It’s a joke how we’ve let children rule our world
We had our family holiday in Kerry this year, where we ate and drank our body weight, read for hours and occasionally stirred ourselves from the armchair for a walk or yet another nerve-wracking drive around the sharp bends and treacherous cliffs of the famous Ring of Kerry.
‘Were the teenagers not bored?’ almost everyone asked, in varying tones of accusation or wonderment. ‘Yes of course,’ I shrugged. ‘But what can I do about that?’
I’m not much for parenting manuals but I definitely missed the tome that says family holidays must be tailored totally around offspring.
Anyway, when did it become child neglect to plonk a couple of teenagers in one of the most scenic parts of the world during a spell of hot weather, treat them to a slap-up dinner each night and only nag them occasionally to pick up their towels or knock off their iPhones? Excuse me for not providing a skate park or a couple of fake identity cards.
I won’t bore you with the details but I actually have done my bit to entertain the troops over the years, although I drew the line at Disneyland.
UNFORGIVEABLE, I know. True, there have also been ‘family-friendly’ events that I resisted, mainly because, in my experience, familyfriendly events mean nothing more than packs of screaming hyperactive children whose parents all seem to know one another and, for all I know, travel together in convoy.
These days restaurants, hotels and festivals and campsites wear their familyfriendly credentials with pride. The top chefs have family-friendly curries and courgette recipes, there are family-friendly dogs, jokebooks and gyms, and familyfriendly jobs, usually for mothers of course. In most cases, it’s shorthand I suppose for harmless or insipid or infantile.
It’s also a reflection of our cuddly ‘child-centric’ society, which I fear has become too entrenched to be a mere fad.
While previous generations demanded that children be seen and not heard, we are going to the other extreme in not just encouraging children to pipe up at every turn but in constantly seeing the world through the eyes of our little darlings. It means that rather than protecting our children and doing our best for them we are in danger of giving them more status and influence than adults.
On the way back from our ‘boring’ Kerry sojourn there were cartoonish signs on the roadworks outside Naas appealing for drivers to slow down because ‘my daddy works here’. Cute, maybe, but let’s hope we have not got to the stage of driving carefully solely to save little children needless suffering, rather than saving all lives, regardless of whether they have children or not.
It’s the same with those irritating Baby on Board car stickers, often to be seen plastered on vehicles careering down the M50 at 150kph. Are we seriously expected to drive extra carefully if the car ahead of us has a baby in it? Why not just drive carefully out of respect for everybody?
THE Baby on Board stickers have recently been adapted as badges for pregnant women on public transport to encourage fellow travellers to give them their seat. Clearly the brains behind this scheme believe that the golden badge of human gestation will be more effective in getting people to surrender their seats than common decency.
Perhaps they are right and it really is no longer adults but babies who hold the key to controlling social behaviour.