Me Parents

Being a parent can be a real obsession. Everyone has a view, a documentary or even a book. A friend of mine who felt she was far from being a yummy mummy – who calls herself a sloppy mummy, which I prefer and is also a category I probably fall into – was given a book recently called Making Happy People: The Nature of Happiness and its Origins in Childhood!

This book identifies what it calls four parenting types – authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent and uninvolved. According to Mr Martin, “authoritative” is the category that makes for happy children, while the rest are a disaster.

But I feel that the author fails to emphasize the most damaging approach of all – me-parenting. Me-parents can be authoritarian, indulgent and uninvolved, but never authoritative, all in the space of a day.

There is just one consistent rule of me-parenting, and it is this: the parents always come first. Me-parents want to be a best friend to their children, they rarely refuse them anything, and they shy away from conflict.

They read this as being liberal and non-authoritarian – ie, in the child’s best interests – when the bottom line is really all about themselves. Putting a screaming toddler to bed on time doesn’t make you feel half as good as letting your progeny curl up in front of a DVD of Toy Story with a bar of chocolate – and it’s way more time-consuming, too.

Feeling loved, needed and comfortable is the first priority of the me-parent. A single whisper of “Mummy, I love you” guarantees a gooey feeling of maternal compliance.

Me-parents have never denied themselves anything, or done anything that could be construed as self-sacrificing – unless you count Pilates – so they are certainly not best-equipped to pass on the basics. Me-mummy parks wherever she likes, shouts at the maid, and refuses to take criticism from her children’s teachers – and Junior absorbs it all like a sponge.

But the discipline issue is merely the tip of the iceberg. Me-parenting means assuming that whatever is best for you is also best for your child – that high-pace working life you thrive on, exotic holidays and late-night parties at which all the mums dance with their four-year-olds.

...The child of the me-parent is expected to be a rewarding hobby and an expression of his or her parents’ life philosophy. Pretentious names, precocious behavior, highlighted hair (at four?) and offbeat designer clothes are all things that make it harder for the kid in the playground – but are more interesting for the me-parent.

When the children get older, even more fun awaits. An excellent example of me-parenting – recently cited by many teenage girls in the western world as a cause of their unhappiness – is the tendency for mothers to seek advice from their daughters.

“Do you think dying my hair blonde will make me more attractive to men?” is the sort of question the poor girls get asked while me-mum is opening her Mother’s Day card. And they say we had it tough when we were young