I’ve always been able to cope with everything, so why do my kids make me so crazy?
My boys are six, four and two. Before I had them I was a PA to the CEO of a local housebuilder. George travels a lot for work and is often away for the whole week so I’m on my own a lot for things like bath- and bedtime which I know should be idyllic times of the day but are mostly awful and involve sooooo much screaming.
When we had our first baby, I stopped working full time and now work three days a week helping out with events, board meetings, training and other projects that don’t fit neatly into other buckets. My boss and I get on pretty well but he’s famous for shouting when things go wrong. I cope by being really calm with him. The problem is that he doesn’t like my replacement because she cries when he goes for her. So he involves me in everything he is worried about. I know it’s a compliment but it takes more than the three days and I get pulled into really stressful things. Recently, I helped with some lay-offs and was online all weekend with it. But I still only get paid for three days.
I find the boys really hard to control. I call them ‘the beasts’ which I realise must sound awful but that’s what they are. I nag them all the time and find myself screaming at them definitely at one point every day. And then I feel so guilty once they’ve gone to sleep and so annoyed with myself for losing it with them. Sometimes they rampage around the house long after bedtime simply because I’m too knackered to stop them and get them into bed. The house is always a mess, overrun with their toys and general junk. My oldest boy is struggling at school but I can’t find time to read with him without being mobbed by the other two. And that’s even more frustrating because I know I need to help him more at home but it’s just so difficult with two other kids. The middle one has minor special needs so he needs to have quite a few appointments with hearing specialists which takes a lot of time. The youngest likes to have all of my attention which is exhausting and means I often have only one hand to do things because I’m holding him the whole time.
The breaking point was a visit to the park when the boys played hide-and-seek. The oldest deliberately wedged himself high up a tree while the youngest, who is recently potty trained, demanded to do a poo immediately. I had to let him do a shit in a bush. The middle one then had a tantrum about being hungry and refused to walk home. I really tried to stay calm but ended up shrieking, then crying and chasing the boys home, raging at them the whole way and then as soon as we made it home I locked myself in the toilet to cry. It was awful. People were staring but I honestly didn’t care.
I can’t understand why it’s so damned hard when I see myself as a sensible, well-organised person who can cope with a lot of stress. My lack of control even seems to stretch beyond the boys. When George was away last week the TV broke and I called the call centre for help, desperate to settle the kids with their usual pre-bedtime programme. The man wasn’t listening to me and I totally lost it on the phone as the boys fought and wailed in the background.
Most of the time I’m embarrassed at myself, embarrassed at the way I behave with my kids and of my life generally.
Monique, 42, PA
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It is an easy conversational turn to remark lightly that working life prepares you well for small children. Long hours, conflict management, multitasking, impossible demands, difficult bosses, etc. We get the point. It’s a nice line but it’s bull. Our workplaces are far more civilised than we let on – even when your chief exec is prone to an emotional outburst. And our children, by definition, are much less so.
I was eavesdropping one morning in a coffee shop while a team of Kiwis and South Africans talked about their work. A woman said: ‘I just want people who are efficient. Who do what they say when they say they’ll do it. I just love that. That guy, Bill in Nairobi, you know him, he’s so efficient he doesn’t even sign off his emails. Fuck, I love that guy.’
Children are never like Bill in Nairobi.
Years of running to schedule, thinking through ideas, delivering practicalities, planning budgets, being listened to and massaging the ego of a big-cheese-boss doesn’t prepare you for the nihilism of life with small children.
Why our children stress us out
As explored elsewhere, part of the problem is that many of us are not hugely experienced with kids.
‘I never thought about how I would find having a baby. My mum had my sister when I was 17 so I thought I knew all about babies but I didn’t know anything. I took six weeks’ maternity leave before the birth and I should have relished that time but I didn’t get it. I read Holly Willoughby’s book, Truly Happy Baby and it seemed to come naturally to her, I thought it would for me.’
Historically, when extended family social groups lived together and spent evenings around fires they demonstrated experienced parenting and balanced each other’s approaches. It didn’t come naturally – it was observed, copied and improved through generations. As the Australian author and child psychologist Steve Biddulph frequently notes, children in less-industrial societies tend to be a lot happier than our Western children, as do their parents. But Monique is often alone with her boys and lacks good advice or much personal support. As she is finding, this is a hard way to parent and not one humans are designed for.
