The Single Dad's Guide to the Galaxy: Parenting in the real world

by Roger McEwan

  I also encouraged combining physical activity and games and in the summer months we can be found battling away at backyard cricket, volleyball, soccer or mini-tennis. These are fun and highly competitive – the odd tear has been known to appear. Unfortunately as your children grow you need to keep adding to the mountain of toys and games to keep them interested and engaged. So the opportunity to purchase some of the latest and greatest toys and games with a visit to Hamleys in Regent Street, London’s oldest and largest toy shop, was a keenly anticipated stop during our holiday in England.

  HAMLEYS

  Hamleys was impressive: six floors jam-packed with toys and games. Liv, who had just turned nine, couldn’t believe the ocean of teddy bears she was confronted with and she delightedly jumped from display to display. Rog, eleven, was interested in toys and models and we split our time between floors one and five. For once I was in no danger of losing them: they’d have to be chucked out of Hamleys.

  The range of toys made selection difficult but eventually Rog and Liv settled on their choices. I counselled Liv that buying only teddy bears might not be a good idea and I gave her time to reconsider. She thought about this, or gave the appearance of thinking about this, but she decided to stick with the teddy bears she’d chosen.

  My approach with the children in these situations is to offer advice highlighting what may happen but let them make the decision. The major exception to this is when it comes to sweets and chocolate. That’s an area I patrol vigilantly, noting what is bought and when it’s eaten. Logic and restraint abandon the majority of children when confronted with items radiating sugar.

  With Hamleys ticked off the list, at least for two of us, we spent the rest of our time in London visiting many of the famous attractions. On our last day, a Friday, we were coming back up the Thames after visiting picturesque Greenwich. I was relaxing with a beer, Rog was taking in the sights and Liv was sitting next me quietly. Unless she’s sick, Liv is seldom quiet. As we slipped back towards Westminster Pier she suddenly looked at me and said earnestly:

  ‘Dad, I don’t think I chose my toys very wisely.’ She had clearly been mulling this over for some time because the sentence sounded more like my words than hers. I smiled sympathetically.

  ‘Never mind, my little one. I did try to point that out.’

  There was a pause while Liv considered this. ‘Well, can we go back so I can buy some different toys?’

  I had been contemplating a leisurely dinner and not a dash back to Hamleys via the Tube during Friday evening rush hour. ‘Darling, it’s 4.30 and London gets pretty busy around now. It will be a mission to get there.’

  ‘We could try,’ she said imploringly in the way daughters can but that you wish they couldn’t.

  When confronted with a question, or in this case an entreaty, from the children I ask myself – is this a battle I need to win? It’s an insightful question that helps me determine if the issue is important or whether I can go with the flow. For example: ‘Dad, can we have an ice cream’ is a battle I probably don’t need to win. If, however, it’s the fifth time they’ve asked, then it’s a battle I must win unless I want to be nagged into submission for the rest of my life.

  This question works just as well when you’re dealing with your significant other. If you heed the answer, you can save many potential stoushs over nothing. Needing to win is different from wanting to win, which is an easy trap to fall into.

  I looked into Liv’s hopeful eyes and decided this was a battle I didn’t need to win. Who knew when, or if, we’d be back in London.

  The London rush hour meant personal space on the Tube was at a premium. Liv hung on to me like a baby koala and stared up into my face for reassurance. Rog, who doesn’t enjoy crowds at the best of times, wasn’t rapt to be impersonating a sardine but he coped stoically.

  We arrived at the well-named Oxford Circus to find rush hour had become ‘get an effing move on’ hour. Making progress, while not losing a child, presented a serious challenge. It’s on occasions like these that having a partner and being able to split child-minding duties is a blessing. With a child in each hand we were a decent barrier to the on-coming human traffic which was flowing fast and in single file. In the crowd I found it tough to get my bearings and it was more by luck than good management that we weaved our way to Hamleys.

  With a good deal of prodding, choices were made in record time. Liv chose toys and no teddy bears, though I laid down the law about that. Included were the magical-looking ‘Lights from Anywhere’, which Liv chose after watching a Hamleys employee make the lights disappear up his nose and come out his ear and other parts of his body. Rog was also delighted with more models and toys and we were soon heading back onto Regent Street. We were still three abreast but this time with shopping bag extensions.

  I figured the worst was over and getting back to the Tube station was merely a question of retracing our steps. But I wasn’t aware that some Tube entrances close at wildly inconvenient times. The closed gate in front of us gave us no choice but to dive back into the human current in search of another entrance.

  Luck seemed on our side and we followed the crowd down a staircase towards the familiar Tube ticket barriers. As we approached the final hurdle, a guard started closing a metal gate door that looked eerily like those used on the Titanic to keep steerage passengers below. Resisting the urge to yell ‘Give us a chance to live, you Limey bastards’ we advanced – witnesses may have said charged – through the crowd as fast as was semi-decently possible. The guard, oblivious to the drama being played out around him, gave a final heave and slammed the gate shut – behind us.

  ‘That was close, Dad,’ the children said in unison.

