I Am Not The Eggman Or The Walrus But I Am The Tooth Fairy, The Easter Bunny And Father Christmas

The nine-year old boy who lives in my house has been losing his milk teeth intermittently for the past four years.  His mother introduced the tooth fairy immediately when this began to happen.  Unfortunately, it is me who not only funds the tooth fairy's payments but also is behind her activities, creeping around at night collecting teeth from shoes or the paws of soft toys, responding in tiny handwriting to written requests, leaving the money and making sure the tooth is well flushed away down the toilet.  These rules have been set by the child's mother and looking back it seems ironic that she has set the rules but it is me who has to fit with them. Fortunately the going rate she has set for each tooth is not overly high, even for an unemployed man, £2 per tooth.  There have been some gripes from the child that this is below the going rate which at his school is £5 or £10 per tooth, making something like £140-£280 for a whole mouth of teeth, if my knowledge of child dentistry is correct.

Some other rules have come from other sources.  The most notable one was either Horrid Henry or Charlie and Lola, the television series featuring young child characters.  In one or more stories, a child lost the tooth that they were putting out for the tooth fairy but still received the money all the same, because, apparently the tooth fairy can see inside children's mouths and note when a tooth is missing.  The nine-year old who distributes all his belongings all over the house, unsurprisingly lost one of his teeth that had come out before he could pass it on to the tooth fairy.  I was apprehensive as a result.  Under what I will term Lola's Law, I had to pay up because the tooth fairy must know it had fallen out (though usually she has to be emailed to be told to come and collect a tooth that has come out), but I feared the tooth would be found leading to the need for more complex fabrications.  Searching for a lost gecko toy, the tooth did reappear fortunately just in front of me, mixed in with some gravel that had been walked in, and I was able to palm it before it was spotted, saying there were stones that I had to chuck out, then making a quick diversion to the toilet to flush away the evidence.

I have other roles, back in April as the Easter Bunny.  The Easter Bunny was again introduced by the child's mother when he was much younger, but as yet has not died.  This child is intelligent enough to ask, if the pharoahs were in Egypt in 3200 BCE and there were stone age people before them and dinosaurs died out 63 million years before humans even appeared how could the world have only been created in 4004 BCE as they tell him at school.  In fact, given that God has not responded to any of his prayers he has rather given up on him and told me the other day he believes people when they die come back as other people or animals, suggesting at 9 he is moving more towards Buddhism or Hinduism rather than Christianity, which leads me to wonder what they are teaching him in RE (Religious Education) and Worship, two lessons he does at his Church of England faith school.  He can discuss black holes and white holes and is familiar with the DNA double helix and yet believes that a rabbit produces chocolate eggs that are available in supermarkets and distributes them around the garden for him to find.  Anyway, so I was again slated with the role of not only buying the eggs, keeping them secret and then staying up to distribute them around the garden (two years running, foxes got to some of them before the child).  As the child gets older I have to stay up later and walk around in fear of being heard or seen. 

Some fiction adds to the feasibility. Having watched 'Hogfather' (2006) in which Death replaces the Hogfather (the equivalent of Father Christmas in Terry Pratchett's Discworld universe), the boy knows that characters such as Death and Father Christmas work in parallel universes with a different flow of time to ours so they can get around the whole world. Condoning this I added that many countries in our world do not celebrate Christmas, some countries in Europe have the gift-giving earlier in December than the 25th traditional in the UK, and given the time zones, it is not Christmas night simultaneously across the whole world.  I was concerned when I first met the boy, that thinking that Father Christmas brought all his gifts, would make him unaware of the money and effort expended by his family in giving him presents.  Thus, in this house, most presents come from named individuals, but Father Christmas tops this up with special gifts. 

Two years ago, enjoying relaxing, I forgot to buy these special gifts and was left to run from newsagent to convenience store trying to buy what I could on Christmas Eve to make up the special package.  Of course, I eat the mince pie and drink the milk (fortunately he does not get brandy in this house, something I dislike) and last year even ate the carrot left for the reindeer, making sure to leave the stub in the garden where the reindeer would have touched down.

Ironically, having some Pagan relatives has added more characters to the mythical cast, though fortunately, as yet, I have not been compelled to dress up as the Green Man and do whatever it is that he does or delivers, but we have attended fires at Winter Solstice to ensure that the Sun comes back.  Fortunately we have never had a case in which the fire has been put out by a typical rainy day in a British December, as I did worry the child may be concerned that we would be condemned to eternal darkness as a result.  He also has avoided being in on the interpretation of the nature of the fire in predicting the year ahead.  Interestingly, though Pratchett's Hogfather is seen as the Father Christmas equivalent, in fact the origins he is portrayed as having sit far closer to the Pagan solstice rituals than anything Christian.

Now, the effort and expense involved in being all these anthromorphic characters is not what concerns me.  It is more that at special times of the year both I and the boy's mother lie to the boy.  We go to great lengths to support the lies.  I have a suspicion that given the boy's intelligence, his knowledge of world history and basic science and a lot of astronomical science, he has already seen through the lies and only plays along because he gets presents as a reward for continuing his side of the pretence.  However, the day will come when he no longer believes and I worry that that day will be soon.  I do worry that I will be caught at one of these activities and so will have to face both the ire of his mother for disrupting the fantasy and from the child disheartened by the revelation that myself and his mother, have clearly been lying.  How then will he be able to trust us when we tell him other things like he needs to clean his teeth, get a decent amount of sleep, do his homework, not bully other children, etc.? 

The alternative seems to be to select a certain date, say when he starts secondary school in September 2013 and tell him then.  However, even then, whilst avoiding the immediate heartbreak of discovery and having a standby that we will still give him gifts at Christmas and Easter (I assume all his teeth will have been replaced by then), the fact of our lies will still be there.

You might suggest I go on discussion boards and see how other parents deal with it.  However, I seem to be surrounded by parents who appear to want to keep their children locked into some idyll.  It does not help that he attends a school that teaches that the world was created in 4004 BCE (and yet ironically often gives toy dinosaurs as rewards to boys) and many of the parents believe that Genesis is the truthful portrayal of how the universe was created.  Of course, there is no date given in the Bible, this date was calculated by Sir Isaac Newton who spent a lot of his career not discovering gravity or laws of motion, but trying to decode the Bible.  In addition, they seek not only not to talk about the various mythical gift givers but also about other things like sex, swearing, alcohol and drugs. 

In the modern world it is a difficult line to tread in not terrifying children about the world out there, but also informing them sufficiently with the information that is necessary to cope with it.  I decided to keep in step with what his school was teaching in its PSHE (Personal, Social & Health Education) which is laid down by the National Curriculum.  However, finding out what they cover in that from the child or the school has proven impossible.  It is a faith school and I know sex is taboo, but they are supposed to get a basic introduction at the age of 8, something his school appears to have neglected.  This is despite the boys discussing openly things being 'sexy' and referring inaccurately to sexual activity.  It is unavoidable when you can see scantily clad women even on Marks & Spencer's posters and almost sexual activity in pop videoes.  In addition, as always, there are elder siblings who begin discussing these things. 

The boy in my house also fell in love with a girl in his class and wrote her cards and things.  Not only is he ill-equipped to deal with sex, but everything else that leads up to it.  Now, I could have sat back and blamed the school for its negligence.  It walks a fine line between OFSTED which seems to inspect it very regularly and the diocese which inspects it too, on very different criteria.  Some parents run a mile from even the mention of the word sex and see it as something that should not be discussed in school coming up with spurious claims that homosexuality is being 'taught' (as in practical instruction) in Scottish schools as a basis for avoiding all sex education. 

Others argue the innocence of the child needs to be protected.  This seems ironic given that these children already have named girl/boyfriends, surely if you combine that with an unwillingness to talk about sex and relationships you are just setting them up for teenage pregnancies with the man walking away.  Once the boy reached 9, I gave him a brief technical talk about 'seed' and 'egg'; 'willies' and 'fannies' but also things like the fact you cannot have 2 girlfriends and sometimes you will love someone who has no interest in you.  This took all the giggling away from talking about girls and things he saw as 'sexy'.  Have I stripped him of his innocence or have I empowered him with accurate rather than distorted information?

Now, given that I have been the source, along with his mother of life information, how is this ever going to be reconciled with the fact that I have also been pedalling a whole range of fantasy characters and going to great lengths to sustain a false belief in them?  How will it impact on his view of God and will he get expelled from his school if he begins to question God's existence?  It seems to me that parents want to have it all ways: to create a fantasy to make the child feel special, to engage them with major annual festivals and overcome fears (such as the loss of teeth).  Yet, in turn, this then seems to ultimately undermine the child's faith in the fact that their parents tell them the truth. 

I think it would have been better from the start to be honest with the child and tell him he gets Easter eggs and Christmas presents because people love him and want him to be part of a happy celebration and that tooth money is to help him forget the discomfort and worry of losing teeth, rather than creating a pantheon of mythical creatures whose role has to be acted out, in this case by me (and, I imagine, predominantly by fathers or pseudo-fathers when they are available).  In many ways I do not think ultimately it 'protects' the innocence of children. 