Single-generational modern living provides us with precious little observed experience to learn from. Not only that, but we are also so involved in getting through the working week that we’re barely even aware of our high stress levels until we see them played out. A mum who works for the local authority watched her four-year-old daughter pushing their one-year-old son on in his buggy, while she walked behind on a call from work. When her young son started to fuss and cry, her daughter imitated her mother, dramatically waving her arms and ‘shhhhhhh shhhhhhing’ aggressively before running her finger across her neck in her mother’s own ‘cut it out’ gesture. The mother was mortified to see herself played out so accurately. A woman who works for a fashion brand was startled one day when a woman she’d never met asked her how her son Miles was. ‘Sorry do I know you, do you know Miles?’ she asked in some confusion. ‘Well no,’ said the woman cheerily, ‘but I always hear you screaming “MILES, MILES!! COME BACK HERE RIGHT THIS SECOND!!” across the park.’
But it’s not just the ‘shushing’ and suppressing of our children when they don’t fit into our working life that’s the problem. It can also be the explosive rage Monique is experiencing. In my house we call it ‘doing the full Billingsgate Fish Wife’. The emotional place that you didn’t think you’d ever get to. When stoical and unflappable adults find themselves screaming, shouting and slamming in ways that they find appalling. A first-time dad recalls his first sight of that rage in his usually serene wife. He was helpfully doing the first wash after the baby came home from the hospital but accidentally mixed the whites and colours. His wife wanted to do things perfectly. Which didn’t include having her firstborn dressed in mucky greige. She was so upset that she picked up a discoloured babygro and yelled ‘I am going to smash your fucking face in with this’ to her stunned husband. He says they laughed about it later. But many, many months later. Monique’s partner George would appreciate this story as he too has watched his previously calm wife turn into a person who can go from normal to postal in seconds. The Monday school run, fraught with missing shoes and reading books and yelling loud enough to disturb their long-dead dog buried in the garden, is a time he has learned it’s best to keep his profile as low as possible.
There is something special about the speed, ferocity and frequency of professional parent rage. Which isn’t to even hint that at-home parents don’t lose their shit now and again. They surely do and, in some ways, it isn’t so different. Yet it’s certainly true that the workplace ‘task’ mindset is incompatible with happy childcare and this, combined with very limited skills to manage children, is a recipe for disaster. At its simplest it’s rooted in a fundamental disconnection from the way children think and behave. It comes from being poor at predicting their next actions and motivators – you think ‘I’m so damned late and he is trying to waste my time’; an experienced parent or childminder, in tune with their child, thinks ‘he loves to pick up small rocks and talk to them as if they were his pets, I’ll join in the chat.’
The contrast between our parenting style and the techniques of a childcare professional can be a stark reminder of that skills gap. When our second child was three, her nursery briefly lost its Ofsted approval on account of some missing paperwork. For her to attend, we had to be there and sit on teeny plastic chairs and watch. I became transfixed by Maureen, who’d run the place for 30 years. Maureen sailed through the children with effortless ease and grace. Nothing that any of the children did surprised her or stressed her. She seemed to see cups falling before they tipped, wees needed just before trousers were wet and to divert tantrums before they took hold. It was majestic, like an enchanted dance you could set to music in an Attenborough documentary. She absorbed warmth and joy from the children and reflected it right back to them. The only thing that remotely bothered her was us mums trying to intervene occasionally. This she would have none of, once sternly telling me I didn’t need to follow my daughter round the room when I thought I was just watching her paint.
Executive Parenting Coach Lisa Reeves explains:
‘As parents, we can get home from our workplaces and find ourselves “on task” again and may slip into the same “push” behaviours we use at work to get things done at home. We can be so focused on the “task” of parenting and everything that “needs to be achieved” that we may push our children away, drive our agenda over and above connecting with theirs, fail to connect and we may end up feeling the “guilt, frustration, sense of failure” emotions reported frequently. AND, our children don’t do what we want!
‘Emotions and stress can drive negative behaviours. The impact of this is that we may risk seriously damaging our relationships with our children, particularly in the “little people” period. If we do nothing, our legacy may very likely be that of the “busy, angry, distracted, impatient” parent our children see on a regular basis. If we want to have connected, positive, long-term relationships with our children, we may need to examine our own behaviour and make choices about what we can change … and then do it.’
