I ONCE made my children walk three kilometres home after they refused to be in a family photo.
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Actually, I’ll rephrase that. They ended up walking home after I issued them with an either/or ultimatum which went something like: “Either you let me take your photo or you can walk home.”
So off they went.
It was New Year’s morning, 2000, the start of a new millennium.
We were down at the beach watching waves roll in under a cloudy sky, relieved that we were all still alive and the Y2K bug hadn’t caused computers to crash, the global economy to stop, the lights to go out and whatever other catastrophes were supposed to happen as part of that relatively short-lived global panic. Such an anti-climax when we had to dig up the secret family survivalist stash of baked beans, toilet paper and candles.
Anyway, back to the beach, and a couple of things worth noting at this point.
Yes, it was only 18 years ago that families had a designated photographer whose job it was to document Important Events for Posterity and cop abuse, at a time when teenage boys still objected to being photographed because it didn’t happen very often. The world was two years away from the first real commercially viable cameraphone, 13 years from “selfie” making it into the Oxford English Dictionary and a whole zeitgeist away from Instagram make-up.
The world was two years away from the first real commercially viable cameraphone, 13 years from “selfie” making it into the Oxford English Dictionary and a whole zeitgeist away from Instagram make-up.
Given that we’d all survived potential global annihilation and could eat the stashed baked beans at our leisure, I thought a photo was warranted.
My three sons, then aged 15, 13 and 12, thought otherwise.
Somewhere in someone’s Good Parenting Handbook is something about giving your children an either/or scenario as a way of avoiding conflict, presenting them with options and choice, and achieving a responsible outcome and the Good Parenting Handbook tick of approval.
Examples from my personal either/or selection include:
Either you take the garbage out/empty the dishwasher or stop poking/pinching/punching/annoying or pulling weird faces at your brother, or you can forget about ice cream after dinner.
Either you put the dirty clothes in the washing basket or you can just keep wearing the stinky ones. (Always iffy with teenage boys inclined to see that as a challenge worth accepting).
Either you eat your vegetables or you’re not watching The Simpsons. (It was 2000 when parents still had some control over that sort of thing.)
Or my personal favourite: Either you read Emma or I’m not taking you for driving lessons. (For my eldest son in year 12 who detested, but read, Jane Austen’s classic for his Higher School Certificate, one chapter at a time, with a chapter equating to one hour of lessons in my car).
Hence my use of “Either stand still and smile for the photo or you walk home” on a beach at the dawn of a new millennium after years of noisy and colourful application of either/or parenting to that point, interspersed with outright ultimatums, pathetic pleading and coarse language.
Now some people might find two parents driving off while their children trudge back home a dreadful thing to do, particularly when I mention that the parents grinned and waved as they drove away. Fortunately I’m not near any of those people.
And it was good for our sons’ little constitutions, particularly when they had to sprint the last 100 metres because I was lying in wait behind some bushes to take their photo as they neared home.
I got thinking about parenting this week after a friend, who’ll remain nameless to protect the innocent, revealed one of the most shocking parenting incidents of all. She’s the mother who made her son read Shakespeare. And not just any old Shakespeare. Hamlet.
Me: “Isn’t there a violent killing in every third or fourth scene in Hamlet? And a main character whose fake madness sends his girlfriend mad and then she dies?”
Friend: “Mmmm, yes.”
Me: “And isn’t just about everyone dead in the final scene so there’s no happily ever after for anyone apart from a ghost?”
Friend: “Ummm, yes. But he’s reading a child’s version. And it’s Shakespeare.”
Her son is eight.
I might be the mother who abandoned her chicks on a beach with a hearty “Ta, ta”, but at least they didn’t have to read Shakespeare in their leisure hours in primary school, which I’ve decided is the example I’ll produce the next time they whinge about the parenting they endured during their formative years.
And my friend’s son years from now will no doubt thank his mother for fostering a love of the English language, as he accepts his second Booker Prize and the crowd cheers.
This weekend we will celebrate my mother’s 80th birthday at a family gathering in the country.
We will tell stories of the past, including the one about the only night Mum tried to feed her children tripe, with a dramatic but fairly predictable response.
From memory it went something like Mum saying: “Either you eat the tripe or have nothing for dinner”, at which we all stood up and walked, hungry but united, to our rooms.
Or there were the endless dramas before school, where 11 children had to get up, get dressed, get fed and be out the door before 8am. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is probably the best way of summing up those years for us as children, and certainly for our mother.
I looked for the photo of my sons taken so long ago, on that strangely auspicious January 1 day, and there they were, with such joy and life ahead of them that it nearly had me in tears.