Slacker mums make great kids( and gues show I know)
I’VE spent some time over the Easter hols thinking about my son’s headmaster, who happens to be the very well-known educationist and historian Sir Anthony Seldon. Now, Seldon produces a book every five minutes (his latest is called Beyond Happiness). He’s transformed three schools into world-class centres of learning, he knows all his pupils’ names and predicted grades by heart, and he answers every email within seconds.
Nobody can doubt his Napoleonic ambition and his Stakhanovite work ethic, all of which he tempers with a softspoken insistence that pupils meditate before class and that the most important life-lesson of all is mindfulness.
I bumped into Seldon at a party not so long ago and he arched his fingers together into a cathedral and contemplated me. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A seven.’
When I asked what he meant, he replied: ‘As a parent, you’re seven out of ten.’
It’s true – and I say this without pride – I sometimes forget what year my children are in, what exams they’re taking, and their teachers’ names. I’ve never done their homework, forced them to take holiday jobs, play musical instruments, or team games. Which makes me whatever the polar opposite of a tiger mother is.
And my two sons are both facing big exams – don’t ask me in what subjects – this summer. They rise before I do, and are heads down all day, hunched over their books.
My older son – doing finals – takes his 7am toast and tea to his desk. Even my sociable younger son has taken to heart his headmaster’s strictures that he should study between six and eight hours a day for his A-levels during the holidays.
I am embarrassed to tell you that my main aim is to try to distract them. ‘Come on, have another Easter egg! Or let’s watch a box set together,’ I beg. But they order me from the room. I am fascinated by this scenario, as I think two things are going on. One, they are grimly aware they are future members of Generation Rent, and will be working on zerohours contracts if they’re lucky, so they’re made of sterner stuff than us softy baby-boomers, to whom their industry seems almost unnatural.
The boys’ father, for example, often has a ‘pre-nap’ (a warm-up for a longer daytime snooze) and can sometimes manage a ‘post-nap’ too.
THE other day, a friend of my son asked my husband what he read at university. There was a long pause. He finally explained that when he was at Cambridge, study was considered ‘bourgeois’. I can’t repeat what he told my son’s friend he ‘majored in’, as I’m worried he might still go to prison, and he winces when politicians trot out the well-worn phrase ‘hard-working families’.
The other thing that’s going on, I hope, is that my laissezfaire approach to parenting hasn’t done irreparable damage to my children’s futures – not yet anyway.
But I admit I rang Seldon – who I found at his desk, quickly writing another book on Cameron’s Downing Street – to ask whether it was normal for my children to work so hard even though I was a slacker mother, and whether, in fact, there was a causal relationship between driven children and hands-free parents. I was hoping he was going to say that being ghastly and pushy was counter-productive.
‘Good parenting… is all about balance, and an art,’ he said, in careful words that I hope will console and comfort other families undergoing exam conditions this holiday. ‘Children have got to feel their parents love and care, but not too much, and the genius of parenting is to allow the child to find the internal motivation to sing or play the cello or dance for themselves.’
Isn’t it reassuring to know that you don’t have to be a manic martinet to breed conscientious offspring, just your averagely slack mum and dad?
Because, as I told Seldon, he was guilty of grade-inflation when it came to marking my report card. I’ve never been more than a four.