  THINGS

  Finding ways to keep the children occupied has become more difficult as they approach their teenage years. When Rog turned thirteen he reached that awkward age between toys and adult pastimes. As a result he’s become difficult to shop for on his birthday and Christmas. He still has toys unopened from last Christmas. I came up with the idea of wrapping them up again but he was far from impressed. He told me that he was getting around to them. Yeah, right!

  Liv, on the other hand, hasn’t yet reached that awkward age and still adores the simplicity of teddy bears. She has an abundance of them at both houses. In fact, she has so many you would suspect that they’ve been breeding like Tribbles (Trekkies will know what I’m talking about). I’m loath to buy more and therefore she too is becoming difficult to shop for.

  Even armed with the latest gadgets and devices, keeping children entertained remains an age-old problem. Blissful were the days when you could lie them on their backs with some plastic shapes to chew on while you sat, feet up, with a coffee. Now we live in an age where children have an abundance of the ‘things’ Norman Douglas describes – but are they happier or more productive?

  On this subject I was fascinated to read an article by German philosopher Georg Simmel. He described how life in cities contains an endless stream of stimulations and distractions offered to us from all sides. We don’t need to think anymore, he said. We merely swim from one distraction to the next. Simmel wrote that in 1903. That’s before cinema, cars, radio, television, the internet, iPods and social media just to name a few of the things we now have. I shudder to think what he’d make of today’s world and the time adults and children alike spend thinking.

  It’s a real tension for parents. How much do you let these ‘things’ occupy the children as you get through your day? In an ideal world I would spend the majority of my time interacting with Rog and Liv, but I don’t live in an ideal world. Who’s going to organise dinner, tidy up and do the washing – and that’s after I’ve finished work to pay the bills. I might just want to put my feet up for half an hour and watch anything on TV to avoid having to think. Sorry Georg.

  Whether we like it or not, technology has become a staple form of entertainment for children. Wh
ile video games, as they were called in my day, have been around for decades, today’s games are unrecognisable in terms of their reach and realism. Xbox, PlayStation and others allow children to play constantly and many, including Rog, would do so if they were allowed. There’s no danger of running out of twenty cent coins anymore, though we wouldn’t want our children visiting arcades unchaperoned in today’s nervous world. Is the world that much more dangerous now? I used to walk to school from age five, but neither Rose or I for a second considered letting our own children walk at that age. That would be tantamount to a dereliction of basic parenting!

  The increased realism of today’s computer games has also been a dramatic change. The video games of my era were exactly that, games. You knew it was unlikely that invading aliens would appear in the sky in neat lines and start moving sideways dropping bombs. Today’s games are scarily real and I wonder whether these games do have an effect on my children. Intuitively I think there has to be some effect, but research is unsure and comic books were once considered an avenue to delinquency. It may be a case of the more it changes, the more it stays the same. Only time will tell.

  TECHNOLOGY

  The other change technology has introduced, potentially more sinister, is the way it keeps children connected. That’s a massive paradigm shift that I doubt we understand. Children used to be in contact with their friends at school, during after-school visits or by phone calls. In between, including school holidays, they were liberated. Now with the internet, email, interactive games, mobile phones and social media they’re wired into the social grid during their waking hours. I can’t know, but my suspicion is that future generations will wonder why we thought that this was a good idea.

  I’ve tried most social media apps because I refuse to be one of those people with a strong opinion about something I’ve never tried. I caught my brother out recently when he told me the movie I was planning on seeing was ‘average with poor acting’. I asked when he saw it and he hadn’t! I have Facebook and Twitter accounts and I post and tweet periodically so I feel entitled to put forward my opinion that they’re mainly time-wasting distractions. But I am in a minority, and the younger generations hammer them and other social media apps.

  With technology dominating the environment I make sure my children get time away from screens and the rest of the world by having ‘non-screen’ time. Each school day between 6pm and 7.30pm, all gadgets and screens have to be put away, including mine. It gives us a chance to interact, make dinner together, play or just breathe. It takes the children out of the cyber world and brings them back into the real world. They usually start by slumping into the couches but within five minutes they’ve started reading, bouncing a ball, checking out forgotten homework or doing a jigsaw. I’m the same. If I turn off my laptop and phone then I’ll drag them out for volleyball or a walk or I’ll spontaneously start pruning a tree. It’s easy to get slack when I get busy but I try to police it with vigour.

  In the weekends the screens are kept at bay somewhat as the children, at least on Saturday mornings, are playing sport. On Saturday evening we often watch a DVD together and, while I appreciate the movie is on a screen, it’s not interactive and requires your brain to engage with the plot. We set the lounge up cinema-like with the addition of blankets and pillows and fill the table with snack foods to munch on. When we watched Castaway I’d forgotten how emotional the scene is when Helen Hunt, whom I have a crush on, discovers Tom Hanks is still alive. After the movie had finished and I put the lights back on Liv said, sniggering, ‘Daddy blubbed.’

  Television remains a source of entertainment for my children but as they’ve grown it’s been surpassed by social media and online content. This despite the number of channels having grown exponentially. Rog watches some sport, mainly cricket, and comedy while Liv gets hooked on hideous but addictive reality TV shows and cooking programmes.