A staged approach to addressing life's issues rather than cottonwooling children is the way to do that.  In addition, it does not undermine the child's faith in their parents telling the truth just at the time when you are about to tell them things which they need to believe in to keep them healthy, solvent and safe in the years to come.  The parents I have asked about all this have proven worse than useless and I do really worry in their rush to pad their children against the world how ill-equipped they will leave those children when they face up to genuine challenges.  So, are there any practical, pragmatic parents out there who can advise on when it is time to pull off the Easter Bunny disguise and come clean?  I fear that it was a path that was doomed to failure the moment the boy-in-my-house's mother first promised him that Father Christmas was going to bring him a gift and, as a result, we may be still be picking up the pieces of those sustained lies, many years from now.

P.P. 05/09/2011
Suddenly it all fell apart.  Forgetting to pay for one tooth, two nights running, led to the utter collapse of faith in the tooth fairy and then with her both the Easter Bunny and Father Christmas too.  Then came the allegations of lying on our behalf.  Fortunately I was away from home when most of this happened, but the investigation and the accusations from the boy seem to have been quite severe, even down to trying to determine precisely which pen had been used to write responses back to his letters to the tooth fairy.

In many ways, all my fears have come true.  Not only have we come abruptly to an end of what was a delightful phase of his childhood, something which was inevitable as we moved quickly towards him starting secondary school (he goes into Year 5 this week), but the sense that the two people he trusted the most had been going to extensive efforts to deceive him over the space of six years, has clearly cut hard.  I do fear it has damaged his faith in anything we tell him from now onwards.  I know you can never keep a child in their 'cute' phase indefinitely, but now the price for not being honest from the start is that we have damaged our relationship with us just at a time when we need him to believe what we say especially about drink, drugs, sex, violence, etc. is completely true.

I would advise all parents, do not be tempted no matter what grannies and grandads say or aunts and uncles advise, to stay away from creating the false hopes of the tooth fairy, Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny and any other anthromorphic creations.  Instead tell the child that they are getting gifts because people love them; they are getting money for their teeth to soothe the discomfort and the worry that losing a tooth can bring to a child.  You can still wrap up everything nicely, you can still have a hunt for the chocolate eggs, just simply do not pretend that some spectral being has dropped them.  Tell the child that you have done it because you love them.  Without seeming too sentimental, this gives them a second gift, because too many children are not aware of how much they are loved, especially in the UK where we do not talk about these things.  To weave fantasy in the place of real love as a motive, will backfire severely just at a time when you need the child to be taking what you say seriously.

Personally I mourn not only the passing of time, the loss of innocence, but also the fact that I have been accomplice to handling the situation so badly with an impact that may echo down the years.  I know lying to children can sometimes not be avoided, but certainly stay away from the sustained lies that these creations bring.  I feel terribly guilty for messing up this boy's life in this way and am glad to be spared the responsibility of having my own children if this is the consequence of my complicity in deception.

The Life Your Parents Forgot

Back in 1992, when I was a mere 24, I attended a wedding back in my home town.  Two of my friends who had been dating since they were at school had decided to get married.  I am a big fan of weddings and went to at least one per year 1991-2002.  Anyway, it was also a good opportunity for meet up with other old friends; I was living in Oxford at the time and saw those who had remained in the town where I grew up, only occasionally.  I agreed to walk to the church which was only 3.2 Km from my parents' house with another friend of mine.  It was a bright sunny day and we intended to drink, as it was neither of us had a car anyway.  He and his brother lived with their parents, this being Surrey where rental accommodation is rare and house and rent prices are well beyond the means of young men doing ordinary jobs (he was a computer programmer; his brother worked in metallurgy).  My friend's brother, who was two years younger than us, decided that walking would take too long and he would cycle.  Whilst it is against the law to be drunk while cycling, you tend to get away with it much more and can stick to back routes where you are unlikely to encounter the police.  In addition, I am not aware of any drunken cyclists killing anyone, unlike even sober car drivers tend to do pretty regularly.  If you are that drunk you tend to fall off the bicycle and end up doing more harm to yourself than others. 

What struck me was the how alarmed my friend's mother was about us going to the wedding on foot and by bicycle.  It was in the middle of the sunny day, in suburban Surrey, not really a scenario that you feel has a high level of risk.  We were going to a wedding rather than a bare-knuckle boxing match and yet she seemed to believe that we would necessarily come to harm and tried to persuade her two sons to not attend.  They had known the groom since early childhood, yet she seemed to weigh her concern about their welfare above any thought of manners.  Both the men decided to go against their mother's wishes.  Of course, we all got there safely and had a very nice day all round.  We drank at the reception but no-one was incapacitated and we came home by taxi and bicycle.

That incident was a minor if peculiar one.  What I did not really take on at the time was what it signalled about how parents handle their adult children.  At 24, I have been a writer with a growing reputation; I could have been the ticket man at Fulham Broadway Station; I could have been in the Army, being shot at in Iraq; I could have been in prison; I could have had a wife and children of my own; I could have been running a business; I could have owned a house.  Okay, so I had not done any of these things.  I was, however, training to be a teacher, which suggested that the state, a school and numerous parents saw me as sufficiently adult to teach a class of pupils, up to 18 years of age.  I was fortunate that after I started the course, I only had to spend another few weeks when looking for a flat in London, living with my parents, so, perhaps I escaped being treated like my friend and his brother, somehow as if we were frozen at the age of 15 forever more. 

Part of the problem in the UK is that accommodation is so expensive.  When you have businesspeople looking for rooms to rent as lodgers in houses, how can a young person working in a shop or a call centre able to get even space in a shared house.  The only answer is parents.  This is why the average age for people leaving home in the UK is now 36, an age when back in the 1960s you would have been expected not only to have your own place (rented or otherwise) but also a wife and children, and be on the verge of middle age.

I think the attitude of parents to their adult children is not only shaped by the economic necessities of trying to live in the UK.  We live in a far more juvenilised society than even the 1990s, let alone the 1960s.  People seem unwilling to take responsibility for any of their actions and baulk against anyone limiting what they do; the speeding issue is a case in point, huge credit card bills is another.  Thus, parents who grew up in an earlier era (and remember someone born in 1981 is now 30), when people had to take more responsibility for their actions see their children ill-equipped.  However, ironically, that is because we have all been hammered by media pressure to protect our children for the apparently ominpresent threats out there.  By fearing all that might happen to our children we actually make them unable to cope when anything out of the ordinary, let alone genuinely dangerous occurs to them.  In addition, by padding them from the hazards of the world, we give them a false illusion that they face no risks and that driving dangerously or spending without thought will never have any serious consequences, or certainly not ones that the parents cannot resolve.

Naturally, I am sure, many children like the extension of the adult safety net.  This approach can be condemned as being a middle class attitude, but you only have to meet with families in poor parts of London or any other city to see, in fact, even among those on the minimum wage and on benefits this attitude of trying to insulate adult children from the world persists.  I have seen parents divide up their own bedrooms so their grown up children can continue to live in the house.  I have seen women go round to the houses of their daughters' boyfriends and shout at them from the street to stay away, often as a result of cross-racial relationships.  You might argue that the motive here is that the poorer population know how really hard life can be; the middle classes just want to protect their children against the potential of having a hard life.  The motives may vary, but the outcome is pretty much the same: treating adult children as if they were frozen in their teenaged years.

I suppose it is natural to perceive family members at a certain fixed position.  You do not see your parents as they age.  You see them everyday when they are growing up and these days when middle age seems to start when you are sixty, and people in their forties wear teenage fashions, your parents look much the same from 30 to 50 and sometimes beyond; my parents in their 70s look better than they did 20 years ago, the pressures of work having been shed from them.  It is the same with your grandparents you tend to fix them at a certain age and forever remember them as that and it can be a shock to realise as an adult that they are 25 years older than when you first knew them.  The trouble comes when we associate certain modes of behaviour with the age we have fixed our family member at.  It can be hard as your parents' faculties begin to fade as they age because you probably still default to thinking of them how they were at 45 rather than 75.  You are usually quickly brought back to reality when you see them again; it can be sad, but you generally adapt and begin quite easily to treat your parents the way you used to treat your grandparents.

The problem is that they too have frozen you in time.  In my experience they tend to think you are somewhere between 15-17.  You look like an adult to them, but they know that in fact you are very inexperienced of the world and are likely to make mistakes.  You have to be warned about these things.  Whilst you may resemble an adult, in their eyes, in fact you lack the ability to make adult judgements and you will make lots of mistakes.  You can be talked to as if you have no knowledge or expertise or experience of the world, no matter how high-flying a post you might hold (especially if it is an industry your parents disapprove of or never felt was right for you) or how many lovers you might have.  I must say, that in fact, this perception is not limited to parents.  Back in 2002, my brother and I got into an argument in a Belgian street.  He started bellowing at me about incidents that had occurred when I was 15 and he was 13, i.e. back in 1982.  Since then the Cold War has ended, AIDS has been a global problem, apartheid has ended in South Africa, home computers had grown from 48k to many Mb capacity, we had been through years of Thatcher and Blair, and yet, he still saw the tensions between us as they had been as teenagers.

Maybe I am unlucky, I do seem to meet people who whilst not having shining careers themselves are surprised that everyone else is not more successful and again blame laziness.  I had one friend who could not understand why I was not studying Korean (he would allow me to learn Japanese at a pinch) and was not making thousands of pounds writing history articles for magazines.  He had no understanding that these things do not happen.  The number of Britons who can understand Korean must be very limited and even those who are successful at article writing (and they are a select band who get lucky breaks) never earn the sums he assumed.  He took his assumptions to be the truth, so any argument against him just showed up how cunningly lazy you were, trying to get out of easy ways to make money.  It is people like this who must have been the witchfinders of previous centuries.

