Do we need a Parents’ Liberation Movement?
This was posted by Jennifer Howze on the Times’s Alpha Mummy blog yesterday:
Parenthood, how do love thee? Let us count the ways.
* Strangers who grope your belly during pregnancy and discuss whether you’re gaining the “right” kind of weight (assumedly not the kind you get from eating that Mars bar you’re holding right there)
* Supermarket cashiers who out of sheer selflessness and concern call security when you try to buy wine and unpasteurised cheese during pregnancy
* Researchers who have determined that by letting your children watch CBeebies while you did the laundry you have basically allowed their brains to eat themselves
* Parenting experts who confirm that by picking up your baby too much/too little that you have condemned them to a lifetime of malformed personal relationships and a career working in a film rental store. A porn film rental store.
* Government officials who create 12-point systems to have your child reading English at Oxford by age two as long as you do these flash cards at home every night for 3 hours. You’re doing the flash cards, right?
Let’s face it, it’s hard enough keeping up with all the advice on parenthood – you can barely fit in a half hour with the little tykes after reading it all. The overall climate for parents is one of judgement and expert opinion, particularly the kind that reverses itself every political cycle.
Isn’t it time that we threw off our shackles, rose up and became free mums and dads? I’ll be debating the topic at the Battle of Ideas this weekend.
On Sunday at 3:30 I’m appearing on a roundtable discussion about why we need a parents’ liberation movement, along with the Guardian’s Zoe Williams, the Institute of Ideas’ Jane Sanderman and chair Jennie Bristow, author of Standing Up to Supernanny.
You can still get tickets to the Battle, which runs over Saturday and Sunday. It’s a real jolt to the intellect with discussions on everything from chav-bashing and the problem with air travel to football rivalry and India’s future: slumdogs or millionaires? What’s best about these sessions is that the audience really takes part – it’s not just a bunch of people on a stage talking at you. Anyone with an opinion can jump in.
Come down for high-spirited discussions and tell us whether you think parents need to be released from their bonds.
See article in the Herald Scotland here:
http://tinyurl.com/yhwf3q6
Thanks for the link Sue – that’s really funny! I thought we had a great discussion at the Battle of Ideas yesterday about ‘why we need a parents’ liberation movement’ – indeed whether we need one at all – which did, as I concluded in the session, lead me to think that it would be good for those of us concerned about the trajectory of parenting culture and policy to do something, and think about what that thing might be. I’m not quite sure how this has already crystallised into the existence of a fully-formed ‘PLM’ – not least because I’ve always thought that movements needed to grow out of something, rather than be launched or founded overnight.
What’s interesting though is that there does seem to be a sense among some in the media that parents should be rising up against some of this stuff, which sometimes leads to a certain wishful thinking that they already are. That happened recently over some of the controversies about vetting, too – I often have to explain that despite a few critical voices, a lot of people are just going along with the vetting scheme and nobody’s actually building barricades.
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