“Does there ever come a time where you’re not embarrassed by your kids’ behaviour?” I asked my friends who have kids older than mine. “No,” came the unanimous response from the assembled parents. My shoulders sagged.
“In fact, let me tell you what my 18-year-old got up to the other day …” one story began.
When I saw the story this week about a kid who knocked over a bronze-age jar in a museum in Israel, my whole body and heart cringed for his poor parents. I think if that had been me, I would have dug into the ground with my bare hands to live as a mole woman, alone with my shame, never to be seen again until my dying breath.
Don’t get me wrong, my kids have done their fair share of parental shaming. There was the time my son pointed at every single person on our packed tram, shouting “HE POOS, SHE POOS, WE POO, EVERYONE POOS!” Or the time we decided to nurture his love of gangsta rap music and he went to school and used some choice phrasing to his peers and teachers, leading to a call from a bemused high school principal and a long conversation with our son about not using words if we don’t know their meaning.
Every time this sort of thing happens, my mum and dad glean untold joy in my humiliation. They see it as payback for the years of torment they experienced during their active parenting years.
For my 18th birthday, they took the whole family, including my 11-year-old brother, to one of Melbourne’s most famous – and upmarket – Chinese restaurants. My brother was so excited that he thanked them by packing so much peking duck in his face that he actually went green; it’s not just a saying, it really can happen. My mother screamed, my dad picked him up and started to run down the ostentatiously wall-papered corridor towards the toilets. They didn’t make it.
Or there was the time my expat parents took a call from my boarding school in Melbourne, letting them know some boarder friends and I had stolen the headmistress’ keys, had them copied, returned them and weeks later let in a bunch of our (male) friends from the equivalent boys’ school down the road for a large dance party in the 19th-century “drawing room”. Trust me, it was the most fun that room had ever seen. Needless to say, my parents were utterly horrified, both by the reports that came in and my later suspension.
I think the mortification of a parent when a child misbehaves is partly down to the fear that they’ll be judged as a “bad parent”. But what constitutes a bad parent differs from family to family.
I happen to think that if you love your kids, you support them, give them positive reinforcement and give them a firm hand when they need it (in addition to, you know, feeding them etc), then almost everything else falls by the wayside.
As I’ve previously written, swearing doesn’t worry me so long as it’s not based on hate, gender inequality, someone’s identity or how they look. This is the reason we were so shocked by the rap-inspired language my son rolled out in the playground a few months ago; it made more sense when we realised he had no idea what the words in question meant.
We all know that parents nowadays struggle in a totally different way to previous generations. Screens, violence on those screens, misinformation and radicalisation, easy access to drugs … and so many more potential pitfalls. So I think we do need to give ourselves a break and find a way to laugh when no one dies at the hands of our four-year-olds.
As a student of history and language, I’d be lying if I said that a child accidentally breaking a bronze-age ceramic – a piece that survived 3,500 years of existence before succumbing to the curiosity of an unsupervised child – breaks my heart into, well, as many pieces as a bronze-age ceramic succumbing to the curiosity of an unsupervised child.
Who’s to blame? The parent for not supervising? The museum for not securing the item in something like a glass case? I’m not a museum curator, I have no bloody idea.
I’m just breathing a sigh of relief that it was neither of my kids. Though at five and eight years old, there’s still time.
Isabelle Oderberg is a journalist, editor, writer and media professional. She is chair of the Early Pregnancy Loss Coalition. Her first book is titled Hard to Bear: Investigating the science and silence of miscarriage