As you can guess, at 43, I am still facing the 'frozen in time' kind of attitude from both my brother and my parents.  It has been exacerbated by me being unemployed for 12 months.  Despite decades of mass unemployment, the default attitude for British people is that being unemployed is the fault of the jobless person; the economy and the attitudes of employers have nothing to do with it.  If only the jobless person applies him/herself, then they will not be without work. 

Being unemployed seems to give everyone a licence to tell you how to live your life, not least your parents.  However, the advice is not restricted to job hunting.  I have a girlfriend, she is the same race as me and the same religion.  She is aged 5 years younger than me.  She has a child that is not mine.  She is not an alcoholic, she is not a drug addict, she is not involved in any criminal activity, she is not violent, she runs her own retail business.  However, the attitudes of my father and brother towards her are as if she was stealing from me on a daily basis or plunging me in crime.  I cannot stand people who stop members of their family linking up with people of a different race or religion, though I can understand the basis of their disapproval.  Yet, in my case, there is not even this excuse.  I could understand even if she was 20 years younger than me or 20 years older, but we seem to be very well matched, and vitally, makes me happy. 

What gives parents and other family members the right to police the relationships that other adults in their family have?  I would be frustrated if I had been 16 or 18 and was told I should not be seeing someone I was attracted to, let alone one I loved and who loves me back, and treats me incredibly well.  How come, in our 30s and 40s, we cannot be left alone to form the relationships we want and maintain them, especially when they are as positive as the one I am in at present?  I am now old enough to have potentially had grandchildren myself and yet I am treated by my family as if I am still not mature enough to run my life.  I think it is somewhat an issue of discrimination against particular members of the family.  As it took me many years before I had sex and did not keep my family informed about every short-term relationship I had; because my girlfriend had a child by a man who fled the country once it was conceived, both of us have been branded by our families as feckless and incapable of making our own decisions.  This seems ironic considering that I have managed offices controlling thousands of pounds and my girlfriend runs her own business.  Yet, clearly this is not enough to warrant us being treated like adults. 

If these people were not family members I would have told them to back off very harshly and in fact, as it is, the persistence of my father and brother in trying to keep running my life has led me to break ties with them both.  The picking on one member of a family seems common.  My girlfriend has two sisters, one of whom is also a single parent.  I have my brother who does not get treated the way I do, despite the fact for many years he settled to no career and spent months travelling, getting drunk and stoned, but now somehow is allowed to be an adult when I am not. 

One friend of mine when living at home in his 20s was compelled to do the ironing and other domestic chores that his brother, only two years younger, was not compelled to do.  His brother, having attended university was deemed to be above those things, yet has flitted from job to job, entered a marriage in which the woman two-timed him even moving her lover into their house and drained him of money before emigrating with yet another lover.  It appears that some of us are marked out as 'black sheep' for our entire lives, on criteria which, objectively, would not suggest such labelling.  It means that no matter how old we become we are never free of being treated as if we are incapable of running our lives without active family intervention.  If I was an alcoholic, a drug addict, regularly in prison, then I could understand it.  My own crimes have been being unemployed and falling in love with a single mother.

I had a friend who married in the late 1990s to a stunningly intelligent and beautiful woman.  He was well-educated and had movie star looks.  They shared a love of travelling to remote places and living adventurously.  However, both had very good university jobs, were healthy, of the same age and were not involved in crime or addicted to drugs or alcohol.  They seemed very well suited.  Yet, from the start her parents disapproved of him and hounded the couple so much that they fled the UK for Belgium.  Ultimately the pressure was such that they divorced.  To me, given how rare happiness is in this world, to drive a couple that way seemed evil.  Alright, there may have been a personality clash, but once your child is an adult you have to accept their choices.  Destroying something that brings them happiness without harm, is perverse.  However, I guess that these parents are not only frozen in time but also cannot see beyond their own petty concerns.

I have no idea who sets the rules.  I have had one male friend who has been physically abused by one girlfriend and robbed from by another; I have one female friend who is always publicly disparaged by her husband, and yet no-one ever seems to speak out or criticise what is going on with them.  Clearly myself and my girlfriend are in some category which allows people to tell us how to live our lives.  Before coming to visit us, her father told her bluntly that she had to leave me.  There was no reason given.  I accept I am unemployed, but then are hundreds of thousands of men in the UK.  I worked hard to try to get a job and having been to 28 interviews in 12 months, I finally secured work.  It may not be the greatest job I could have got, it pays £7000 per year less than I received in my last post, but it is permanent, it uses my skills and those things are not to be ignored in the current economic climate.

I have never attacked my girlfriend (I have never attacked anyone) and am like a father to her child.  We argue far less than is the apparent national average despite me spending the bulk of the day with her.  I am not a drug addict, an alcoholic or a criminal.  I do all that I can to make her and her child happy.  Yet, it is not enough, she has been told repeatedly to leave me as I have been told repeatedly to leave her.  There is no sense that I am an adult, that I can make my own decisions, make my own mistakes indeed, and live with the consequences.  I cannot predict the future.  Looking back there was little I could have done to spare myself from redundancy.  Yet, somehow, I am expected to have prescient powers that would have allowed me in the 1980s to know what careers and which employers within those careers would be safe bets in the 2000s.

Remaining with my girlfriend then opens me up to further charges (and she has experienced very similar on her side from her father), that I am naive, that I have no idea what I am doing and need to be guided.  Mistakes dating back decades are raked up for both of us.  For me it is joblessness, for her it is having a child as a single parent, that seem to be the clinchers, the things that rule out us being able to shape our lives properly or to make decisions.  I am not even permitted to say I am going for a test for Asperger's (let alone doing it) without being ridiculed at length by my father. 

I am a man, I have run offices, I have made financial decisions, I am trusted by the state to drive on the roads, to vote, to pay taxes, to obey the law, yet I am not deemed capable of taking decisions on my own health and above all on my own relationships.  My girlfriend and I have been utterly loyal to each other, we have had no other sexual partners since being together and yet our parents see the other as being reckless and bad for their child.  If they knew how hard it is to find someone who you are compatible with, I would hope that they would be pleased for us that we have managed to find someone who makes us happy.  Even if my girlfriend had all those bad characteristics, it would be up to me and her to decide whether the relationship should continue. 

We have been facing so much anyway, that I would just beg for her and my family members, if they cannot tolerate the partner we have chosen, just to stay quiet.  If you cannot say something nice, say nothing at all is what I would say.  However, any attempt to get them to back off elicits even more patronising criticism from both sides that even at ages 43 and 38, we are not capable of making our own choices and have to have parental intervention to show us where we have gone so wrong.

Parenting is not about ensuring that your children live their lives very precisely the way you have set out, even if that was possible (and, of course, parents, whatever they might think, are fallible; my father lent me money so I did not have to pull out of the house purchase and now says, three years on, that that was a big mistake on his part and I should have continued renting).  Parenting is about equipping your children to deal with the world out there and what it might throw at them.  Yes, you will act as a fall back, a safety net as far as you can, for many years.  However, once your child is an adult you have to recognise that the state views them sufficiently mature to do all the things like vote, have sex, die for their country, go to prison, whatever and live with the consequences.  You may disagree with how they live their lives, but if they are happy and are not making other people unhappy, it is not your place to intervene. 

You can never control another person's life, even your partner's and to try to do so ends in bitterness and failure.  As a result of my brother and father and my girlfriend's father constantly haranguing us to end the relationship, we feel large chunks of our families have turned their back on us. 

Men take it harder than women which is why I have ceased contact with my brother and father over their repeated criticism of my relationship.  Ironically, my girlfriend keeps trying to get me to make it up with them.  However, being an Asperger's sufferer (however much my father denies it), I remember all the insults and shouting as if it occurred hours rather than weeks and months ago, so it makes it that much harder to move beyond.  In addition, all the signs are any attempt to re-establish contact from my side will be seen as me admitting I was wrong and apparently giving them the green light to harangue me further in an attempt to direct my life in every aspect.  To accept that is to give up any standing as an adult and to accept the view that I am incapable of living my own life and making my own decisions.  I do not know what their motives are but clearly they seem to be very far from any kind of love.  For practical reasons, I have to maintain contact with my father, but unfortunately it comes at a high price. However, I have no such connection with my brother and I anticipate that the last time I will see him is at my father's funeral.  

Help From Harry Potter And Shrek

At the end of 2009 I commented on how when I was brought in to an advise a boy of 8 on how to live his life, I found myself turning to a combination of popular cultural references, a little bit of William Shakespeare and some Percy Sledge: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/12/sledge-shakespeare-poloniuss-precepts.html  This month I found myself referencing 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire' (2005 - the movie; I have not read the novels; the boy is still too young to have read them) to assist me.  There is such a sharp division between adult and child culture, to some extent these days set by which technologies we use and how, but, also, as always, simply because we keep our culture to define where we are in our lives and keep the other groups out.  Yet, fortunately, there are some things that straddle the ages and act as a decent shorthand or reinforcement for the point you are trying to make.