Which is sound advice, albeit hard to act on when your mind is awhirl just dealing with everyday life. Let alone pissy emails from your boss while you are trying to manage three rambunctious boys.
The sources of professional parent stress
In contrast to magical Maureen, professional parent stress is reactive, scary and – as Lisa rightly says – unproductive. Our stress response is often triggered by our professional approach to five factors: time, tasks, relationships, behaviours and multitasking.
The first factor is our stress around time. This comes from our precise, professional reading of the importance of timeliness. The working parent thinks: ‘I am two minutes late for baby swimming and I must resolve this by rushing Felix and stripping him off with ruthless efficiency even if he screams the roof off.’ This ratchets up a notch if it’s a real deadline, like the school bell. A market-researcher dad of two girls says: ‘That’s when the touchpaper really gets lit. When your child, through sheer stubbornness, makes others late and that lateness, from a personal perspective, is unacceptable. If you have all the time in the world, then you cajole, chivvy, distract or incentivise – on a deadline, you simply force shoes on unwilling feet and drag the – sometimes kicking, but always screaming – child.’
The second factor is our approach to task management. The parent views timeslots as precious and tries to get ‘the best’ use from each segment. The parent thinks: ‘We have come to this museum and we have two hours here, and so Felix should use that opportunity to explore the stimulating exhibits.’ Only to find that Felix would rather just run up and down the curved wheelchair ramp. Our professional eyes see a ‘right way’ to do things and a ‘wrong way’. Our children don’t distinguish and simply pursue what they fancy. Experienced childminders understand that little kids will explore naturally if given enough time; harassed parents try to fight this, to the detriment of happy children and their own sense of calm.
The third factor is that we think about our relationships in a rather transactional way. In an appraisal, for example, as a manager we may fully engage our concentration in building an understanding between ourselves and the person we are reviewing. We assume that the other adult in this scenario will respond positively to that intention and together we will use the time well. In life with children, it works very differently. The parent thinks: ‘I don’t see Felix enough in the week but I have taken off this afternoon to come to the museum with him. Now we’re together we need to get together and build the polystyrene bridge and have a good chat about the importance of keystones.’ In our eyes, we are generously bringing the useful skill of knowing how to build a bridge to our child and they are benefiting from our total attention. Less promisingly, we’ll probably do this loudly so that the other toddlers, whose parents may not be so architecturally well informed, will also benefit. To convey that we’re a good parent, doing a good job of educating our child and this is important to us and … because I am used to quite a bit of external validation. But none of this works out very well when Felix decides to kick the shit out of the keystone and we look like a pompous arse.
The fourth challenge is that many working parents have unrealistic behavioural expectations of small kids and lack the skills to moderate those behaviours. We think something like: ‘Felix is now two and should not do things that are monumentally irritating all the time’. Like repeatedly asking to touch mummy’s boobies. Very loudly. Or to sing the same inane song again and again and again. On a bad day, this can feel like a relentless personal attack. We apply adult thinking and wonder why our child is being so mean. Then we also lack the skills to distract them towards something more positive without them even noticing it has happened. A content manager described how her three young sons go round and round constantly on their squeaky swivel chairs in the kitchen. It drives her crazy and she ends up yelling ‘STOP STOP STOP!!! GET OFF!!!! GO TO BED’. Anything to make it end. Naturally this makes the swivelling even more exciting. She recently asked her four-year-old son how she could be a better mummy. He said, ‘Please shout less’. She cried and then he cried because she was sad. A Montessori teacher who listened to this story being told was bemused. ‘If you don’t want them to swing, don’t have the chairs’ she said reasonably, and we laughed at the simplicity of the answer. While knowing that the chairs look great, she spent time and money on them, and there’s no way she’s chucking them out.
The fifth factor is that we are unable to resist applying our usual multitasking approach to work to child management. Something Monique is really finding with those emails she can’t help but read. We are thinking (but not even saying): ‘Felix, just sit quietly and enjoy your sandwich while I try and crush a work stressball that’s just exploded in my email’. Felix feels your attention slip away from him. Distracted, he squeezes his smoothie carton down his front, drops the carrot crisps into the puddle on the filthy floor, eats them anyway and snatches some other kid’s scooter for a spin round the cafe, chased by the scooter owner and their granny, who wants you to know that she knows you are a dismal parent.
