Parenting: Totally different - still just as hard

 

I grew up in the 1980s, when we walked home from school unaccompanied, played outdoors until dark, and bought sweets shaped like cigarettes with the coins elderly neighbours pushed into our eager hands.

 

We played in building sites and fields pocked with cow pats, cycling adults’ bikes with no brakes and riding go-karts our fathers cobbled together from parts lying around. We climbed trees, went barefoot, and if we did get a lift somewhere, there were probably seven other people in the car, crammed onto each other’s laps and none wearing seatbelts (cars didn’t have them in the back seat, even if you’d wanted to wear one).

 

We had our children at an age when our parents were waving us off at the train station, the first generation to go to college. Now we’re caffeinated, worried 40-somethings whose children run our lives. We drive them to baby yoga, birthday parties in noisy warehouses, cheerleading and chess. We never let them leave our sight. They sleep in our beds until they hit puberty.

 

If you were picked last for football, you couldn’t make a fuss about it. You were warned against being a girl, and if you were a girl, you were ordered to be a big girl. You got a medal if you came first, second or third. Otherwise you lost. You accepted that.

 

Our fridges are shrines to our children’s ability to show up.

 

We ate food that came from boxes, packets, and cans, all accompanied by boiled potatoes and cups of milk. Dad was served first, and Mom ate last: Fish fingers, Angel Delight, tinned pies, and additives defined by E numbers made up a large portion of our diets. We ate it all, and if we did leave anything on our plates, we were warned about the starving children in Africa. After dinner, the girls washed up, and we watched TV on first one, then two channels. Back to one channel if it was raining and the reception died.

 

There were no gifted children. We all have gifted children today.

 

In years to come, our children will complain about us, just as we do about our parents. With all our books and blogs and courses, we’re still just winging it.

 

Aoife O'Carroll is a separated mum living in Co Kerry with her two boys aged 17 and 14, and a girl aged 10.