Liz Fraser - A Spoonful of Sugar

‘Oh well, it’s just my silly toe. Means I can’t walk, but you know, I’m fine apart from that. So who’s for coffee?’

Ten minutes later my husband has been discharged, caffeinated beverage in hand, to play with the little people, leaving me alone to have a good natter with Granny. Shrieks of laughter and excitement fly up from the garden every so often – and the kids seem to be having fun too.

Having fun : now there’s a thing. Surrounded by all of our incessant – and often quite unnecessary – rushing, working, worrying, buying, cleaning and general obsessive busyness , it seems to me that our children are left with remarkably little time for what being a child is surely all about: having FUN. Having the freedom to muck about, dig in the earth, find little bugs, stick them down their sister’s neck, and not worry about anything; being able to just BE.

Granny notices this too.

‘Just look at that lot – happy as ducks in water down there, adventuring. It’s beautiful. You don’t see so many kids these days just playing freely like children should, without an adult or a piece of silly legislation to spoil it all for them.’

There’s a pause, while I think of a neat way of asking the question that pretty much sums up the core of this entire book. Drum roll … Deep breath …

Splish! A suicidal greenfly lands in my coffee.

Fishing the squirming insect out with my little finger, I try again.

‘Granny?’

‘Yes?’

‘You know there’s a lot of concern these days about what’s happening to our children’s health and happiness, and that many kids aren’t having what we consider to be a proper childhood any more.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Well,’ I pop my drowning friend on the corner of an old copy of National Geographic so he can take some time to reconsider all his life choices. ‘What do you think childhood is actually for ?’

There is a long pause, as she searches for a tactful way to answer this that won’t make me feel as stupid as a remarkably stupid person sitting a remarkably difficult nuclear physics exam.

‘Well,’ she offers at last, giving her coffee a little stir. ‘Firstly, I think childhood is for having TIME. Time to think, time to learn, to process, to experiment, to grow into yourself. There seems to be so little time available to kids these days for any of that. It’s all rush, rush, rush.’

‘Yes, but that’s just how it is in modern times, Granny, isn’t it? So much can happen at once, with email and mobile phones and BlackBerrys – that’s a kind of phone by the way, not a fruit – that we never get a chance to just stop .’

‘Exactly, and there’s your problem. Adults can rush about if they like, but rushing children means they lose that important freedom to play properly. You have your whole adult life for such responsibilities and constraints – they’re not for children. How can they learn through play, using their imagination, if they are stopped every twenty minutes to rush on to the next task?’

OK, here I am guilty as charged, and, dare I say it, you quite possibly are too. My kids are constantly being told to ‘Stop doing that now, it’s time for …’ and if that sentence doesn’t end in ‘school’ then it’s ballet or dinner, or homework, or bed. Or something ! We all know kids who are marched from pillar to post, in a supposed bid to give them the ‘best’ childhood, whatever that means.

Granny isn’t done yet.

‘And it’s not just the pace of their lives that takes their childhood away. It’s also what they’re exposed to and how they are treated. Childhood is a heavenly time and you should try to make it last as long as you possibly can for them – so why dress your three year old up like a pop star or coach your little ones for university or stage school? There are plenty of years ahead for that, and the early years of childhood are not the time. You don’t need to cram it all in before they’re ten!’

She stands up gingerly and hobbles to fetch a box half full of what looks like they might once have been ginger biscuits. When offered, I take one, nervously. I’m reasonably sure you can’t die from eating a ten-year-old ginger biscuit, so let’s keep an old lady happy.

‘When I was young,’ she continues, sitting down again and taking a suspiciously chewy bite of something that should be rather crunchy, ‘we didn’t worry . We really didn’t. We had very few things , but what we did have was the freedom to live happily and to grow – without worry. Kids seem to have so much to worry about now – but why? Why put that on them?’

It’s true indeed that there is far more for children to fret about than even when I was growing up ages and ages ago … in the 1980s. My children worry about everything: from getting their five portions of fruit a day to what they wear, whether they’ll pass their ballet exams; whether they have even a tenth of the myriad technological gadgets on offer in Tesco’s; what’s on YouTube; if they have seen all the latest films; whether the world is about to burn itself into a crisp; why they haven’t received any emails for a month; if they are the only kids in the class to go to bed at eight o’clock, and a million other things.

Much of this has not come from me (especially the five portions thing, which the school curriculum seems to obsess about and it drives me crazy) but from school and their friends. So what can we parents do to alleviate some of this concern?

Over to Granny: ‘Well, you don’t have to heap so much responsibility onto their shoulders, do you?’

‘Responsibility? Like what?’

‘Like all of your own worries. If you are worried about how much exercise they take, then just fit some more into their daily life, without making a big deal about it. Don’t have a long talk with them about how bad it is not to exercise enough. They don’t need to know that until they are well into their teens, and if you’ve got them into a healthy routine they’ll do it as part of their normal life anyway. Stressing kids out about what they eat, and all the bad things that are happening in the world, and how much work you have to do, and deadlines and things going on in a marriage are not at all for children’s ears.’

‘So, basically you’re saying we should chill out more and protect them from a lot of our worries?’

‘Yes! It’s about as simple and easy as that. It even extends to all the little responsibilities you give them, like what they wear, what they eat, what they watch. Children aren’t designed to take so much responsibility on board – they sometimes need to be told: this is the way it is, so eat up, or put this on, and that’s the way it is!’

Worry is a terrible thing to load onto a child and causes all manner of problems. They should be free to learn without any responsibility and concerns that belong in the adult world. They don’t need to be bombarded with information and offered hundreds of choices – tell them what they need to know, make sure they have what they need, and leave the rest to the grown ups.

The issue of work and marital issues is one many of us can identify with: I get really crotchety when either of these is causing me grief (usually it’s both, but let’s not dig too deep into this!) and I know my kids pick up on it very fast. The same was true when we moved house and started to have financial concerns recently. My usually delightful and sunny temperament (a mild note of sarcasm here …) was replaced by that of an irritable and decidedly un-jolly witch, and I know my kids were all affected by the general stress that floated on every dust particle in the entire house – and given the state of the building work, there were millions of those.