At the present count, we have 14 syringes. Some are stuffed in kitchen drawers, but I have also found an alarming number under my eight-year-old daughter’s bed, suggesting heavy recreational use. But this isn’t a crack den. It’s simply your average British household with small children who take – need? – the family-favourite brand of paracetamol, Calpol.
Formulated in 1959 and administered to children for nearly 70 years, Calpol is a part of British life. And this is set to continue: more than five tons of Calpol are sold every day and more than 12 million units each year. With more than 70 per cent of the market share, Calpol is the family narcotic of choice. Nothing conjures up childhood memories quite like that little brown bottle.
But are we – as Dr Chris van Tulleken suggested in a 2018 BBC documentary – addicted to this ‘heroin of childhood’? I dare say we might be. I say ‘we’, since this so-called addiction stretches stickily from my children who like the ‘better juice’, to me, their weary mother, who likes the effect. And by effect, I mean its sedative properties.
Calpol’s website may advertise its ability to ‘take great care of your little one’ with a picture of a mother and daughter lying giggling on the grass in the sunshine, but that doesn’t fool me. A picture of a child zonked out in a dark room would be far more appealing to many British parents. Calpol is largely administered to send a child to sleep. Calpol’s marketeers knew this, advertising the product in the late 1970s with the slogan: ‘Pleasant for baby, peaceful for you.’
Comedian Michael McIntyre’s 2019 Calpol sketch taps into its emotional monopoly over parents. Your children ‘are better people’ once they are dosed with Calpol, he shouts as he peacocks up and down the stage, likening the Calpol syringe to a weapon worn on a holster or a petrol pump.
In the syrupy interstices between gentle parenting and the good old-fashioned ‘method’ of leaving howling children behind closed doors, Calpol inserts itself. Modern parents like myself, who practise a fabulously inconsistent combination of the two, find Calpol to be the last remaining tool in their arsenal – and one that is seductively wrapped up as care. If you are unwilling to let your child cry themselves to sleep in distress then a 5ml dose of Calpol from the purple syringe at 3 a.m. is your last act of agency.
Modern Calpol’s sugary recipe (2.2g of sugar per 5ml) places it in the grand tradition of infant medicine with a sweetener to get it down the hatch. In response to concerns that dosing a child with Calpol was the sugar equivalent of pushing liquid Haribo down your baby’s throat, former owners Johnson & Johnson introduced a sugar-free version into the ‘Calpol family’ in 2011. For obvious reasons, I have never bought it: we all know that the little mouth only opens as obligingly as it does for the sugar high.
I was once advised by a GP to administer gripe water – dill seed oil and sodium bicarbonate – to my colicky first child. But one cursory glance at the label confirmed to me that since it contained no drugs whatsoever it was never going to do the job. Sorry but I needed to send her to sleep to allow me to Pritt Stick myself back together.
No, narcotics are what parents really want for their children. It is Calpol’s marketing genius to convince us that we don’t all live in a kiddy crack den.
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