When this happens, the professional parent feels judged and gets very cross. Thinking ‘Oh FFS, not only is it kicking off with work but the damned child is running riot in a restaurant when I only needed, like, FIVE MINUTES to sort this out’. Poor Felix gets a right bollocking and starts to cry for his nanny/gran or other more sympathetic carer, compounding the chaotic failure of the special afternoon at the museum.
Partnership
But it isn’t just the children who are fuelling this anger. Monique and George had been together for years before they had kids and he was always a big supporter of hers. He helped with her career, talked through problems and generally gave her a lot of encouragement. Their friends saw them as a great team.
However, since the kids arrived, he’s had less capacity to do that. The boys are all-consuming. They seem to take up all the space and air in the house and garden. By the time they are in bed there seems to be nothing left for the adults aside cleaning up mess and sorting the boring admin. George gets overwhelmed with it all and often slinks off to the sofa with a beer to watch mindless TV. Which Monique understands and wishes she could copy but never does because she washes, irons, packs lunch boxes, tidies away train sets and sorts out ‘endless fucking pants and socks’. It’s not that George isn’t helpful – he does stuff in the house – it’s just that he doesn’t seem to ‘see’ a lot of the monotonous boring stuff. She once heard him explaining to one of the boys that the washing basket was magic. ‘You put your clothes in dirty and they appear back in your drawers clean and folded.’ He says he was joking and was just encouraging him to use it. Monique couldn’t look at him for three days.
At night, the boys often shift beds through the house and, as George is often away, are used to snuggling with mum when they fancy a cuddle. Monique knows she should return them to their own beds but she is often too tired to get up and loves those warm, peaceful moments. George doesn’t though and, when they do it when he is home, he gives up and moves to the spare room. He has often packed up and gone for a few days by the time everyone rises. Some weeks she feels she may as well be a single mum. When he returns it takes a few days for him to settle back into family life and then, of course, off he goes again.
Another mum whose partner is often away has similar challenges:
‘It really disturbs me how much conflict the kids can create between us. We have the same general style and agree on the big themes but disagree on so many little details. He will go away for a fortnight with work and not understand that in that space of time I might have negotiated a 10-minute increase in bedtime with the oldest, for example, and then he comes back and expects everything to be the same and enforces the old rules when quite a lot of to-ing and fro-ing might have gone on between me and the kids to agree what we have. And he expects me to agree with him for the sake of solidarity, but sometimes I have to be on the kids’ side because it would totally betray them to change all the rules again because dad is back. I am also driven insane by his obsession with table manners – he thinks there is a correct way to eat a chocolate croissant for God’s sake – so many meals have been ruined by his constant nit-picking at the kids. I really notice that, on those rare occasions when the two of us are away on our own without the kids, all that stress seems to just fall away and things seem much easier. When it’s just me and the kids it’s hard work – but at least I’m not constantly having to run every bloody tiny decision by someone else. Which gets exhausting.’
This disconnection from the day-to-day is a problem that limits how much George can help even if he wants to. Monique doesn’t think George has a clue what reading level the oldest is on: he doesn’t engage with spellings or times tables at all. He doesn’t know any of their shoe sizes or think about haircuts or the dentist. Monique thinks this is pretty normal. Her friends say their partners are just the same. But it still drives her crazy and, when he heads to the airport, she often feels a stab of raging jealousy that it’s never her who gets to escape for a few days. The very thought of being on an aeroplane without kids is a fantasy.
They both know they need to reconnect and talk about doing things together. But it rarely works. Even when they make plans they are often too tired to follow through. Sometimes his mum stays and they plan to go out, but then they feel guilty because she wants to catch up with them so they stay at home with her. They have a teenage babysitter who lives a few doors away but she struggles to manage the boys at the best of times. Monique doesn’t like to risk leaving her in charge for fear of coming home at 11pm and finding the kids wrestling and the kitchen ransacked.
Release
Because George is away, Monique doesn’t get to carve out time to regularly do what she wants to do. She has been putting on weight and would very much like to join a park running club, as she used to run when she was younger, but needs a group to get going again. Because of his erratic travel schedule, though, she hasn’t managed to attend a regular group. She knows she could and should go alone when George is home and feels guilty that she doesn’t have the motivation to get up before the kids and just do it.
