At what must be the world’s most well-situated lawn bowls club, the ground is stripped to flat squares before the infinite, impossible blue of the Pacific Ocean. From the Clovelly clifftop, the sea itself is geometric: the horizon, a clean faithful line. Just down the hill from here, beyond the rock pools, says Dr Norman Swan, is one of the best swimming spots in Australia.
It has been a cold winter, but today – if you only looked at it – could be mid-summer. The sky is cerulean. And in the early afternoon sun, it is warm, too. It is here that the doctor, broadcaster and – to some – “king of Covid” has come to talk about why the “easy” period of childhood is not so easy at all and why parenting may never have been quite this hard.
This week, Swan will launch his book, So You Want To Know What’s Good For Your Kids. And it has been one of the toughest tasks of his life; sifting the evidence on what is developmentally happening for children between the ages of five and 10 and what the research says about the best parental responses – far harder than the man trained in paediatrics expected. It’s not an advice book (he’s not in that business, he says), it’s just evidence. And what you do with it? That’s up to you.
For Swan to come to write a book about children and parenting, to arrive at this overwhelmingly beautiful, clean, healthy strip of the world, is what one might call “a journey”. The distance between where he started – in his unsettled household in post-war Glasgow – to where he is now feels vast. “You couldn’t be further away from Glasgow than Clovelly beach,” he smiles.
And to write about childhood, even through a strict research lens, is to think about your own.
The Glaswegian is, of course, not only a media personality, but a father to three adult children and stepfather to two teens. He is also a son. And the hallmark of his own upbringing, he says, was inconsistency.
“My mother probably had borderline personality trait and you never knew where she was coming from. So you could be in this sort of loving situation, and just like that she could turn on you – nastily sometimes, with a slap. I mean, I wasn’t physically abused, but I probably was psychologically abused.
“My father was rather weak, and he disappeared from the situation. As a musician he was always away in a room practising, or choosing his reeds. I suspect it was a form of escape.
“It’s very challenging,” he says, “and at times – even now at times, not with my kids, but elsewhere – I can hear my mother’s voice coming out of my mouth, and it scares the shit out of me.
“I tried very hard to do the opposite of what I experienced as a child.”
The need for parents to be warm, consistent and to set boundaries and reasonable expectations are the through-lines of this book. This is not a reaction against his own upbringing, says Swan, but a response to the evidence. Evidence which he tried to put into practice as a father.
“What I was intent on doing was giving consistency, because … the evidence just points that again and again, regardless of the age of your child: be consistent, be predictable, have routines.”
The inconsistency of his childhood meant Swan learned quickly to look after himself, but it ripples out in other ways. “I became independent quite early because I couldn’t trust advice from my parents. I basically lost trust fairly early on in anything my parents told me or said to me,” he says.
“A psychologist reading what I’ve just said … will say, ‘Oh, he’s got attachment problems’, which is probably true, because the child that goes through that has a problem with attachment. And I’m aware of that. I’m self-aware of that.”
Above us, birds converse in the foliage; to the left, sunbathers rest on the warm sand. As we walk, joggers pass us, glistening in the sun. Swan talks about his determination to provide a different upbringing for his children – not to be a perfect parents, but good enough. It paid off. His three children, he says, have turned out incredibly well.
“It was their mum,” he says. “I was absent for a lot of time, travelling around, trying to make it in the media and what have you. She did an amazing job.”
He hasn’t talked with his children about how they feel about that absence. “I’m not the only father to feel they didn’t have enough presence in their child’s lives,” he says. His children know and value what their mother did for them, but he reckons, “I think they also get what I’ve done for them, too.”
Two of his children gave speeches at his wedding a few weeks ago. They were hugely funny, he says. “Only children know your strengths and weaknesses … and go straight to it.”
The marriage is his third, and a few years ago Swan expressed “mild” embarrassment at having been twice divorced. That embarrassment, he says now, was likely a product of its time. But a reflection does remain: “Every failed relationship, at least 50% of the problem is me.”
