Being a parent is hard. 

Its not something they prepare you for. Sure they tell you about the dirty nappies and the sleepness nights and you can read up about the total and utter financial drain. But no one tells you the real stuff. 

No one tells you that you have to watch your precious, perfect, sleeping newborn be pricked with a needle and scream their tiny perfect, helpless head off. And the sole purpose of the exercise is to make them bleed. 


No one tells you that at 8 weeks old you have to sign a piece of paper giving permission for them to be pumped full of drugs and live bacteria so that they can be ill. And then you have to do it again, 4 times before they are 3. Sure the books and the clever people will tell you that you’re protecting them in the long run. But the exact moment the needle goes in will be when your newborn baby will stare at you with total devotion but then their eyes will question why you could allow such pain and suffering and their total trust lowers to 99%.


No one tells you that you will have to force them to go to a childminder or school because as much as every hormone in your body tells you need to be at home with them, you have no choice but to go to work or to an appointment or something. Sure its for their benefit in the long run. But at that moment its abstract benefit. 


No one tells you that youll have to sit them down and force them to do spellings or readings or some piece of seemingly irrelevant homework when all they want to do is go out and play or watch TV. But, hey, its for their own good in the long run. 


But is it? Is it really? 

What are we teaching them? That if they work hard enough they’ll always get 100% and reach their goals. But they wont. 

Every single one of them will reach a point when they cant get any more. Some will be prime minister but theyll never be the leader of the world. And some will work the till at Tesco but theyll never be store manager. Who cares? Wont we love them all the same? Doesnt the world need checkout assistants? 


Its hard being a parent. 

Its hard being a parent and a school governor. 

I know that schools try so hard to reach every childs potential. They know more strategies than you can imagine exist. They know the research behind every theory. They know it works. 


And im sure it works. 

But at what cost? 

I want my children to be happy. My children are all super clever (arent everyones?). And i want my children to be able to be prime minister if thats their potential. But id rather they were happy checkout assistants than miserable CEO’s. 

Its hard being a parent. 

My kids want to go to university. But i know  the realities of what that could mean. It could mean a lifetime of debt and still they could end up ‘average’. Did those 18 years of being told they could ‘be anything they wanted to be if they tried hard enough’, did they really help? Werent we as parents actually complicit in their misery? 

I want the best for my children. I want to give them the world. I want them to have every opportunity they could possibly imagine and more. But most of all, i want them to be happy. I dont want them to feel like theyve failed even when they havent. 

I was told by one of my children’s teachers this week that I wasnt trying hard enough. I needed to do spellings and reading EVERY night so that the child could get the results they were capable of. So tonight that particular child hasnt watched any TV but has been practising spellings over and over. Their final test score is exactly the same as it was at the beginning of the night. So they’ve worked super hard, foresaken all fun and achieved exactly nothing. How on earth does that benefit the child? 

One of my children subscribes to the “good enough” mindset. As a governor, i know this is the absolute evil of children that must be got rid of at all costs. Teachers use almost every waking hour trying, researching and using every method to circumvent the “good enough” mindset some children (especially boys) have. But my “good enough” child is possibly the happiest of all six. I doubt this particular child will be the most academically gifted in the world, but i dont doubt they could be the greatest in anything else they put their mind to. But im clearly the one at fault for not pushing them past the “good enough”. 


Its hard being a parent.