I love my pash-ion for kissing my kids
You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss. An innocent osculation, an unsulliable salutation. Unless, of course, you’re a celebrity dad on the receiving end of a platonic peck on the chops from your sevenyear-old daughter at the local ice skating rink.
When footballing fashion icon David Beckham shared a festive family snap of daughter
Harper going in for an endearing smooch on the smacker this week, the affectionate act was slated as ‘‘disgusting’’, ‘‘gross’’ and ‘‘wrong’’. Not to mention cunning, calculated and social media-savvy, for it’s not the first time the Beckhams have gone viral for snogging their offspring. Beckham first kissed his girl on social media last year and wife Victoria did it in 2016.
On the face of it, David Beckham is hardly a soul sister of mine. He’s filthy rich, globally famous and his impressive physique is tattooed to within an inch of its A-list life. But I have even less in common with former tabloid editor and talent show judge Piers Morgan, who declared Beckham’s kiss ‘‘creepy’’ and ‘‘weird’’. Morgan, like his good buddy Donald Trump, spends an unhealthy amount of time goading the Twittersphere. He’s called women’s rights marchers ‘‘vacuous rabid feminists’’, took a pop at actor Daniel Craig for carrying his baby in a papoose, hashtagging him #emasculatedBond, and he chimed in during Britain’s Mental Health Awareness Week with a nostalgic defence of the stiff upper lip.
‘‘I’m not convinced by this new trend of male public soul-bearing,’’ Morgan tweeted. ‘‘Time for our gender to get a grip. Life’s tough. Man up.’’
Life certainly is tough if you can’t be a little lovey-dovey with your kids, so why is it that, while kissing children on the cheek attracts no controversy, lip-smackers make us feel strangely uncomfortable? Are we seriously incapable of separating this quixotic celebration of kinship from its adultsonly sexual connotations? Let’s be clear here. If you think it somehow kinky to kiss your seven-year-old on the lips, then kissing a six-year-old must surely be more indecent. What about a five-year-old? Four? Three? Two? When does it become weird? No one gives a second thought to nuzzling up to newborn babies, after all.
Earlier this year NFL star Tom Brady raised eyebrows for sharing a Facebook video of his 10-year-old son Jack giving him a quick peck, followed by an ‘‘uncomfortably long’’ locking of lips. And remember the hoo-haa that erupted when former Socceroo Craig Foster was televised rubbing the chest of a young girl in front of a 40,000-strong crowd at an Australian Legends XI game in 2016?
After being trolled online for his ‘‘inappropriate hand gestures’’, Foster was forced to point out the girl was his eight-year-old daughter. It was a fatherly hug, albeit awkwardly executed.
I was raised in a stoic rural family that actively recoiled from physical contact. Ditto my Westie husband, who would rather crawl into a hole and die (and he’s a roading contractor, so he’s perfectly capable of digging himself into deep holes) than kiss his wife in public.
Yet, like racism, sexism, homophobia and political conservatism, the desire (or lack of) to show affection in public appears – refreshingly – to be generationally fluid. Whereas my father couldn’t bring himself to hug or kiss his own mother as she lay dying in a hospital bed at the age of 97, my kids had no qualms about giving ‘‘old Grandma’’ one last cuddle before she shuffled off this mortal coil.
And although I still don’t like being kissed by strangers, I frequently embarrass myself by going in for a hug instead of a handshake these days and I have no qualms about kissing my sons on their heads, necks, cheeks or lips.
So go on, bend down like Beckham and plant a big slobbery one on your kids’ lips. Try it on your teens, too, even if it embarrasses the crap out of them. In fact, why stop there? Play tonsil hockey with all the old codgers in your clan while you’re at it. Just be aware that you could be opening yourself up for a slip of the tongue.
I should have known something was up the last time my five-year-old son asked, ever so politely, if he could kiss me on the lips. Sure, I said, immediately regretting it as he pushed in his tongue and roared with the sort of maniacal laughter usually reserved for fart jokes in our house.
Kissing your kids is one thing, but when they pash you? That really is gross, weird and creepy all rolled into one.
Life certainly is tough if you can’t be a little loveydovey with your kids.