When your kids are perfect and everyone else’s suck

IF another kid is being a jerk to your kid, should you intervene? It’s a fine line between overreacting, and standing by, writes Darren Levin. Here are my rules.

I ACTUALLY love kids playgrounds, but things can get out of hand pretty quick.

Like when the Mr Whippy van comes along and you’re in danger of getting trampled by tiny pairs of $150 Nikes. Or when your four-year-old twin girls run off in different directions and you have to instantly choose which one you love best. (The one that went to bed on time this week, usually.)

Whether you’re outdoors or inside one of those noisy cesspits of bacterial disease, playgrounds are a great place to eavesdrop on other dads talking about their ideas for start-ups. “It’s Uber, but for pork crackling,” they say as you try contain your kids in a safe corner so you can quickly update your SuperCoach team.

But anywhere kids play can also easily turn into a political background — and for once it has nothing to do with Donald Trump. Forgot monitoring your kids screen time. You have to monitor their swing time, such is the demand for these crack pipes masquerading as entertainment. In case you don’t know, their parents get really snarky when your kids hog the swings, primarily because it’s low-touch play equipment that allows them to check out for a few minutes and update their SuperCoach team.

(Sidenote: councils really need to address the swing-to-seesaw ratio. Have you ever seen a line for the seesaw? No, because they’re boring af.)

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HOW my bogeyman plot spectacularly backfired.

The playground ettiquette between parents and kids is vast and complex. (Pic: iStock)

But playground politics can sometimes reach the kind of intensity usually only seen in the comment sections of a vaccine debate. It happens when there are jerk kids running amok and you have to work out whether to stand aside or step in. And the jerk kids are almost always boys. Why? Because “boys will be boys” is a pervasive and toxic ideology still embraced by dads and mums who don’t want to take responsibility for actually parenting their entitled “little man”.

Experience has taught me there is a subtle art to stepping in. Intervene too early and you could ruin a key moment of personal growth, or even worse, embarrass your kids in front of their peers. (You’re about as cool to them as a fidget spinner, remember.) Intervene too late and your child could end up on the deck.

Here’s a handy guide to the most common scenarios, and how an expert (ie. a dad with 1.2 more kids than the average Aussie family), deals with each.

When there’s a scuffle over communal toys

Stand aside and let your kids sort this one out. It’ll teach them resilience and the kind of negotiating tactics that will hold them in good stead in this dog eat dog world. There’s probably also a lesson here in the value we place on material objects over people, but this will no doubt be lost on a kid that just wants a turn on a balance bike with one working wheel.

When there’s trash-talk being exchanged

Stand aside, but monitor the situation. “Dumb-dumb” can turn into “poo-poo head” very quickly. And, trust me, you don’t want a “pee-pee butt” situation on your hands. Our children are precious, perfect flowers and we must protect them from bad words. “Sticks and stones” is an adage from a bygone, pre-Twitter era.

Darren Levin with his three daughters. (Pic: supplied)

When you’re pretty sure a fight is going to break out

This happened to me recently in an RSL play area during pub dinner with the fam. A group of boys were terrorising and intimidating other kids, while their parents were on the other side of the venue eating parma and sinking pots. This is a sliding door moment most parents will face. Who do you confront? The kids? The parents? What if you confront the parents and they end up being total psychos and you end up the hapless punching bag in a YouTube brawl video that goes viral? How might one monetise that? What if you confront the kids and things get heated and you end up as the protagonist of Christos Tsiolkas’ sequel to The Slap? What then!?

I avoid confrontation in my life at all costs, so the rule of thumb for me is this: I step in when my kids ask me to, either verbally or through a look of sheer terror on their face. Which is what happened at the RSL that day.

But as I methodically planned out my pre-emptive strike, waiting for just the precise moment to step in and tell those kids off in a polite and non-threatening tone, I noticed another dad had beaten me to it.

It was my dad and he had already reprimanded the kids, coaxed apologies out of the parents, and was now sitting at the table with them discussing footy and having a beer.

I guess they didn’t have existential parenting crises in the ‘80s.

Darren Levin is a writer, editor and wannabe dad-fluencer based in Melbourne. Find him on Twitter and Instagram.