At 71 now, Swan has had space to consider what marriage means, and how it should work. “The act of marriage itself is about a bit of ritual which sets a moment in time,” he says. “When you’re living with somebody, in a relationship with them – there’s a seamlessness to that.
“Marriage creates a node in your life. A moment where a decision has been made, a commitment has been made, and I think that’s important.
“I think I’ve changed a lot,” he says. A good marriage is not about enmeshment – “it’s about space, it’s about independence, it’s really understanding what you value in the other person. And … I’ve got to grow up sometime.”
As we walk, Swan talks with the measured authority with which listeners and viewers have become familiar over his 40 years in Australian media. He has won a Gold Walkley, received the medal of the Australian Academy of Science and last year was appointed a member of the Order of Australia. Australians turned to him during the first years of the Covid-19 pandemic as a trustworthy authority and that authority has been translated into two books before this latest one – one on healthy longevity and another on general health.
For So You Want To Know What’s Good For Your Kids? he read meticulously on the five-to-10 age group – a period of childhood he says has been overlooked both in terms of its difficulty and importance. The idea that the children are fine and not much happens during these years, he says, “is completely not true. And it’s particularly not true at the moment.”
From the rise in eating disorders in under-10s (“Is it neurotic parents coming forward imagining something is wrong? The answer is no”), to gender dysphoria to battles over eating vegetables, the book scans the gamut of experience. As we walk through the Waverley cemetery, where rows of sun-bleached angels and headstones are frozen in a march off the sandstone cliffs, Swan stops regularly when making a point.
“Anxiety is the dominant thing, and the question is: why? There’s a Nobel prize in the answer to that,” he says.
“It’s easy to blame screens and social media. And it’s possible that the use of screens and social media by parents – forget about children for the moment – increases their anxiety.”
Evidence is not definitive, he says, and it is possible that curating screen content, talking to children about what they are viewing as one would talk about a book, is not harmful. But still he adopts the public health precautionary principle: “How long do you wait to have proof that something is harmful before you do anything about it?”
If there is a suspicion that something like unrestricted screen access might do harm – even if it’s a low level of harm to a large number of children – and there is no harm in removing that perceived danger, then “remove it”, he says. “And I can’t find any evidence of harm [from] not giving a child a mobile phone until they’re 13.”
But while he has clung to the evidence and had his individual chapters reviewed by subject specialists, there is something a little more ancient, a little more instinctive and perhaps a lot more difficult that he introduces also. Amid the science and sociology, Swan describes the Yiddish term nachas; the glow of pride that one takes in their children’s happiness and achievements.
The parents I know, I say, are too stretched to take a moment for nachas or, sometimes, to even find the joy in their children. “[I’ll] tell you what I think – it’s not in the book,” he says, his sigh barely audible above the birdsong. “I think it’s about time.
“We are time poor, and the way to get through a lot of that is actually to sit in the moment,” he says. “This is as hard a time as ever before to be a parent; if you live in a city like Sydney or Melbourne, both parents have got to be working full-time, are exhausted by the end of the day and you just don’t have time to reflect.”
It is during this time to reflect, the time to settle into the moment with one’s children, he thinks – those loose, unscheduled moments – that nachas can squeeze through the cracks.
“I just think it’s very hard for parents to make that time. It’s just … transactional – you’ve got to get dinner on the table, you’ve got to get them bathed, you’ve got to get them to bed, you’ve got to read to them. And there’s just not that space.
“And I don’t have an easy solution for that. I think that’s why you feel pressed, and sometimes just don’t have the time to get to that nachas point.”
Lately, Swan has been making time. His children are all over the world. They are adults, with their own lives, their own successes. But he has been creating blocks of five days or so when they all come together. “You just have that time.”
It takes a day or two of being together for them all to fall into the rhythm of conversation, settle back into familiarity. But when that moment passes, he feels it. “And they feel it too, actually. They feel it too.”
The last gathering was only recently, at his wedding in Europe. “I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do next time,” he smiles. “I’m not getting married again, so … ”
So You Want to Know What’s Good for Your Kids? by Dr Norman Swan is out now through Hachette.