I do have issues with the Harry Potter series.  I feel it lauds the elite public school system of the UK which already provides such a large percentage of leading people in all sectors of business and public life, and due to the policies of the current government is taking an even tighter grip on the reins of power.  The Potter books teach ordinary children who go to comprehensive schools or even grammar schools and academies, to look up to those who are 'special' enough, magic in fact, and so entitled to attend the elite boarding schools.  Hogwarts has all the trappings of Eton and beyond it Oxford, Cambridge and Durham universities.  Pupils wear gowns, they eat in wood-panelled refectories along long wooden tables, they have houses and common rooms and indulge in life-risking sports.  The one saving grace is that ultimately Harry Potter fights a form of Fascism based on biological racism, but then again, have we really moved on from the writing of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and their 1950s attitudes?  I can enjoy the Narnia, Middle Earth and Hogwarts stories for their drama and adventure.  I am able as an adult with a critical eye to sift out the hidden messages that I disagree with and not let them indoctrinate me in the way I fear the authors intended; though I think Rowling, unlike the other two, was writing what she thought publishers would expect rather than views she held. 

Given my qualms about the Potter stories, why have I cited them as being useful for assisting a nine-year old boy.  Well, it comes down to the less fantastical elements, that Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, despite their old fashioned names and magical abilities, are often pretty much like children of today.  The fact that schools all seem to be embracing public school behaviour, filtered through an American high school lens makes the gap even narrower.  The scenario was that at the nine year old's school they were having a Valentine's disco.  In contrast to in my era when you simply pitched up and hung around with your friends until you got enough courage to ask one girl for a slow 'side-to-side' dance (as Lenny Henry has so well characterised it), he was expected to ask a female partner to attend with him, as if it was the 1950s and it was some real-life version of 'Grease' (1978).  Possibly this would work if he was 13, but at 9 it is really unknown territory.  However, a realm which I fear is going to be very common.  Returning to my sixth form college at the end of the 1990s I found in place of the very informal discos we had had fifteen years before, now there were formal 'proms' very much on the US style.  This trend seems to be extending not just to secondary schools now but also primary schools.  The boy informed me that apparently at his school 'ballroom dancing' with girls was not permitted until you reach Year 6 (aged 10-11).  Perhaps all the ballroom dancing programmes on the television are encouraging this.  Yet, it seems terribly unnatural in the 2010s as if fearing that our 9 year olds will behave like 13 year olds we try to make them into 63-year olds instead!

Anyway, the formality of the process which no longer simply involves him going to the school office to buy a ticket at lunchtime or after school, has thrown open a whole new set of questions for his acting father (me) to answer.  Why when the law says that teenagers do not have the maturity to have sex, do we think they have the maturity to operate in a bewildering social melee.  The poor boy was torn between wanting to do what the teachers encouraged and ask a girl (there is one in a particular he liked anyway) and yet he knew how boys' attitudes can turn so quickly and was fearful that asking a girl would then lead to ridicule from his male peers.  Of course, there is the potential for ridicule from the girl he asks or her friends.  All the stuff about when you ask and what to do if she says no, or something the school in its dated gender role model, seems to have not considered: what happens if a girl asked him, especially if he did not like her?   All of this is tough when you are 13,  four years younger seemed too young.  Boys tend to think even their pseudo-fathers are the ideal men whereas in fact a lot of us, especially those who have taken over where another man has left, were never very good at this stuff in the first place.  So humiliated and bullied in my youth I lacked the courage to ask women out until I was 29 and even then did not have sex until I was 34, so how could I ever be the kind of expert the boy was looking for?

In this circumstance, Harry Potter was my saviour.  'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire' features a ball to which the, by now, 14-15-year old male protagonists are expected to ask a female to accompany them to.  Of course, Harry and Ron prevaricate so long that the two girls they would have asked are asked by other people and they upset the twins they invite as their 'substitute' guests too.  With the boy having seen the movie multiple times, I could simply reference at length the interaction between Harry, Ron, Hermione (the one Ron really wants to ask), Cho Chang (the girl Harry asks to the ball too late) and the Patil twins (the two 'substitutes') and very quickly have communicated the pitfalls of such circumstances.  Other movies in the series have been useful in addressing what it feels like to see someone you fancy going out with someone else, as occurs for Hermione in 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' (2009).  I think the school were wrong for staging the event in this old fashioned formal way, especially for children so young.  However, it seems they are prey to our societal trends which want us to go back in time in so much of how our society is run.  Perhaps there are good elements in that, but do not suddenly thrust our 21st century children into the social and gender divisions of the 1950s or 1910s without equipping them first.  Without Harry Potter to help I would have battled to find a way, so quickly to enculturate a young boy into social behaviour which was alien to my youth and was never expected to reappear.

As an afterthought, I was also reminded of how useful the Shrek series of movies has been.  It might seem odd that young people have anything to learn from the story of an ogre.  However, the four movies (2001, 2004, 2007, 2010) are very useful in outlining decent behaviour for young men.  They show how to interact with women, what it feels like to be in love, feeling constrained by a relationship and the daily grind, dealing with in-laws and the challenges for young men of becoming fathers.  There is stuff about getting irritated with your partner, your friends, your children, feeling down about your place in the world.  Shrek is in fact very much an everyman for modern western society.  Amongst all the adventures, jokes and songs, there is actually a lot of decent advice which is hopefully being drip-fed into young male minds to counteract the more insidious distortions of console games, music videos and online pornography.  Much output from Hollywood features 'family values' but too often it is in a perfect vision in which everyone always has more than enough, does not have to work hard, is not exhausted from a day at work, is never sick or just fed up and the children are easily won over.  A lot of such output shows you the vision of family and relationships, but rarely engages with the much harder reality.  It is ironic that a movie about someone in a fantasy world (though often painfully like our own (especially in 'Shrek 2' with its spoofs of California and US real-life police series) actually provides better lessons for children about the challenges of the future in the kinds of life they are going to live.  To some degree they all come down to saying that in this life we cannot really hope for much more than to have love and some good times.


P.P. 14/02/2011: It subsequently transpired that the 'rule' that each boy could only attend the disco if partnered by a girl had been made up by a set of influential Year 4 girls who were keen that one particularly popular boy ask one of them to the dance.  I do not know what concerns me more about this: that given the strange things the school has come out with over the past 5 years that I was quite happy to accept this latest development or that 9-year old girls seem to have learnt how to pull off social plotting like devious teenagers, I imagine from watching some US high school drama.  The boy from my house went to the disco and apparently enjoyed himself right until the end when other boys bullied him.

Setting this incident aside, I still believe that due to the fact that there are not a great deal of cultural aspects that me and the boy share in common ('My Goldfish Is Evil' or 'Trapped: Ever After' anyone?) and certainly ones that have life lessons that are useful and not poured on too thickly, I will be returning to Harry Potter and Shrek to help him resolve social dilemmas in the future.

Skill of the Past: Using a Cassette Recorder

Having been literally bullied sick by my boss, whose picking up on small things I may have said weeks earlier and then assembling them into a file which apparently demonstrates my unprofessionality (if there is such a word) despite her committing many of the same 'offences' such as receiving personal phonecalls at work, has driven my blood pressure so high as to leave me debilitated.   Back at home I am obviously seeing more of the woman and her 8-year old son who live in my house than of recent when I have primarily been living in another town in the very social class divisive South-West of England.  Anyway, the boy came to me the other day because his mother had said that I might have something him to record music with.  Neither his mother nor I are in a position to buy him a minidisc or MP3 recorder which would be the modern type of system.  However, I did remember that stored away in the shed was a hand-held cassette recorder that I used to use in the 1990s for recording interviews.  It was not one of those mini-cassette recorders that people used as dictaphones back then, it takes full-sized cassettes.  We have had a few machines around the house that take cassettes and my car which is now 14 years old takes them too.  However, I would not know where to go to buy a blank cassette and the only place you can get music on cassette is in the cheaper charity shops like those associated with hospices rather than the big national charities.  Surprisingly quickly I found the machine.  Usually it takes a couple of hours for me to sift the stuff stored in the shed only to remember that I gave the thing away a few months earlier.  I so regret giving away my copy of the 'Talisman' board game when I left Milton Keynes.  The boy in my house would have loved it and even if he had not given the number of expansions I had to the original I could have sold it for over £100; the basic game sells for around £30 on eBay and rare expansion sets for over £200.

I have heard that following the concern in the 1970s that traditional skills were being lost we now have more thatchers in the UK than we have work for.  Every episode of 'Time Team' over its sixteen years seems to have drawn on a different craftsman/woman able to make pottery or mosaics the way the Romans did or weave or make swords the way the Saxons did or cook or dance the way the Tudors did.  It seems that we have sufficient guardians of the 'old ways' for now.  However, what this incident with the cassette recorder showed me was how fast other technology-dependent skills are being lost.  I suppose if, like my grandparents I had lived from the 1910s to the 1980s I would have seen many skills that were no longer needed as mechanisation of all aspects of our life, notably in the home, advanced without cease.  Technology dates very quickly.  I remember the acclaim that the University of Hull received back in 1986 for putting the Domesday Book on its 900th anniversary into computer format.  By the end of the 1990s no-one had computers that could access those files (though ironically people can still read the original book).  This year it was announced that a project to update the computer files was complete.  I wonder how long it will be before these are obsolete.

