on the very best ways to embarrass your children
Harry Wallop offers his essential guide on how to be a badly behaved parent
Last weekend, my wife and I settled down with our two boys, aged 10 and 12, to watch True Lies. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten the scene when Jamie Lee Curtis – playing the buttoned-up wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger – pretends to be a prostitute and performs a striptease.
“Enjoying this?” says my wife to the 12-year-old, who is burrowing into the sofa to escape the shame of watching a sexy scene with his parents.
Can there be any more delicious parental joy than making your child squirm with embarrassment?
This week, a survey of 2,000 parents tried to find out why children embarrass so easily. After extensive research (sitting down with my children and seeing how flustered they got…), I have discovered five ways to make your offspring squirm.
Sex Acknowledging that it’s normal for two adults to take their clothes off and get jiggy is a no-no. As is saying “get jiggy”. The pinnacle of embarrassment is asking your child about their biology homework, as I did recently. “What’s that?” I inquired, as my son tried to hide a sheet of A4.
“It’s gross. You can’t look.”
“Let me see,” I said, sensing his fear. I eventually prised from his hands a diagram of the female reproductive organs.
“It’s just a woman,” I said. He didn’t speak to me for weeks.
Social Media Instagram (Facebook is totally lame if you are a pre-teen) is meant to have a 13-and-over age limit – but this is ignored by every Year Six I know. Hippy hippy shake: dad dancing is one of the worst crimes of all So if you want to check what pictures your children are posting, become their friends online. Then leave comments for all their real friends to see: “Nice hair, darling. But couldn’t you have tidied your room before taking a selfie?”
Boom! Yoof speak is, like, totes awks. The kids won’t think it’s “sick”. In fact, they will look at you – as we all did at David Cameron when it was claimed he would win an Olympic gold medal for “chillaxing” – with withering disdain.
Sounding out text speak, such as saying “Lol” after a joke, is enough for your child to demand a parental divorce.
Affection in front of others A public show of endearment is the canary in the embarrassment coalmine. If your child wriggles uncomfortably when you plant a big, wet kiss at the school gates, you know this is the start of a decade of trying to avoid being seen anywhere near you.
Remember, this is healthy. Embarrassment is a child’s way of cutting the apron strings and finding their own two feet.
Dancing to pop tunes Loping around the kitchen using a wooden spoon as a microphone is the worst crime of all. According to this week’s report, the reason parents are so embarrassing when they are shaking their hips is because they stopped learning any new dance moves at the age of 25. I don’t think I learnt any in the first place.
Which is probably why all my children think that my “dancing” is so awful. Nothing causes them more teeth-grinding distress. Except writing about them in the pages of a national newspaper. That’s a lifetime of therapy.