Parents Under Pressure
BBC Two
Did everyone get the memo? The one that says that parenting is, well, kind of hard? What Larkin said in 1971, Parenthood’s Grandpa Buckman put almost as poetically in 1989: parenting is like “your Aunt Edna’s ass. It goes on for ever and it’s just as frightening.” And today, just look around your office at the armies of working parents, their grey eyes screaming the message that their mouths will, given a nanochance — that the baby isn’t sleeping. I wonder, sometimes, if kids really are their parents’ bundles of joy, or bundles of kryptonite that suck out of Mum and Dad the ability to find joy in anything.
Of course, it’s easy for me to be flippant about it as I screech through my early thirties, facing a different sort of energy-sapping nemesis (the concerned do-gooder: “Have you met Trev? He’s entirely wrong for you, but it’s him or a trip to the egg-freezing clinic.”). But Parents Under Pressure suggested that mums and dads have earned every shade of that grey-eyed panic. The newsreader Sophie Raworth was like a posher, prettier version of Jeremy Kyle as she catalogued every sort of dysfunction. The experts and family case studies lined up with apocalyptic findings. Absent father? Your daughter is more likely to develop early and get into “sex and drugs and rock’n’roll”, said Professor Jay Belsky, one of the more colourful contributors. She could even be more likely to get breast cancer in middle age. Child spends lots of time at nursery? He/she could become badly behaved at school, having a domino effect on classmates — and across society, polluting like cars, added Belsky. Even stay-at-home mums aren’t immune: fail to bond with babies in their first year and their attachments could get so tangled that they’ll go on to self-harm. And to be distant parents themselves ... Misery upon misery, as vast as Aunt Edna’s ass . . .
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Just as scary as these big-headline findings were the lower-key examples, showing the everyday attrition that grinds down parents and kids. The nice girls who sat on the trampoline, upset that even when Mum got home from her long shifts “she’d try and like blank us out so she can still do work”. And Mum, who used to go for a cry on her bed, “because that was the only way I could get time for myself”.
There were solutions here — talking therapies, play schemes, Janet and John-style tips such as “be available” — but it was hard to focus on them, given the overwhelming tone of gloom. It fell to Noah to be the main source of hope: a small baby being passed around a classroom on the Isle of Man so that kids would learn “empathy”; see what Noah needs, just as we used to with a class hamster. So things might improve, in one generation, on one tiny island. Yikes. By the end I wondered if this wasn’t just an information programme but a reassurance exercise — if, of course, parents are reassured by knowing that everyone else is having an equally tough time. Good luck, mums and dads, and godspeed, Noah.