Town Mouse

‘They listed, in great detail, all the ways in which we’d been terrible parents’

There was one less pleasant aspect to lockdown.

It gave the young Town Mice, now all teenagers, an opportunity to list, in great detail, night after night, all the ways in which Mrs Mouse and I had been terrible parents when they were small.

There was a long list of complaints. We didn’t feed them properly. We should have stayed in our town nest and not moved to the country, because they felt lonely and isolated. Why did we not have a television? Or a Nintendo Wii? We argued too much. We screamed at them. We complained about money. Our cars were grotty. We were always late to collect them from school. The house was messy. We wrote about them too much in the Daily Mail.

And I was permanently grumpy. ‘You think you’re great, but you’re not,’ was one hurtful comment.

It seems the idyllic, free and easy, bohemian country life we thought we’d given them was not as idyllic as we’d thought. It now appears that they would have preferred bourgeois respectability.

I lay in bed worrying about this grievance list night after night. I comforted myself by reflecting that at least the young mice were telling us all of this now. How much better than spending a fortune on shrinks and waiting till they were 50 to tell us how much they hate us – or put it all in a book, like Nancy Mitford.

‘They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you,’ as Philip Larkin put it. When our first child was born, I remember thinking that I would be the first parent ever to avoid f**king up my children, but it seems that has not turned out to be the case.

I’ve since discovered that lockdown loathing, where the offspring review their parents unfavourably to their faces, has been very common.

Families have spent much more time together than usual. So the young ones have had the time and leisure both to ponder the subject and to discuss it at the kitchen table. To use the language of the young, it’s a meme. The teenagers may even have an app for it, I don’t know.

One friend told me that his 22-year-old daughter had exploded one mealtime, complaining that her childhood had been a disaster because Dad was always away and Mum was in a state of permanent panic. The older daughter, now 25, later told the parents that in her view they had done a great job, which took the sting out of the initial complaint somewhat.

Another dad endured years of penury and struggle in order to send his daughter to Bedales. Under lockdown, the daughter informed him she would much rather have been sent to the local comp. She’d felt incredibly poor as everyone else’s parents were loaded. She now had unreasonable expectations of what life should be like, having been exposed to the offspring of the greediest people in the world.

I suspect the kids have got together on a review site called Parent-adviser and wound each other up about the terrible parenting they’ve received.

Why are they so whingy? It’s because, as a reaction to the distanced parenting style of the baby boomers, we hovered overmuch. And we constantly told them how amazing, unique, wonderful and talented they were.

I also blame the envy-producing advertising sales business – Instagram. It’s very easy for people to post a picture that projects a perfect or happy life. The teenagers and twentysomethings are forced to make comparisons with others. Even when you know the pictures are lies, you still feel somehow inferior.

Parent-whinging is nothing new. Socrates’s son complained bitterly about his mother, Xanthippe. ‘No one could put up with her vile temper,’ he told his dad.

‘Which think you,’ asked Socrates, ‘is the harder to bear, a wild beast’s brutality or a mother’s?’

‘I should say a mother’s when she is like mine.’

Socrates reminded his son that his mother had suckled him at her breast and then clothed, cared for and worried about him for years and years. He should be more grateful.

The contemporary sage of the boomer generation, Lady Antonia Fraser, who gave her now middle-aged children a highly privileged education, told me recently that they all complained: ‘The one who went to boarding school told me he wished he’d gone to day school, and the one who went to day school is angry he didn’t go to boarding school. You can’t win!’

The upside of all this is that our shortcomings as parents have all now been thoroughly aired and we’re all getting on pretty well now, I think. Nothing has been repressed. The little mice now accept we parent mice are full of faults, but we mean well. Maybe we’ve been ‘good enough parents’, as the kind paediatrician and psychoanalyst Douglas Winnicott recommended.

I do wish, though, that our children would display just a touch more Stoicism – and that, one day, they’ll forgive me for writing this piece.