Somehow this cycle of wanting to exercise and failing has become a sticky issue between them. She blames him for not helping her sort it out. He thinks if running is important to her she should ‘stop talking about and bloody well get on with it’. He means this supportively but Monique doesn’t hear it that way.
George doesn’t say much about it but she also suspects – knows – that he resents that the boys have destroyed their sex life. They can’t remember the last time they so much as spent a whole night alone in the same bed, let alone had sex. They’ve ignored this for years while the kids were feeding, but now they are bigger it’s not getting better. He tries to make a move now and again but she’s too pissed off about the magic washing basket to agree. He also, rather unsubtly, tried buying her sexy underwear for her birthday but she won’t wear it because she feels too fat. It’s ironic that, after three glasses of wine, she’ll happily admit to her friends that sex is exactly what they both need to feel better.
How the world treating us differently adds to that anger
Parental rage can also be triggered by discovering that the wider world treats us differently as adults when we are with young children. When Monique thinks about the TV call centre she knows that what set her off was the implication that fixing the TV to please her kids was indulgent and trivial. When, at that moment, it felt very important to her.
I have only twice engaged with the C-word in public and it can’t be a coincidence that both involved being attached to very small babies. The first time was when I tapped my Oyster card to check into the local DLR station (part of the London underground network). If you are lucky enough not to need to understand the oddities of London’s transport system, it’s like this: when you check in and don’t then check out again at the other end, your card is charged the maximum possible fare for any journey. Approximately the price of a penthouse in Mayfair. So, after checking in I went to the lift to take the buggy down to the train and found a biro-ed A4 note taped to it saying the lift was broken. I asked the man at the station to help me downstairs with my buggy, which on another occasion had happened without incident. But this guy said – in these exact words, but in the fabulously patronising tone beloved of authority when speaking to a very stupid child – ‘We do not help mummies with their buggies down the stairs because of health and safety’. As you might imagine, my reasonable tone whipped to incandescent rage and he simply repeated this mantra many times and told me to walk my buggy to the next station, while also refusing to concede that there was no external signage about the broken lift and the fact that I’d already paid for the journey. I resorted to yelling obscenities at him – see above – and then dramatically hoiked up my giant newborn buggy and stormed down four flights of stairs while he hollered health and safety warnings after me including my favourite line: ‘I just don’t understand why you are so angry’. I was so angry because he was treating me as a less-than-person. Not fully adult. Not significant. Just another mum.
When I called an old friend about the DLR incident she was reassuring: ‘Oh it’s because you’re really tired – people get to you more. When my daughter was that age I got so cross with my sister that I punched her, with my fist, in the face. Over Christmas dinner. With all of our kids watching. Yeah, it was bloody awful but we get on OK now.’
If you’re too tired and wired to read the above
• Try to give in to life with small children being demented, exhausting, boring and filthy: it’s not you. Remember that we weren’t supposed to bring up kids in small household units separated from the rest of the world.
• Forgive yourself: the working world is terrible preparation for looking after children – however much we joke that it sets us up well. You are used to getting stuff done, meeting deadlines and being listened to. You now have to learn a whole new set of skills – akin to herding mutinous cats – slow down.
• Ignore all the media mum stories in glossies and on Instagram: they have different challenges to you. Most of them are entrepreneurs who run their own businesses, or freelancers who can control the hours they work and have loads of help – if you have time to set up baby pictures with your child dressed as a furry animal, then you don’t have a real job. I work flexibly now but I didn’t before and know there is a big, big difference between a fixed job and freelancing.
• Accept that you don’t get any thanks or praise or recognition for any of it. A manager with three kids said: ‘If I deliver three kids to their schools on time and with the right kit I feel a monumental sense of achievement, but no one else notices. If I say one reasonably smart thing in a work meeting, someone is quite likely to come up to me afterwards and comment on it being helpful. Yet the former is soooooo much harder than the latter.’
