The greatest damage you can do to a child? Withhold love

My mother told me once that if she had her time over, she wouldn’t have had kids. An offhand remark, possibly not meant, but never forgotten.

What I’ve learnt: the greatest damage you can do to a child is to withhold love. Withdraw it. Weaponise it, by wrong-footing the person without power. Picture: istock

Lily Allen went there. Actually went there. Said that her children had ruined her career. Of course it went viral. My first thought: Lily, no, no, stop, what will your girls think of those words down the track? Her daughters, 11 and nine, didn’t need to hear this. Plus, what message does it send to women in their twenties and thirties; and what ammunition does it give to the incels, the Andrew Tate-ists among us? It’s exactly what they want to know. And from a former poster girl of gloriously brazen, brutally honest young womanhood no less.

But, context. The throwaway remark – about the difficulties of balancing motherhood with work – appeared at the tail end of a podcast; Allen was laughing at the time. Explaining that she’d chosen to step back a little from her music career to focus on her kids. “I mean, I love them and they complete me, but in terms of pop stardom, totally ruined it.”

Ah, that little qualifier, “I love them”, and thank goodness for it. It was the bit they – we – needed to hear. But, context. The throwaway remark – about the difficulties of balancing motherhood with work – appeared at the tail end of a podcast; Allen was laughing at the time. Explaining that she’d chosen to step back a little from her music career to focus on her kids. “I mean, I love them and they complete me, but in terms of pop stardom, totally ruined it.” Ah, that little qualifier, “I love them”, and thank goodness for it. It was the bit they – we – needed to hear.

Lily Allen said that her children had ruined her career. Picture: Getty

So. This wasn’t blame, frustration, regret taken out of context, it was light-hearted banter. Because yes, kids do veer careers, and sometimes stop them. The juggle is hard and gruelling for women and we can’t have it all, completely. Everything in our lives succumbs to compromise because of those vanquishing little disruptors. Could I have done motherhood better? Oh yes, because exhaustion from the juggle constantly crashes into it. But no parenting journey is perfect. For me, motherhood has meant an anchoring in an unimaginable bliss – as someone who’d never wanted kids as a late teen, nor as a career woman in her twenties.

But then something took over. A vast want. A pull to the wild within. The consuming biological craving shifted a life path. A steady job was left and somehow a different, less linear kind of career formulated. But I would never tell my children they ruined my work – they didn’t. They pulled me to the coalface of a vivid, complicated, different kind of life; to the coalface of living.

Some personal context: my mother told me once that if she had her time over, she wouldn’t have had kids. An offhand remark, possibly not meant, but never forgotten. It felt cemented in truth because it wasn’t spoken in anger, it was noted matter-of-factly, within a liberated, post-divorce life. She had fled housewifely, pre-feminist suburbia and then had to juggle career, financial stability, the mentally draining complications of an ex, plus parenthood. A lot. Yet her throwaway remark coloured my perception of how I’d been parented; I suddenly felt an obstacle in my mother’s life. Which is why I thought principally of Allen’s girls when I heard their mother’s remarks – and took a sharp intake of breath.

What I’ve learnt: the greatest damage you can do to a child is to withhold love. Withdraw it. Weaponise it, by wrong-footing the person without power. It is catastrophic for the child. But digging a little deeper, Allen wasn’t blaming her kids for the loss of career. She was speaking specifically about the demands of being a young pop star, and she’s now pivoted into acting with enormous success.

Peter Garrett knows the tonic of being well loved as a child. When he was 23, his mother died in a house fire. How did he get through it? He told this magazine it helps, in the wake of any life-cataclysm, if you’ve been well-loved as a child. “That equips you as well as anything can for whatever you’ve got to deal with.” I agree, and because of that truth tell my kids how much I love them, all the time; they never experience the piracy of love withheld. Meanwhile, Allen is still admired for her honesty and bluntness, and I suspect her daughters are doing just fine with a mother like her.