What I was surprised was that a child whose reading age is well advanced compared to his physical age and is able to programme the Freeview box, search the internet for downloadable games and asks me if I use Google and Word, found it so tricky to operate a cassette recorder.  I realised that the key challenge came from that the rules of cassette recorder are mechanical rather than electronic.  He quickly mastered pressing the 'Record' and the 'Play' buttons together in order to record.  He worked out he needed 'Fast Forward' and 'Rewind' because he is familiar with video cassettes, though even his 2-year old cousin has grown up in a world without them.  What the 8-year old could not get was the concepts of how the cassette machine worked.  When he rewound to find what he had recorded, he asked 'doesn't it know where the music is?'.  Naturally on an MP3 recorder it would know.  I had to teach him about looking at the spools and how far they had wound on and matching it against the little indicators on the front panel.  This recorder had no counter but I must say I have not seen one with a counter in twenty years.  Then he complained that the music had been lost and we found out that in switching cassettes he had put it back to play the B side rather than the A side on which he had recorded the music.  He has never encountered a recording storage item with two sides.  DVDs have one side, CDs have one side, even archaic video cassettes only have one side (unless someone can show me a Phillips cassette from the early 1980s; anyone remember them?).  He even had difficulty opening the cassette box as it looks different to a DVD or CD box.  To me it was a matter of a flick of my thumb but I had to demonstrate a skill that very few people in the world know how to do.

I guess all of this is simply a reflection of me getting old.  I do not feel incapable of operating successfully using current devices but I have probably not slipped into the assumptions about all technology based on what is currently the norm.  Perhaps in the future we will be surprised to find we used to have press buttons (even if these are increasingly simply squares on the screen rather than actual physical buttons) and not command a device by our voice or our thoughts.  I do think it is worthwhile making a record of those little skills that we never even thought about when using them, such as the rules and norms around operating a cassette recorder (the fact that you will not get 'disk read error' but that the tape might snap) and a score of other devices which were once part of everyone's home and are now going the way of the upright washing machine and the valve (and even the transistor) radio.

Is R.S.V.P. Dead?

The fact that historically people have written 'R.S.V.P.' (standing for the French phrase Répondez S'il Vous Plait, i.e., Respond, Please) on the bottom of invitations suggests that even in the past, ages which we think had greater manners, people could be neglectful of telling their host if they were coming to an event or not.  However, certainly in my life of forty years, I have seen a decline in this basic courtesy.  It seems to occur at all levels.  In the workplace the advent of electronic systems has actually reversed this tendency a little.  Send an electronic invitation to a meeting and the recipient is often compelled to click if they will attend or not.  If you do not use such a system, though, then people sending apologies, or probably more accurately, Apologies, has declined severely even in the period that I have been in full-time work since the early 1990s.  I suppose there are things like emails and even online conferencing to fill the gaps, but it is not only an issue of knowing who has been involved in a debate at a meeting and who has had their voice heard, but simple professional courtesy.  I suppose such 'non-productive' activity has been frowned upon since the era of 'lunch is for wimps' that came in during the 1980s, in fact to make under-staffed offices seem dynamic.

Of course, companies not contacting you after you have attended an interview to tell you that you have not got the job has been going on for many years now.  It leaves you hanging in doubt for a number of days, hoping that you will get a call.  How hard is it, as with my last interview, when there have only been four candidates, to telephone and thank you for attending but saying you have not got the job.  They do not have to telephone, they could send an email, putting you out of your misery far quicker.  No-one seems to spare a thought for the fact that applying and being interviewed for jobs is tough enough and the lingering hope that you might have got it, just makes it feel even more bitter.  Clearly I cannot comprehend that for companies recruiting, a quick phonecall is something that they have no time for or no willingness to do.  Perhaps they do not even give it that much thought, once the candidate is out the room they give no consideration to the fate of the people who did not get the job.  In this, however, they do not realise that they might be dissuading someone they thought was good enough to interview from ever applying again and also might be attracting unnecessary bad publicity from someone working in their sector.

I suppose the fact that I cannot understand this off-hand behaviour shows how out-of-step I am with current business culture, which, certainly where I am now working, seems to have gone back to the 1980s.  I get accused of being 'unprofessional' because I keep my workforce informed about developments, rather than concealing what I know.  The attitude of my superiors is often incredibly patronising, they seem to believe that the average office worker has no idea about the broader business and lacks the intelligence to guess about it.  They also seem to assume that people are only concerned about having a job or being unemployed, that they are not interested in the own job, its quality and how it fits into the broader scope of the company's activity. 
Another criticism I have levelled at me, is that I 'waste' too much time on niceties.  I guess perhaps living in Britain with culture so influenced by the USA I am in a society far removed from what I see as courteous.  When I faced frustration from colleagues that meetings did not start the moment everyone was seated, I began to characterise the introductory conversation as the 'Bedouin tent coffee conversations', i.e that before you start business you show interest in the people you are meeting with, as humans.  Having worked in Germany and especially in Spain and Portugal, I know business people there put a lot of store by such interaction.  It was incredibly embarrassing to be at a series of meetings across a number of days in Portugal involving representatives from France, Germany, Hungary, Spain and Portugal, to find we had to turn down the events we had been invited to because my company had booked us to fly out two hours after the last meeting was scheduled to finish. The company seemed to have no idea how rude that seemed to our hosts and the fact that we missed out on the informal networking.  I know that people on expenses and 'junkets' earn a bad name, but in British business culture we seem to have gone too far the other way and now seem terse and cold towards international business partners.

Such terse verging on rude behaviour is not confined to the business world, it is now embedded in our social contacts as well.  It seems ironic that people feel that if they cannot raise you on your mobile phone that something is wrong.  Using Twitter and Facebook people update their acquaintances and even complete strangers to their state of mind, even their whereabouts.  However, send out an invitation, electronically, or particularly on paper and you receive a completely different attitude.  Of course, two hours before any event you are hosting you receive a flurry of people pulling out.  This is the stage when they realise that if they actually are going to attend they need to stop what they are doing and begin getting ready and setting off.  This is pretty rude especially for events that need catering, but these days I am glad for even this last minute courtesy.  What is more common is people simply not turning up and not informing you of that fact.  Given the range of communication devices we have these days there is no excuse.  You can text or call from a traffic jam, you can send an email or a tweet from the railway station where you are stuck or even from the wireless laptop you have with you on the train.  You can telephone.  Even if your mobile phone has been stolen or run out of charge you can still use the remaining telephone boxes.  If I am not able to answer, then simply leave a message.  None of this is difficult.  For those people who have decided not to come long before the actual day, it is even easier.  However, these days it is rare to receive any communication that the people are not coming.

It seems ironic given how much 'rage' we have in public life that people actually find it difficult to engage with people, even their friends, over 'challenging' or 'difficult' issues.  They are quite happy to bellow or hoot someone or swear vigorously at them as that is all one-way communication, they have no real emotional engagement with it and can stomp or drive away if they do not like the response.  People cannot deal with 'I am sorry, I cannot come to your party' and the 'That's a shame I was really looking forward to you being there'.  That is too much of a burden for so many adults these days.  They would rather be rude and saying nothing at all.  This unwillingness to even face a slightly discomforting conversation feeds back into business and I have a manager who complains 'I don't want to know that' when people make even constructive criticism about the company and tries to have every meeting artificially jolly even when people are at loggerheads.  Part of the reason is that too many people in work cannot process the concept that others see their company and people's behaviour within it as different from how they see it themselves.  Often these days I hear people say that it is a 'lie' when people express a differing opinion.  This tunnel vision allows people who do not respond either way to an invite, to see themselves as being polite and in the right.

It is not that I accept that my event may not be the most important thing on a person's agenda, I am quite happy for them to say 'no, I cannot come', whatever their reason.  What is more difficult is hearing nothing at all, especially when buying food and drink is an issue.  It is infinitely worse when the event is not an adult one but a child's.  This is the situation in which rudeness begins to result not just in too much food being bought or people sitting around waiting for someone to turn up who never comes, in such circumstances it is far more unpleasant.  For the past five years I have been involved each year indirectly in a child's birthday party.  Given that with funds tight, children these days are usually limited to the number of people they can invite, they carefully select who will receive an invitation.  The day of the party comes and you have heard nothing back from half of the parents even though you have left reminder messages on their answerphone and sent texts.  You dare not tell the child that half of their friends may not come, just in case, as often happens, some of them actually turn up, even though they have given you no indication that they are attending. 

Another percentage will show up at the wrong time.  Two of the families this year, despite saying their child was attending had gone shopping, one lot to London and then only realised they were supposed to be coming to the party.  One showed up near the end and one never came at all.  I feel discouraged when people do that to me as an adult, but to a child with all the issues about having their friends around and the presents they will receive it easily turns what is supposed to be a happy day into a stressful one as they cling on hoping a particular friend will show and the adults are no better informed than them.

