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Abstract: What’s the one thing that everyone can easily do, that can cause irreversible damage?…<\/p>\nAbstract: What’s the one thing that everyone can easily do, that can cause irreversible damage?…<\/p>\n
If I were to ask you what is the easiest thing in the world to do, in one way the answer is limitless, in another it must surely be only one thing; and it’s one thing that can cause almost irreversible damage.<\/p>\n
Given the indomitable character of the human spirit, there’s very little that we cannot do, and some people find certain things easier to do than others; so the easiest thing that anyone can do by implementation<\/em> is indeed limitless. But if you were to think about what is the easiest thing that everyone can do by abstention<\/em>, the answer is straightforward: screw up your kids.<\/p>\n I was reminded of this recently by two totally random, yet related events.<\/p>\n The first was the news that a former colleague of mine is expecting a set of twins. Not by mail order, obviously. She’s pregnant. She is already a remarkable mother, and her infant son is a glowing example of what boundless love and inexhaustible commitment can produce. I told her this when I heard the news because I knew she would be a little anxious about her impending “insta-brood”.<\/p>\n But for every couple like her and her husband, there are far too many, even that I know, who have totally stuffed up their kids. The reason? As parents, they took the easy route.<\/p>\n If you were to stop and think of every possible pathway that your children could take, of every single conceivable permutation of events that could impact on their development, you’d crawl up into a ball and whimper like a frightened puppy.<\/p>\n The ‘fun’ of course starts before you and your partner even thought about the possibility of maybe even considering the notion of developing a twinkle in each other’s eye. In fact even before you met and your loins were lubed with lust, your body was cocked and loaded with all manner of chromosomal material that, unknown to you, carried the potential for all manner of trouble.<\/p>\n Either of you could have been the carrier of a gene for any one of a myriad physical or mental disorders that were lying dormant and unresponsive until it got the wake-up call. This would have been nestled in the tightly coiled DNA your partner; and when the two of you hooked up, blam!…the code had been set for a possible lifetime of suffering and hardship.<\/p>\n Assuming the resultant fetus’ DNA was healthy, the possibilities of damage whilst curled up, supposedly protected, in the womb are numerous. The mother is the sole source of nutrition, and so what she consumes seeps into the fetus. Tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceutical medication, bursts of sugar, stress, chemical imbalances, they all make their way into the system, and the growing baby taps into it.<\/p>\n Assuming the mother is responsible, the pregnancy is healthy and the birth (don’t get me started on that) goes well, what you’ll receive in your arms in the delivery room, will be for the first, crucial months little more than an empathetic sponge. If you’re stressed (and which new parent isn’t), it’ll be stressed. If there’s a simmering anger or tension in the home, it’ll soak it up and hurl it back at you, with interest.<\/p>\n But, it’s when the baby starts activating its senses, looking around and noticing things, that your problems take on a whole new dimension; for this is when its psychological development really kicks into gear. Every single moment of every single day your child will be faced with moments, many of which you’ll consider inconsequential, that could dictate how he or she will grow up. That’s why it’s called ‘upbringing’.<\/p>\n Let’s tick a couple of boxes: disciplining them, not disciplining them, not listening to them, fawning over them, shouting too much, not talking enough, forgetting to pick them up from school, not attending their sport events or school play, interfering at their sport events or school play, getting divorced, getting caught in flagrante\u00a0delicto<\/em>, getting drunk in front of them, getting fined, them finding out you have skeletons in your cupboard, them finding erotic material in your cupboard, them finding your best friend naked in your cupboard while you’re at work…In fact, anything that can happen if you drop your guard for even a minute.<\/p>\n This is one of parenting’s unfair kicks where it hurts: any of these things can sow the seed of disruption in your child’s development. They can take root in the child’s psyche and gently fester, nurtured by things you then say and do, or don’t do, and reap untold drama later in their life, even passed on to their own children.<\/p>\n And this is why a parent’s best friends are ‘engagement’ and ‘constant vigilance’, and why the easiest thing in the world is to disconnect or drop your guard and screw up your kids.<\/p>\n Now if you were paying attention you’d remember that I said I was reminded of this by two totally random, yet related events; and I mentioned the first.<\/p>\n So what was the second? I passed a birthday milestone recently – one with a zero in it, and not the big four-zero either. Amongst those who phoned me was my mother, and, as she often does, she said how proud she was of me as a son and as a father. She then brought up something that since becoming a parent myself I had never considered about my mother: she said, “You know, no matter how old you are I’ll always worry that you’re okay”.<\/p>\n Another mum who took the hard route, and didn’t screw up.<\/p>\n Originally published in The Sunday Tribune<\/em>, 22nd April 2012<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Abstract: What’s the one thing that everyone can easily do, that can cause irreversible damage?… If I were to ask you what is the easiest thing in the world to do, in one way the answer is limitless, in another it must surely be only one thing; and it’s one thing that can cause almost…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":547,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107,1],"tags":[121,79],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.darylilbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.darylilbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.darylilbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.darylilbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.darylilbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=546"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.darylilbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":549,"href":"https:\/\/www.darylilbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions\/549"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.darylilbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.darylilbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.darylilbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.darylilbury.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}