I have noticed that some Christian traditions have had a second coming in the internet age. Take intermittent fasting or time limited fasting or the 5:2 diet; this is just a modern way of fasting. Fasting is a bedrock of both Judaism, Islam and Christianity, although what passes for a Lenten fast these days in Ireland is lamentable. ‘Meditation’ is a secular form of praying. And then there is modern parenting.
Twitter/X is filled with nuggets of wisdom on modern parenting do’s and don’ts. One Twitter/X account, Raising Happy Families, has many tweets that I find myself agreeing with. This account comes complete with TikTok videos. This tweet caught my eye.
“When parents do everything for their kids, it prevents their kids from building self-esteem. When kids lack self-esteem, they will grow up mentally weak. When kids grow up mentally weak, they will struggle with mental health. The solution is for parents to do less for their kids. Giving kids more responsibilities will allow them to feel a sense of accomplishment & build their self-esteem Try these: Bring them to help with errands. Give them chores around the house. Put challenges in front of them & let them figure it out. Watching kids figure out their problems, and become more confident, is a joy of parenting.”
The language is all gender neutral – parents instead of mother or father – and the dreaded kid instead of children, but what this husband and wife team (doctor and child specialist according to their Twitter bio) are saying is true. Parents should do less for their children.
This is similar to what my own child specialist, who is called Nana (that’s my mother) would say if asked: your children need to do more around the house. This simple advice is so rare these days, especially in middle – class households, that I fear we are raising a generation of fragile brats, an incredibly dangerous combination.
Perhaps one of the reasons women are so reluctant to have children or more than one or two children is because of the workload. Most mothers work outside the home and then they come back to the second shift. You can outsource this or get the husband to do more but most of it still falls on the shoulders of the mother. There is not a huge amount you can do about this when your children are very small but as the children grow up the seem to remain as clueless as toddlers. This is because mothers continue to mollycoddle their children. This is not only terrible for mothers who have enough on, but awful for children and teenagers also.
I have sometimes visited a home to witness the mother preparing dinner, do everything around the house while older children, this is older children now, sitting down in front of the TV or more likely on their phones. What kind of fresh hell is this? When the children eventually deign to plonk their bottoms at the table for dinner, they proceed to ask for various things that are not immediately to hand; glasses of water, a spoon, some sugar laced condiment. They didn’t think of putting these on the table before the meal and instead proceeded to disturb everyone with the constant demands. It’s outrageous.
In any modern family there is plenty to do. Of course, the trap many mothers fall into is that it is always ‘easier to do it myself.’ That is true. In the beginning this is absolutely the case; it takes longer to instruct a child to do a chore and supervise the completion of that chore to your satisfaction, then doing it yourself.
Sure, it’s easier to do it yourself, at first but this is not helpful in the long run to either you or your child. Instead, what mothers and fathers must do is set time aside and teach children basic chores around the house, supervising their completion and dishing out the usual praise when it’s done. This means you ‘have to stand over them.’
When a meal is finished children should not flee the table like they would the scene of a crime. They should stay and help with cleaning up after the meal their mother or perhaps father has gone to the trouble of preparing.
I also object to this anything goes routine at weekends and especially at holidays. This is where children usually sleep in for ages, having stayed up late on some screen and then come down, wearing their pyjamas and demanding breakfast. Again, what kind of nonsense is this? Your house is not a hotel where there is some kind of three-hour window for the breakfast buffet.
I do allow my teenage daughter to sleep in sometimes as I read somewhere their brains really do need it but this ‘lounging around’ should stop. Children, especially older children, should not be permitted to wander round the house in Pjs, onesies or dressing- gowns, munching food while slumped on the couch watching Netflix. And they do this, while the mother ‘catches up on her chores’ she couldn’t do during the week as she was working. No wonder younger women are refusing to have children if this is all they see or have experienced. What woman would sign up to this life?
No, no and no again. Your child should wake at a normal time, not too much later than their weekly time. They should get dressed into actual clothes. They should not go on a screen first thing. They should be told to help with laundry/empty the dishwasher, sort the laundry or help with the shopping or mind in a civilised fashion a younger sibling, such as reading to them or doing Lego etc.
On the other end of the scale, I do know of some children (like my son) that will wake themselves up early in order to sneak in some screen time. Nice try. If one of my children is foolish enough to get up early and expect a screen, they will be handed a hoover, a younger sibling to mind or a pair of rubber gloves and told what bathroom to clean. Unsurprisingly, said child does not get up before 7am ever again.
Sometimes children will actually wander around their home, where their mother and father have both been working all week, with bedrooms stuffed full of plastic crap they got at Christmas and shelves full of books and say the words I’m bored. Oh really? I mean how dare they say this in a busy and affluent house. How dare they. They should be given a choice; read a book or hoover their room.
There is nothing new in challenging children or giving them responsibility or whatever the X experts like to say. One painter I like is the Dutch painter, Bernard Jean Corneille Pothast,1882-1966. “Pothast’s scenes are highly moralistic, extolling the role of the mother in educating and shaping the future generations.” He painted rustic images of a mothers instructing her young daughters in tasks around the house. However, mother also taught them to read, see this beautiful painting, The Reading Lesson.
Bernard Jean Corneille Pothast, Dutch 1882-1966 The reading
‘At my mother’s knee’ was a phrase most people understood in that you learned a simple household task under the careful and kind supervision of your mother. Daughters used to learn to sew for instance at their mother’s knee.
Bernard Jean Corneille Pothast, 1882-1966, The Sewing Lesson
It was not just daughters however. Patrick Kavanagh recalls his mother telling him to ‘see about the cattle’ as remembered in ‘In Memory of my Mother’. Seamus Heaney wrote the much-loved poem, ‘When All The Others Were Away at Mass’, about the simple chore of peeling potatoes that he shared with his mother. It was named Ireland’s favourite poem of the last 100 years, in 2015.
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives-
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
Next time you have a chore to get through, think about including your child. It might turn out to be one of their warmest memories.