Are our lives so busy; do we and the children around us have so much going on that we simply forget all invitations?  In fact, those families who fill their children's weekends with sports and music activities are often the ones best at responding to invitiations even if it is with a constant 'no'.  If we lived in primative times when communication was difficult there might be an excuse, but these days when we walk around with communication devices that can send a movie to the other side of the world in seconds, why is it so difficult to use such tools?  I am probably coming at this from the wrong end.  How did it become acceptable to not respond to an invitation at all, and yet see no difficulty in speaking to the people you have so snubbed, again?  How is it acceptable to ignore an invitation and then turn round and invite the people you have just snubbed to some event?  I suppose it is this breakage in people's minds between their actions and the consequences of those actions.  I suppose when people see nothing wrong in speeding then I should not be surprised that they see nothing wrong in ignoring an invitation and expecting you to be happy about it.  We have become so utterly selfish that other people's feelings count for nothing compared to our desires and our apathy.  Have we so lost empathy that we cannot see that if we treat someone else's child in such an off hand way someone will treat our child just the same?  It seems so.

One reason why I like Goths is that all, I think without exception among those I have met, have 'old fashioned' manners.  If they cannot attend they phone or text or email me and say 'sorry, I can't come, maybe next time'.  This is a rarity in modern UK society where people think it is acceptable simply to ignore an invitation whether they want to attend or not.  People wonder why our society is so fragmented and it is because despite all the technology that allows us to do it, we have developed an antipathy (maybe simply an apathy) to simply communicating with people.

Are Children of Lone Parents Stronger?

I read a headline on a newspaper in a shop recently which blared that 1 in 4 parents in the UK is now a lone parent and the bulk of these are single mothers.  There is an easy assumption that this signals a decline in British morality that started sometime when the contraceptive pill came into common usage and as a result of 'free love' of the 1960s.  Of course, lone parent families are no new invention, just look at the records of 1919 and 1946 to see how many there were.  In the Victorian period when mortality was higher, the average working man dying at 45, there were often widows bringing up children alone.  People say, well, of course, it was different back them, people could draw on the wider family, forgetting that these days many grandparents, about 300,000 in the UK in 2009 are the prime child carers and that if you ever go to poor areas and I can draw on personal experiences from East London and Milton Keynes (which does have a poor ghetto area) then daughters, sisters, mothers, aunts and grandmothers often step in for childcare roles.  I remember standing behind a woman in a post office in Milton Keynes who said 'I was looking after my daughter's step-daughter's daughter...' as showing something of the nature of modern UK families; with longer life expectancy people across four generations can be involved.

You can argue that part of the problem is that people take on children as a pastime that they tire of.  It is certain that in our increasingly horribly sexualised society in which as Natasha Walton noted recently that the media in all forms encourages vigorously boys and men are to be macho and violent and girls and women submissive in a way that horrifies anyone who lived through the era of feminism.  It also means that men do not take responsibility for anything which is seen as 'feminine' and that includes looking after children.  Creating children, spreading your seed is macho, but dealing with the consequences is never seen as needing thought.  It is much the same with attacking men for looking at you in a pub or driving too fast, we have become a society which neglects thought of the consequence of any action, it is saving face that is the only thing that matters.  Thus, I am not arguing that access to contraception is causing lone parent families, in fact it is helping prevent it spreading so far.  The problem is that in the desire to move back to 'Victorian values' we have rapidly moved back to a society in which men of all social standing got women pregnant and left them to the workhouse or begging.  These days the workhouse is social welfare and so many people try to make single mothers feel guilty and grateful for the meagre income they receive.  No credit is given for trying to find work in a society in which child care is prohibitively expensive and no credit is given to those grandparents and female relatives who spare the state of its childcare responsibilities.

Thus, I would argue that we should move from this simple assumption that sees lone parent families as somehow a symptom of immorality, except on the basis of (men) not living up to the consequences of your actions, and again that seems to be something that is lauded in our media rather than condemned.  I also think that the condemnation of lone parent families on the basis that the children of them will be socially dysfunctional is also wrong.  It is far better for a child to be with a loving mother than having an abusive or neglectful father in tow.  I have noticed this many times before when speaking to children from lone parent families.  It is apparent that they are far better equipped for dealing with the world than children who grow up with two parents.  One of the most robust, innovative and well-travelled woman I ever met had had a father and uncle who had committed suicide when she was a girl.  I doubt she would have experienced all that she did unless that had happened in her life, she was a better person for it.

There is something about a child with a single parent that makes them more resilient and though I have long known this, it is has become more observable as my own household has changed.  As I have noted before, I have become de facto father on the eight year old son of the woman who lives in my house.  Now, however, whilst paying the mortgage on the house as an investment, I have moved away to find work and now live in a hotel.  Hence, the boy who has had this pseudo-father for five years, is now back, more consciously to being the child of a single parent.  Have I seen a change in his behaviour?  Immediately.  He has grown up incredibly in the three months since I left.  His literacy skills have leapt on but far more importantly he has shaken off silly, juvenile behaviour and now really contributes to the house, tidying his room, sorting out his laundry and washing up twice per week, all things he would never do when I was in the house.  He has a curiosity about vocabulary and certainly about finance that was also missing until I went.  Very rapidly he is gaining very useful skills that will stop him being one of these feckless teenagers you see trying and failing to live away from home at university and going back to live with their parents well into their 30s.

Why is there this difference?  I suppose because the child learns quickly that with one person if it cannot be done it will not be done.  There is no father to cover when the mother is sick.  There is no-one to mind the child when the shopping or the cleaning or the cooking is done, the child witnesses everything of everyday life which twin parents not really consciously generally shield their children from.  They also learn that if they do not do what they are asked, something is going to go wrong, there is no father to fetch the dishes or pick up the rubbish in their place.  If the child does not do it then it is simply another job for the mother.  In a single parent family there is none of the sleight of hand that occurs automatically in a dual parent family.  This tackles one of the key problems of contemporary UK society, that it is someone else's responsibility to do anything you dislike.  Shirking such responsibility is impossible in the single parent family.

The one drawback of the single parent family is money.  Since the late 1960s in the UK, certainly in southern England, but increasingly elsewehre, it has been impossible for one parent to earn enough to support a partner and two children in a middle class lifestyle, i.e. a car of less than 10 years old, a 3-bedroomed house, a foreign holiday once per year, a television that works, insuring household items and being able to replace things that break, eating out in a restaurant once per month, not a luxurious life but a 'comfortable' one.  Lone parents unless among the very rich cannot have a comfortable life.  Even with me paying into this single parent family neither they nor I can achieve such prosperity.  Some lone parents do get enough money from a partner who has gone but they are not the majority.  Given that the cost of so much, notably entering higher education, effectively precludes it to so many people, this is one drawback for the lone parent family, not helped by women earning 17% less than a man in the same role; women being in the large majority of lone parents.  However, given the efforts in the media to constantly discredit so many of the universities and degrees a large portion of the students whose families are new to higher education have been through, perhaps a more innovative, robust attitude to life that a child of a lone parent develops is going to help them when the Establishment has ensured that so many people's qualifications have been devalued.

Look around at the single parent families you know and you will find their children are more mature and are certainly aware of the consequences of their actions, even if the context they are living in limits their options for the future.  I am not advocating that men go round fathering children and abandoning them, on this blog I have always insisted people should handle the consequences of their actions.  What I am saying is that the media should not see single parent families as an easy target to say something about declining morality and rather see them as actually admirably equipping children for the challenges they are going to face.

Sent From Home At 8 Years Old: How Boarding Schools Screw Up Britain

It has always struck me as odd that local authorities and children's homes battle so hard to find adoptive parents or at least foster parents for the children in their care, 'in care' as the phrase goes and yet wealthy parents are permitted to send their children away from home to boarding schools which pretty much resemble children's homes of the past.  It is argued that children need solid families to permit them to grow up as balanced individuals and less likely to fall into crime, mental health and a whole range of problems that impinge on UK society.  However, the rules for the privileged seem to be very different and they are allowed to put their children into a context which severely damages them and in fact makes them socially disfunctional.  The huge difference is that a child from a children's home will never become an MP whereas a child sent to a boarding school quite possibly will end up in the government or a leading civil servant or military commander or lawyer or clergy person.  Why do we think it is fine to cut one set of people off from their families, and in some cases actually see it as a better method and yet for another set of people it is seen as something we should be trying to end and to find families that will take these children and give them a 'proper' family? Of course, one argument is that it is about money.  By definition, a child sent to a boarding school comes from a wealthy family so even if they have no talent or are lazy they will succeed and will get a house and a good job whereas a child from a children's home or local authority care has no-one to provide these advantages so are more likely to end up homeless or facing mental health issues.

The thing that triggered off this posting was the Channel 4 programme 'Cutting Edge' which today had an episode 'Leaving Home at 8' about 8 year old girls sent from their parents to a boarding school.  For those unfamiliar with the UK system, boarding schools are those at which a child stays all year except during school vacations.  They sleep, eat and live at the school.  Some of these boarding schools are the elite 'public' schools, but there are other less prestigious institutions.  They all do, however, charge high fees which mean a small slice of the population can attend.  However, as adults this small slice is over represented among the elites in British public life and business.  In total 67,000 children in the UK attend boarding schools; 59,000 children are in local authority care.  Of children in care 53% leave school with no qualifications; 45% end up with a mental health disorder (compared to 10% of the general population) and of those people in custody 30% have been in care, though children in care make up only 0.5% of all children.  In contrast 70% of judges, 68% of barristers, 55% of partners in law firms, 54% of journalists and 54% of doctors went to fee paying independent schools, of which boarding schools make up 13% of the total private school pupil population.

