Parenting

Q. We frequently have our very young grandchildren to visit. However it reduces us to teeth-grinding, stony silence when the parents allow their children to spend fleeting milliseconds at the table before galloping off around the room while we try to eat food which has taken time, effort and love to prepare. Trying to correct the children evokes defensive retaliation from their parents. We love having the family round. How can we tackle this diplomatically? – Name and address withheld A. Say nothing. The grandparent role is to love unconditionally and effect corrective behaviour by more subtle means than criticism. Tackle this with a two-pronged attack.

Complaining about ‘toxic parents’ has been a viral hit on TikTok with videos on the topic racking up several billion views. Only one of those views is mine and there won’t be another because it was like peering through a window into a cross between a padded cell and a charnel house. In video after video, boys and girls across the English-speaking world – aged roughly 15 to 25 – share the trauma of what they’ve had to endure, courtesy of their terrible mothers and fathers. Many children suffer at the hands of the people who should protect them, but in this case what the kids find intolerable would, to anyone sane, look like normal, even responsible, parenting.

I think by now it’s becoming horribly apparent to parents of every political persuasion that we can’t sit out the culture wars. You might call yourself progressive, loathe the Tories, but still… the ideological tide is rising, and when it laps at your own child’s feet, everything changes. It becomes impossible to ignore the fact that gender activism these days isn’t about gay rights or even trans rights, it’s not about being inclusive, it’s about presenting utter nonsense as plain fact. A generation of children are being fed a distorted version of reality.

I’m currently standing at the top of Brownie Point Mountain, having spent the past two weeks looking after our three sons while Caroline has been sunning herself in Barbados. I’ve been cooking, cleaning, washing – you name it. As if that weren’t heroic enough, I spent the previous week with our 18-year-old daughter in Mexico City helping her find a flat and a job. In other words, I’ve had no help from Caroline for three straight weeks. I feel so virtuous, I’m almost tempted to throw myself off said mountain. A place in heaven would be guaranteed. I daresay some women reading this will be thinking: ‘Why should you get any points for doing what your wife has been doing for almost 20 years? Typical bloody man.

Human beings are wanderers who roam the world in search of adventure. And this love of adventure creates a need for home: homecoming makes wandering worthwhile. Hence human beings have devised instruments that help them to navigate, so as to guide them to their destination and — most importantly — to guide them back again, to the place where they are at home. The sextant was one of the most beautiful examples of this: an instrument for steering by the stars, which you held to your eye, and which reminded you of the vastness of the space across which you peered and the littleness of your own ambitions. Our ancestors who steered by the sextant never doubted the fixed background to human life, the unchanging heavens by which they navigated.

Thrusting women who identify as men and then have babies into the spotlight has been a strange priority during the first few months of Biden’s America. Just three days before Mother’s Day, Rep. Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, sent Twitter ablaze while testifying before the Democratic Oversight Committee on some conspiracy theory called the 'Black [sic] maternal health crisis’. The crisis, it turns out, isn’t that community’s abortion epidemic but the country’s legion of racist OB/GYNs, apparently. ‘Every day, Black [sic] birthing people and our babies die because our doctors don't believe our pain. My children almost became a statistic. I almost became a statistic,’ Bush wrote on Twitter ahead of her video testimony.