  Liv used to love the music channels and I wondered why she went off them, but after chatting to her it was obvious. The world has changed and the music channels have been left behind. Spotify, iTunes and other streaming services have changed the power balance, allowing listeners to play what they like, when they like, making music channels yesterday’s news. If Liv wants to watch a music video then she can do so online.

  One thing hasn’t changed – music and growing up go hand in hand. Rog and Liv have entirely different tastes in music and keep me up to date with what’s hot in their world. Liv is a top-twenty girl and listens to the latest hits, which are in my opinion, except for a few artists such as Pink, pretty awful. Rog on the other hand, taking after me, likes alternative music and plays Muse, The Killers or Skrillex when it’s his turn in the car. Recently he put on ‘Anarchy in the UK’, which made me wonder how he’d heard of the Sex Pistols but I should have guessed, it was a game, Guitar Hero.

  I’ve noticed that today’s music (words that make me feel old) is far more risqué in image and language. Bump and grind has been taken far too literally with the clothes worn, leaving little to the imagination. Added to this is the frequency of swearing where only the ‘C’ word seems outlawed. It isn’t only alternative or fringy artists either, number-one songs often contain a string of swear words. Why radio and TV stations bother to bleep out the offending words is beyond me. Everyone, children included, know what the words are. Pink’s number-one hit ‘Blow Me (One Last Kiss)’ had the classic line ‘Just when it can’t get worse, I’ve had a shit day’. The radio station silenced the ‘sh’, leaving Pink having an ‘it’ day. That brings more attention to the word, not less. And shit, ‘shit’ is pretty mild.

  It seems to me that society is still using 1900s thinking to handle swearing. We pretend it doesn’t exist and bleep it out, maintaining the illusion of an upright – and uptight – society. My stance on swearing where my children are concerned is straightforward: they know which words are swear words so there’s no excuse for using them. If they hear them in a song, or coming out of my mouth as they do sometimes, it’s no big deal. I’ll happily sing ‘I’ve had a shit day’ as we drive along – though interestingly I get told off by the children, who have weirdly assumed the role of language police.

  While on the language theme, when the children got to that age when toilet humour is hilarious, I placed a ban on rude words. Having your children saying poo and fart in public is somewhat cringe worthy. To sidestep my ban my clever Rog came up with the concept of using ‘edur’ words. That’s rude words backwards. Liv joined in with gusto and they invented words such as detraf, ttub and oop. I tried banning edur words too but it was a crafty mechanism and we all still use them today as a code when in public.

  The times children spend hours without ‘things’ is probably rare, yet I think Norman Douglas is right. It’s only when they’re absent that your brain is fully engaged. In my own case, I never study or write unless I can block out a chunk of time enabling me to think and reflect at a deeper level. I’m considering extending our non-screen, non-connected time. I love the idea of spending time together in a hut without electricity, living basically. Maybe a good idea for a holiday although I can imagine the look on the children’s faces, especially Liv, when I explain how a long drop works.

  Reflections

  Setting times when no one is allowed to use screens is good for the children and family interaction.

  Technology provides entertainment but it is important to keep an eye on your children. Social media in particular can become very invasive.

  ‘Is this a battle I need to win?’ is a great question to ask yourself to help put issues into perspective. It works with children and significant others.

  Let your children keep you up to date musically – there’s no excuse for being stuck in the nineties, eighties or worse.

  Don’t get too hung-up about bad language – it’s unavoidable. What is important is that your children know what is and isn’t appropriate. And when!

  16. School


  Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

  George M Trevelyan (historian, 1876-1962)

  You’ll have gathered by now that my parenting style is best described as relaxed. Being a parent is much easier when you are having fun – in fact I can’t think of anything that you do better when you’re not having a good time. Being relaxed doesn’t, or shouldn’t, equal being slack and it’s important that you get the details right, especially when it concerns school. I don’t mind if my laidback style gets me into the occasional scrape, but I hate it when it affects my children. In particular it’s been my tendency to leave organising school to the last minute that’s bitten me on a regular basis.

  Like all parents, I want my children to blend in at school. This is especially important on the first day of the school year when they are thrown together with a group of mainly strangers. I know we’ve all been through this process, and it may be good for a child’s development, but my recollection of being lumped in with thirty random individuals was that it was daunting if not downright scary. Imagine this concept in a work environment – after the Christmas holidays you arrive at work and are confronted with all-new colleagues with eclectic traits such as: happy, committed, diligent, ambivalent, moaning, malingering and psychotic. No thank you. I prefer my existing happy, committed, diligent, ambivalent, moaning, malingering and psychotic colleagues. At least I know who’s who.

  Then there’s the new teacher to navigate, who also has traits from the previous list. I don’t want to further blacken my reputation with the teaching profession, but parents, students and children all know how enjoyable it is to have a first-rate teacher. It makes a world of difference. But it’s a lottery. I was in love with my teacher when I was six and I got a pretty decent, and needless, smack in the head from another who was clearly in the wrong profession when I was eleven or twelve. I cross my fingers at the start of the school year and hope my children get someone who’s at the top of their game.