The programme was harrowing even though it featured very privileged people, the girls themselves were distraught at being separated from their parents and many of the parents were too.  This is unsurprising.  At 8 a child can do many things on their own but they are far from being an independent person.  Whilst boarding schools probably lack the bullying and in fact torture of pupils by others whether their peers or older, that happened in the past, certainly it is an unhealthy environment into which children should be put, and this is recognised by the fact that, as noted above, local authorities and charities always seek to house children in their care with adoptive parents as much as they can.

The damage that boarding schools do to children was highlighted in a 2008 investigation by MPs:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/may/11/publicschools.schools  Of course, not only are there the initial problems created by taking a child from their home and putting them in an instituion, anyone who has worked in the UK especially in London and towns like Oxford where adults who went to boarding school are more numerous, sees the problems that such an education lays for life.  The people who have been through the boarding school system have been doing something like military service for their childhood and of course this makes them tough but it also makes them very callous and uncaring about others.  I have seen no evidence in adults who attended boarding school, of the team spirit that such schools argue they promote.  When you have had no privacy, no space of your own, no space to be yourself and no security for the things you hold dear, of course you will always snatch whatever you can from others and give no thought to anyone's needs bar your own.

I will take a real life case: a woman I met some years ago in Oxford.  Her name was Tiffany 'Tiffy' Foster who though from Suffolk had attended a boarding school in Oxfordshire.  Her family numbered senior military officers and clergymen in its ranks.  I worked with her for nine months and found immediately that she viewed anyone she met who had not been to such a school with disdain which was ironic as she wanted to become a school teacher in a comprehensive school presumably to lord it over the pupils and fellow staff.  She argued that we who had not attended a boarding school were all too weak to deal with life. I was particularly angered when she complained that neither a single (by determined choice) mother who had an incredibly intelligent  daughter able to produce poetry that scanned at the age of eight stood no chance in life before she was not faced with the toughness of a boarding school.  She made no apology for the advantages of wealth and connections she had gained that made her life so easy.  However, this did not stop her taking other people's things in the office without apology.  I guess that the privileged do not feel rules apply to them or really that anyone else's concerns matter.  Another offensive remark she made was to ask what all the fuss was about the First World War (she intended to teach history).  I asked her what was the lowest rank of any of her family who had fought in that war and she said colonel; none of her relatives died in the war.  The highest rank any of my ancestors attained was sergeant-major and that was because he had served in the Anglo-Boer War in which he was decorated.  He was demoted twice for striking officers who were younger and less experienced than him but casualties always meant re-promotion.  He survived the war but died soon after from the affects of gas poisoning.  I have come a long way in social standing from that ancestor of mine (he drove a tram in peacetime) but I realised that it brought minimally closer to where Tiffany saw herself as standing.  To make such a remark about the war that took the lives of millions and mutilated many others was sickening.  Other boarding school families were not spared in the way the Fosters were, yet her own narrow horizons and self-obsession, promoted by her schooling barred her from seeing that.

This is one example, I have encountered many others in my career, but fortunately now I am out in the provinces, far fewer than I once did.  The trouble is that the higher echelons of our society are filled with these people and unfortunately no-one seems to really ask whether people who have been through such a harsh, uncaring school system (despite the efforts of the teachers to make it welcoming, the whole set up of divorce from their parents cannot be counter-balanced effectively) are really mentally fit to have so much power.  Of course, the generation above them lift them up without even thinking about it and they have an effective propaganda machine working for them.  When training as a teacher in a comprehensive school in Oxfordshire I was stunned to find that the headmaster of that school which took a wide range of ordinary pupils had a peculiar deference for neighbouring boarding schools.  Did he have no faith in the system he was part of?  Did he simply do it because it was a job?  Did he look on his own pupils with disdain and only see his role as fulfilling some compelled duty?  He might have been an isolated case, but the way that he privileged teachers who had had a boarding school background, was rather unsettling.  Even though he had not been part of that system he was incredibly deferential towards it much to the dismay to those who had come up through the same type of school that he was overseeing.  I do not have to say anything about the Harry Potter stories and how they show that boarding school pupils are 'magic' and special, to indicate that boarding schools get lots of free propaganda, most importantly to educate us, the bulk of the population, how reverential we should be to their pupils and alumni.

The sense that boarding schools are 'special' producing exceptional people, rather, than in fact, screwed up ones with out-of-date knowledge, is terribly prevalent in UK society.  Even the review in 'The Guardian' of this 'Cutting Edge' programme ended saying '... the kindness of the teachers shows that the boarding school model, somewhat [!] anachronistic in the 21st century, can still work.'  Work at what?  Producing another whole generation of people who will get power as a gift, almost a right, and yet have been screwed up by a system that makes it impossible for them to engage properly with the large majority of people they will encounter in everyday life.  However much they dislike it, they will have to mix with the rest of us.

Anachronistic is the word.  The boarding school system harks back to a period long before even the Victorian era.  I would argue that it owes much to ancient Sparta and the sense that children need to be becoming warriors from birth and that the weak should be exposed, marginalised from 'proper' society.  If we witnessed families, say in China, sending their young children, to be taught in 'education camps' there would be dismay and anger and yet that is what we see in the UK.  There would certainly concern about the future of China and its place in the world if these children were being groomed to run the country.  Yet, that is precisely what happens in the UK.  Boarding schools are bad for the UK because they screw up the people who are going to be our leaders and make them unsuited for the posititons of power they are going into.  Of course, I would ban them immediately.  In the meantime, however, I hope we can shift opinions of those people, you and me, who suffer at the hands of the selfish, arrogant, greedy former boarding school pupils and rather see them as 'special' in a way that we should pay deference to, but see them as people with 'special needs', people effectively mistreated by uncaring parents and in need of particular help in living in modern UK society.

School Uniform in 21st Century Britain

This posting is really only going to seem relevant to parents of school-aged children, but I think it also says something about how British society sees itself and, as I have commented on before, how wedded to the past it is. As I have written before, a woman and her 7-year old son live in my house. The boy goes to a local Church of England school which seems to be caught somewhere between the obsession with being sued that is common in the 2000s and attitudes that were going out of fashion in the 1950s. It assumes all families consist of a mother, father and three children and that the mother does not work and is in a position to bake cakes and provide voluntary assistance throughout the year. As it was, many of the nouveau riche, formerly lower middle class parents who tend to send their children to the school (faith schools always draw on a narrow social as well as religious, and often ethnic, basis) are now having to send the mother to work to deal with the recession, especially as so many of the fathers are self-employed and small/medium enterprises (SMEs) are suffering.

Anyway, a declaration has gone out that now the childen must wear Summer uniform. For the girls this is a silly blue-white checked dress of the kind you would have found in small branches of Tescos in 1973 (when Tescos was a down-market general stores rather than the mega-supermarket chain of today). The boys must wear shorts. Again, in my experience shorts went out in the early 1930s. They are humiliating for the children who have to wear them, and given how active boys are, just increase leg gashes and bruises that look terrible. Light summer trousers would be fine. The boy in our house is already embarrassed as other boys say they can see his underpants through the shorts. I also think the clear gender segregation is bad. What would happen if as in the movie 'Ma Vie En Rose' (1997) a young boy decided he wanted to wear a dress? What if one of the girls (or rather her mother) felt it was best for her daughter to match the current fashion among female university students around here, to wear shorts? People have been struggling to break down gender segregation and then a school seeks it to be very visible on the basis of how things were done fifty years ago.

In the late 1970s there was a move to less gender-specific clothing with sweatshirts or plain shirts and trousers. Where I grew up which had a large Muslim population, this overcame the issue with Muslim girls being compelled to wear skirts contrary to the precepts of their faith. Of course, I suppose a Christian school does not have to face that issue, but what about girls and boys with birth marks or scars on their legs? They have no option but to expose this. In the late 1990s parents, especially the middle class, who turned their back on a liberal approach to education, saw the revival of uniform as somehow connected to discipline. Of course, uniform avoids the problem of school becoming a fashion parade and fights over expensive trainers, but that did not mean having to change uniform back to the pre-1976 model. Ties have come back for girls and boys, fortunately now elasticated, though that was forced again by fear of litigation over health and safety rather than practicality. Many schools have the sensible 'French Foreign Legion' style caps with the neck protector, but the school I am talking about has simply revived the old fashioned school cap and stuck it on the head of boys and girls. The boys look like mini-versions of Brian Johnson of heavy metal band AC/DC, not really appropriate for school in the 2000s, more worringly the girls look too much like St. Trinians pupils.

People need to understand that uniform is fine for school children, but a uniform that is suited to the demands of the 2000s not the 1950s. We need to return to the practical style of the 1980s. I am sure some schools do, though none in the cities I visit regularly. To compel children into outfits that segregate them on basis of gender, take no consideration of religious or medial needs and open them up to ridicule, is a bad way to run things and must increase the challenges, already numerous, that teachers face on a daily basis. The ironic thing is, parents in their 30s now were born in the mid-1970s and went to school in the early 1980s and so never wore the kind of uniform they are happy to see foisted on their children. Just because it was seen as suitable for your parents does not mean you should force it on your children. Realise what good education is about, and it is not based on looking like children from an Enid Blyton story.

