The Good, The Dad and the Ugly by Brian Viner

Author:Brian Viner [Viner, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847377548
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

13

It Takes A Man To Be A Father

Learn from the ways other dads do it – they might just be right. And if they’re wrong, learn from that, too.

Good parenting. It is the holy grail of child-rearing because to fulfil its requirements, all the time and on every level, is, frankly, nigh-on impossible. Most of us do the best job we can according to our temperaments, our children’s temperaments, and the circumstances of any given situation. Experience helps too, but however many kids you have, and however old the eldest is, you’ve never had a child older than that. Which might sound like something of a riddle, but I’m sure you get the gist. When your eldest is twelve, you’ve got twelve useful years of fathering behind you, and yet you’ve never been the father of a teenager before. To an extent, therefore, fathering is about making it up as you along.

It also helps enormously, over the entire eighteen years or so from, you might say, the cradle to the rave, to keep an eye on how others do it. Mostly, it is a judgemental eye. Sometimes it is an admiring eye. Very occasionally it is an outraged eye, as when another parent rebukes your own children inappropriately or unfairly. The Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas recognised the dramatic potential of just that situation when he wrote a novel, which became a bestseller and in due course a TV series too, about the far-reaching consequences arising from a father slapping another man’s son at a suburban barbecue. He called it, simply and effectively, The Slap.

Something vaguely similar happened to us once on a holiday with another family, when the other dad shouted at Joseph and Jacob in a restaurant. He would certainly never have raised his hand to them, and it’s true that they were having a niggly tiff with one another, but I felt that it was my place to shout at them, not his; while he clearly felt, like the bloke in The Slap, that if I wasn’t going to take action, he should. Whatever, my rising irritation with my sons was instantly redirected, unspoken, towards my friend. Like Jane when the children were very young, I felt that crossness was my prerogative, not his. His anger seemed like an implicit criticism of my parenting methods.

Certainly, the parenting methods of friends, relatives, and for that matter perfect strangers, are not only fascinating to most of us, but also, very often, wrong. Actually the process starts even before we become parents. It did in our case, anyway. Never, we resolved sniffily, would we do as our friends Cathy and Pete did, and plonk any toddler of ours in front of the telly to buy some peace and quiet. Yet as soon as we had toddlers of our own that’s precisely what we did, issuing a silent apology to Cathy and Pete as we left the room, and years later we rolled our eyes when another good friend, who’d had two children in her forties, rationed their TV-watching habits with what seemed to us excessive zeal.

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