Kids call the shots in modern families
Sometime in the past few decades, parents stopped being the leaders of the family unit and became slaves to the tyrannies of the ankle-biters — but there’s got to be a better way, writes David Penberthy.
By way of an understatement, there must be a happy medium between the parenting methods of the so-called good old days, where it was held that if you spare the rod you spoil the child, and the 21st century approach where kids are not only regarded as equals but even leaders in the inner workings of families.
There was an interesting little academic study released this week that on the face of it merely addressed the issue of parental stress — or more accurately, maternal stress — in the context of meal times.
A Flinders University survey of 22 mothers found that getting dinner on the table was “a high-pressure juggling act” that makes mums want to throw a tantrum or get takeaway.
“Accommodating kids’ sport commitments, juggling allergy issues, meeting health guidelines and finding the time to cook is a major stress for mothers who feel under pressure to provide nutritious meals every night,” the survey found.
“Running out of ideas and motivation is a key stress that makes getting takeaway food tempting.”
MORE FROM DAVID PENBERTHY: How can one street contain so much violence?
Ostensibly this research is little more than good fodder for one of those whimsical pieces you’d find on a mothering blog.
To my mind it speaks to a greater truth, namely that in the space of just a few generations, the lines of command within families have been seriously redrawn.
Members of my parents’ generation tell stories of dinner times where the little ones were threatened with physical punishment or forced to go hungry if they didn’t eat what was put in front of them.
This survey suggests that in 2019, instead of giving our kids the time-honoured speech about the starving children in Africa, we are more likely to return to the kitchen to prepare them another dish if the first one has been rejected.
On top of that you can layer on the pressure parents now feel to make sure they are ticking all the requisite boxes on the food pyramid when it comes to dinner time and school lunches, especially with lunch boxes being the subject of random inspections by the health narcs on the lookout for rogue items such as choc chip biscuits in kindergartens and schools.
I am not a mother — although, as an aside, I would note that in 2019 if I choose to identify as one it is my right to do so — but I have always done pretty much all of the cooking at home, not as a chore but because I enjoy it.
Having said that, I freely admit to being guilty of not sticking to my parental guns like my forbears and demanding the children eat what’s in front of them, or go without.
Rather, I will tailor meals to suit their individual appetites, occasionally even grumpily preparing new meals when the first one is rejected.
MORE FROM DAVID PENBERTHY: The Left are now doing the Coalition’s hard work
Like many families, I’m in the vaguely annoying position of having kids who seem to have secretly collaborated in devising a list of culinary likes and dislikes that makes a one-dish meal a logistical impossibility.
One of them likes chops; the other hates them but loves snags (which the other one won’t eat); one loves lasagne; the other has an aversion to bechamel sauce. On and on it goes.
Clearly this column is not an attempt to denounce my own children in print. I love them with all my heart.
It’s more an act of self-denunciation, as at some point us parents appear to have given away much of the authority that we used to command, with the modern family becoming less of a rules-based entity and framed instead around mutual negotiation.
You can see it with other indicators such as the decline in children having part-time jobs, or even the extent to which pocket money is no longer necessarily linked to the performance of specific domestic tasks, but just doled out without expectation, as part and parcel of parenting.
As I read the survey, I had the evocative, no-bullshit words of my late Granny Pfitzner ringing in my ears.
My Grandma was the absolute epitome of Australian working class resourcefulness. She had nine kids. She spent much of her life in public housing but she ran a fastidious house, winning several garden awards, and she always put a meal on the table for her kids, with the expectation they would eat it, or go hungry.
MORE FROM DAVID PENBERTHY: Don’t underestimate the dork. He may win
I wonder what my late grandma and others from her era, who were born in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, would make of the brand of “stress” identified in this Flinders University survey?
There would be people reading this column who grew up in an era where there were no washing machines (only washboards), no disposable nappies (only cloth ones you have to scrape out revoltingly with a knife), no microwaves, no pre-made meals, no house cleaners for those of us who are middle-class enough to employ one, and at a time when the gender split on domestic chores was even more imbalanced than it is today.
They would look at the brand of “stress” identified in this report as a bit of a laugh.
We aren’t busier and more time-poor than we have ever been. We just think we are.
Stress is largely an imagined construct for our more mollycoddled modern generation, with the mollycoddling extending downwards towards the children, as we turn ourselves into short-order chefs to satisfy their pickiness, as befits a family unit that is governed not by bosses, but run by equals.