The Insidious Oppression of England's SATs

As regular readers will know in my house lives a woman and her 7-year old son. Yesterday evening the woman was ill and it was the evening when the boy's school was going to give a briefing about the SATs (Standard Assessment Tests) that the boy has to do this May and June. As I have commented before, the UK, particularly England (Wales dropped SATs 2002-5; Scotland and Northern Ireland have different sorts of tests), is obssessed with setting targets and testing children at many levels. I have commented on the government's attainment targets for babies, which open us to ridicule from other member states of the EU. However, more oppressive is the SATs system which sets tests at ages 7, 11 and 16. The results are used to create league tables of schools' achievement that take little consideration of the ability of the children when they entered the school (no I am not suggesting a test at 4 as well, but just pointing out that every school is treated the same whether it is in the poorest or the wealthiest district or has a majority or a minority of pupiles whose first language is English). The SATs for 11 year olds (Key Stage 2) were almost ended last year because the examining company could not cope. Such regular and stringent testing is not healthy and creates lots of pressures for children and divisions.

Erratically from the late 1960s through the 1970s, county-by-country most of the UK abandoned the 11+ exam which divided children at that age into two types of school: grammar schools and secondary modern schools. There was supposed to be a third strand, mimicking the West German model, with technical schools too, but as is always the case in the UK there very, very few of these. This system persists in the counties of Kent and Buckinghamshire and some state schools have mutated into grammar schools meaning they can have a selection test for entry. The 11+ system was very unfair. As girls are often more intelligent than boys at the age of 11, if you were an 'average' girl you were far less likely than a boy of the same ability to get into grammar school as there set gender quotas. Availability of places at grammar school also varied considerably from district to district. Near where my parents lived there were three grammar schools within 5 Km, in other towns there would often be one. So if you took the test in one town and got a particular grade you would easily get a place at grammar school but if you got the same grade and happened to live in the next town along then you might have to settle with a secondary modern school.

Not only was the system erratic, being a lottery based on child's gender and residence, it was very divisive. The curriculum at grammar schools was quite different from that at secondary modern schools. In particular foreign languages were not taught at secondary modern schools and the emphasis tended to be on technical skills rather than any opportunity to do science. So children put into secondary modern schools, the majority, were excluded from subjects which they may have excelled in. In addition, we know that children change in ability quickly through their teenage years, their interest in school fluctuates and they may become excited by a subject area, yet they were locked into a particular curriculum at the age of 11 and had not chance to break out of that. In addition, it made it very clear that the majority of children were being labelled 'second class' and effectively excluded from the chance to get 'A' levels or access university. Of course things have changed, the bulk of the UK has a comprehensive school system in which all children are exposed to the full range of the curriculum and with the National Curriculum introduced in 1992 they all have to teach the same subjects (with some regional variations such as Welsh language).

At one stage it seemed that with the growth of selective schools as if the SATs at 11 would mutate into a new 11+ exam and I am glad they are collapsing. However, even though that nasty development has been halted, I remain concerned about the amount and nature of testing of children in Britain. The briefing yesterday evening was presumably supposed to calm the nerves of parents but I must say I came away feeling utterly alarmed for the future of the boy in my house. The teachers said that we should not use the term 'SATs' around the children so as not to frighten them. However, in this media savvy era (the 7-year old told me why we needed CIF cream cleaner and Bounty kitchen tissue in the house the other day) children pick up on this and you cannot censor what older siblings who have been through the process will say. I have already seen the 7-year old crying over the huge list of spellings he has to master. The teachers madly spoke of 'spelling patterns' in English and I felt like leaping up and asking her about: 'here', 'near', 'weir', 'pier', 'peer' and 'kir', which all rhyme in British English and 'bough', 'cough', 'though', 'through' and 'nought' which all have different sounds (given the use of phonetics in spelling in Britain nowadays these are real challenges).

Here I am only talking about the Key Stage 1 tests which cover 7 year olds. There is loads of stuff on the higher level SATs which you can find all over the internet. At 7, the pupils can attain Levels 1, 2A, 2B, 2C and 3. With the usual bell curve patten the 'norm' is 2B. We were shown examples of Levels 1, 2B and 3 work and I was stunned at the levels expected. Of course they had a brief statement at the end that they 'celebrate' the achievements of children at all levels but it was clear that any child falling below Level 2B would be seen as 'falling behind'. Children working at Level 1 get 'tasks' rather than 'tests' so that they can give oral rather than written responses. However, this clearly will open them up to stigma from the children doing the 'proper' tests. The assessment is done by the teachers who are clearly sympathetic to the children, but it did seem very clearly, that they were being compelled to begin dividing children up on a very 'Brave New World' basis (in the novel people are categorised as things like Alphas, Betas, Epsilons, etc. by intelligence and physical nature and have access to various opportunities accordingly), they might as well go the whole hog and give the childen a big badge to wear saying '1' or '2B' or whatever. Societies, including children's classrooms, are harsh places when you provide even more tools for them to discriminate.

These children are expected to write for a total of 2 x 30-45 minutes in two sessions, not only developing stories or reports and writing postcards but spelling complex words correctly. Words like 'tantrum', 'suspicious' and 'suggestion' were shown to be expected to be in their level. They should use punctuation like question marks and exclamation marks as well as commas. Many adults I meet in professional life have challenges with this. The testing is not only about writing, but they have to read books of many pages on complex subjects (West African culture was one book we were shown) and then complete a long set of questions about the book. The children also have to make presentations which are assessed and be able to use complex phrases to explain things and respond to questions from the audience. This is a test of not being shy and again I see adults in business who find these things a real challenge and yet the government expects 7-year olds to achieve what many 27-year olds find hard.

The mathematics at first seemed more down to Earth with addition, subtraction, handling money, etc. Then we were told they had to use times tables (I did not even start learning times tables until I was 8 and not tested on them formally until I was 11, not 7) and applying mathematics to problem solving. They also have to discuss three dimensional shapes. In science they have to record results from experiments and also understand what makes a 'fair', i.e. consistent test with only one variable. Again, if you stopped a lot of adults in the street they would find this a challenge.

I felt as if I had seen a presentation about the Key Stage 2 SATs for 11-year olds rather than anything appropriate for 7-year olds most of whom find sitting still for more than 10 minutes hard and who write and draw things that we find almost impossible to recognise without explanation. It is no wonder that British children start school at 4 compared to aged 6 in Sweden. It seems impossible for the bulk of children in the UK to pack in all that the government expects them to know by the time they turn 7. This is not education it is a mechanisation of childhood with no clear need in sight. Despite such methods over the past two decades, we seem to have no improvement in Britain's competitiveness in the world and certainly none in ability to speak foreign languages. Instead we are creating very stressed children and that is very apparent. You just have to look at the Japanese system which comes closest to the current British approach to education to see how many suicides of young people it ends up in. The rise of teenage suicide in the UK cannot be divorced from the type of education system the country is running.

Reporting back afterwards the mother of the child was incensed. This came less from the expected level her son is supposed to be reaching for, as she pointed out, he cannot 'fail', the worst he gets is Level 1. What angered her was the list of work the school expects the parent(s) to do with the child ahead of the SATs. There is a long list of writing, speaking, reading, mathematics and science exercises (all of which need some (or a lot of) internet input, so creating a social divide immediately) that the parent is directed to do with the child. Already I have witnessed how much stress the spelling list is causing and that is without getting the child to presentations and experiments. Most households in the UK have two working parents who lack the energy, time and often intelligence to engineer the things the school is suddenly demanding. They are putting huge moral pressure on the parents that if they do not do these things they are failing their child. The woman in my house asked why, if she was expected to do all this at home, did she bother to send the child to school and that she might as well home tutor him. She asked why was the school not teaching to the SATs. Of course the trouble for the school is that they are compelled by the National Curriculum to teach a full spectrum of subjects including as diverse as ICT, PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education), religious education, geography, history, art, physical education and add extras like foreign languages as well as the English (which encompasses literacy, public speaking and writing), mathematics and science. By default the parents have to fill the SATs training that the school cannot jam into the day.

It is clear I should never have attended the briefing evening because the stress on mother and child has been immediate. There is three months of this, with the half-term break, until the SATs saga is over and clearly a lot more tears from mother and child along the way. It is clear that in this household and I am sure hundreds of thousands of others, it is in fact going to be detrimental to the child's development in terms of learning, let alone emotionally. The mother asked me why the government inflicted SATs on children and I said it was clear that at age 7 it was simply to enculturate them into the incessant testing that they are going to experience for the following 11 years (as with the school leaving age rising to 18, there are exams at 17 and 18 too). Abstractly I thought SATs were a bad thing in principle. What I have come to recognise this week, is that expected levels are totally unrealistic and put immense pressure on parents, teachers and children which is detrimental to all of them. Even if SATs are not abolished they need to be set at a level appropriate to 7-year olds, not trying to force them all to be geniuses at that age and attain levels which many adults find challenging (and yet function perfectly well in society). My father argued that the benefit of SATs is assure that teachers are working hard enough (he has a very negative view of anyone involved in education), but in fact they do not do that, they actually disrupt teaching immensely and sap the moral of teachers and their pupils.

I was stunned by what I saw is expected of 7-year olds. We need people to speak out not only about the unsuitability of all of this testing but also how dangerously inappropriate the levels of expectation for young children are. We are rapidly screwing up the rising generations of British people and all of us will pay the price in the years to come.