• Learn stuff. Read parenting books, do a parenting course, try out what they suggest, watch and copy from the Maureens of this world: the childminders, au pairs, nannies, grannies and teachers. Child psychotherapist Sarah Clarke has two specific pointers on the kind of techniques you need. First, the golden rule is to ‘follow the child’. If they want to take all the pans out of the cupboard and drum them with wooden spoons, go with it. It’ll save you a fortune in softplay. Second, as they get older, offer them a choice of two things that are acceptable and manageable to you: ‘We can go to the park or make biscuits, which would you prefer?’ The point is that you can learn the skills you need to manage small children just as much as you can learn to dodge the thrown lunches of shouty bosses.
• Seek to get the best out of your partnership, if you have one. Yes, easier said than done. But sulking along in parallel is no good for anyone. Get therapy if you need it. There are a hundred different techniques to think about but the often-cited ones are to turn off the TV and chat over dinner. Ideally not just about the kids or your peanut-brained new boss.
• Sort out the household jobs. Be brutal about what jobs you can drop: a mum of seven kids once told me to never sort sibling pants and socks. Just put them in a drawer and let them choose their own. They know exactly what size is theirs. Advice I have followed since. The world is also divided into mums that iron and those who do not. My headline take is that having any aspirations to ‘domestic goddess’ status is a big risk after kids as the more perfectionist you are the harder it is. I will simply observe that others who are similarly slovenly seem to get more sleep. Mum-of-seven also said to only cook one dinner a night, even if parents and kids eat at different times. And ensure that the kids help around the house (see parenting advice books for help on how to do that, but withholding the stuff they want until they do what you need them to is a fair start). And if you have multiple kids’ clothes to sort and spend half your life squinting at faded age labels, try the dot labelling system I read about once on Mumsnet. Quoting RainWildsGirl: ‘I use the “label dot” method: DC1’s [this means the “oldest darling child” for anyone who is not a user] clothes get one Sharpie pen dot on the label. DC2’s [child two] get two dots, DC3’s [third child] get three dots. This means when it’s time to hand something down you add a dot so it becomes the next DC’s item.’ It also helps pre-readers spot their own clothes.
• Exercise is very often the difference between a happy and a broken parent. Don’t treat it lightly. Make it a priority.
• Don’t ignore sex. As one woman who is often furious with her partner for not doing enough at home says, ‘you know, we did it last week and I actually liked him for 24 hours’. Relationship therapists tend to agree, reporting that lots of people use kids as an excuse to avoid sex and that this is really damaging to relationships. Relationship therapist and coach, Karen Doherty, says, ‘Sex can be a great “connecter” throughout the years of a relationship because it can put you back in touch with the self you were and the partner you fell in love with. But it doesn’t just happen. Sex needs to be remembered and the effort needs to be made to have it. Whether it’s a merger, the kids or just life taking its toll… you have to choose to take the time and make the effort to connect sexually. A divorced woman in her 50s said wistfully to me recently, “It’s funny, we used to laugh at Saf when she moaned about always having to have Sunday morning sex but she’s the only one of us still married”. The irony is that loads of Sundays, one or the other of them didn’t want sex, but the routine maintained the intimacy and a kind of communication. More and more relationships are breaking down and people are seeking solace and sex outside of the marriage. If a couple can at least talk about sex, or the lack of it, or how they miss it or how they want it and maintain a sense of humour about it (because, let’s face it, sex can be very funny) then they have a chance of navigating the minefield called a relationship.’
What happened next?
Monique and George had a big rethink after she described events at the park. He realised that working and managing the boys was too much and so has accepted an in-house consultancy job two days a week, which allows him to be home more. They also looked at all of the household jobs that needed doing each week and rebalanced them between them. George said he had been giving up helping because whatever he did seemed to be wrong. Monique gets that she can’t be critical of how he does things if she wants his help and that the happiness she feels at sharing the responsibility means it is well worth accepting that he’ll never hang the washing neatly.
Monique also decided that her habit of following work emails and trying to manage the kids at the same time was a disaster and stopped checking her email when not at work. This dramatically changed the behaviour of the kids – somehow they know when she is watching and when she is mentally in another world – and she recommends it to everyone. Her mother gave them a tatty copy of Positive Discipline by Dr Jane Nelsen and they’re trying out some techniques with mixed success. On advice from friends, they also signed the older boys up for tae kwon-do, which they hope may help manage their energy levels. Things are definitely calmer but Monique still fantasises about using a flame-thrower on the mess.