or worse, times have changed and nowadays it’s frowned upon to let children learn their own lessons about gravity and rip-tides, and what it feels like to ride a BMX through a bifold door. But it would be too sad to forgo a precious family summer for that reason. Although it represents a challenge to packing the boot, take your own vast arsenal of child-safety equipment with you. Not only will it save you from having to spend every waking minute of your holiday body-blocking two toddlers from an open-tread staircase and trying to lure them away from the tetanus-laced swing-tennis pole with a mini Bulla, clever redeployment of the baby gate will help you force a compromise with your parents. While they’re at the bowlo’s seafood night, install it at the front door, knowing that anyone over 60 is incapable of figuring out a child-proof latch, and calmly refuse them entry until they agree, at least, to take the rope swing off the Hill’s Hoist and stop letting anyone under preschool age operate the ride-on mower in thongs. My new husband and I just had our first Christmas as a married couple, and did well blending our separate family traditions. But afterwards I discovered that his family don’t take their tree down until the beginning of February. Mine always gets rid of it straightaway and to be honest, I’m struggling not to judge him for wanting to keep it up. Steph, via email

Of course you are. As someone who also likes to get the decs off first thing Boxing Day so the tree can be sawn up and stashed in the green bin by noon, I know how hard it is to watch a blue spruce die a slow, agonising death in a corner of the family room. But late tree removal isn’t necessarily a sign of bad character. It could be your husband’s way of justifying the $60 he paid the local Scouts for it, as you might justify a pair of $900 Louboutins on a cost-per-wear basis. As you may one day have to explain in return, the more you use something, the cheaper it becomes. Not a moral failing. Just simple economics.